Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [193]
Vile fruit dangled from the linden tree in the green: a human figure twisted in the hot July breeze. It was Odo, Dietrich saw as he edged closer, and he thought first of suicide. But the rope was tied to the trunk and there was nothing under his feet from which he might have jumped. Then he understood. Returning to his son-in-law’s house, Odo had been waylaid and killed for the sin of bringing the pest.
Dietrich could endure no more. He ran. His sandals clapped against the wooden planks of the millstream bridge and found the Bear Valley road. The track was baked hard in the sun, except where it ran between the swell of the land. Here, the rivulet had turned it to mud, which splattered Dietrich’s legs as he splashed through it. At the bend, he came upon one of the Herr’s rouncies, a gray one, fully saddled and caparisoned, nibbling from some succulent bush by the pathside.
A sign! he thought. God had sent a sign. Seizing the reins, he scrambled up the bank and settled himself into the saddle. Then, without a look behind, he directed the unwilling horse eastward.
8
NOW
Sharon
THE SUBCONSCIOUS is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does. Sharon was in the middle of her galactic structure class—seven upper-class physics majors—when, in turning about after making a point, her eyes fell on the poster-sized chart of the distribution of redshifts.
Of course.
She fell silent, and the student who had just answered her question shifted uneasily in his seat, wondering where his answer had gone wrong. He tapped his stylus staccato on the tabletop and looked for support to his classmates. “What I meant …” he temporized, hoping for a hint.
Sharon turned around. “No, you were quite right, Girish. But I just realized … Class dismissed.”
Now the singular difference between the graduate species and his undergraduate cousin is that the graduate student may be discontent with such an unexpected boon. For the most part, they are there because they want to be, and not because society says they ought to be. And so they filed out of the seminar room buzzing to one another while Sharon fled to her office, where she scribbled furiously.
When Hernando entered half an hour later, tossed his cap on the bookshelf, and dropped his backpack beside his desk, she was so deep into it that she never noticed him. He stared at her for a while before he settled himself to sort out his notes for his nucleonics lecture.
“It’s because time is quantized,” Sharon said, drawing Hernando out of his own contemplation.
“What? Time is quantized? Yeah, I suppose. Why not?”
“No, it’s the redshifts. Why the galaxies are receding at discrete velocities. The universe sputters.”
Hernando spun his chair to face her. “Right.”
“Okay, vacuum energy. Einstein’s lambda, the one he called his biggest blunder.”
“The cosmic fudge factor he threw in so he could get the result he wanted.”
“Right. So, Einstein was a genius. Even when he made a mistake it was brilliant. Lambda is pushing the galaxies apart faster and faster. But the amount of energy in the vacuum depends on the speed of light—and vice versa.”
“That’s what your theory seems to suggest.”
She ignored his doubts. “If light speed drops, it reduces the amount of energy the vacuum can hold. So where does the excess energy go?”
Hernando pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “Outside the universe?”
“No, inside the universe. Into ordinary radiation and matter. Into dust clouds and microwaves, stars and planets and galaxies, into whales and birds and college professors.”
The post-doc whistled. “The Big Bang itself …”
“And with no wacky inflaton field needed as an epicycle. Quantized time is the only thing that explains the redshift gaps.”
“Measurement resolution?” Hernando suggested. “Limited samples? Unrepresentative samples?”
“That’s what they told Tifft when he discovered it. And … they