Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [210]
SHE STARED at him, her head spinning. Aliens? she thought. In medieval Germany? It was fantastic, unbelievable. Was he serious? She listened as he described his evidence. His solution seemed more incredible than the original problem!
“And you think this scenario is true?” she asked when he had finished.
“Yes. And so does Anton.” He showed her a note that had come with the printouts. “And he is nobody’s fool.”
She read the note quickly. “He doesn’t come out and say so,” she pointed out.
Tom grinned. “I said he was no fool.”
“That’s better left to you, I suppose. What I’d like to know is why you dragged Nagy space into it. If you’re determined to ruin your own reputation, can’t you leave mine out of it?”
Tom scowled. “Give me credit for a little sense,” he said. “I’m saying this theory explains the facts very neatly. And, if it’s true …” His voice trailed off.
If it’s true … Sharon felt her heart quicken.
“I dragged Nagy space into the picture because neither Dietrich, nor anyone else, described a spaceship.”
“How could they,” she pointed out. “They had no concept of spaceships.”
“Medieval people weren’t stupid. They were having a technological revolution themselves. Camshafts and waterwheels and mechanical clocks…. They would have recognized a spaceship as a vehicle of some sort, even if they called it Elijah’s chariot. But, no. Dietrich and Joachim and the Bull of 1377 all state that the aliens ‘appeared.’ Isn’t that how you described hypospace travel the other day? A single stride covers great distances, was how you put it. No wonder Dietrich was so interested in seven league boots. And that’s what Johann meant when he pointed at the stars and asked how he would ever find his way home again. Traveling the way he did, he would have had no idea which one was his own.”
“Appeared. That’s a lot to read into a single verb.”
He slapped his stack of computer printouts with the flat of his hand. “It all ties together, though. Consilience, not deduction. No single strand of reasoning is enough to support the conclusion; but taken together … A prayer attributed to Johann says that there are eight secret ways to leave the Earth. How many dimensions in your ‘hidden’ hypospace?”
“Eight.” The word came out reluctantly. Her blood hammered in her ears. What if?
“And the religious treatise attributed at third hand to Dietrich: to travel to other worlds you have to travel inside. You used almost those exact words. Your twelve-dimensional geometry became a ‘Trinity of Trinities.’ The writer mentioned ‘times and places we cannot know, save by looking inside ourselves’.”
“But, that really was a religious treatise, wasn’t it? I mean, the ‘other worlds’ were Heaven, Hell, and Earth, and ‘traveling inside’ meant searching one’s soul.”
“Ja doch. But the ideas weren’t written down for seventy-five years. The writers took something they had heard at third or fourth hand and interpreted it according to some familiar paradigm. The rationalism of the Middle Ages was already giving way to the romantic mysticism of the Renaissance. Who knows what Dietrich himself understood when Johann tried to explain it to him? Here.” He closed the flap on the manila folder and handed the entire package to her. “Read through it the way Anton did and see if it doesn’t make sense.”
She looked him in the eyes as she took the folder from him. He really is serious, she thought. Which, knowing Tom, could mean that he was unable to deal with the original problem’s insolubility.
Or else, maybe his idea was not as crazy as it sounded.
Give him a fair chance. He deserves that much before I call the men in the white suits.
She went to her beanbag chair and slumped into it. She read the items slowly and carefully, relying on his English translations. Middle German was too hard to follow, and Latin was Greek to her. From the edge of her eye she could see Tom fidgeting.
Crazy, disconnected items. But a thread that ran through them, tying them together. She came at last to the treatise that Tom had shown her originally. She recognized the ugly, angular