The Cusanus Game

  * * *

  “A CALL FOR you, Domenica,” said Luigi.

  “Who is it?”

  “Keller, Bernd.”

  “Okay, yes. — Hello, Bernd! What a surprise!”

  “Same here, Domenica. So you still dwell among us.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Not yet sent through space and time?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  A bee landed on the rim of my glass and crawled along the curve. I jumped up and accidentally knocked over my chair. The patrons at the next table gave me a startled look. I took a few steps out onto the square. The owner of the Cavallo raised his head questioningly. I signaled to him that I was on a call.

  “Don’t play dumb, Domenica,” said Bernd. “There have been some rumors about the activities of that fabulous Istituto della Rinascita.”

  “Such as?”

  “They use tunnels through which you can crawl into the past.”

  “Crawl? That’s the first I’ve heard of it. So you know more than I do,” I replied.

  “You’re not permitted to talk about it. I get it.”

  “Of course I can talk about it. I just wouldn’t know what.”

  Didn’t he have anything more to say to me? The conversation was getting on my nerves. I couldn’t focus on his words.

  “Because you’ve been brainwashed.”

  “Listen, Bernd…”

  “You probably didn’t even realize it.”

  His sly intonation and his know-it-all manner bothered me. Why should I argue with him about this at all? He had chosen to back out. That had been his decision. Or rather, his sister’s. So then what did he want? I didn’t feel like discussing this subject with him anymore. I didn’t want to discuss it with anyone. It made me nervous.

  “Is that why you’re calling me, Bernd? I don’t really understand what you want. Do you want to warn me about something, or…?” I asked him.

  “Yes … that is, no. It’s completely your own decision. That’s how it has to be.”

  “You told me that once before, but I still don’t understand what you mean.”

  My impatience was growing.

  “It’s better that way. You won’t get lost like so many others. You’ll come back. I’m now completely certain that you don’t have an older sister. It’s you yourself. I ran into you,” said Bernd.

  “Where?”

  “On the train station square. In front of Termini.”

  “When?”

  “On June twenty-second. I called you that day.”

  “I remember your call. It seemed pretty confused to me,” I replied.

  “Yes. I was pretty flustered at the time. You had given me quite a scare, for you were completely changed—older. And you had said such strange things. But since then I’ve put one and one together…”

  “And hopefully gotten two.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Both of us were silent. So I would meet him at some point on Piazza dei Cinquecento, because I had met him there. That was absurd and yet entirely logical.

  “How are you doing? How’s Birgit?” I asked.

  “We’re doing well.”

  “Did you find a job?”

  “Not yet. I’m doing another voluntary semester, to the extent that’s even still possible. The department is in disarray, but they granted me another scholarship. Birgit has a job in a café on Piazza della Rotonda,” Bernd replied.

  I nodded. The same old story.

  “Say hello to her. And take care of yourself, Bernd.”

  “Take care of yourself too, Domenica.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT I heard screams and the sound of people running in the streets. Thousands of black bodies had crawled ashore from the lagoon and were trying to surmount the old brick walls that line eastern Castello and the arsenal. Some had already made it into the city, before they were discovered and slain. They looked like human-sized black slugs, and many of them wore decomposed shreds of clothing or rotten shrouds. No sooner were they slain than those creatures turned into puddles of stinking black slime, the surface of which shimmered gold.

  An enraged crowd had gathered in front of the institute and was trying to smash the windowpanes with cobblestones, but the windows kept disappearing, and the stones crashed ineffectively against the bare masonry.

  Later that night a hailstorm fell. The hailstones sprayed over the roofs and amassed in the streets and on the squares. In the light of the full moon they flashed like billions of diamonds.

  When I awoke, rain was pelting against the windowpanes. I opened the screen door to the loggia, stepped out, and took a deep breath of the cool, damp night air. In the east the lightning flashes of a departing storm could be seen. The clouds broke. A waning moon had ascended to its zenith and hung small as the skull of a cat between three solitary stars. The lagoon appeared as if it had been filled with tar, and the reefs of the Tethys Sea shimmered on the horizon like the bones of the dead. The walls of San Michele rose like a dark fortress, lined with vigilant cypresses.

  I shivered and fled back into the cozy security of my bed.

  VII

  Solitons

  Therefore, the object of every cognitive power can be only equality itself, which can reveal itself in its likeness. Hence only equality is the object of perceptual knowledge as well as of imaginative and intellectual knowledge. By nature the power knows its own object. But knowledge arises through likeness. Hence the object of all cognitive powers is equality, whose likeness actualizes all cognitive powers … But every likeness is a form or sign of equality.

  NICOLAUS CUSANUS

  “In fact, it’s not hard at all to carry out an air braking in the high atmosphere of Mars. Much easier than in the Earth’s atmosphere. Imagine an insect that has to fly through blinds to get into a room: It has to go at a very particular angle through two slats. Whereas on Earth the slats of the blinds have only a small gap between them, on Mars they are far apart, so form practically no obstacle. — Massage my back a little bit, Abe. But be careful. My spine is extremely tense. Yes, that’s good. — Where was I?” said Heloise Abret.

  “… so form practically no obstacle,” said Abe.

  “What?”

  “Whereas on earth the slats of the blinds have only a small gap between them, on Mars they are far apart, so form practically no obstacle,” repeated Abe.

  “Thank you, Abe. — I’m exaggerating a bit, my dears. But the scale height of the atmosphere is much greater in the case of Mars. That is, the atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than that of Earth, but due to the lower gravity it extends much higher into space. Its density is reduced by half only every six miles, instead of every three, as in the case of Earth. Besides, the atmosphere of Mars has triple the molecular weight, because the proportion of heavy gases is higher. So downright — not so hard, Abe — downright ideal for an air braking and another one — Touché! Touché!” said Heloise, cutting at an angle with her mother-of-pearl-covered pocketknife, on which a little silver chain dangled, into the peel of the orange she held in her left hand.

  “And then we should have glided down on our beautifully tiled belly like a bar of soap in the bathtub. But we didn’t manage it and spun on an erratic course like bolas whose cords had gotten tangled—literally. For when we were about to jettison the cable that connected us to the ascent stage—the ‘tether,’ they call it at NASA—it didn’t go bang, but only plop. And when we had finally gotten rid of our counterweight, we went into such a spin that the computer was incapable of getting the situation under control before the first braking and of bringing the heat shield into position. ‘You’re looking really good,’ Houston still assured us, when hell had already broken loose among us ten minutes ago. When the time-delayed reaction of mission control finally reached us, panicked cries of terror subsided into horrified silence. There was nothing they could do to help us, sitting there on their asses; they lived hopelessly in our past. Then we flew
into the dead zone, and contact broke off completely.

  “We had to abort the approach. Of course. With a little bit of luck we would have just scraped along the outermost atmosphere and remained on an open return course. You always approach an outer planet in its direction of motion on the night side. If things go wrong, then PAMAO. That sounds like a tropical vacation paradise, doesn’t it? In NASA lingo it stands for Passing Mars Abort Option, and means a hellish version of Apollo 13. But anyway: You get a push, which carries you back into the inner Solar System. But we didn’t get lucky. We ricocheted off the atmosphere like a pebble on a pond; that is, Mars dealt us a blow that threw us off course, hurling us into the outer system. That meant that Mars and the sun had to take over the braking, and that took a miserably long time.”

  Heloise looked into the distance. The mother-of-pearl handle of her pocketknife sparkled, the little chain flashed.

  “The Valles Marineris drifted by below us. It looked like a terrible ax wound in the skull of a slain warrior. We were supposed to have landed down there, between the western commencement of the rift valley and the foot of the Tharsis ridge with its monster volcanoes. The scientists of the Geological Survey anticipated interesting findings there. It was a rather controversial hypothesis among areologists, but still: It was well suited to attract private investors, and NASA desperately needed the money for the Mars missions. There was speculation that the Hellas Basin on the opposite side of Mars was the impact crater of a large planetoid, which, I don’t know”—she stabbed her forefinger into the fruit—“a few hundred million years after the formation of the planet broke through the crust and penetrated deep into the mantle. The shockwaves of the impact, according to model calculations, had propagated straight through the planet and raised a plume of core matter. This ultimately caused the Tharsis ridge to bulge out and the gigantic shield volcanoes to rise up across it.” Heloise turned the orange around and looked at it from the other side.

  “Through those volcanoes, the proponents of this theory surmised, some material from the core must have been carried up to the surface—a lot of heavy elements like uranium, platinum, gold, and rare ores, which would be of the utmost significance for a settlement of Mars and the construction of an aerospace industry in situ. Gigantic lava caves full of vast treasures, well hidden from views from outer space. All we would have had to do was gather them up and bring them to Earth.

  “Oh well, nothing would come of that now. Mars—adieu! We flew by and out into the night and the cold far from the sun. Half the distance to the asteroid belt lay ahead of us before we would reach our turnaround point, before our speed would be used up and we would fall back into the inner system.

  “The cosmic rays lashed us so hard in the face that we almost lost hope of ever getting home alive. We had to do without artificial gravity once we had separated from the ascent stage. Mission control calculated and calculated. They didn’t dare to tell us the results, for all they could have presented to us was a depressing pattern chart of Hohmann ellipses: far outward, then deep inward and past Venus—so that it would take more than three years before we came close to Earth again. Right, Abe?”

  “To be honest, Heli, such calculations far exceed the computing capacities for which I am designed.”

  “Why should you burden yourself with stuff like that?” she said with a good-natured wave of her hand. “The technicians in Houston, by the way, quickly found the error that had led to the failure. It would have been easy to avoid its occurrence, but technical processes that have been computer-simulated a hundred times are considered sound. Around that time I discovered the blessings of SimStim; I flew with the wild geese and the swallows and in the end with the eagles. But times were tough, my dears. Horribly tough.”

  Heloise slit open the fruit with her fingernail and inserted a segment into her mouth.

  “Rations were reduced to the absolute minimum. It was barbaric. And the taste of recycled water can be conceived only by someone who has tried it. — Won’t you get rid of these peelings here, Abe?”

  Abe extended two tentacles, gathered up the orange peelings, and disposed of them somewhere inside his wire-mesh body.

  “Yes, that’s how it was, my dears,” said Heloise, fiddling with the little chain on her knife, lost in memories. “Mars turned into a crescent and the sun got smaller and smaller. It was depressing. That pale, weak little light was supposed to be able to stop us and bring us back? Perhaps we were simply drifting despite all laws of physics into the interstellar night? Sometimes, when I lay awake in the darkness, I thought I could already hear the rumble of the crushing storms on Jupiter.

  “Finally we were only creeping along—another light-second and another. The turnaround point was like a winter solstice: The farthest point had been overcome, but the long, cold winter still lay ahead of us. Around that time, Chris discovered the melanoma on his shoulder. He just went out, outwitted the airlock-spacesuit security, and disembarked. ‘Farewell and get home safely,’ he left on the screen. He traveled seventy-five million miles at our side—until the first course correction for the Venus swing-by. That’s where he left us.”

  Heloise shaded her eyes and looked into the sky over the Ospedaletto, which was dominated by the massive tower of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. In the merciless autumn light her face was like an ancient land fissured by the erosion of time, emaciated by deprivation and aridity—an epidermis turned into dry valleys and dunes. But her smile cast all ugliness aside. Cheerfully, she said: “He’s still up there somewhere, perhaps for another hundred thousand years. — Abe, what are you doing? Have I asked you for something?”

  “Sorry, Heli. I have moved you into the shade.”

  “Thank you, Abe. That’s very thoughtful of you. — Well, one less nose breathing and one less mouth eating, that was to our benefit, of course. And we did ultimately make it. But there weren’t many of us left when they picked us up with a shuttle five light-seconds from here. We had to hold out another six months on Earth’s doorstep, on the old, never completely finished ISS, until we had learned in the centrifuge to sit upright in a wheelchair, until we had enough strength that our heads didn’t sink to our chests at half a g,” she said with a sigh. “In the meantime, they’ve all died: Natasha and Caroline, Brad and Raphael. Brain tumor, anemia, bone cancer. We are simply not optimally constructed for something like that. Or not yet,” she added.

  “But I’m alive!” she exclaimed, banging her small fist on the armrest so that Abe straightened up in surprise. “I got off lightly. Irreversible atrophy of the muscles and advanced osteoporosis. Abe has to transport me like a porcelain doll, right, Abe?”

  “Oh … hm. If you say so. To be honest, I have never been confronted with the problem of transporting a porcelain—”

  “Never mind, Abe. We don’t need to delve deeper into the matter.”

  “If you say so.”

  With her thumbnail she slit additional segments of the fruit, pulling apart the rest of the orange.

  “So now they will send people not only through space, but also through time,” said Heli.

  “Hey, watch out! Is there a short-circuit here somewhere, or what?” Renata cried, raising her head; she sniffed and scrutinized the metal mesh around the cushioned seat hollow. “For a moment I thought something had caught fire.”

  Heloise had paused in her movements and looked at her.

  “Everything’s fine, sweetie. You don’t need to tell me anything. Nothing at all. The same goes for you,” she said to me. “Perish the thought that something here should really catch fire or something even worse should happen”—chuckling, she inserted an orange slice between her shriveled lips and nibbled with a smirk—“I know how these things are done. It’s harmless. You’ve been taught to hold your tongues.”

  Renata and I exchanged a glance.

  “Time always seemed to me to be something immense, something unconquerable. Like a bulldozer that pushes us with unrelenting cruelty into the future. Sometimes agoniz
ingly slowly, as in my case.” She shook her head with a smile. “Now it too has been conquered. Or can’t one put it that way?”

  “It’s probably only the beginning,” I was about to say, but it was as if my throat were constricted.

  “Are you afraid, girls?” Heloise suddenly asked.

  “Yes,” said Renata.

  I nodded.

  “I was afraid back then too. Extremely afraid.”

  “Things don’t always go wrong,” said Renata in an upbeat voice; the fragments of amber in her eyes flashed cheerfully. “In the meantime more than a hundred people live in Port Abret alone.”

  Heloise gave a dismissive wave. “They could have spared themselves the trouble of naming a settlement after me. An undeserved honor. After all, I never set foot on Mars. What do you think about that, Abe?”

  “Nothing,” replied Abe.

  “You’re right as always, my treasure,” she said, raising her chin. “As for these time travel experiments, I’ve known for years that something has been going on there. There have been plans for a long time. I had enough free time to delve into the mathematical works of Hla Thilawuntha, who is regarded as the reborn Ramanujan, the self-taught Indian mathematician who came to Cambridge at the beginning of the last century and astounded the world—which, by the way, is not at all such an absurd idea, when it comes to time travel.”

  I saw a bee land on the back of her hand. Heloise and Renata seemed not to notice the insect. I was sure that it existed only in my imagination, but the urge to drive it away was nearly overpowering, and it cost me a great deal of effort to remain calmly seated.

  “This Frans,” she said, “whom they supposedly send to get wood … I’ve wondered for years where the building plans of one or another palazzo that have turned up recently have suddenly come from. They were considered lost for centuries. I couldn’t make sense of it. You, Abe?”