Eifelheim

Chapter One NOW Sharon During summer sessions, Sharon and Tom both did their research from home. That is easy enough today, when the world lies literally at our very fingertips; but it can be a trap, too, for what we need may lie just beyond the tips of our fingers. There is Tom hunched over the computer by the window, tracking down obscure references over the Net. He has his back to the room, which means to Sharon. Sharon lounges on the pillow sofa on the other side of the room, notebook open, surrounded by wadded-up balls of paper and half-finished cups of herbal tea, thinking about whatever it is that theoretical physicists think about. She gazes in Tom's direction, but she is looking on some inner vision, so in a way she too has her back turned. Sharon uses a computer, too, but it's an organic one that she keeps between her ears. It may not be networked to the wider world, but Sharon Nagy creates her own worlds, strange and 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 slippylooked at sideways, they would vanish. And yet . . . And yet, she sensed a pattern lurking beneath the chaos and she stalked it as a cat mightin stealthy half-steps and never quite straightforward. Perhaps it lacked only the right 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 . . . "Durak! Bunozo! Jaki!" . . . 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?"Flynn, Michael is the author of 'Eifelheim ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780765319104 and ISBN 0765319101.