The Cusanus Game

  * * *

  FRANS HAD A tiny apartment on the second floor of a house on Rio di Sant’Agostin, directly in the shadow of the brick toad of San Lorenzo.

  “What was that old man actually talking about with the face that supposedly riles the Austrians so much?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you seen it yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the master himself. Professor Ishida as a cherub—only his head and his odd beard. As large as San Michele, it sometimes floats over the northern lagoon. Until now no one has figured out how he does it, no one can understand how it works. Probably it’s a holograph for which he uses the humidity, as it can be seen particularly clearly in hazy weather.”

  “And why does he do that?” I asked.

  Frans shrugged. “Ishida is simply an eccentric fellow—and also terribly vain.”

  “That hasn’t escaped my notice.”

  “By the way, you can now buy the Ishida cherub as glass art. A student he failed commissioned it in Murano and sent it to physicists all over the world.”

  “That must have rankled him.”

  “Not in the slightest! In the meantime, he sends out the thing himself. It promotes popularity, he says.”

  * * *

  BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP, I wondered how that fish experienced its gradual ossification. It must have been like a sort of time dilation. The environment must have accelerated nightmarishly, while time for it slowly came to a standstill.

  When I thought he had long been asleep, Frans suddenly asked: “Do you know where I get the wood samples from?”

  “From the foundations.”

  “Oh, what the heck. If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll reveal it to you.”

  “I’ll be as silent as the grave.”

  “From the past.”

  “You screwball.”

  He didn’t respond to that. From his breathing I could tell that he had fallen asleep.

  The death of a fish and the death of a nano. Both had disappeared from our universe. Their event horizon had closed around them.

  * * *

  FRANS WAS A tender lover, but not a very attentive one. He always seemed to be preoccupied with something, even when we were together. Often he was nervous, stressed, and sometimes completely drained. He constantly shuttled back and forth between the NNTR and the city authorities, often sat for hours with Ishida and his assistants or had things to do in the studio, where he advised the technicians during the construction of simulations, which were worked out holographically with computer support down to the minutest detail.

  “Why go to such trouble to create artificial realities?” I asked him.

  “It’s an age-old dream, Domenica. People are prepared to invest a great deal if given the chance to visit a longed-for world that lies beyond the realm of their experience. It need not even be real; it must merely appear sufficiently real to them. The brain lets itself be deceived easily. And that would hardly be the case if it didn’t want to be deceived. Nothing is more appealing to people than roaming other worlds.”

  “Other worlds? Most people can barely cope with the one they live in.”

  Frans laughed. “That’s exactly why.”

  “So it’s pure escapism.”

  “No, Domenica. It is done out of entirely practical considerations.”

  “To earn money?”

  “That too. But not only. It’s a multibillion-euro market. And it has huge potential for growth. It began with a well-told story. Today you can literally depart your reality. Technology makes it possible.”

  “But that’s all just trickery.”

  “Not trickery, but simulations, which can no longer be distinguished from reality. At least not by the human senses. At this point they go far beyond the optic and acoustic. The problem of olfactory components has been solved as well, and in the haptic area we have already made some progress with the help of nanotechnology. Think of Kazuichi’s finger and Ishida’s hands.”

  “You said: ‘But not only.’”

  Frans nodded and scrutinized me.

  “That has to do with addressing,” he explained. “We Dutch stumbled on it. Through extensive correspondence, realities can be linked across time.”

  “So then, when you suggested that you got the samples from the past…”

  “Yes.”

  VI

  The Astronaut

  The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

  DAVID BOHM

  “Of course SimStims already existed back then,” Heloise Abret said. “Without them I would have gone crazy. I would have died like Chris, except that I would have died of boredom. — Abe, lift me up a bit, I can barely breathe. Don’t you see that? How am I supposed to speak like this? Yes, thank you, that’s good. — What were we just talking about? Oh yes, right. My favorite was bird flight, naturally. Besides, it can be simulated ideally in a state of weightlessness, without technical effort.

  “Children, I’m telling you, it’s magnificent. To soar in the morning at sunrise over a river, which rolls and whirls along just below you, as the morning mist lifts, the sky becomes golden—endlessly gliding along close to the surface of the water. The reflections of light make you high, flickflick—flickflickflick. I’ve flown for hours with wild geese, fished with them, mated with them. Of course, that was all still a bit primitive back then, thirty years ago. In the meantime, a lot has been accomplished in that field.

  “Do you know how it all began? The American philosopher Thomas Nagel provided the initial stimulus. Last century, in the early seventies—I think it was in 1974—he wrote an essay for The Philosophical Review: ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ That was an interesting challenge for neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. In any case, the idea never lost its hold on them: ‘Interspecies Transcription of Mental Models of Reality’ is what it’s called today, if I’m not mistaken.

  “In a very confusing way sense impressions of the external world mingle with deeply dormant emotions—that I can assure you. For a lot of people it was a curse, as soon became apparent. Like a drug. For us astronauts, though, it was a blessing. It helped us chip away at the enormous mountain of time that had suddenly risen up before us. It opened up to us—cooped up as we were in that tiny cosmos, in that cramped capsule, in which we had to endure—realms of experience, expanses of space.”

  Heloise spread her hands, and her eyes followed the sickle-shaped black shadows of the swifts, which plunged from the massive brick tower of Santi Giovanni e Paolo and shot through the afternoon sky. Her small, wrinkled face stretched into a happy smile.

  “The flight of a bird. That glorious feeling of gliding. You feel every feather that stands up or bends—how it reaches into the air currents and slices through them, how the interplay of forces is transferred to the body, how it reacts to them with economical countermovements, how it tilts and twists, straightens and tautens. True, all this can be expressed mathematically and represented by vectors, but you have to feel it—experience it!

  “The bath of a swallow early in the morning in the cool, clear water of an oasis, before the animals are led to the water and the palms gather up their shadows for midday. When your breast plows for a brief moment through the water, it’s … it’s like a ringing—a high, piercing sound that flings you up and carries you into the day.

  “I see I’m going into raptures, girls. Forgive an old woman. But Heli, I said to myself again and again in those days, this is your only chance. This is the only way you can hold out. And that was the truth too. Wasn’t it, Abe?”

  “Yes.”

  “He says yes and has no idea. Or do you have any idea what four years of weightlessness mean? Of coldness and loneliness? No one who has not experienced it firsthand has any idea. At the time, I was the same age as you are now, girls. ‘Where did you find the strength?’ they asked me. ‘I have strength,’ I assured them. ‘I simply didn’t give up,’ I said. In the end—well—then it was hard. I s
lipped into the plumage of an eagle that had to survive a hard winter. That made it a little easier…”

  Heloise’s gaze got lost in the distance, and her small delicate hands lay motionless in her lap. Her fingernails were unusually long, like talons.

  “I glided along over snow-covered forests, over glaciers and white slopes, over icy peaks under a black sky, observing the course of the distant sun. NASA had done all that was humanly possible for us. But the best idea was to send us those data packets. The transmission of a single-hour SimStim program lasted several days. Masses of data. We erased from the computer’s memory everything that had become superfluous with the failure of the mission, and loaded it up with SimStim. We stored a lot, for the ship computer was equipped with millipede nano memory storage, which had been developed shortly before the turn of the millennium and could hold incredible amounts of data.”

  Heloise waved her hand and said, “Abe, I would like to lean back a bit. I’m exhausted. Yes, that’s good.”

  She was silent for a long time. I thought she had fallen asleep and asked Renata with my eyes whether we should discreetly withdraw, but then she went on: “Humanity grows with each technological adventure, even with a failed one. Only I have shrunk.”

  She chuckled.

  * * *

  “TODAY I’M VISITING an old friend. Would you like to join me?” Renata had asked me.

  “Sure. As long as I won’t be intruding.”

  “Does the name Heloise Abret mean anything to you?”

  The name sounded somehow familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember in what connection. I shook my head.

  “Do you remember the failed Mars mission in 2022?”

  “I remember only failed Mars missions,” I replied.

  “I mean the manned one, which didn’t return for four years, because the spaceship first had to fly a good distance toward Jupiter and then take a huge detour before it came back into the vicinity of Earth.”

  “That was before my time.”

  “Heloise is the only survivor among the six participants in the mission. I met her when I worked here, before I went to Rome to study. She had chosen to spend her old age in Venice, and lived here in the Ospedaletto. I attended to her.”

  “You worked as a nurse?”

  She nodded. “I was active for STOP at the time, but that didn’t earn me any money; it was volunteer work. I needed a job on the side. So I became a geriatric nurse.”

  “What was STOP?”

  “Save Terra from Overpopulation.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Condoms for the world. Websites in all the languages of the Third World about family planning and contraception. Didn’t do much good. But, we told ourselves, at least the children have their fun blowing up the condoms into balloons.”

  “And you lived here in Castello?”

  “Yes, I had a room in the Ospedaletto. It’s very close to here. I’ll show you.”

  We walked down Calle Barbaria delle Tole toward Campo de Santi Giovanni e Paolo, but turned right shortly before it and entered a building, quite inconspicuous-looking from the outside, right next to the grandiose baroque facade of the Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Derelitti.

  “The Ospedaletto used to be an orphanage,” Renata explained, “but it was famous for the musical performances in the Sala Musica on the second floor. To this day there are concerts there, but unfortunately only rarely.”

  Then she showed me an architectural feature: a winding spiral staircase made of large stone slabs in a round tower at the back of the building.

  “That’s the chiocciola. The former owner of this building impressed his guests by appearing on horseback on the fourth floor after having his horse climb that spiral.”

  The tower and the surrounding buildings now housed an old people’s home, which was affiliated with the nearby Ospedale Civile. The wings of the building surrounded a spacious inner courtyard, in which a cafeteria had been set up.

  “Let’s sit down. She’ll come soon,” said Renata. “When I worked here, they washed corpses and put them in coffins in this courtyard. The residents could watch from the window when one of their fellow residents departed this life.”

  “Horrible.”

  I looked around. At the center of the cobblestone courtyard was a marble pozzo with a rusty lid. It stood on a low octagonal marble step and was crowned with a wrought-iron decorative arch, from which a lantern hung. Under the white sun umbrellas stood wrought-iron tables with heavy white marble tops. The north side of the courtyard was flanked by four stone figures. Three of them depicted, it seemed to me, the pleasures of life, while the fourth, on the outer left, in the shade of a cypress, was probably meant to be an allegory of arrogant erudition.

  Suddenly a scraping and dragging could be heard above us that I could not place. Was it some sort of road sweeper or a cleaning robot? The sound lasted about ten minutes and seemed to be coming closer; then the strangest object I had ever encountered appeared at the entrance to the tower. It looked like an armchair spun out of strong silver wire, or rather a wicker beach chair, which with the undulating movements of its wire bristles or tentacles or whatever the winding, surging, thin tendrils of flexible steel wire should be called, made that scraping, scratching sound.

  Embedded in the center of this cocoon was—like an egg in a nest—a tiny, dainty figure in pale blue coveralls. At first glance she could have been mistaken for a doll. She looked terribly frail and feeble, until she raised a finger, pointed to us with an energetic gesture and commanded:

  “There!”

  The wicker chair directed the optic cell at its upper end at us, tautened its wire bristles, and began to move toward us.

  “Renata,” she exclaimed, “how lovely to see you again! How have you been, child? I see you’ve brought a friend with you.”

  “Domenica Ligrina. She studied with me. Both of us finished this spring.”

  “Biology, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Botany.”

  “How wonderful.”

  “I’m the only living person who has been beyond Mars,” said Heloise Abret, holding out her hand to me. It felt like a tiny, shy animal, and I let go of it immediately for fear of hurting her. She gestured over her shoulder. “Abe, my life companion.”

  What did she mean by that? No one was standing behind her. Did she mean the extended camera eye of her mobile chair, which rose over her head and was directed at us?

  In her dark eyes flashed energy, while her body, worn down by the long period of weightlessness and dried up by the hard radiation like an autumn leaf, hung limply in the tender embrace of the machine.

  “How are you, Heli?” asked Renata.

  “NASA provides for my well-being,” she said, baring her false teeth. “Whether it wants to or not. It has no choice. — Don’t let me sag like this, Abe! I can’t breathe.”

  Abe whined and straightened up with a scraping sound. With trembling hands, Heloise opened the zipper of her coveralls a bit. I had never before seen such an emaciated human body. Her skin was almost black and riddled with pale spots where the pigment was destroyed.

  “What would you like to drink, my dears?” she asked. “It’s all on NASA. It owes me my life. But I don’t want to complain. Considering the circumstances, I’m doing excellently—and the same could certainly not be said of the space agency.” And patting the fine mesh at the edge of her seat hollow, she added: “And Abe takes good care of me. What brings you to this beautiful city? Is Rome already being evacuated?”

  We told Heloise about our contracts with the Rinascita Project and that we were to undergo training with the NNTR here in Venice.

  “But they haven’t told you anything concrete yet.” She nodded and chewed on her lower lip. “Probably there are still aptitude tests to be given. Medical examinations. We astronauts often didn’t even know yet the evening before takeoff whether we would really be on the mission.”

  Heloise was silent for quite a while, and then she
said: “It must be something completely new. The Holy See, the NNTR, the CIA, the CHI, the Pope, and Ishida in one boat—what an unholy alliance! Those are extremely unusual connections. Entirely new dimensions are opening up there! Would you have thought it, Abe?”

  “No,” said Abe.

  She closed her eyes and sank back in her lined nest of steel wool.

  “Come on, Abe,” she said. “I’m exhausted. Good-bye, you two. And visit me again soon.”

  Abe rose and began to move, dragging and shuffling. For several minutes, the sounds could still be heard on the stone slabs of the spiral staircase, until they went silent up on the fourth floor.

  * * *

  “SEPPIA D’ORO,” THE “golden ink” is what the Venetians called the nanos.

  At noon the lagoon lay black under the sun when they swarmed and multiplied. It must have been quadrillions by now. The surface of the water shimmered gold. In the north was San Michele, the great death raft of the city, where tens of thousands of bodies waited for Judgment Day embedded in cold mud or in stone troughs and acacia-shaded niches.

  What would happen when the teeming mass engulfed them and the great transubstantiation of the corpses began?

  During the day, when the wind blew in from the ice dams, it was pleasantly cool in the city, and the residents opened windows and doors. In the evening, when it came from the mainland, it sometimes bore swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes from the countless canals and estuaries. Then the street cafés would close early and no one stayed outside unless it was necessary. There were screens in all the doors and windows. They’ll save the city and lose it to malaria, I said to myself. Or they’ll devise new nanos to turn those insects into diamonds, simply by transforming their exoskeletons into crystalline carbon.

  In the morning, the coral reefs of the Tethys Sea were enveloped in haze, while Ishida as a cherub hung over the water beyond San Michele. The Prince Eugene flew through the face as through a cloud, and for a minute the eyes of the professor could be seen sliding back on the outer shell of the balloon and undulating from the turbulence of the engines, before they found their way back to their proper place. Then he looked down again, smiling like a satisfied God the Father, who after completing his work on the seventh day surveyed his Creation.