Eifelheim (35 page)

G
OTTFRIED AWAITED
by the baptistery, but Dietrich took him first into the sacristy and spoke to him alone. “Why do you choose baptism, friend grasshopper?” he demanded. No sacrament could be valid if its meaning was not understood. Baptism was a matter of will, not water.

“Because of Lorenz the Smith.” Gottfried rubbed his forearms slowly, a gesture which Dietrich had concluded meant thoughtfulness, although the precise rhythm of the rasps might indicate irritation, confusion, or other sorts of thought. “Lorenz was an artisan, as am I,” Gottfried said. “A man of low besitting, to be used as those above him would. ‘In justice do the strong command; in justice do the weak submit.’”

“So the Athenians told the Melians,” Dietrich said. “But I think our word ‘justice’ and yours do not signify the same thing. Manfred cannot use us as the Baron Grosswald uses you. He is limited by the customs and bylaws of the manor.”

“How can this be,” the Krenk asked, “if justice is the lord’s will?”

“Because there is a Lord above all. Manfred is our lord
only ‘under God,’ meaning that his will is subordinate to the higher justice of God. We may not obey a bad lord, nor follow an unlawful command.”

Gottfried grasped Dietrich’s arm, and Dietrich tried not to flinch from the horny touch. “That is the very thing! Your Herrenfolk have obligations to their vassals, ours do not. Lorenz used his own life to save Wittich, and Wittich was only a … One who labors at whatever is needful, but without the special skills of an artisan.”

“A gärtner. But if Lorenz saw that Wittich was in pain, naturally, he tried to help.”

“But it is not among us natural for the greater to help the lesser. An artisan would not help a mere gärtner; not without … Without your
charitas
to move him.”

“To be fair,” Dietrich said, “Lorenz did not know his life would be forfeit.”

“He knew,” Gottfried said, releasing his grip. “He knew. I had warned him against touching the wires when they were animate. I told him the fluid could strike a man like lightning. That was how he knew Wittich’s peril. Yet he had no thought to stand by and watch him die.”

Dietrich studied the Krenk. “Nor had you,” he said after a moment.

Gottfried tossed his arm. “I am Krenk. Could I do less than one of you?”

“Let me see your hands again.” Dietrich took Gottfried by the wrists and turned his hands up. The Krenkish hand was not like a man’s hand. All six fingers could act as thumbs and they were long compared to the palm, which consequently appeared no bigger than a
Thaler
gold-piece. The passage of the fiery fluid had left a burn on each palm, which the Krenkish physician had treated with an unguent of some sort.

Gottfried pulled his hands away and snapped his side-lips. “You doubt my words?”

“No,” said Dietrich. The black marks had seemed much like the stigmata. “Have you the love of God in your heart?” he asked abruptly.

Gottfried imitated the human nod. “If I show in my actions this next-love, then I have it inside my head, not true?”

“‘By their fruits you shall know them,’” Dietrich quoted, thinking of both Lorenz and Gottfried. “Do you reject Satan and all his works?”

“What is then this ‘satan’?”

“The Great Tempter. The one who always whispers to us the love of self rather than the love of others, and so doing seeks to turn us from the good.”

Gottfried listened while the
Heinzelmännchen
translated. “If when I am beaten,” he suggested, “I speak inside my head—think—of beating another. If when something of mine is taken, I think to take from another to replace it. If when I take pleasure, I do not ask the other’s consent. Is this what you mean?”

“Yes. Those sentences are spoken by Satan. We seek always the good, but never may we use evil means to achieve it. When others do evil to us, we must not respond with further evil.”

“Those are hard words, especially for the likes of
him.”

All voices spoken through the
Heinzelmännchen
sounded alike, but Dietrich turned, and saw in the doorway Hans. “Hard, indeed,” Dietrich told the servant of the talking head. “So hard that no man can hope to follow. Our spirits are weak. We succumb to the temptation to return evil for evil, to seek our own good at the expense of others, to
use other men
as means to our own ends. That is why we need the strength—the grace—of our Lord Jesus Christ. The burden of such sinfulness is too great for us to carry alone, and so He walks by our side, as Simon the Cyrenian once walked beside Him.”

“And Blitzl—Gottfried—will follow this way? A Krenk well known as a brawler?”

“I will,” said Gottfried.

“Are you such a weakling, then?”

Gottfried exposed his neck. “I am.”

Hans’s horn lips spread wide and his soft lips fell open.
“You
say so?” But Gottfried rose and strode to the sacristy door, passing close by Hans to emerge on the altar. Dietrich looked at his friend. “He will need your prayers, Hans.”

“He will need one of your miracles.”

Dietrich nodded. “We all do.” Then he followed Gottfried to the baptistery.

“Baptism,” he told the Krenk beside the copper basin, “is the washing away of sin, just as ordinary water washes away dirt. One emerges from the water born again as a new man, and a new man needs a new name. You must choose a Christian name from among the roll of saints who have preceeded us. ‘Gottfried’ is itself a good name—”

“I would be called ‘Lorenz’.”

Dietrich hesitated at the sudden pain in his heart. “Ja. Doch.”

Hans laid his hand on Dietrich’s shoulder. “And I would be called ‘Dietrich’.”

Gregor Mauer grinned. “May I be called godfather?”

5
NOW
Sharon

D
URING THE
Middle Ages, they used to burn heretics.

Now, it was never so many or so often as has been supposed. There were rules, and most of the penalties were acquittals, pilgrimages, or other impositions. If you wanted to burn, you really had to work at it; and it may say something about human nature that so many did.

Sharon did not know she was a heretic until she whiffed the smoke.

Her department head lit the first faggot. He asked her if it were true that she was investigating Variable Light Speed theories and she, with the innocence and enthusiasm of anyone filled with the holy spirit of scientific inquiry, said, “Yes, it seems to resolve a number of problems.”

Now, she meant the cosmological problems: flatness, the horizon, lambda. Why the universe is so finely tuned. But the department head—his name was Jackson Welles—was dead to the spirit and was justified by the law—the law in this case being the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein said it, he believed it, and that settled it. So he had intended a completely different set of problems. “Like Noah’s flood, I suppose.”

The sarcasm surprised Sharon a great deal. It was as if she had been talking about auto mechanics and he had responded with a jibe about pinochle. It didn’t process right away and because thought in her always induced reflection, Welles took this to mean that his arrow had sunk home, and he leaned back in his chair with his hands interlaced over his stomach. He was a lean man, hardened by treadmills, universal machines, and academic politics. He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.

They were sitting in his office, and it struck Sharon how spare the office was. Twice the girth and depth of her own, it contained only half the clutter. Textbooks, shelved and looking new, journals, photographs and certificates, all forbidding in their orderly ranks. His chalkboard held not equations or diagrams, but budgets and schedules.

It was not that Welles did not think, but that he thought about things beside physics. Budgets, grants, tenure, promotions, the administration of the department. Someone must think of such things. Science doesn’t just
happen
. It’s a human activity, performed by human beings, and every circus needs a ringmaster. Once, a very long time ago, a younger Welles had written three papers of exceptional merit deriving quantum mechanics from Maxwell’s equations, the consequences of which were still emitting doctoral
dissertations around the world; so don’t think he was a
Krawattendjango
—a “tie dude,” as our kids say in Germany. It is not given many men to write even one such paper. Perhaps a longing for those heady days, and an understanding that a fourth was not in him, informed his attitude.

“I’m sorry,” said Sharon. “But what has VLS to do with Noah’s Ark?” Even then, she thought that maybe it was some abstruse joke on the head’s part. He did have a deadpan sense of humor, and Sharon was more accustomed to clowns.

“Do you really think you can prove young earth creationism?”

Perhaps it was the earnest expression on his face. The grim-set line of his mouth. Inquisitors may have had such an expression when they relaxed their charges to the mercy of the secular arm. But Sharon finally realized that he was serious.

“What,” she asked, “is young earth creationism?”

The department head did not credit such innocence. He thought everyone as attuned as he to the vagaries of legislatures, school boards, and other such sources of madness. “That God created the universe only six thousand years ago? Tell me you never heard about that.”

Sharon knew how Tom would have answered, and fought hard to keep his words from her lips, saying instead, “Now that you mention it, I have heard that.” She really had needed the reminder. She spent most of her waking hours in Janatpour space. There were no creationists there, young or otherwise. It would have confused them and they would have gotten lost along one of those nameless dimensions of hers.

“‘Now that you mention it,’” Welles mimicked. His sarcasm was famous in the higher reaches of the school’s management. Deans fled at his approach. “There is nothing so well established as the constancy of light speed.”

It was the wrong thing to say, not only because there really were several other things better established, but
because there is nothing guaranteed to get the back up of a no-fooling scientist than
argument from authority
. Neither Welles nor Sharon had been raised religiously and so neither of them realized that they were having a religious argument, but something atavistic rebelled in Sharon’s heart. “That’s the current paradigm,” she said. “But a more careful inspection of the data—”

“You mean until you can
spin
the data to prove what you want!” Welles said this with no sense of irony. Kuhn may have been a poor philosopher, but he was right about the cold, dead hand of the Paradigm. “I researched it myself when I heard what you were up to, and there has been no change in the measured speed of light for several decades.” He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands again under his breastbone, taking her silence as acknowledgement of the devastating impact of his rebuttal.

“Excuse me,” Sharon said with only a minor tremor in her voice. “A couple of decades? That’s like measuring continental drift for a few hours. Try a couple of centuries, like I did. You need a long enough baseline to—” And here her thoughts slip-slid away in an unexpected direction as her memory pulled a factoid from the hat. She examined the factoid top to botton, side to side, and around and around. Welles’s eyebrows rose at the sudden silence. It was so sudden and so silent that his ears hurt. But when he opened his mouth, she raised a hand to him. “Did you know that when Birge reported the decrease in light speed in
Nature
in 1934, he’d found no change whatsoever in wavelength?”

Welles, who hadn’t known the first, was equally in the dark on the second. “You mean when he reported an error in his measurement …”

“No, wait,” she told him, “this is really interesting.” She had forgotten that she was on the carpet in her department chairman’s office. She had found a glittering nugget in the ore and wanted to show it to everyone, supposing they would be as delighted as she was. “Think it through, Jackson.
Light speed is frequency times wavelength. So if c is dropping and wavelength is constant, frequencies must be increasing.”