Eifelheim (71 page)

So I told him. Tom and Judy added the details. The mystery. The folktales. The hints and fragmentary evidence. Heinrich nodded as he listened and asked an occasional question. Tom’s explanation of hypospace physics confused him, I think; but then he was getting it at second hand. I think Tom was confused as well. Sharon lived in a different world than we, an austere world and strangely beautiful; but one whose beauty we could at best only dimly grasp. Sharon had seen the likeness of a circuit in a manuscript illumination. Let it go at that. Her insight had given Tom the courage to test his intuition; and his intuition had sent her groping down a path that might one day give us the stars. Surely, God moves in mysterious ways.

Heinrich accepted it all quietly. How could he doubt when he had held the skull in his own hands? He looked out into the surrounding forest. “There will be the remainer of the skeleton, of course,” he said, pointing into the grave with the stem of his pipe. “And of others as well. You say there were several of these beings? And out there?” The pipe stem swept the Black Forest. “Out there, what? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed beneath the living soil.” He sighed. “There is much work to be done. And don’t forget the cries of fraud or hoax that will be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Arni and the university people.”

“No!”

We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Johann’s skull in her hands, and Gus, his initial fright over, was peering at it curiously, eyeball to eye socket. I was proud of the way our two workmen had reacted. Whatever was to come of all this, it boded well.

“You know what they’ll do, don’t you?” she said. “They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bulletproof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn’t right. It isn’t.” When she shook her head her whole body shook.

“That’s not true, Judy,” Tom said, gently putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and gazed up at him.

“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip off some cells for the biologists to wonder at. That much,
he
would have wanted. Then we’ll make plaster casts and hang those. But him, we’ll keep safe from harm and someday—when Sharon’s work is done—someday we’ll find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children’s children will.”

Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the shaft, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and anticipation the like of which I have never seen.

I
HAVE
tried to depict the milieu of the mid-fourteenth-century Rhineland as accurately as possible, but that is difficult enough to do for early twenty-first-century America, let alone a time and place where the worldview was so different from our own categories of thought.

For one thing, they took Christianity seriously; in many ways, more seriously than modern Bible-thumpers. At the same time, they took it more matter-of-factly. It was Christendom, but the first stirrings of the nationalism that was to destroy it were being felt. At Crécy and elsewhere, it had begun to matter which nation or race you were.

Philosophers studied nature with virtually no intrusions by theologians who were themselves natural philosophers. Natural philosophy formed the basic undergraduate curriculum, along with logic and the “exact sciences” of mathematics, astronomy, optics, statics, and music. Art and humanities were not taught. Doctors of theology, medicine, and law had first to master this curriculum. Never before or since has such a large proportion of a population been educated so exclusively in logic, reason, and science.

Key was the concept of secondary causation: God had endowed material bodies with the ability to act upon one another
by their own natures
. Hence, “natural laws.” If God made the entire world, then invoking God to explain the rainbow or magnetism or rectilinear motion added nothing to human understanding. Philosophers therefore sought natural explanations to natural phenomena. That a later century would invoke religion over a trivial matter of the earth’s motion would likely have astonished them.

W
ITH TWO
notable exceptions, the historical events and personages mentioned in the text were as described. The likeness of Margaret Maultasch, the Ugly Duchess of Tyrol, was used to portray the Queen of Hearts in
Alice in Wonderland
. The Markgraf Friedrich mentioned in the text was Friedrich III, who ruled in Baden, not his cousin, Friedrich IV, who ruled at the same time in Pforzheim. The months in which the Black Death struck various cities and regions were compiled by Peter Ravn Rasmussen in an atlas at
www.scholiast.org/history/blackdeath/index.html
.

Marshal Villars really did refuse to take his army through the Höllenthal, using the excuse quoted. The overthrow of the Strassburg town council and the Friday 13th massacre of the Jews were described in the
Chronicles of Strassburg
. Duke Albert and King Casimir did offer their realms as sanctuaries to the Jews, and the guild militias did assemble and defend the Jewish quarter of Regensburg. As in any age, there were wicked men and good. The story of the Feldberg Demon is recorded in the
Annals of St. Blasien
. The argument for natural rights of people against their prince was advanced by William of Ockham in his
Opus nonaginta dierum
. (And earlier, by Aquinas in
On Kingship.)
Ockham determined and incepted, but never took a doctorate. He was last heard of when he left Munich on 10 March 1349 to make his peace with the Pope. The date on his
Denkmal
in Munich is incorrect, as we know from documents that he was alive after that point.

The two major alterations to historical events are the Flagellant procession at Strassburg and the Storming of Falcon Rock. The Flagellants did not actually reach Strassburg until June of 1349 and the Papal Bull condemning the practice was not issued until 20 October of that same year, after the events of the story. I have moved both of them up to February to coincide with the Benfeld conference.

The Freiburger militias stormed and took Falcon Rock in 1389. I moved it up by forty years, to March of 1349
and had Manfred participate. The romantic
causus belli
was as described.

A minor alteration: Nicole d’Oresme did not write
De monete
, in which he enunciated Gresham’s Law, until after the time of the story. There are a number of other small adjustments of this sort.

T
HE MODEL
that Sharon develops for the multiverse was slapped together and given a coat of paint many years ago for the novella “Eifelheim” (
Analog
, Nov., 1986) from which the “Now” portions of this book derive. Mohsen Janatpour, who now teaches at the College of San Mateo in California, was most helpful in this and Janatpour space was, and is, named in his honor.

Recently, variable light speed (VLS) theories have become a hot topic among cosmologists. One prominent advocate is João Magueijo, whose gossipy book
Faster Than the Speed of Light
is a good introduction, as well as an entertaining narrative of how physics actually gets done. I was pleased to read in his book that he considered the “Kaluza-Klein” model that Mohsen and I came up with back in the 1980s, though unsurprised to see him reject it. I decided to keep it, just because.

In all fairness, the historical decline in light speed really does seem due to changes in measurement methods. VLS theories address a change only in the aftermath of the Big Bang, as a way of getting around the kludge of inflaton fields. The inflaton, invoked simply to save the appearances of the theory and afterward allowed to disappear from the universe, would never have passed muster with Buridan, and Will Ockham would have howled about the needless multiplication of entities. VLS theories nicely resolve the “cosmological problems” using inherent feedback loops that homeostatically fine tune the universe. No new entities are needed.

When we last spoke, Mohsen and I discussed also the quantization of the redshift. Some physicists see it; others don’t. Same data. One explanation for a quantized redshift
is that time is quantized just as space is supposed to be. Since I had already invented the fictional chronon for the original “Eifelheim,” the redshift business fits right in. If it’s true, we may have to revise the universe, again.

C
ERTAIN GERMAN
terms, idioms, and turns of phrase employed from time to time have been written as if they were English: thus “gof” and “doodle” instead of
Gof
and
Dudl
. But for the most part, English equivalents have been used. So, Bear Valley and Stag’s Leap instead of Bärental and Hirschsprung. Wiesen Valley instead of Wiesenthal. Birds like Waldlaubsänger and Eichelhäher are woodleaf-singers and acorn-jays; flowers like Waldmeister are “woodmasters,” and so forth.

The feudal and manorial systems were common across Western Europe although by the time of the story both had been breaking down for some time. The terminology is equally strange, whether German, French, English, or Latin. I have used the more familiar term unless there is good reason otherwise. So,
castle, manor, steward, dungeon
instead of
schloss, hof, verwalter
, or
bergfried
. Where the English term would have sounded “too English,” the German was employed:
buteil, vogt, junker
instead of
heriot, reeve
, or
squire
. The German for a
joust
was
buhurdieren
, so I used the archaic English word,
bohorts
.

Manfred’s speech on
page 173
is adopted from the fourteenth-century biography of Don Pero Nino,
El Victorial
(“The Unconquered Knight,”) by Gutierre Díaz de Gómez, one of his companions.

The description of Manfred girded for war on
page 172
is adapted from the medieval epic,
Ruodlieb
.

Fr. Rudolf’s sermon on
page 195
is from Peter of Blois, 1170. Max’s complaint about sportsmanship on
page 196
is likewise taken from life.

The story of Auberede and Rosamund on
page 120
, which took place in France, is recounted in Régine Pernod’s
Those Terrible Middle Ages!
and combined with that of another
peasant. That two medieval women serfs could own a house in town and go off there to live together may startle some.

The famous stink of Brun, brother to Otto, and the attendant bathing practices mentioned on
page 194
are from the epic
Ruotger
and applied to Manfred’s neigbor. We often read that people did not bathe in the Middle Ages, yet we have the evidence from
Ruotger
and also, more offhandedly, from the flagellants’ oath not to bathe for the duration of their service. It would seem contrary to swear an oath to avoid something that one never did. More likely, in Transalpine Europe in a time before hot water heaters, bathing was a sometime thing.

“Falcon Song” on
page 222
was modified and adapted from Franz H. Bäuml’s
Medieval Civilization in Germany, 800–1273
, (Ancient Peoples and Places, v. 67).

Dietrich’s discussion of the intension and remission of forms and the mean speed theorem on
page 85
is adapted from William of Heytesbury’s
Regule solvendi sophismata
, as quoted and discussed in Edward Grant’s
The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages
.

The Latin honorifics bestowed on various philosophers have been translated. So Peter Aureoli, the
doctor facundus
, is “Doctor Eloquent” and Durandus, the
doctor modernis
, is “Doctor Modern.” Will Ockham, who never completed his doctorate, was called the
venerabilis inceptor
, the “Old Inceptor.” Inceptor was a “degree” short of the doctorate that endowed
ius ubique docendi
, the right to teach everywhere.