“I know that sort of talk. You’re your father’s daughter all right. He always had some excuse to slip away. He never showed consideration for me. I might have guessed that you’d abandon me too.”—Were those tears in her voice?—“I’m always left standing alone…”
Yes, she really was crying. Oh God!
“You can always reach me under this code, Mother, wherever I am. Where are you calling from? Do you finally have an ICom?”
Of course, she must have had one, or else my device could not have identified her.
“The call was disconnected by the other party, Domenica. Would you like me to reestablish the—”
“No, thank you, Luigi. I’ve had enough for today.”
* * *
IT WAS STILL dark when we rode out to the Leonardo da Vinci Airport. We had only hand luggage with us; the rest of our things had been sent ahead by freight, for even though none of us had a lot, it amounted to a small relocation. Falcotti had advised us that it was better to move out of our apartments. Signore Paolini, my landlord, had acknowledged the news with a silent shrug and had given me one of his saddest looks.
Each of us was dozing in a seat on the small bus, which had pulled up whisperingly in front of the institute at three in the morning. We had celebrated our departure there with far too much red wine. Neither Bernd nor Birgit had shown up. I had not expected that, but you made the good-bye much easier for me that way, Bernd.
The fuel cell worked soundlessly; only the noise of the tires could be heard as we rolled through the silent, empty streets. The traffic lights were turned off or destroyed; many probably had been for years. There was rarely an illuminated window. Only on Via della Magliana were there a few streetlights burning at irregular intervals. On the side of the highway to Fiumicino, wrecked vehicles gutted by fire came into view again and again; our headlights yanked them out of the darkness and then let them sink back into it. Drones came flitting through the sky like bats, briefly hovered over us and checked the identification of the vehicle and our ICom chips, only to dart away on their nightly hunt.
A wide perimeter around the airport was closed off and secured with double razor wire as well as a high-voltage fence. Every hundred yards there was a tank. We had to pass through three security checkpoints. At each one a uniformed man stuck his head in, stared at his Palmtop, and matched our IComs with the chips of the accompanying documents our driver handed over to him. At the third one Marcello jumped up and rushed to the door.
“Stay here! Do not get off the bus!” the security officer barked.
Marcello ignored the command, pushed past him, went plunging off the bus—and was looking into the barrel of a submachine gun pointed at his head.
“Don’t move!”
Another uniformed man rushed over and cocked his weapon. They tried to drive Marcello back onto the bus, but he suddenly doubled up and vomited. The security officers jumped back so that their uniforms would not be soiled, seized him from the right and left by his upper arms, and dragged him to the roadside, where he puked the contents of his stomach into the dead gray grass. The vomit, in the aggressive ice-blue xenon light that suddenly stabbed down at a slant in front of us from the sky, looked like blood. I shuddered. Out of nowhere a military drone appeared over the bus and circled the vehicle. The two rotors of the aircraft whirred almost soundlessly, which intensified the sense of menace, while with its jerky dragonfly-like movements it kept its double-barreled weapon constantly aimed at us.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” cried our driver, throwing up his arms and dropping them onto the steering wheel.
They pushed Marcello onto the bus. One of the security officers waved his submachine gun.
“Drive on!” he shouted.
The door closed with a sigh. Marcello flopped down into his seat. His face was ashen and covered with sweat. He was struggling for breath. Renata grabbed him by the shoulders from behind.
“You are never to do that!” she cried, hitting his shoulders with her fists. “Never! Never! Never!”
Marcello turned his head crossly and tried to fend her off.
“What did you want me to do, puke all over the bus?”
“That doesn’t matter. You can easily die that way, you hear? Those guys are scared. They’re nervous. It happens very fast, believe me! In a situation like that you have to stay completely calm. And whatever you do, just don’t move.”
“Oh, leave me in peace,” he murmured.
He was again overcome by nausea. He averted his head and pressed his hand to his mouth.
“Let him be,” I said to Renata, putting my arm around her soothingly. She was trembling all over. I had never seen her so worked up.
“In situations like that I’ve seen many a friend—” She broke off.
“Calm down, Renata. Nothing happened.”
The bus drove on slowly. We passed a burned-up delivery truck that was in the left lane. The metal was annealed and looked eerily pale; the back tire was still smoking. The downdraft from the rotors of a hovering drone blew the black curls across the asphalt. The strobelike glare of its searchlight ran across our faces in order to consign them to some electronic catacombs.
* * *
THE AIRPORT SCREENING dragged on endlessly. In the meantime, dawn was already breaking. Our travel documents were double- and triple-checked. Here and there protests among the waiting passengers grew loud. They had no effect. I was reminded of the television reports on the situation in Naples when the Gaeta-Termoli line was established. That was how far north the African continent had pressed in twelve years. We Romans had suddenly become Moros.
I looked out at the new launch system through the large shatterproof windowpane. Soon the sun would rise. A light-clipper crouched, darkly glistening, on a stratolifter at the end of the ramp of the linear accelerator, as if the darkness of the night with its glitter of stars had been compressed into an elegant sculpture. The broad, sweeping wings of the flying wing aircraft were encrusted with a sprayed-on film of solar cells, which completely absorbed the light. The panoramic windows on the edges of the wings were brightly illuminated and looked like closely arrayed faceted eyes, which stared alertly into the brightening sky. Slowly it began to move, gliding with increasing speed on the monorail of the magnetic levitation train, which rose in a gentle curve. It accelerated the machine to three hundred miles per hour, and then it ignited with a blue flash the double engines of the remote-controlled hydrogen booster at the tail of the stratolifter, which bore the aircraft upward. With its gleaming flame the lifter burned such a steep vapor trail into the morning sky that it looked as if the ramp of the magnetic train continued into the high atmosphere in the form of a thick white braid that the wind billowed rapidly northward. At a height of 115,000 feet, the lifter would uncouple and return. The plane, with the sun on its dark shoulders, would then race against the day to New Caracas, Sydney, or Tokyo, or as far as the dikes of Singapore.
In the meantime, the second plane with its fully fueled lifter had been hoisted onto the catapult, and a third and fourth were preparing for takeoff. The light-clippers had to scale the sky at daybreak; those with the greatest distance to cover went first.
We had to wait until the first lifter came back. It descended, clusters of landing gear extending downward, touched down, and released half a dozen wildly dancing braking parachutes. Finally we could take off.
We flew on a twin-engine turboprop with Fiat hydrogen engines. The plane was designed for eighty passengers and filled to capacity. It purred almost soundlessly, heading northward at two hundred miles per hour. From that height it could be made out clearly that the forest damage in the Abruzzo region had progressed further than the last satellite photos I had seen at the institute had suggested.
Ernesto was asleep in the seat next to me. I wondered once again what a quantum physicist could contribute to Rinascita della Creazione di Dio. “That’s quite simple to answer,” he had said to me when I had asked him about it. “Creation consists of quanta. Perhaps our job
will be just to bring them back into their divinely ordained order.” So he didn’t know either.
We were already over the Po Delta when Ernesto finally awoke. The water glistening in the morning light and the floating farms on it looked like shimmering natural silk with dark rectangles printed on it.
“What sort of technical equipment is there in Venice that is unavailable in Rome?”
He looked at me sleepily and shrugged. “Since the beginning of this century, Venice has been the world capital of virtual reality. That’s where cutting-edge research is conducted: optics, holography, simulation. And for ten years the Japanese have had a high-tech base there: the NNTR is restoring the city literally from the ground up.”
“NNTR?”
“Nippon NanoTech Research. They’re using various nanotechnologies to turn the rotten wooden foundation in the subsoil into a load-bearing and resistant substance. So far with moderate success and some unexpected side effects. In the Middle Ages whole forests were rammed into the mud of the lagoon that once stretched between Pula and the Peloponnese. Maybe they need you botanists to determine the wood species that were used back then so that they can program their tiny machines properly.”
“Botany deals only very marginally with wood, Ernesto,” I replied. “Wood is a product of nature, a cadaver of a once-living thing, so to speak. Interesting at most for age determination in connection with paleobotanical questions.”
He yawned. You could at least feign a little bit of interest, you arrogant egghead, I thought.
“And Toshiaki Ishida and his team are there too. Number one in RT.”
“What’s that?”
“Ray tracing. Surfaces are covered with microscopic optic elements that simulate computer-operated structures. That achieves an effect similar to what chameleons or octopuses do with their skin cells.”
“What’s the point of that?”
He shrugged and went on: “Or random objects are computer-generated in a holographic rendering. They construct virtual realities that you can’t distinguish from reality. That began in the 1980s with film. Lucasfilm was the first. The entertainment industry put a lot of money into these studies in order to make the animations more and more realistic. Then the U.S. Army further advanced research in this area—just think of the battlefield holos used to deceive enemy reconnaissance. Suddenly there was money in abundance. But the Japanese are foremost today in this field of optics. Do you remember the movie Final Fantasy, by Hironobu Sakaguchi? It came out around the turn of the century.”
“No, I’m not familiar with it.”
“A purely computer-animated production of incredibly lifelike detail. You think you’re looking at real people. Every single hair, every impurity of skin. Absolutely perfect! Ishida was his disciple. That movie is second to none. I see a connection there, incidentally, to the Netherlands, where similar studies are being conducted at the CIA.”
“The CIA?” I asked in confusion.
“Not the Americans, for heaven’s sake. The Casimir Institute in Amsterdam. It’s known as the center for quantum gravity and multidimensional boundary layer studies.”
“Then maybe we’re going to plant the world with holographic flowers and reforest it with virtual trees,” I commented jokingly.
Ernesto didn’t laugh. From the perspective of quantum physics, such a world was perhaps completely indistinguishable from the real one. Patterns in photon drifts, mobile atoms, molecular concentrations and interactions, the pull of nuclear forces and gravity. Reality originates in the brain, projections on the inner screen with vague correspondences in the real world, that much was clear to me; they are distorted reproductions, at most parallelisms. Like the pins in the cylinder of a music box in relation to the melody? Where had I read that? Nonetheless, they were astonishing references. Analog efficiency optimization: Here the evolution of consciousness had had to overcome the highest threshold; selection had raged mercilessly. Only those who bore the best image of their environment in their minds were capable of surviving. The interface had been developed to perfection, so that consciousness had the impression of sitting directly behind the eyes like a pilot in the cockpit, looking directly out into reality. A fallacy as a trick of survival, for this supposedly real world exists only in the head. The actual real world is entirely different, something absolutely foreign. — Or maybe not?
I remembered the lectures on the physiology of perception. The blue of the sky: There are no blue photons. Nothing about light is blue. There’s no blue coloration of the retina—no trace of blue in the signal that shoots into the brain through the optic nerve. The blue of the sky is solely in the mind of the beholder, is the impact of an electromagnetic vibration of a particular wavelength transformed into a color sensation, the result of a collision of subatomic particles—a correspondence in different reality media. Still, perhaps there were more correspondences between the inner and outer reality media than the neuroscientists and cognitive scientists thought. We’re not so far apart, after all, my dear Ernesto, I said to myself, we biologists and you quantum physicists.
Ernesto had mentioned the chameleon. That animal had mastered the art of turning the inner reality into the outer one, reverse-translating it, so to speak, and it served as a symbol for that mental step. It provided the crosscheck, so to speak: outer—inner—outer. And still more remarkable was the octopus, which produced within seconds a whole spectrum of external features, as if it possessed the magical powers of a shape-shifter. Nature is full of camouflage, Richard Fortey had noted half a century earlier, but human beings are the only living creatures on Earth who find pleasure in deceiving themselves. They are bent on developing that art to absolute perfection.
But to what end? Is that a sensible step in evolution or a step into the abyss?
Questions upon questions …
IX
The Border
A land is never poorer than when it seems to overflow with riches.
LAO TZU
The caravan leader looked at the device on his belt and pointed out the direction to the men, mustached fellows with turbans or scarves wrapped around their heads. They laid their dusty carpets in the grass and unrolled them toward the southeast. After the men had said their prayer, they stood up and bowed one last time toward the dark half of the sky. The evening air was damp and cool. The path of the sun was still low in the sky, but it was already perceptibly ascending from its winter camp, each day a finger’s breadth; for the time being, however, it was still too weak to burn away the fog that lay over the Po Plain in winter. But the dust and ash in the high atmosphere augured magnificent sunsets.
The previous night the caravan had camped at a mountain oasis below Monte Scarabello; it had been a cold night. Now they had reached the edge of the plain, where the Baganza Valley opens up toward the north. Near Marzolara, within sight of the border, they set up camp. They had arrived at their destination. The drivers had relieved the camels of their loads and led them to the riverbed to drink, where water came out of the ground between flat boulders. Now the animals were grazing on the grass-covered western slope, at the foot of which the men had lit a fire.
“Over there begins, as some claim, the promised land,” said the caravan leader, pointing northward with his chin into the hazy plain. After twenty days of steppe, bare mountains, and stretches of desert, the green of the vegetation was pleasing to the eye.
“But it’s not our land,” he went on, “and we have no place there.”
He paced up and down before the men, who now sat by the fire and had placed kettles on the stones to brew tea. The evening light poured coral-red through the cloud banks over the western horizon and died away only very gradually.
“Some refuse to believe it,” he went on. “There are always men among those I lead here who consider themselves clever enough to surmount the border and enter this supposed paradise. They cherish the belief that they could find asylum there.”
The caravan leader eyed the young men.
&
nbsp; “Be advised: No one has ever succeeded in that. The border cannot be surmounted. And it is deadly.”
He spat into the fire and ran his finger under the edge of the turban over his forehead, in order to loosen it.
“Some claim that on the other side of the border is a land in which milk and honey flow. That’s nonsense. True, the people there don’t suffer from hunger, indeed, they are immeasurably rich in comparison to us, but they don’t share with us, because they know that not enough would remain for them of that to which they lay claim. So they defend their wealth tooth and nail. They live in fear, for they regard their land as an island in chaos. And they are afraid that this island could go under; beset by storm surges, it could be swept away. That’s why they have surrounded themselves with a wall of weapons, which extends from the icy Norwegian Sea across Eastern Europe to here and from here westward to the great sea, which follows the Biscay dam, the Wales-Ireland dam, and then the curve of the North Sea and from there stretches back up to the Norwegian Sea. This island Europe is a world unto itself, which has nothing to do with the world we know.”
In the growing darkness the animals could be heard picking greedily at the lush grass. They had drunk their fill and belched rumblingly.
“Behind that wall live more old people than in the whole rest of the world combined. And for many of those old people, time doesn’t pass anymore. They have decided that time has to stand still, and they believe they can stop the flow of time. They possess many technical capabilities that we do not even understand. Sometimes, however, we reap some of those benefits. That’s the basis of our business. For we have things to offer in exchange that they with all their technology are unable to produce.”
The caravan leader pointed to the loads. “Spices,” he said. “Coffee, cocoa, tobacco. Those are the things that they need from us. And that’s why we’re here.” He rose. “For that we receive from them solar technology, radio technology, medical equipment, medicine, vaccines.”
A few of the men laughed halfheartedly, exposing gaps between their teeth.
The Cusanus Game Page 12