The Cusanus Game

  Renata was right. I had lived long enough near Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, where the horror of the stake-burnings remains palpable to this day, where, according to the calculations of a statistician, the ground had been so saturated with the ashes of the victims burned at the stake that the air still contained molecules of them. The idea of breathing in remains of Giordano Bruno, who had been burned at the stake there, had always sent shivers down my spine, and whenever I crossed the piazza I had held my breath until I got dizzy.

  “A ghastly hovel,” I said.

  “And the building was thoroughly renovated only at the beginning of the century.”

  “Why wasn’t it torn down?”

  “Nothing is ever torn down here, Domenica. Everything here is protected as a cultural heritage site.”

  The boat was moored in front of a building with a marble facade in a strange mixture of classical and baroque architecture, as only the nineteenth century in its immoderate historicism could have brought forth; over mighty portals flanked by Ionic columns were the words:

  ISTITUTO TECNICO PAOLO SARPI

  On the right side, next to the tunnel-like passage of Calle San Francesco, it was flanked by a strange building with a Renaissance facade that included three marble sarcophagi at a lofty height—perhaps the final resting places of highly renowned engineers and inventors. The idiosyncratic architectural solution made an impression less sublime than it was ridiculous, for it seemed like a bizarre, vertically constructed bathhouse, in the stone tubs of which sweaty technicians could have their backs scrubbed. It was the former church of Santa Giustina, in which a museum for the history of technology had been established, as I later learned.

  Through the portal flanked by columns made of polished dark wood we entered another world. Only the old marble floor had been left untouched; everything else was glass and brightness by means of refined indirect lighting. Palms and papyrus plants in troughs exuded freshness. There was a slight whiff of frangipani in the air. Was it a shady garden? Was a scent synthesizer fooling my nose with vibrations? Somewhere water burbled. To the right next to the entrance blazed a bougainvillea. I surreptitiously ran the back of my hand over the flower petals. It was real.

  Right at the entrance, a sculpture stood between palms. It portrayed a kneeling old bald-headed man wearing a toga. His mouth was open in a painful cry; he had wrapped his arms comfortingly around the shoulders of a younger man, who lay half-upright before him on the ground, a hand covering his face in agony. Apparently he had been blinded.

  On the wall behind the sculpture hung an oval painting. It was the portrait of a middle-aged man in monastic dress, with clear, knowingly gazing eyes under thin, widely curved eyebrows. His mouth was framed by a dark beard, his nose jutted out, his forehead was broadly domed under short-cropped brown hair.

  FRA PAOLO SARPI was inscribed on the small brass plaque under the painting.

  “The teacher of Galilei,” declared Ernesto, who had stopped next to me. “He was luckier than Bruno. As a native-born Venetian, he enjoyed the protection of the city, but the fundamentalists got him nonetheless and mutilated his face so badly with knives that he could never show himself again in public.”

  I thought of CarlAntonio.

  “He was our most significant scientist in the sixteenth century. He became famous as a historian, for”—he shrugged with a sigh—“in Venice scientists have never counted for much.”

  “That has changed with Professor Ishida, I’ve heard.”

  Ernesto cast me a surprised glance, then laughed. “You can say that again.”

  We waited.

  * * *

  PROFESSOR TOSHIAKI ISHIDA insisted on greeting us in person, our escort informed us. With a billowing, open lab coat he finally strode hastily through the glass door, which soundlessly slid aside, a short, slight man around fifty years old, with his VR glasses casually pushed up on his forehead, as if he wished to demonstrate that even an extremely important experiment could not prevent him from welcoming us.

  “My young friends!” he exclaimed in perfect Italian, spreading his arms. “Welcome to this beautiful city! Welcome to our institute. I hope you had a pleasant journey.”

  Then he repeated the gesture of greeting silently in Japanese; he placed his fingertips together and bowed several times.

  He had short gray hair and almost white side-whiskers that stuck out a handbreadth from the periphery of his face like a grotesque ridden-up ruffled collar. His alert black eyes flashed triumphantly.

  “Oh, God,” whispered Marcello. “Looks like a macaque.”

  “Then be careful around him,” Renata said with a chuckle. “Macaques are agile—and they bite.”

  I had trouble suppressing the urge to burst out laughing.

  “Shh!” Kazuichi hissed.

  “Indeed. He’s his own logo,” Ernesto murmured.

  I noticed that his skin was greased with a cream or oil that, depending on the angle of the light, caused iridescent color patterns to appear on it .

  “I know that in Europe people usually greet each other with a handshake,” declared Ishida, raising both hands, which suddenly scintillated in all colors of the rainbow. “As a rule, we here in the institute refrain from that. Not out of impoliteness”—he raised his chin, the ruffled collar stuck out even more—“nor for hygienic or other medical reasons, but rather solely for technical reasons. You will all understand that in due time. Incidentally, you are staying very close to here. It’s the red house to the right up on the Rio, No. 2821 N, about a hundred and fifty yards from here. Mr. Kazuichi Inoue, one of my assistants—you know him already, of course—will attend to you. He will show you your apartments shortly. Your luggage is already there. We’ll do everything we can so that you feel comfortable here with us. But first familiarize yourselves with the city, to the extent that you are not already familiar with it.” And raising a shimmering finger, Professor Ishida added: “Get a pathfinder tattoo. Here in Venice it can easily come to pass that you end up in a blind alley or even in a canal.”

  Renata sniffed disdainfully.

  Professor Ishida’s raised palms flashed, and he bowed in parting. “Thank you.”

  The glass door snapped aside and closed behind him. A billowing white silhouette faded away on the other side. The professor hurried back to his experiment.

  Suddenly I noticed that I was dead tired.

  “How did you Japanese people learn to speak such fabulous Italian?” Marco asked our escort, as we walked along the Fondamenta Santa Giustina to our housing.

  “Ha,” Kazuichi replied, grinning. “Piped in.”

  “Piped in?”

  He jerkily lowered his thick head. I would have to get used to his manner of nodding.

  “SimStim,” explained Kazuichi. “Simulated stimulation. Deliberately induced imaginings. Ideally via Brain-Computer Interface.”

  He tapped his temple, and I noticed that he wore, half covered by his bristly black hair, an implant the size of a euro-cent piece under his skin. I was horrified; I had long since decided never to have one of those brain pacemakers implanted in me. How could you know where your own memories ended and the Net began?

  “If you don’t want to wear your own BCI,” he said, as if he could read my mind with that thing, “you have to undergo an indirect SimStim treatment. That’s an elaborate procedure, which lasts until the data packets have been individually fed to you. A few electrodes are stuck to your forehead and you are slid into a tube. After a few days you begin to think in the desired language and talk away: Uzbek, Visigothic, Middle High German, Aramaic, Martian—whatever your heart desires.”

  “That’s impossible,” I blurted out with astonishment.

  “It has been possible for a long time,” he said, nodding to me. “In the meantime, you can also have yourself programmed with sense impressions of animals, of dolphins or wild cats or birds. That’s only more complicated and not entirely risk-free. Have you never heard of the ‘Flight of the Condor,’ by Lu
ciero Montalban? The mental symphonies of Fautin and Norrevang?”

  He shook his head with a laugh when he saw that we were staring at him blankly.

  “Where are you from, people?” he asked.

  “I thought those are VR spectacles,” Marco interjected suspiciously. Perhaps he believed our tutor was pulling our leg.

  “The VR provides only the scenery,” explained Kazuichi. “The smell, the taste, the physical sensations, the actual kick—that comes from the inducer. Via BCI or conventional SimStim.”

  “Are you experimenting with that here?”

  Again that exaggerated nod.

  “I thought you worked with holography.”

  “It’s all related,” replied Kazuichi, scratching his temple where the cent showed under the skin. “Reality models. That includes photon manipulation too—spatial, temporal…”

  “Light?” Marco asked, frowning and stroking his thin, shaved head. It was not his field—nor mine. Ernesto, walking on the other side of the Japanese man, smiled indulgently at so much ignorance. Suddenly I had the impression that Kazuichi was listening inwardly. Was he heeding the voice of his master? Or the whispering of the Net?

  “You mean optics?” he asked Marco distractedly. “Yes, optics too, of course. We work on real reality,” he explained. “That will be clear to you in due time.”

  I had stopped and looked to the right. Directly behind the old building of the institute was a huge building complex, which in its bareness and featurelessness resembled an airplane hangar or a military technical facility. It extended eastward to the church of San Francesco and northward almost to the water of the lagoon.

  “Oh,” said our Japanese guide, eyeing the white block. “Someone has been fiddling with a switch again.” He shook his head with amusement.

  I didn’t understand the remark, but I was too tired to ask what he meant.

  * * *

  OUR APARTMENTS WERE on the southwest and northwest sides of the four-story house. The corners of the building had been constructed as balconies overlooking the northwest lagoon with San Michele as well as the city to the south. The view did not much interest me, however. I decided to leave my suitcases unopened, and I lay down for an hour.

  When I visited Renata later in her apartment on the fourth floor, she was standing with a glass of orange juice at the balcony railing. Ernesto was sitting in an armchair in the living room.

  “Shall I bring you a glass of juice too?” he asked me.

  “Yes, please. Where are Marcello and Marco?”

  “I think they’re lying down,” he replied.

  I stood next to Renata. She was looking across to the distant mountains rising from the gray-green haze of the plain, their pale summits showing faintly against the clear, light blue afternoon sky.

  “Homesick?” I asked.

  She frowned and wrinkled her snub nose. After a moment’s hesitation she shook her head wordlessly, but I noticed the pain behind her determination not to let herself be overwhelmed by emotions. I quickly changed the subject.

  “Is that snow?” I asked, gesturing with a nod to the mountain range. “I’ve never seen snow. In reality, I mean.”

  “Lime,” said Renata.

  “Limestone?”

  “The corals and shells of the Tethys Sea—compacted and lifted into the sky. It was once the coast of North Africa. That’s where I come from,” she said with a smile. “That always fascinated me as a child. To have been born on the northern coast of Africa.”

  “A Moro in disguise,” said Ernesto. “I’ve suspected you for a long time.”

  “Hey!” I cried in shock as my eyes wandered toward the southeast. “That’s impossible!”

  The bare, windowless block of the institute had disappeared. Instead the architecture of the old Istituto Tecnico Paolo Sarpi in its boring regularity of black-stained cornices and tall double-gabled windows extended eastward as far as the slender brick tower of the Campanile di San Francesco. Ernesto came out onto the loggia.

  “Look at that,” I said. “I swear that an hour ago there was a smooth white block here at least two hundred yards long.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He ran his hand through his short brown hair, which was already thinning quite a bit on top, and nodded at me. “Ray tracing,” he explained. “It’s an optical trick.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “It’s not even that new. Sasha Migdal, a Russian quantum physicist, already patented it last century, in the nineties. He called it ‘Metaflash’ or ‘Metastream,’ a computerized reproduction of three-dimensional surfaces. It was a trixel technology.”

  “Holographic?” asked Renata.

  “Yes, something like that, merely more refined. Television works with pixels—two-dimensionally. Here, three coordinates of a picture element are stored. These days, people are working with additional dimensions. Subtle information about surface texture.”

  “Those are just games,” I broke in.

  Ernesto nodded, but he had not even been listening. “The military technicians call it WaveCam—wave camouflage. Or Overlay, because it is superimposed on real or projected surfaces. Visible light is modulated by invisible light. In that way, you can make a coarse surface appear smooth as a mirror or make an even surface appear structured. You can cover it with fur, present it as overgrown with plants, or adapt it entirely to the surroundings.”

  “Now hold on,” I said. “The chameleon has been doing that for more than fifty million years.”

  “Some octopuses too,” added Renata. “Have you ever seen how they do that? It’s incredible! One glance at the background, and the surface of their body turns a split second later into its photographic image.”

  “Nanos machinulis,” said Ernesto; it sounded almost reverent.

  “What does that have to do with nanos?” she asked with a frown.

  “The surface of the building has been sprayed with smartdust. The particles assume the function of monitors. They group themselves into picture elements. With a computer you can thereby simulate any structure and alter it constantly. Do you see the shadows of the cornices and intrados? They follow exactly the position of the sun.”

  “Might the professor have sprayed himself with something like that?” I asked. “He looked as if he had applied some sort of cream.”

  “That looked gross,” said Renata, wrinkling her nose. “And then that straw star of a beard. A strange fellow.”

  “That iridescent coating on his skin?” Ernesto reflected. “Maybe so. Perhaps they use that to simulate tactile and haptic impressions.” He became really excited. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that before? The sense of touch is the most difficult to simulate. Ishida is trying to do that with smartdust. Directly on the skin. Probably the substance contains graphite and reacts to electromagnetic fields. That’s brilliant!”

  We work on real reality, Kazuichi had declared. That will be clear to you in due time.

  “But what, for heaven’s sake, does that have to do with botany?”

  “Well, they’re obviously trying to re-create reality as closely as possible. Of course that includes trees, bushes, grass…” he speculated, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

  “Photos or videos would be sufficient for that,” I replied.

  “Think of extinct plants. Suppose they want to simulate a primeval jungle, with giant ferns, giant horsetails, and other plants. For that you have to know exactly what those plants once looked like.”

  “Ernesto, no one knows what those plants once really looked like. What we see in textbooks are reconstructions that have been made on the basis of fossils and in comparison with current species that are regarded as their descendants or relatives.”

  “That may be true. But perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps the simulation doesn’t have to be so exact. Perhaps an approximation is enough.”

  “Hm.”

  “That reminds me of those countless old Jurassic Park
movies,” Renata interjected.

  “Why not?” replied Ernesto. “But instead of a movie, a SimStim total artwork, in which you can smell the cadavers of those beasts and taste their blood.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you like that sort of thing…”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many people are completely crazy about such sense impressions.”

  “The site where the institute now stands supposedly used to be a huge empty area on which two ancient rusty gas holders stood,” said Renata. “The old people here told me that. I worked nearby for a few months.”

  “In the Ospedale?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “In the Ospedaletto of the Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Derelitti. That’s an old people’s home on Calle Barbaria delle Tole. It must have been abandoned in the meantime. Back then they had already stopped taking in old people. I always liked visiting that church over there.”

  She gestured to the narrow campanile beyond the institute building. “That’s San Francesco della Vigna. There used to be a vineyard there. Sometimes the monastery garden is open. It’s absolutely silent there. You really believe you are in a garden in which time came to a standstill centuries ago,” she said dreamily, running her hand across her forehead. “Until the tolling of the campanile bell brings you back into the present.”

  She smiled at me and added: “By the way, when the death knell sounds from San Francesco at midnight on Shrove Tuesday, the Carnevale di Venezia is carried to its grave.”

  “Oh,” said Ernesto, but we could tell by looking at him that this information did not mean much to him.

  At the time, I had no idea how many hours I would spend in that monastery garden—with an anxious heart and desperate hope.