Eifelheim (58 page)

That was her cue. “What’s wrong with the sequence nineteen, fourteen, two?”

“Umm … The gap between fourteen and two is too great?”

“Right. In the Beginning, there was just a single Superforce, because the extra dimensions hadn’t rolled up yet. As the energy levels dropped, the polyverse warped and the individual forces, ah, ‘froze’ out of the soup. Gravity became separate at Planck scale energy, 10
¹⁹
proton masses; the strong nuclear force at unification scale, or 10
¹⁴
proton masses; and the weak force at Weinberg-Salam scale, ninety proton masses, which is about 10
²
.”

For once in his life, Tom was able to leap ahead of her. “And you think your chronity ‘froze out’ somewhere in between.”

She grinned. “My guess is about 10
⁸
proton masses. I call that Nagy-scale energy because I’m just so freaking modest. CERN can’t reach that; but maybe the new L4 accelerator will. Even back in the 1980s, they could reach Weinberg-Salam scale. They fused the weak force with electromagnetism and created the electroweak force.”

“Wait, I remember. That’s the breakthrough that gave us the antinuclear shield, right?”

“Eventually. The weak force governs atomic decay. Once we could hitch it to electromagnetism, the fission suppression field was only a matter of time. Holy shit!”

Tom blinked. Perhaps it was from the flash of insight. “What?”

“We know how to manipulate electromagnetism. If we can fuse chronity with the electroweak force … that should be able to manipulate the time force.”

“Time travel?”

“No, no. But time is three dimensional. Nagy-scale energy gets us
inside the balloon
, and we could … well, go anywhere. Light speed is still the upper limit; but if we go far enough in the right direction, the kilometers become very short and the seconds become very long, and we can pick any freaking light speed we want!” Well, taking a shortcut through the inside of the balloon would be a neat trick topologically, like a donut jumping through its own hole; but, who knew? With the proper energies, focused in the proper directions …

He blinked again. “Instantaneous interstellar travel?”

She shook her head. “As near as makes no difference. Tom, we wouldn’t need spaceships, at all.
We could drive our cars to the stars
. With protective suits, probably, we could walk! A single stride would cover interstellar distances.”

“Seven league boots! Sounds like you’ve discovered hyperspace.”

“No.
Hypo-space
. Topology is conserved. The eight hidden dimensions are
inside
the universe, remember? To travel to other worlds, we have to travel inside.” She laughed, but this time he was oddly quiet. “Tom?”

He shook himself. “Nothing. I just had the oddest feeling of déjà vu, is all. As if I’d heard all this before.”

XXIII
JULY
, 1349
The Feast of St. Margaret of Antioch

J
OACHIM WAS
tolling the Angelus bell when Dietrich left Nickel Langermann’s hut, where he had lanced malignant pustules on Trude Metzger’s arms and on the back of little Peter’s hand. The pustules worried him. The “wool-sorters’ disease” was often fatal. Lost in such thoughts, he blundered into a press of chattering villagers returning from their fields. “Come to visit your daughter, old man?” he heard people call. “Ach, Klaus! Klaus! Here comes your father-in-law!” “That is a hard path for a frail old man; are you well?”

And there stood Odo Schweinfurt, from Niederhochwald, blinking dully in the setting sun. The old man searched up and down the high street, saw the mill, and set off in that direction. “No, the miller’s cottage is over there!” someone called out, and Odo turned uncertainly.

The commotion drew Hilde from her cottage. “My father is here?” Hilde asked. Then with delight more feign than fair, she cried, “Daddy!” But he stank of the pigs he tended and she came no closer than her nose allowed. Klaus stood behind her, still in his white-powdered apron from the mill, and regarded the old gärtner narrowly. He had not his wife’s disdain for the man’s calling, but his nose was no less gentle for that. “What do you want, Odo?” he asked, for he misdoubted any came to his door without some want.

“Dead,” said the old man.

“Bread? Does Karl not feed you? Such an ungrateful son!” He laughed, for Hilde’s brother was well-known as a pinch-pfennig.

“No,” said Hilde, wiping her hands on her coverslut. “He said ‘dead.’ Who is dead, Daddy?”

“All. Karl. Alicia. Gretl. Everyone.” He stared around at the press of villagers, as if searching, searching.

Hilde’s hand flew to her mouth. “His whole family?”

Odo sank to his wasted haunches in the dirt of the high street. “I’ve not slept for three days, nor eaten since yester-morn.”

Dietrich stepped forward. “What happened?” he demanded.
Dear God
, he prayed,
let it be the murrain
.

“The blue sickness,” Odo said, and those who stood close by groaned. “Everyone in the Lower Wood is dead. Father Konrad. Emma Bauer. Young Bachmann. All of them. Ach, God is cruel to kill my son and my grandchildren before my eyes—and spare me after.” He turned his face to the sky and shook both fists. “I curse God! I curse the God that did this!” Dietrich heard the word run through the crowd like a flight of arrows whisking through the air.
The pest! The pest!
Folk began to edge away.

Even Klaus stepped back. But Hilde Müller, with a countenance white as the clouds, took her villein father by the hand and led him toward her home. “He will be the death of us,” Klaus warned her.

“It is my penance,” she said, with a toss of her head.

“It’s a hard path up from the lower valley,” Herwyg One-eye told anyone who would listen. “Bad air cannot climb it.” But none answered him and each fled in silence to his own place.

I
N THE
morning, Heloïse Krenkerin flew over the Lower Wood and reported a pair of women living under a lean-to on the far end of the fields there. They had a small campfire and ran into the woods on catching sight of Heloïse. A third must have been hiding there, as well, for someone loosed a bolt when she swooped down for a closer look. At best, no more than a handful lived; unless others had fled to St. Peter or Bear Valley.

The Herr heard this report in his high seat and fingered an
old scar on the back of his right hand. Dietrich studied the councilors, who sat along the black oak table in the manor hall. Eugen, pale and wide-eyed on his right; Thierry, who had ridden from Hinterwaldkopf on another matter and who sat now grim-visaged by his liege’s left; Everard, cheeks flushed and eyes dully glazed; Klaus, anxious and unable to hold himself still; Richart, his law books useless in this matter, casting his attention here and there as others spoke. Dietrich and Father Rudolf represented the ghostly arm, and Hans spoke for the eight Krenken.

“Wiped out?” Manfred said at last. “Half my living gone,
and we heard nought until now?”

Everard spoke low, though not so low as to go unheard. “When a man’s family dies, your living seem less weighty.” A rebuke from one so obsequious as Everard drew startled glances. The steward gave off a sharp, pungeant odor that Dietrich could not name.
Drunk
, Dietrich decided from the reddened cheeks, the slurred voice, the glazed look.

“Heloïse saw a body on the trail.” Max continued his report. “Perhaps they sent a man to notify you but he died on the way.”

“As well he did not succeed,” said Thierry, whose fists were stones on the table.

“Praying mine Herr’s grace,” Klaus said, “but my wife’s father says it was no more than three days from the first death to his flight.”

Manfred frowned. “I have not forgotten,
maier
, that you broke my curfew.”

“My
wife
bid him welcome …” He straightened. “Would you turn away your own father?”

Manfred leaned forward over the table, and spoke in measured tones, “In. An. Eyeblink.”

“But … He was amongst us before anyone knew he had come.”

“Beside which,” the schultheiss said, glad for something covered by law and custom, “those of each village have the right to visit the other.”

Manfred gave his lawman an astonished look. “There
stands a time for rights,” he said, “and a time for what is needful. I gave orders that
no one
might enter this village.”

Richart was scandalized; Klaus genuinely puzzled. “But … But, this was only Odo!”

Manfred rubbed his face.
“No one
, maier. He may have brought with him the pest.”

“Mine Herr,” said Hans, “I am no scholar of these things, but the speed of the pest argues that the small-lives quickly devour their … We would say ‘host,’ though the guest is unwelcomed. These small-lives act so quickly that, did Odo carry them, he must show already the signs; and he does not.”

Manfred grunted and his bearing was yet skeptical.

Everard giggled and spoke to Klaus. “You are a fool, miller, and your wife rides you. And anyone else she can mount.”

Klaus darkened and rose from his seat, but Eugen raised a hand. “Not at mine Herr’s table!”

Manfred, for his part, snapped, “Steward, remove yourself!” When the man did not move, he cried, “Now!” and Thierry rose with a hand on his sword-hilt.

But Father Rudolf spoke in a querulous voice, “No, no, this will not do. This will not do. We mustn’t fight one another.
We
are not the enemy.” And he took Everard by the elbow and helped him to his feet. Everard squinted at the assembly as if only now seeing them. Rudolf guided him toward the door and he staggered out, blundering first into the doorpost. Max closed the door behind him. “He stinks,” the sergeant said.

“He is afraid,” Dietrich answered, “and drunk because he is afraid.”

Manfred’s eye was hard. “I will brook no excuses! Max?”

“There were fresh graves in the churchyard down there,” the sergeant continued, “but also bodies lying about—in the green, in the fields, one man dead even at the plough.”

“Unburied, you say?” Dietrich cried. Had it come upon them
that
suddenly?

A finger jutted from Manfred’s fist. “No, pastor! You will not go down there.”

“To bury the dead is one of the commands that the Lord fastened upon us.” A great ball of ice had formed within Dietrich as he thought about what awaited there.

“If you go down the mountain,” Manfred told him, “I can not permit your return. The living here need your care.”

Dietrich formed an objection, but Hans interrupted. “It will by us go easier.”

“Then you, too, must be barred from returning,” Manfred said to the Krenk.

Hans worked his lips in a brief Krenkish smile. “Mine Herr, my companions and I are forever barred from ‘returning.’ What is one lesser exile within a geater? But, the small lives that devour your folk would likely not attack mine. The … How do you say it when kinds change?”

“Evolutium,”
suggested Dietrich. “An unfolding of potential into actual. An ‘out-rolling’ toward an end.”

“No, that is not the right term … But what it means, mine Herr, is that
your
small-lives know not
our
bodies, and would lack the … the key to enter our flesh.”

Manfred pursed his lips. “Very well, then. Hans, you may bury the dead at Niederhochwald. Take only Krenken with you. When you return, wait at your former lazaretto in the woods for signs of the pest. If no signs appear in … in …” He cast about for some interval that might provide protection. “In three days’ time, you may return to the village. Meanwhile,
no one
may enter this manor.”

“And what of my wife’s father?” Klaus insisted.

“He must go. It sounds harsh, miller, but it must be. We must look to ourselves.”

E
VERARD LAY
facedown in the path near the curial gate. Klaus laughed, “The sot had puked his guts out.”

The sun was high but the breeze off the Katerinaberg
carried with it enough chill to mitigate the heat. The roses had come into their time and their sharp tendrils had entwined themselves around the trellises of the Herr’s garden. But the earth here by the gate had been scuffed bare by countless obedient feet, and the yellows of the butterheads emerged more miraculously from the barren ground.