Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [217]
It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind had ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had for their part found it unappetizing. The eyes were gone, of course, and two enormous sockets set on either side of the head gaped empty; but whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was a mummy’s head.
Heinrich held it out and Judy took it gingerly. Tom stood behind her, inspecting it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on its edge with his feet dangling in the hole. He took his pipe from his pocket and lit it; though I noticed his hands trembled a bit with the match. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten into? I have a feeling Bishop Arni will not like it.”
So I told him. Tom and Judy added the details. The mystery. The folktales. The hints and fragmentary evidence. Heinrich nodded as he listened and asked an occasional question. Tom’s explanation of hypospace physics confused him, I think; but then he was getting it at second hand. I think Tom was confused as well. Sharon lived in a different world than we, an austere world and strangely beautiful; but one whose beauty we could at best only dimly grasp. Sharon had seen the likeness of a circuit in a manuscript illumination. Let it go at that. Her insight had given Tom the courage to test his intuition; and his intuition had sent her groping down a path that might one day give us the stars. Surely, God moves in mysterious ways.
Heinrich accepted it all quietly. How could he doubt when he had held the skull in his own hands? He looked out into the surrounding forest. “There will be the remainer of the skeleton, of course,” he said, pointing into the grave with the stem of his pipe. “And of others as well. You say there were several of these beings? And out there?” The pipe stem swept the Black Forest. “Out there, what? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed beneath the living soil.” He sighed. “There is much work to be done. And don’t forget the cries of fraud or hoax that will be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Arni and the university people.”
“No!”
We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Johann’s skull in her hands, and Gus, his initial fright over, was peering at it curiously, eyeball to eye socket. I was proud of the way our two workmen had reacted. Whatever was to come of all this, it boded well.
“You know what they’ll do, don’t you?” she said. “They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bulletproof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn’t right. It isn’t.” When she shook her head her whole body shook.
“That’s not true, Judy,” Tom said, gently putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and gazed up at him.
“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip off some cells for the biologists to wonder at. That much, he would have wanted. Then we’ll make plaster casts and hang those. But him, we’ll keep safe from harm and someday—when Sharon’s work is done—someday we’ll find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children’s children will.”
Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the shaft, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and anticipation the like of which I have never seen.
Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal
woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.
—PETRARCH
HISTORICAL NOTES
I HAVE tried to depict the milieu of the mid-fourteenth-century Rhineland as accurately as possible, but that is difficult enough to do for early twenty-first-century America, let alone a time and