Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [36]
“I needed to get out of the apartment for a while,” Tom said.
“Oh,” the young woman told him, “I’m glad you came. I’ve been following your researches.”
Historians do not normally acquire groupies. “Why on earth would you do that?” Tom said in surprise.
“I majored in analytical history under Dr. LaBret at Massachusetts, but differential topology was too tough for me; so I switched to narrative history instead.”
Tom felt much as a molecular biologist might upon encountering a “natural philosopher.” Narrative history wasn’t science; it was literature. “I remember my own problems with Thom’s catastrophe surfaces,” he ventured. “Sit down, please. You’re making me nervous.”
She remained standing hipshot, with the carton. “I don’t mean to keep you from your work. I only wanted to ask you …” She hesitated. “Oh, it’s probably obvious.”
“What is?”
“Well, you’re researching a village called Eifelheim.”
“Yes. The site is an unexplained void in the Christaller grid.” That was a deliberate test on Tom’s part. He wanted to see what she would make of it.
She raised her eyebrows. “Abandoned and never resettled?” Tom nodded confirmation. “And yet,” she mused, “the locus must have had affinity or it would never have been occupied in the first place. Perhaps a nearby site…. No? That is odd. Perhaps their mines were depleted? Their water dried up?”
Tom smiled, delighted at her perception, as much as her interest. He’d had a difficult time convincing Sharon that there even was a problem, and all she’d come up with was a common cause, like the Black Death. This young woman at least knew enough to suggest local causes.
After he explained his problem, the librarian frowned. “Why haven’t you searched for information from before the village’s disappearance? Whatever caused its abandonment must have occurred earlier.”
He swatted the carton. “That’s why I’m here! Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”
She ducked her head to the storm. “But, you’ve never referenced Oberhochwald, so I …”
“Oberhochwald?” He shook his head in irritation. “Why Oberhochwald?”
“That was Eifelheim’s original name.”
“What!” He stood sharply, knocking the heavy reading chair backward. It hit the floor with a bang and the librarian dropped her carton, folders skittering across the floor. She clapped a hand to her mouth, then stooped to gather them up.
Tom darted around the table. “Never mind those now,” he said. “It was my fault. I’ll pick them up. Just tell me how you know that about Oberhochwald.” Lifting her to her feet, he was surprised at how short she was. Sitting, he had thought her taller.
She pried her arm from his grasp. “We’ll both pick them up,” she told him. She set the carton on the floor and dropped to her hands and knees. Tom knelt beside her, handed her a folder. “Are you certain about this Oberhochwald place?”
She stacked three folders into the carton and looked at him and he noticed that her eyes were large and brown. “You mean you didn’t know? I learned only by accident, but I thought you … Well, it was a month ago, I think. A brother in the theology school asked me to find a rare manuscript for him and scan it into the database. The name Eifelheim caught my eye because I had already scanned several items for you. It was a marginal gloss on the name Oberhochwald.”
Tom paused with several more folders in his hand. “What was the context?”
“I don’t know. I read Latin, but this was in German. Oh, if I’d only known, I would have sent you an e-mail about it. But I thought—”
Tom placed a hand on her arm. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Do you have it here? The manuscript the brother asked for. I need to see it.”
“The original is at Yale—”
“A copy is fine.”
“Yes. I was about to ask you that. We kept a copy of the pdf scan in our own database, and df_imaging comes in once a month and organizes the archives for us. I can call it up.”
“Could you do that for me? Bitte sehr? I mean, pretty please? I’ll finish this.”
He reached under the table to retrieve another wayward