Eifelheim Read Online Free Page B

inaccessible, among which lies one at the very edges of cosmology.
    It is not a beautiful thing, this world of hers. The geodesics are warped and twisted things. Space and time spiral off in curious, fractal vortices, in directions that have no name. Dimensions are quicksilver slippy—looked at sideways, they would vanish.
    And yet …
    A ND YET , she sensed a pattern lurking beneath the chaos and she stalked it as a cat might—in stealthy half-steps and never quite straightforward. Perhaps it lacked only theright beholding to fall into beauty. Consider Quasimodo, or Beauty’s Beast.
    “Damn!”
    An alien voice intruded into her world. She heard Tom smack his PC terminal and she screwed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. Almost, she could see it clearly. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups connected by a meta-algebra. But …
    “Durák! Bünözö! Jáki!”
    … But the world shattered into a kaleidoscope, and for a moment she sat overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. She threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against white bone-china teacups. Evidently God did not intend for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She glared at Tom, who muttered over his keyboard.
    There is something true about Sharon Nagy in that one half-missed detail: that she uses a pen and not a pencil. It betokens a sort of hubris.
    “All right,” she demanded. “What is it? You’ve been cursing in tongues all day. Something is bugging you. I can’t work; and
that’s
bugging me.”
    Tom spun in his swivel chair and faced her. “CLIO won’t give me the right answer!”
    She made a pout with her lips. “Well, I hope you were able to beat it out of her.”
    He opened his mouth and closed it again and had the grace to look embarrassed, because there was something true about him also. If there are two sorts of people in the world, Tom Schwoerin is of the other sort. Few thoughts of his failed to reach his lips. He was an audible sort of man, which means that he was fundamentally sound.
    He scowled now and crossed his arms. “I’m frustrated, is all.”
    Small doubt of that. Sharon regarded his verbal popcorn much as a miser does a spendthrift. She was the sort of person for whom the expression,
That goes without saying
,really does induce silence. In any event, Tom’s frustration was only a symptom.
“Why
are you frustrated?”
    “Eifelheim won’t go away!”
    “And
why
should it go away?”
    He threw his arms out wildly. “Because it’s not there!”
    Sharon, who had had another
why
ready in wait, massaged the bridge of her nose. Be patient, and eventually he would make sense.
    “Okay, okay,” he admitted. “It sounds silly; but … look, Eifelheim was a village in the Black Forest that was abandoned and never resettled.”
    “So …?”
    “So, it
should
have been. I’ve run two-score simulations of the Schwarzwald settlement grid and the site gets resettled
every time.”
    She had no patience for his problems. An historian, Tom did not create worlds, he only discovered them; so he really was that other sort of person. Sharon yearned for her geodesics. They had almost made sense. Tom wasn’t even close. “A simulation?” she snapped. “Then change the freaking model. You’ve got multicollinearity in the terms, or something.”
    Emotion, especially deep emotion, always caught Tom short. His own were brief squalls. Sharon could erupt like a volcano. Half the time, he could not figure out why she was angry with him; and the other half of the time he was wrong. He goggled at her for a moment before rolling his eyes. “Sure. Throw out Rosen-Zipf-Christaller theory. One of the cornerstones of cliology!”
    “Why not?” she said, “In the
real
sciences, theory has to fit the facts; not vice versa.”
    Tom’s face went red, for she had touched (as she had known she would) upon one of his hot buttons. “Does it,
a cuisla?
Does it really? Wasn’t it Dirac who said that it was