Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [207]
SOME LONG time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric’s raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans’s cheeks.
9
NOW
Tom
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.
Tom awoke in a cold sweat. No, it’s not possible! It was absurd, ridiculous. But everything fit. It all fell into place. Or did it? Was it the answer to his dilemma, or a chimera that made sense only as a troubled dream?
He glanced at Sharon, who sprawled, fully clothed, beside him. She must have returned late from the lab and crashed. Usually, he woke when she entered the condo, no matter how late the hour or how deep his sleep; but he could not remember her coming in last night. She turned slightly and a smile sketched itself on her lips. Dreaming of chronons, no doubt.
He eased out of bed and tiptoed from the room, closing the door gently behind him. He seated himself at CLEODEINOS and called up the Eifelheim file. He carefully checked and cross-referenced each item, creating a relationship map. Information lay in the arrangement of facts, not in the facts themselves. Rearrange them in another configuration and—who knew?—their meaning could change utterly.
He put his facts into chronological order, placing undated items through context or through logical relationship, not always an easy task. Not only had the calendar been unreformed, but they had started years at different times. In the Empire, a Year of Our Lord started on the Feast of the Incarnation, while regnal years, like IV Ludovici, began on the civil new year day. It seemed screwy to Tom, but Judy had laughed and said, “Render unto Caesar, Tom. Popes and emperors may have been trying to one-up each other for centuries, but no one ever forgot that they had different spheres of authority.”
Which meant that everything from January 1 to March 25 of 1349 CE, in the modern reckoning, had been recorded as Anno Domini 1348.
He interpolated the dates when the Black Death had broken out in Basel and Freiburg, and any other contextual events on which he could find information. The record was spotty, incomplete. If the strangers had arrived in the fall, why had there been no rumors about sorcerors and demons in Oberhochwald for six months or more? He didn’t really know when Dietrich had bought the wire; nor when the “travelers had determined to try for home.” And how did Ockham fit in? The Pope had invited him to Avignon on 8 June 1349, but there was evidence he had left Munich earlier, just ahead of the Plague outbreak there. Nothing further was ever heard of him, and historians supposed he had died of the Plague along the way. His route would have taken him near Oberhochwald. Would he have stopped there to see “my friend, the doctor seclusus”? Had he brought the Plague with him from Munich? Had he died there?
Tom chewed on the tip of his lightpen. He envied physicists. The answers were always “in the back of the book.” If the physicist were only persistent enough or clever enough, she could pry them loose from the universe. Cliologists were less fortunate. The facts themselves did not always survive; and those that did survived by luck, not importance. No amount of persistence could interpret a record that had perished in