Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [211]
When she finished, she closed her eyes and tried to see her way clear to the answer. She tried putting the puzzle pieces together as he had. If this went with that … Finally, she shook her head, seeing the trap that he had fallen into. “It’s all circumstantial,” she said at last. “No one comes right out and says anything about aliens or other planets.” The teakettle began to whistle and she went to the kitchen to turn it off. She laid Tom’s papers on the kitchen table, where she had dumped her own papers last night. She opened the cabinet above the sink and searched for a morning tea.
“Yes, they did,” Tom insisted. He had followed her into the kitchen. “They did come right out and say so. In medieval terms and concepts. Oh, we can talk easily enough of planets orbiting stars; but they were just beginnning to realize that their own planet turned on its axis. ‘World’ meant … Well, it meant the ‘polyverse.’ And ‘planet’ meant ‘stars that moved.’ We can talk about multidimensional space-time-whatever continua. But they couldn’t. They were only just grappling with the concept of a continuum—they called it ‘the intension and remission of forms’—and Buridan had only just formulated the first law of motion. They didn’t have the words to define the words. Everything they learned from the starfarers was filtered through a Weltanschauung unequipped to handle it. Read Ockham someday; or Buridan or Aquinas. It’s nearly impossible for us to make sense of them, because they envisioned things differently than we do.”
“People are people,” she said. “I’m not convinced.” It occurred to her that she was not playing Devil’s Advocate. It was Tom who was advocating devils. She wanted to share this Tom-like joke with him, but decided that it was not the right time for it. He was too deadly serious.
“Everything you have,” she told him, “could be read another way. It’s only when you put them all together that they seem to form a pattern. But have you put them together right? Do all your pieces even come from the same jigsaw puzzle? Why should there be any connection at all? Maybe the journal wasn’t kept by your Pastor Dietrich. There might be other Oberhochwalds—in Bavaria, in Hesse, in Saxony. The ‘upper village in the high woods.’ My Lord, that must be as rare in southern Germany as Main Streets are in the Midwest.” She held up a hand to forestall his objections, as he had done to her earlier. “No, I’m not mocking you. I’m just pointing out alternatives. Maybe the lightning flash really was a lightning flash, not an energy leak from a crippled hypospacecraft. Maybe Dietrich sheltered Chinese pilgrims, as you thought originally. Maybe Joachim was high on ergot when he thought he saw flying monsters. And copper wire must have other uses than repairing alien machines.”
“What about the descriptions of the hidden, innner worlds and the Trinity of Trinities? Doesn’t that sound like your hypospace?”
She shrugged. “Or it sounds like medieval theology. Physics and religion both sound like gibberish if you don’t know the basic axioms.” She poured the hot water into a teapot and let the brew steep. There was no room on the kitchen table, however. It was littered with papers. When she had dropped the folder there, some of the contents had skidded out. Tom’s printouts were mixed with her own from the lab. Medieval manuscripts and circuit diagrams for chronon detectors. She tsk’ed at the mess and began to straighten it up. Tom stood in the doorway.
“Do you know what I find significant?” Tom said. “The way Dietrich referred to the aliens.”
“If they were aliens, and not hallucinations.”
“All right. If they were aliens. He always called them ‘beings,’ or ‘creatures,’ or ‘my guests,’ or ‘travelers.’ Never anything supernatural. Didn’t Sagan once say that alien visitors would be