The Cusanus Game

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE CUSANUS GAME

  Copyright © 2005 by Wolfgang Jeschke

  English translation copyright © 2013 by Ross Benjamin

  Originally published as Das Cusanus-Spiel by Droemer Verlag, an imprint of Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf. GmbH & Co. KG, in Munich, Germany.

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-1908-1 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-8871-1 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781429988711

  First Edition: October 2013

  For Julian and Rosi

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  I. The Horse on Via Garibaldi

  II. CarlAntonio

  III. Ghost Towns

  IV. Imaste Dio

  V. Witch-Burning

  VI. In Vincoli

  VII. A Chicken for Cusanus

  VIII. Light-Clipper

  IX. The Border

  BOOK TWO

  I. The Toad in Castello

  II. Scarabeo

  III. The Executioner at the Ponte del Paradiso

  IV. Letters from a Witch

  V. Nanos Machinulis

  VI. The Astronaut

  VII. Solitons

  VIII. The Serenissima

  IX. The Garden of San Francesco della Vigna

  X. Sand from Mars

  XI. Death Raft

  BOOK THREE

  I. Highgate

  II. The Cusan Acceleratio

  III. Padania

  IV. The Salt Caravan

  V. The New Vatican

  VI. The Octopus

  VII. Princess Brambilla

  VIII. The Inner Circle of Hell

  IX. Message from a Cologne Witch

  BOOK FOUR

  I. The New Dam

  II. The Eye in the Sky

  III. The Papers of Dr. Goldfaden

  IV. The New Clothes

  V. Transitions

  VI. A Spring, a Summer …

  VII. An Autumn …

  VIII. … And a Winter

  BOOK FIVE

  I. Crossroads

  II. Forking Roads

  III. Exit Roads

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Time is an unfolding of God.

  —NICOLAUS CUSANUS

  What is fascinating about the principle of the kaleidoscope is that it suffices to shift but a tiny fragment of reality into another position in order to create new, unexpectedly variegated fantasy worlds, which delight the eye and the mind.

  —JEREMIAS WOLF

  The world is everything that is the case and also everything that can be the case.

  —ANTON ZEILINGER

  PROLOGUE

  Emilio was woken by the wopp-wopp of the weak repellers. Perhaps animals had stumbled into the border surveillance. When he heard the hum and rumble of heavy repellers and the howl of the vortex launchers, he stood up and stepped outside the tent. The moon shone in the west.

  Suddenly he heard a cry in the camp, then loud, vehement words. Bakhtir came marching toward him, beside himself with anger; with kicks and punches he drove two young men in front of him. They seemed dazed and did not even try to evade the head driver’s blows. Ghamal and Pietro; they were in shock. Emilio grabbed an armful of branches and threw them into the embers to kindle a fire. Both of the boys had bloody noses and bruises on their faces and arms—marks of the repellers.

  “At least they got such a scare that they turned around,” Bakhtir exclaimed with a voice as if his throat were constricted, “but Ibrahim and Hakim…”

  He broke off and tried in vain to suppress a sob.

  “Your son?” asked Emilio.

  Bakhtir nodded silently. Emilio grasped him by the shoulder. “You go into your tent!” he shouted at the two young men, who cowered before him and held their heads in pain. “We’ll speak about this tomorrow.”

  They struggled to their feet and staggered away.

  “That crazy Ibrahim!” cried Bakhtir; it sounded like a wail. “He persuaded Hakim and the two others to come with him. I should have put that fellow in chains.”

  Furiously, he kicked a stone into the fire.

  “Try to calm down, Bakhtir,” said Emilio. “We will find out what happened.”

  “Do you think there’s still hope?”

  The caravan leader shrugged silently and looked down at the ground.

  “Hakim!” Bakhtir cried out into the plain. There the fog had spread like a milky lake out of which the treetops rose. “Hakim!”

  No answer. The lights had gone out. The howling of the wolves and the rumbling of the repellers had fallen silent. The newly kindled fire blazed, illuminating the faces of the men. Bakhtir wept.

  * * *

  AN HOUR AND a half after sunrise, the airship appeared. When it was floating over the campsite, the whine of the jets died away and it descended. Shortly before landing, they once again briefly hissed, and the supple, light gray plastic body of the zeppelin, which was covered with a glistening film on its back and flanks, broke open at the bottom like a soft pod and released containers that arranged themselves into two rows.

  The drivers began emptying the containers. They were filled with packaged loads, cocooned in silvery plastic threads. These were now exchanged for the goods brought by the caravan. Emilio checked the electronic identification of the packages with his device. On the LED appeared numbers, quantities of items and descriptions of goods, as well as names and addresses of the respective recipients.

  The men were about to heave the loads onto the animals’ backs and tie them down when the figure of a man in a Euro-blue protective suit appeared in the opening at the front of the zeppelin. His polarized helmet visor revealed no face. He raised his hand and exclaimed, “Hello, Emilio!” He then added gravely, “Please come with me.”

  Bakhtir spoke up hoarsely. “My son,” he said, “was one of the boys who…”

  There was a brief, heavy silence. Then the man in the protective suit said, “You may come too.”

  He climbed the aluminum ladder into the cockpit. Emilio and Bakhtir followed. Behind them servos hoisted the containers into the cargo area and fastened them in their foam troughs. Emilio could not believe his eyes; the cockpit was far more spacious than the external dimensions suggested.

  “My boy,” Bakhtir said in a near-whisper. “Is he…”

  “I’m sorry,” said the man in the protective suit. “Unfortunately nothing remains of either of them. They ran straight into a la
ser fan.”

  “My son,” Bakhtir sobbed. As if of its own volition, his hand pulled his revolver from his belt and pointed it at the pilot in the protective suit.

  “Stop this nonsense, man!” cried the pilot. “From where you’re standing, you could damage a lot of outrageously expensive electronics and trigger the self-defense, if you shoot. So put that thing away!”

  Emilio reached out toward the revolver, but it was too late. Bakhtir had fired two shots at the man’s chest. The double wreath of Euro-stars remained intact, but an alarm siren began to bleat, and somewhere the hiss of escaping gas could be heard.

  “Hold the man back, Emilio!” shouted the pilot, slapping with his glove at the large panel of switches on the left shoulder of his protective suit. “He seriously believes that I’m here in the flesh. And now get out of here as fast as you can, damn it! From here I have no control over the aircraft’s self-defense.”

  The next instant the man in the protective suit was gone. The room had been reduced to a third of its length and was filling up with whitish smoke from the floor. Where the two shots had hit the wall there was crackling, and the alarm siren would not stop bleating. The smoke thickened. Bakhtir coughed and doubled up, causing even more gas to stream into his lungs.

  “Out! Out! Out!” shouted Emilio.

  He grasped Bakhtir by the shoulders, drove him to the hatch, pushed him out and jumped after him. With a snap the hatch of the cockpit sealed shut behind him. They crawled out from under the airship—not a second too soon, for the engines were firing already and the aircraft took off. Emilio and Bakhtir threw sand at each other to stifle the flames licking at their djellabas; then they squatted down, vomited, and coughed their guts out.

  “This was a needless tragedy, caravan leader,” said the voice of the man in the protective suit from the device on Emilio’s belt. “You must impress upon your people that we are not running an adventure playground here. This is a border that nothing and no one can penetrate. It is the border between past and future.”

  Emilio spat to get rid of the acrid, burning taste in his mouth.

  “And on which side lies the future?” he asked.

  André laughed.

  “Here the clocks go faster, and have done so for more than five hundred years. Look at your calendar, Emilio. It shows the year 1425. Here we live in the middle of the twenty-first century.”

  “Then we still have a lot of time,” replied the caravan leader.

  The man on the other side of the border didn’t answer. And Emilio saw that the light had gone out. The connection had been broken.

  Book

  ONE

  I

  The Horse on Via Garibaldi

  I once thought that truth could be found better in darkness. But of great power is the truth in which possibility itself shines brightly. Indeed, it shouts in the streets … With great certainty it shows itself everywhere easy to find.

  NICOLAUS CUSANUS

  From behind the barrier of stacked-up sandbags, a man appeared.

  “Halt!” he cried. “Halt, signorina! You can’t drive across here!”

  He had a rifle under his arm and, despite the heat, a blue knitted wool cap on his head. I was about to turn left onto the Ponte Sisto, but the engine stalled. The indicator light blinked red. I gave the battery a kick, but the thing was totally dead. The man came running across the street with a sideways gait, leaning his right shoulder somewhat forward—probably because of his weapon—and limping a bit. Breathing heavily, he grabbed the handlebars of my Lectric and held on to them.

  “Let go right now!” I shouted, kicking at his knee, but he dodged and tightened his grip.

  “Listen, signorina! I’m really trying to help you. You can’t cross here. See for yourself.”

  Only now did I notice that there was a tank on the other side of the river, at the turn onto Piazza Trilussa, and two more armored vehicles had driven up, one close behind the other, on Lungotevere della Farnesina. Soldiers in light blue EuroForce combat uniforms stood there, heavily armed and with technical equipment on their backs.

  I stepped down, pulled my crash helmet off my head, shook my hair out, and looked back. The street lay deserted before me.

  “But I live over there,” I said, “on Via Garibaldi.”

  The man shook his head, pulled a crushed pack of Nazionali from his shirt pocket, fished one out and stuck it between his lips, dug out an ancient Camel Zippo lighter, flicked it open, and lit the cigarette. Greedily he sucked in the smoke. He’s definitely pretty sick, I thought in passing. His cheeks were pale and sunken and covered with gray stubble. Greasy gray curls hung out under the edge of his wool cap, which bore the Juventus emblem in front. He raised his face, bared his yellow teeth, and let the smoke stream out between them.

  “Riders on horseback,” he said, coughing into his arm held in front of his mouth. “Riders on horseback,” he repeated in a tone as if he were speaking of something particularly abhorrent. With the rifle he pointed across to the opposite bank. “Three or four. Armed. Moros, in the middle of the city—in broad daylight. It would be time to blow up the bridge.”

  “And you think that would stop them?” I asked. “The river is gone.”

  He shook his head. “Here no one’s getting across. We’ll make sure of that,” he asserted, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder.

  I saw rifle barrels jutting over the barrier of sand-filled gray and black plastic bags and from the second- and third-floor windows. The display windows of the sporting goods store on the ground floor were blockaded with cabinets and overturned tables. “Around the clock,” he assured me.

  Along the left bank, similar makeshift barricades of sandbags and car tires had been piled up to shoulder height on the sidewalk in front of the houses. The only way to reach the entrances to the houses was sideways through a sort of labyrinthine passage.

  To fill all the sandbags was no problem, for in the months of dryness the hot south wind had deposited pale drift sand from the Sahara all over the city on the outside steps and in the entrances to the houses. Now it nestled against the foot of soot-covered walls—several feet high in many places.

  The man with the wool cap suddenly raised his head as if he were picking up a scent. From Saint Peter’s Square, where a unit of the EuroForce light air cavalry was stationed, I heard the sound of approaching helicopters. From there they patrolled the city and flew missions to secure the southern belt highway and give the convoys covering fire. That was during the day—at night no one dared to use the southern Grande Raccordo Anulare between Via Aurelia and Via Appia, when car tires burned in the lanes and sniper fire was to be expected. Sometimes the stink of burnt rubber reached as far as Trastevere.

  The whipping sound grew louder; two shadows in gray and brown camouflage paint emerged one after the other from the haze in low-altitude flight and took shape over the Ponte Mazzini. The funnel-shaped double barrels of the ShriekGuns projected downward from their bellies like the stingers of monstrous insects. The rotors spun deafeningly and raised dust from the bone-dry riverbed, which clouded the air even more and filled it with the stink of old death.

  The helicopters suddenly rose high and leaned into a sharp right turn. I saw only briefly the white helmets with the flipped-down data visors shimmering between the reflections on the plastic bubbles of the cockpits; then the machines had disappeared behind the pines on the Gianicolo hill. After that the sonar weapons screamed for several minutes.

  The man flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and nodded to me.

  “Now you can cross, signorina,” he said, eyeing appreciatively my laced suede vest, as if he were permitting himself only now to cast a glance at something other than the supposed front line. Sweat trickled down between my breasts and ran over my belly. I wiped my forehead with my hand.

  “You should look for another apartment,” he said. “Trastevere has been given up since the police station on Via Garibaldi was closed. You’re not safe over th
ere anymore. You should get that straight, signorina. The west side of the city has been in the hands of the Moros for a long time. There have been lootings in the Vatican. Despite the EuroForce guards.” He spat. “Since Papa Coward absconded to Salzburg, not a damn soul cares what happens here.”

  “There can’t be much left there,” I said. “Most of it was brought to Vienna and Budapest a long time ago.”

  “You should see what the Americans and Japanese are making off with.”

  “On behalf of UNESCO.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he said, pulling his wool cap off his head and wiping his face with it.

  I shrugged and tried to start the engine, but the battery indicator light blinked red. I had already noticed on Via dei Cerchi, shortly before Piazza Bocca, that it was almost dead. It hadn’t charged the previous night: power outage—lately there was one every other day.

  “Do you live alone?” the man inquired. “Here in the house there are still apartments. Safe apartments. I’m the super here. Ask for Dino, if you’re interested.”

  “Thanks, signore!” I called over my shoulder, hanging the helmet on the handlebars and pushing my Lectric between the concrete-encased posts onto the Ponte Sisto. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  “You’re welcome to move in with me, my dear!” he shouted, and laughed bleatingly.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  * * *

  THE SOLDIERS ON Piazza Trilussa waved me through. With their light blue ceramic armor and helmets, their flipped-down VR-visors, laser-aiming devices, whip antennas, and heavy hand weapons, they looked like upright crustaceans.

  As I turned onto Via Garibaldi, I saw that it had been closed off halfway up with coils of razor wire. An officer raised a hand and stopped me. He was around thirty, of medium height; with his closely trimmed full beard and his brown curls under the light blue beret, he was really good-looking. From the walkie-talkie in the breast pocket of his camouflage bulletproof vest, a voice chattered excitedly.