The Cusanus Game

  “Was that noticeable?”

  “I noticed it.”

  I looked down at my iridescent palms. “So I could have been duped even more effectively.”

  Frans sighed.

  “I simply find the idea of billions of robots scurrying around on my skin creepy, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s merely a matter of getting used to it, Domenica. More microorganisms settle on your skin than there are human beings on Earth. You know that better than I. Do you ever give it a second thought?”

  “Excuse me, I wash my hands regularly and shower every day.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, you smarty-pants. You’re right.”

  “By the way, that involuntary collaboration of the human brain is essential to such simulations. They would not even be possible without that notorious human tendency toward self-deception.”

  “Is that an insight of the wise Toshiaka Ishida?” I asked.

  “No, that was already figured out when the first VR programs were written. The problem with cyberspace is the so-called combinatorial explosion. In order to realize a genuine smello-feelo SimStim, the volume of data grows astronomically. Despite data compression and prefabricated senso components, it would not be manageable even with state-of-the-art optical computers. Without the helpful support of the fastest computer in the solar system, things would look pretty gloomy for Ishida’s little magic tricks.”

  “My brain?”

  “Our brain, yes. It’s eager to fill the gaps that our technology has to leave open due to a lack of capacity.”

  “My brain. We were talking about my talent for synesthesia and confabulation.”

  Frans laughed. “All right. Your brain.”

  * * *

  KAZUICHI OPENED THE door of the control room and hastened over to us. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead. He was straining to listen inwardly; probably his implant was chattering.

  “About an hour ago the ESA received a signal from LISA; in the meantime, LIGO and VIRGO have reported the approach of a soliton as well. Amsterdam has just confirmed it.”

  “When will it pass through?” asked Frans.

  “Around zero-two-three-zero. Maybe somewhat later.”

  He seemed stressed, and I noticed that he had bad breath.

  “Then I don’t have much time left for the preparations. See to it that as of two-three-zero-zero someone from makeup is there. The same tour again: end of the tunnel?”

  “Fifteen seventy-two. We’ve already begun the construction. The simulation should be up by midnight. San Francesco. On the big stage.”

  “Excuse me please, Domenica. I have to go,” said Frans.

  “You’re being sent … on a trip?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “May I … may I watch?”

  Frans looked at Kazuichi questioningly. He shrugged and said, “Why not?”

  “What do you have to do?”

  “Get wood,” said Kazuichi.

  Both of them laughed.

  Like little boys, I thought.

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON I roamed the city—aimlessly. A few times I had to sit down, because I felt really sick with anxiety. I had a stomachache, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten anything since morning. So I bought a sandwich in a café, but didn’t get a single bite down. Finally I fed it to the fish in the Giustina.

  Shortly after midnight I went to the studio, where I was assigned a seat. When Frans came out of makeup, he looked like an extra in a Hollywood movie from the sixties of the previous century. He wore tight pantaloons, pointed shoes of soft leather, a wide raw linen shirt laced across his chest, and a broad leather belt; over it the cucullus, the gray cowl. So that was what a mid-sixteenth-century Venetian looked like who could loiter in the harbor, snip off wood samples, and make inquiries and observations without attracting attention. I eyed him from top to bottom.

  “Is that all you need for the trip?” I asked him.

  “Everything I need I carry in my head. I couldn’t take much more with me, or else no transition would occur,” he replied.

  One might have thought he was putting out with fishermen who disapproved of wasting space in the boat with personal belongings.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked, irritated by the tinge of disquiet in my voice.

  “No,” he said, briefly pressing me to him and giving me a kiss on the forehead.

  My lips sought his mouth, but Frans was not as affectionate as usual; he was inwardly tautened—inattentive. As if he were already on his way.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Soon, I hope,” he replied. “But it’s impossible to predict where the returning soliton will drop one off, sooner or later. It can take two or three days, but just as likely two or three weeks.”

  “Damn, Frans. I’m fond of you. Take good care of yourself!”

  He smiled and stroked my hair fleetingly; inwardly, he had already departed. “I’ll be back soon.”

  I noticed that my fingers had dug into the linen material of his jacket. I had to force myself to extract them. Frans turned away and walked through the gate in the transparent partition that divided the rest of the studio from the simulation stage.

  On the other side, morning dawned over a monastery garden—about fifty feet by fifty feet. Gradually, the colonnades of the cloister emerged from the darkness. A fountain burbled in the middle distance; it was new. The brick pedestal in the center of the inner courtyard was freshly laid; the statue of San Francesco had not yet been erected. The grass was trampled, almost completely hidden under building rubble and garbage. In the corner was a heap of broken bricks; scrap wood lay around. Palladio’s facade of San Francesco della Vigna had just been finished. An important time marker for travelers, Frans had explained to me: the year 1572. The monastery courtyard had served for years as a storage area for the carpenters and stonemasons. After completing their work, they were in the process of cleaning it up. The labor dragged on. Over the unadorned single-story building of the monastery, the studio ceiling flashed like a diamond crust of laser muzzles, reflectors, and filters.

  The studio was filled with whispering and buzzing, which was transmitted over the monitor speakers. It sounded as if dozens of beehives were getting ready to swarm. The sound made me even more nervous than I already was. Involuntarily, I scratched my forearms.

  Frans strolled across the inner courtyard and entered the dark cloister. In the simulation itself he could no longer be seen, but on the monitors, which showed a contrast-enhanced image, he was visible. He stood in the shadows with his arms crossed and looked toward me. Could he make me out through the partition?

  I waved; he did not react.

  I had never before seen so many technicians, engineers, and assistants in the control room. There were fourteen or fifteen sitting at the consoles and at least another ten standing around. Kazuichi had taken a seat at the mission controller’s console, flanked by two assistants. Why wasn’t Ishida present? The trips had become routine, it had been explained to me, and it was now the middle of the night.

  “Another five minutes to transition,” a technician said over a loudspeaker. Frans stepped out of the shadows, walked to the middle of the inner courtyard, and placed his hand on the empty pedestal of the monument. He really did not seem to be afraid. It was his sixty-third trip, he had told me. He nodded to the control center and signaled with his hand that he had understood the announcement. He was not permitted to carry any electronic devices on him.

  The tension in the control room grew, though everyone was acting with studied calm.

  Someone shouted something in Japanese—terse and severe. It sounded like a command to fire. Kazuichi nodded and keyed something into his console. A monitor showed a light blue graphic, a curve shooting steeply upward. The wave was approaching. I thought I heard a rumble that shook the foundations, but no one seemed to take notice of it. The morning light over the simulation had brightened. In
the monastery courtyard all the details could now be made out.

  Frans stood in the midst of the broken and discarded building material and debris. Tools leaned against the walls, along with boards, half-hewn stone moldings, primitive hoisting equipment with coarse hemp rope.

  Over the loudspeaker came the countdown: “… twelve … eleven … ten … nine…”

  The roar of the wave swelled. I covered my ears. It seemed to me as if the image of the simulation were becoming distorted. At the center of the stage I perceived a blurring, as if I were looking through a transparent plastic sheet deformed by the wind. But it was probably due to my overtired eyes, which had been staring for too long at the holograph. And I didn’t hear a rumble, only the voice of the technician and the chirping and clicking of the instruments from the control center.

  Frans gave a thumbs-up and nodded.

  “… two … one … zero!”

  A gong sounded.

  Where Frans had stood, about two or three paces from the brick pedestal of the monument, a dust cloud surged up as if someone had knocked away a cricket ball, as if a small whirlwind were plucking at the leaves of the bushes.

  “We’ve caught the curl!” a voice cried triumphantly. A jumble of voices arose, relief, cheers. The faces of the technicians lit up with joyful excitement.

  Kazuichi came out of the studio, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  “The transit worked,” he said.

  “Where is he now?” I asked him.

  “At the destination, I hope,” he replied, exhausted. “If everything went according to plan, the soliton dropped him off in the monastery garden on a summer morning of the year 1572.”

  “He’s already there? I mean … he’s not still on his way?”

  “Time is not a road, Domenica. Time is a threshold. A nothingness.”

  “On a … summer morning?”

  The Japanese man looked up at the studio ceiling as if he were checking the brightness of the sky. Time seemed suspended. It didn’t get lighter. Not a leaf or a blade of grass stirred.

  “The simulation is now frozen. It stops until he enters it again. On another summer morning. Three or four days later. Maybe in a week or in two weeks. As long as he needs. But not too long. It must not change too much,” he said, pointing to the debris lying around in the monastery garden.

  “Then he reappears.”

  “He can reappear at any moment. The length of his stay has no influence on the time of his return. It is solely dependent on where the soliton that brings him back drops him off. That can be in a few hours or tomorrow or in a week. Whenever a soliton coming from the past passes through on its way into the future.”

  I suddenly found it hard to breathe. The air in the studio was stale and stuffy. In the transept of the monastery a choir could be heard faintly. Monks who had gathered for morning prayer?

  “Turn off the radio!” Kazuichi shouted into the control room. “Sorry,” he said to me, patting my arm. “Don’t worry, Domenica, we’ll get it done. We’ll bring him back to you.”

  I was in a hurry to get out of the studio. In the anteroom technicians crowded noisily around a vending machine. It smelled like cheap instant coffee.

  The night was clear and cold. I walked along the Fondamenta Giustina and tried in vain to fathom the depths of time that now separated Frans and me.

  Time is not a road, Domenica. Time is a threshold. A nothingness.

  From the balcony I looked out over the city. Venice slept. Beyond the Lido the Milky Way poured into the sea; light that had traversed the abysses of centuries reached its destination—at exactly that moment.

  The campanile of San Francesco della Vigna projected like the pointer of an astrolabe vertically into the dark vastnesses of the night somewhere between Sirius and Tureis, into the billion-years-deep abysses from out of which, invisible to the human eye, fossil light trickled. I stared upward and tried to comprehend that I was looking across the sea of time at archipelagoes that were decades, centuries, millennia apart and combined into constellations—a mosaic of time snippets.

  Suddenly I grasped what Ishida had meant by the arranged photos that lead people to believe in the course of time. The past is a collage, a gallery arranged in layers, which is projected onto a two-dimensional screen. The photos are copied over one another on a single film. The dimension of depth is blocked out. It’s not the planimetric projection that fools the mind, but its own conception of depth. You have to negate the dimension of depth, and the spatially staggered distances arrange themselves on the surface like terrain formations on a topographical map. The sky is a gigantic screen on which the history of the universe is displayed: a synopsis of all events that have ever taken place in it, from the beginning. Our cosmos presents itself to us as a user interface. Similar photos are dragged over one another with the cursor. Then the negated dimension is reopened. The transition has taken place. That’s how the universe of photons is constituted, which can bridge billions of light-years and have already reached their destination before they set off. That’s how the trictrac game of space and time works. It was fantastic.

  Hla Thilawuntha had figured out those rules and opened up access to all this with his mathematics. Only in reality the game was played in higher dimensions. We primates with our savanna brain could intuit it, but not really grasp it. Frans had indeed only taken a step over the threshold—but that threshold existed outside our everyday reality.

  IX

  The Garden of San Francesco della Vigna

  For the rest of my life, I will reflect on what light is …

  —Fifty years of intense reflection have not brought me closer to the answer to the question “What are light quanta?”

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  The soliton had passed through, heading toward the past. It had rolled down from the future, had with its universe-crushing power touched us so gently that we were able to detect its proximity only indirectly. It had washed around the membranes of our reality and made them permeable for a moment, had surged through us, as the physicists asserted, because it traversed all dimensions, the unfolded ones as well as the ones curled up in Planck space—however many that might be. It traveled farther into the depths of the past until after 15 billion years it would reach the beginning and cross the nadir of the continuum, as a swell crosses the North Pole, maintaining its direction of movement unchanged and yet inverted 180 degrees in the opposite direction, only to seek its way up into the future, to the end of time; there, perhaps—no one knew—streaming through a high gate, it was turned around in a similar way and headed back down into the past, driven by unimaginable forces. No one knew how long it took one of those strange cosmic tsunamis to travel along the surface of space-time. Perhaps the question was senseless, for it moved outside the continuum, as an electron moves along the surface of a conductor.

  Nor did anyone know how many of those inconceivable energy packets were out in the cosmic ocean and whether there was any connection between them. From their movements it could be inferred that there was no interference between them. They seemed not to touch when they encountered each other—indeed, they did not even react when one glided through the other, just as a neutrino doesn’t react to the Earth and passes through it when it crosses its path.

  One of those waves would carry Frans back into my present. But no one could tell me when that might happen. Day after day I went to the studio and stared through the glass wall at the stage on which the simulation had been frozen: the monastery courtyard of San Francesco della Vigna on a summer morning 480 years earlier shortly before sunrise—a sliver of time, cast in glass in order to survive, captured by the computers in the control room, whose displays glowed patiently in anticipation of the moment that the spell would be broken and time would begin to move again.

  Sometimes it struck me that only a few paces away the monks of the monastery were immobilized in the midst of their morning prayers as in an old painting. And then, when I closed my eyes, I thought I cou
ld hear their singing again, the lauds penetrating upward from the depths of the centuries as from dark vaults.

  “When will he return?” I asked Kazuichi whenever I saw him, full of impatience, even though I knew that the question was senseless. “You promised me you’d bring him back.”

  “With the next passage upward,” he replied with a laugh, for in the beginning it was more a game, “or at the latest the one after that.”

  “When will the next one be?”

  “Hard to say. Sometimes we have three or even four a week, sometimes none at all.”

  “And how many have there been since his departure?”

  Kazuichi raised his hand and extended his fingers. “Five,” he said. “Up to now, he has always managed it quickly. Sometimes only a day passes, or a week; sometimes it takes a bit longer. You won’t be an old woman so soon, Domenica.”

  He chuckled. But I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

  “Don’t worry. It’s completely normal, believe me,” he said, nodding at me encouragingly.

  * * *

  “HOW MANY OF these tunnels are there actually?” I asked Ernesto.

  “As far as I know, four. And another twelve are in the works. The longest is in Amsterdam; then comes the Venice tunnel. In Oakland and Johannesburg they have not yet advanced far. Into the nineteenth century or so, if I’ve been accurately informed. You only find this out on the sly. The Americans in particular shroud it in secrecy. Every scientific publication must be approved by a special committee made up of representatives of the government, the military, and the intelligence agencies, who have no clue about Thilawuntha’s complex mathematics. Their institute in Oakland resembles a fortress and is more heavily secured than the Pentagon, the Dutch scientists who were permitted to visit it told me.”

  “They probably have to keep the militant creationists at bay,” I surmised.

  Ernesto nodded. “The military and the intelligence agencies guard the institute with grim determination. The thought that some rats could gnaw in the catacombs of the past at the foundations of the United States is unbearable to them. They regard it as an unforgivable error of judgment on God’s part that he did not bestow the invention of the time tunnel on them but on the Dutch instead. Meanwhile, they had been spying on their studies from the beginning, but had long dismissed them as crackpot ideas.”