The Cusanus Game

  II

  Scarabeo

  We have to learn to look at space and time differently, as participants in a relational world rather than the stage in an absolute world.

  LEE SMOLIN

  So this was the glorious Venice—somewhat old and rotten and putrid seen from up close, I said to myself, but thanks to the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the Association of International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice, UNESCO, and Japanese high tech, on the road to recovery.

  Here too time folded back on itself, the past was intertwined with the present as in Rome and in other ancient Italian cities. But at first glance this city struck me as absolutely un-Italian, foreign, Oriental. Certainly, it had for centuries been an—often ungrateful—bastard of the Eastern Roman Empire.

  But that first impression deceived. It was not at all characterized by that sublime Byzantine laziness, that sleepy indifference and dreamy idleness, but rather by rapacity and ingenuity. You needed only to observe the Canal Grande on a normal weekday, the busy back and forth of the suppliers, deliverers, and collectors, to feel the engine of restlessness, bustle, and acquisitiveness. Behind the magnificent facades of the palazzi—then as now—profits had always been made without reservation. That was and is the pride of this city, the core of its history.

  Because of its geographic location, Venice had never used land vehicles. The nerve of modernity leads only to the periphery at Santa Lucia. There it was severed. In the city itself, as had been the case for centuries, only the patter and shuffle of human feet could be heard. That produces the nostalgic illusion of timelessness, to which the contemporary individual, stressed by noise, only too easily succumbs. And the inhabitants of this island had made a business out of that too.

  So this was the much-extolled robber bride of the eastern seas, done up extravagantly, though by no means tastelessly, and, as she aged, increasingly dependent on the attentions of her admirers.

  * * *

  WE WERE GIVEN ample time to settle in. Kazuichi attended to us. Two days after our arrival he provided us with our work equipment.

  “This is the Scarabeo,” he explained, handing us a Wristtop, a flat transparent device with a strap and a metallic-coated surface. “It’s compatible with any ICom. That means you can ask a question via your ICom, and it will get you the answer from the Web or wherever. The Scarabeo is the best server technology currently available; it is equipped with the most up-to-date semantic and ontological search programs and will get you all the data you need. If vocal does not suffice, then there’s a Vid here—” He tapped on the tiny screen. “If the size does not suffice, then you stick this here somewhere—” He unfolded a piece of film, slapped it against the wall, and smoothed it out. “On demand, there’s animation. The slicing has three presentation levels: infotainment, high, and top—also with VR optics or as a holo, as needed. The Scarabeo has access to all public Nets; also available are all films, operas, operettas, musicals, and the whole tralala down to folklore. Okay? Shunts for institute networks or other exclusive or arcane infopools with special permission are built in, of course. Got it?”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  “I work with a BCI,” said Kazuichi, tapping his temple. “That’s not everyone’s thing, I know. But I have gotten so used to it that I could no longer live without the thing. I’d feel as if I were in a dark cell—sensory deprivation. I need the Web around me, like a spider. If I don’t have constant access to all data—without any time lag—then I get sick.”

  Renata looked at me. I shrugged.

  “I’ve already worked with something similar,” said Ernesto, turning the Scarabeo between his fingers. “We called them Minatori. Browsers for the library computers. With them you descend into the mines of knowledge.”

  “How poetic,” Kazuichi said without a trace of irony. “The Scarabeo is the next generation; it has about ten thousand times the capacity. It got its name because it combs through the dung that human civilization has heaped up in ten millennia of written culture—from clay tablets to infoflashes. It scrapes together what you need and rolls it into bite-sized—”

  “Hey! Yuck!” exclaimed Renata.

  “Well—into manageable portions, okay?” Kazuichi said with a grin. “As is proper for a dung beetle. You should always carry it with you. At work, I mean. Or privately too…”

  Did I want to know everything at all times? Did I ever want to live on a data garbage dump? Oh God, no. The ICom was already a burden for me sometimes. But I could order it to leave me alone and hold all calls. To be unreachable—at least for a brief time, before you’re reminded by the Net to plug in again. It was unfortunately only a privilege of the rich and powerful not to be constantly available.

  * * *

  MY SCARABEO SURPRISED me with a detailed training program for the next weeks: specialization in the ecology and flora of Central Europe. At the same time, language courses were on the agenda. Dutch at the top. We were to receive our special training in Amsterdam and would possibly be assigned fieldwork there too—far outside the death zone. Bernd’s fears had remained unfounded.

  On my wrist bloomed corncockle and spreading wallflower. “Agrostemma githago…” Luigi prompted from the Scarabeo’s store of knowledge. “Erysimum repandum.” They were so present that I thought I could smell their wild earthy scent. The pinnate brushes of the small pasque flower (Pulsatilla pratensis) took shape, and the swollen lips of the lady’s slipper (Cypripedium calceolus). The good king Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus) extended its tight umbel toward me. The cabbage thistle (Cirsium oleraceum) demonstrated prickly defiance. The hairy willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) grew forth in its starred purple. The timid little red tips of the bog asphodel (Narthecium ossifragum), the refined chador of the hoary plantain (Plantago media), the ringing white bells of the sidebells wintergreen (Orthilia secunda), and the whispering little helmet of the Manchurian monkshood (Aconitum variegatum), the blue eyes of the common chicory (Cichorium intybus) gazed at me and the golden ones of the liverwort …

  “Hepatica nobilis…”

  “Thanks, Luigi,” I said. “That’s enough work for today. We’ll review it again later.”

  Most of those beautiful fragile creatures had long since departed reality. Some had already gone extinct in the twentieth century; many had been claimed by the terror of the twenty-first. So many dead—wiped out, lost forever. The Scarabeo conjured them up from old plant books, from specialized botanical literature and encyclopedias, re-creating them before my eyes in precisely detailed holographs, plucking them for me in Walahfrid Strabo’s Hortulus and with Besler’s help in the gardens of Johann Conrad Freiherr von Gemmingen, once prince bishop of Eichstätt.

  Did Sarah now work with something like this too? Probably she didn’t need it, because she always knew best. What had become of her? Probably she had long since returned to her country, held a professorship or headed an institute. I decided to have my device search for her website, but could not remember her last name.

  * * *

  DR. MONDOLONI WAS a friendly, considerate, and quiet man in his mid-thirties. He was a head taller than I, slender, and almost bald. What remained of his hair had been cut to a millimeter in length. His thick, dark eyebrows looked like caterpillars over two gently gazing dark brown eyes.

  “He’s gay,” said Marco, who had a lot to do with him, because his brain was being stuffed with medieval dialects by the bushel in the form of intensive treatments.

  I shrugged.

  “For God’s sake, nowadays you can do something about that,” Marco blurted out.

  “Why should he?” I replied. “I like him the way he is.”

  Dr. Mondoloni’s language laboratory was in the basement of the old building up on the Fondamenta. Through the window children’s shouting and the chugging of the boats on the Rio Santa Giustina could be heard. He could have scanned my ICom without saying anything to me, but that would have seemed impolite to him, judging from my impression of him. He sat do
wn opposite me on a chair, smiled at me encouragingly, took a notepad and pen, questioned me, and took notes.

  “Have you ever worked with dream screens before, Signorina Domenica?” he asked with a soft voice.

  “No. I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.”

  He raised his thick black eyebrows and nodded. “They’re daydreams of a sort, based, like many interface technologies these days, on simulated stimulation of sense impressions, known as SimStim—that is, on induced memories of experiences that you yourself have not had. But don’t worry, I won’t tamper irresponsibly with your memory. It’s my job to impart language skills to you. After a few sessions, you’ll have the sensation that buried childhood memories have become accessible again. And these memories are linked with linguistic memories. You will feel as if you had grown up as a small child in another linguistic environment, as if you had learned that language naturally but since forgotten it. And suddenly the memory resurfaces.”

  I had to stretch out on a narrow chaise lounge, and Dr. Mondoloni fastened electrodes to my forehead and temples. The touch of his fingers was as delicate and gentle as if I were being grazed by down. I looked anxiously up at the dome of his head. As many as a hundred living and dead languages were filed away in there, Marco had asserted. The thick black caterpillars of his eyebrows crawled toward each other, rose, sank, wriggled, recoiled from each other, and approached each other once again as in a bizarre mating ritual—reduced to a strictly arranged synchronized ballet. He noticed my gaze and smiled.

  “I wish you a pleasant shopping expedition in Amsterdam, Signorina Domenica.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, and then …

  * * *

  I STOOD ON the Noordermarkt square, a shopping basket on my arm, as Mother always gave it to me to take along. The clock on the church tower across the square struck twice—so it was half past eleven. I was running late. I walked past the poultry and cheese stalls alongside the Prinsengracht to the north end of the square, where the vegetable and fruit sellers offered their wares. The stalls were already half empty. With fascination I stopped in front of the flower stalls. That concentrated luminosity of the asters: yellow, orange, red, and brown—waning joyfulness of summer. A last summoning of warmth and already an autumnal scent of heaviness and moisture, of ripeness.

  I knew that the woman whose stall was in front of the church always had the largest selection of apples. She pulled her strong red hands out from under her green apron and turned to me.

  “Kan ik u helpen?” she asked.

  “Ik wil appels kopen. Welke zijn goed?”

  “Ik heb nieuwe Elstars.”

  “Geeft u mij maar een kilo.”

  The market woman gathered the apples into a bag and weighed them. I put the bag in the basket and paid.

  “U spreekt mijn taal absoluut perfekt. Waar heeft u dat geleerd?” she asked me. So it was apparent that I wasn’t from around here.

  “Datzelfde zou ik u kunnen vragen,” I replied, and was suddenly no longer certain whether we had previously been communicating in Dutch or Italian.

  A parrot squawked: “Kan ik u helpen?”

  Next to the fruit stall a showman had pitched a tent. In front of it was a barrel organ to which the parrot was chained. A boy in overalls, who was barefoot despite the already autumnal coolness, carried a box of apples through the entrance to the tent, from which at that moment the showman emerged. He had on clown makeup and wore a coarse black-and-white-checkered shirt, a multicolored vest, and baggy pants made of black velvet with wide suspenders made of the same material.

  The showman went to the barrel organ and began to turn the crank. A folksy melody rang out. “Kan ik u helpen?” squawked the parrot, scurrying aside on its perch. The man looked strangely familiar to me and I approached him with curiosity. He half-averted his face, but I saw clearly, standing out at the temple under the chalk-white makeup, the small slender cross he wore under his skin.

  “Signore Falcotti!” I blurted out. “How is that possible?”

  He continued to turn the crank as he looked at me with his black-rimmed eyes. His large, bright, red-painted mouth stretched into a smile.

  “You recognized me right away?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  The boy carried another box of apples into the tent. His legs were tanned, his feet dirty. He picked out an apple, tossed it back and forth between his hands three or four times, winked conspiratorially at me, and bit into it.

  I knew at that moment that everything around me was not reality. Rather, I felt as if I were acting in a play, standing on a stage or a movie set, but there was no script or screenplay. It was all so absurd. The barrel organ had gone silent.

  “Let’s go inside,” said Falcotti, holding up the flap at the entrance to let me in. In the middle of the tent was a wooden table on which the boy had set six or seven boxes of apples.

  I was reminded of my early childhood: Behind my parents’ house stretched a large garden with several apple trees. One of them stood close to the house, and its branches jutted over the railing of the balcony on the second floor. When the trees were in bloom, thousands of bees swarmed around them, and the blossoms were full of those buzzing insects. When I was two or three years old, I had at an unattended moment gone out on the balcony through the door from my parents’ bedroom, had unsuspectingly grabbed at the blossoms, and had promptly been stung by a bee. The jolt at the sudden, unexpected pain was elemental—like a powerful electric shock. Horrified, I ran into the room, got tangled in the curtains at the door, and fell down. My father was standing in front of the mirror. With a glance he grasped the situation, rushed over to me, picked me up, and pressed me to his chest. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even scream. “It will get better soon, my child,” he said close to my ear. “It will get better soon.”

  It didn’t get better soon. An ambulance brought me to the hospital, because I went into anaphylactic shock. I almost could have died, my father later told me. As a child I didn’t understand what death meant, but the horror that pierced me to the core like a sharp wedge and incapacitated me so that I couldn’t even scream was lodged deep in my soul. I had felt creaturely fear for the first time. That’s what death must be like, suddenly pouncing on you, I often said to myself later. And from that point on, my throat always constricted when I saw bees or wasps near me.

  Falcotti eyed me, waiting.

  “You look funny,” I lied.

  “Do you think so?”

  His hair was stiffened with gel and stuck out in spikes. The colorful patchwork vest was shabby and the greasy high collar of the shirt was torn under the ear. He shrugged apologetically. “As a psychologist one is sometimes forced to take on strange roles. In your case, however, I was happy to do so,” he said, pulling with two fingers on his painted lower lip.

  “What do you mean?”

  Falcotti gazed silently at his reddened fingertips. His dark eyes looked out through the white makeup as through the eyeholes of a mask. That was when I noticed that he had shaved off his beard. He took a small, curved knife, grabbed one of the apples, and sliced it. Suddenly his hand and his forearm were covered with bees, crawling all around on his skin.

  “Watch out!” I cried in horror.

  Falcotti looked at his hand. The insects did not seem to bother him in the least.

  “They won’t do anything to me,” he assured me.

  “Were those creatures inside the apple?” I asked in amazement.

  “No, in the blossom,” he replied.

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “I know: You’re thinking that was a long time ago. The time in between—that seems mysterious to you. But there’s an explanation. I will give it to you, but I have to ask you to keep absolutely silent about it.”

  A bee crawled across his cheek. He brushed it away. Suddenly the bees had been disturbed by something and began to swarm. Their threatening buzzing filled the tent. I turned on my heel, ran out, and crashed into the barrel o
rgan. It began to play …

  Then the world disintegrated, morphed into a polished metallic tube, in which shadows of four-dimensional figures moved.

  “Kan ik u helpen?” squawked the parrot, but it had already dissolved, as had the chain, the barrel organ, the whole Noordermarkt square.

  * * *

  GRADUALLY I CAME to and had a throbbing headache. I heard voices, people laughing and chatting, but so softly that I couldn’t understand a word. A church clock struck at the edge of audibility.

  I ran my hands across my forehead to massage my aching temples—and reached into a spider’s web of electrodes, which withdrew from the touch like almost-insubstantial undersea creatures. The voices vanished. I seemed to have somehow triggered an alarm, for Dr. Mondoloni’s face appeared at the entrance to the tube.

  “Everything all right?” he asked, sliding back the tubular equipment.

  “I can’t say,” I murmured. “A bit of a headache.”

  “That’s normal,” he explained, spraying an ethereal substance on his fingertips and beginning to massage my forehead and temples with circular movements, as his caterpillar eyebrows resumed their mating ritual. I couldn’t watch them, and closed my eyes. Within seconds the pain dissipated, but I was enjoying the touch of his fingers.

  “That was strange,” I said.

  “Strange?”

  “Yes, a grotesque situation.”

  Dr. Mondoloni stopped and stood up. I got up too and fixed my hair.

  “Can we do another session tomorrow? It’s better if we start off—”

  “If you promise not to unleash bees on me again, Doctor.”

  “Bees?” he asked, visibly perplexed.

  He held the chip he had ejected from the console up to the light, as if he could spot an insect embedded in it as in amber.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”

  “No, I really don’t know it,” Mondoloni emphasized, clearing his throat self-consciously. “That isn’t directly related to the language lesson, Signorina Domenica. It’s a sort of vaccination for your training—custom-made by the boss himself. I don’t know the formula. I know only that it serves your protection.”