The Cusanus Game

  “Let’s go! Get ready!”

  I turned around, but couldn’t find the original of the forceful woman anywhere. Perhaps she was supervising the excursion from her desk in Turin or Bologna and directing her swarm of schoolchildren via satellite.

  The schoolchildren sullenly pulled themselves together, fished their jackets out of the chaos, and put on their caps. The herd of travel bags grew agitated; it electronically picked up a scent and began moving, pushing and shoving, toward the exit. One of them let out a sobbing bleat, because it got wedged between a chair and a table leg. A kick from a young man freed it from its unfortunate situation and it hurried to catch up to the others.

  I took Renata in my arms, glad that most of the people had in the meantime left the room, for I couldn’t hold back tears.

  “Have a good trip,” I sniffled. “See you in Amsterdam.”

  She nodded. I felt her digging her mutilated fingers into my shoulder.

  “Take care of yourself, Domenica.”

  “Yes, you too,” I replied.

  When I kissed her on the cheek, I noticed that she was crying too.

  “Hey!” she said, running the back of her hand over her lips and nose. Then she fastened her wooden clasp tighter in her hair and grinned at me bravely. At that moment I realized how fond I was of her.

  “Give Frans my regards. I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” she said, giving me an encouraging poke. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Would you be so good as to look in on Heli at the Ospedaletto?”

  Renata fished out of the pocket of her anorak a small square package, which fit in the palm of her hand, wrapped in gold paper and adorned with a red ribbon.

  “Give this to her, please. It’s a Christmas present for her. I found it by chance, but didn’t have time to bring it to her myself.”

  “What is it, if I may ask?”

  “It’s a small piece of Mars.”

  “That will definitely make her happy.”

  “Yeah, I think so too.”

  I waved to her for a long time as the train left the station, heading out onto the embankment toward Mestre.

  * * *

  ON THE WAY back I went to the Rialto market. Next to the traghetto pier, a float rocked in the canal on which a nativity scene was being set up—apparently the Adoration of the Magi.

  Afternoon was approaching, but the fish market was still bustling. Gulls squawked. They demanded their due, pattering by the dozens on the ledges, crowding together in the warm spots on the roofs and besieging the chimneys. On the splashed ground were heaps of discarded greasy white Styrofoam containers with the remains of blood-speckled crushed ice. Oily zinc tubs on wooden stands, half filled with gray-blue clouds of cuttlefish, coiled together like excised brains full of dark memories. Fish guts were scraped off slippery wooden boards. Broad blades glided through light red gaping tissue, scraped emery-rough fish skin, crunched through cartilage and fish bone. Cut-up bodies, tossed briefly onto the scale, slithered into transparent plastic bags. On the edge of a fillet board, upright chopped-off swordfish heads were lined up into a picket fence.

  Whenever I came here, I observed with a mixture of horror and fascination the killing all around. The transformation of living things into food, discreet, clean—apart from a few blood spatters. The opening and emptying out of abdominal cavities, the expert, exact mutilation. When I closed my eyes, I heard whispering at the edge of the audible. White noise? Little screams? Or was it only the roar of my own blood in my inner ear?

  I noticed a young man with a shaved head looking around uneasily. A salesman handed him a bulging plastic bag full of fish from behind the counter, which he quickly slipped into his shabby duffel bag.

  “Is the signorina looking for something in particular?” the salesman asked me loudly and somewhat too forcefully. “Bronzini, mormore, dendici? Completely fresh. All caught last night.”

  In the lagoon?

  He wore a black wool cap and a new red plastic apron, which was sprinkled with fish scales as with mother-of-pearl sequins. I had stared at the plastic bag for too long. It did not contain dead fish; I had recognized the sluggish movements immediately. They were paralyzed specimens infected by nanos gone haywire. “Golden fish”—oros, which were in the meantime worth their price among collectors.

  With a heavy blade as wide as a hand, the merchant hacked off a ray’s fin edges and tossed the mutilated body onto a heap of half-prepared fish in which there was still life, which shuddered with pain.

  “Here!” cried the merchant, throwing a severed fin toward me. But he had feinted; it landed a few yards next to me on the ground between the Styrofoam containers. A gull with a hunched neck and large as a goose grabbed the piece, fluttered ungracefully into the air with the spoils, and dragged its large yellowish red feet behind it like rags. The fish dealer guffawed at the successful joke and, with a sniffle, wiped his nose on his sleeve. The sellers at the surrounding stalls grinned. The young man with the duffel bag had disappeared into the crowd.

  I shivered. It became clear to me that the scientists had long since lost control. Those nano-contaminated things had long since passed from hand to hand; they ended up in souvenir shops, on shelves and in display cases, as wall decorations in living rooms all over the world—and on Falcotti’s desk in Rome. And I doubted whether in their isolation measures they had also considered the birds, which caught their prey in the lagoon and dragged it God knows where. Or had they been fully aware of the risk they were taking? An unashamed large-scale field experiment? It was in any case clear that nothing and no one could stuff this genie back into the bottle.

  X

  Sand from Mars

  If we indeed live on a brane in a spacetime with extra dimensions, gravitational waves generated by the motion of bodies on the brane would travel off into the other dimensions. If there were a second shadow brane, gravitational waves would be reflected back and trapped between the two branes. On the other hand, if there was only a single brane and the extra dimensions went on forever … gravitational waves could escape altogether and carry away energy from our brane world. This would seem to breach one of the fundamental principles of physics: the Law of Conservation of Energy. The total amount of energy remains the same. However, it appears to be a violation only because our view of what is happening is restricted to the brane. An angel who could see the extra dimensions would know that the energy was the same, just more spread out.

  STEPHEN HAWKING

  At the institute I noticed that in Studio Two an additional simulation had been generated and in Studio Three a third was being prepared. Were those emergency measures?

  The second stage also showed the frozen image of the monastery courtyard in the morning light, but some details had changed. The stones and broken bricks were gone, as were the scrap wood and tools. The grass patches between the cloisters had recovered; the grass had grown. What did that mean?

  Kazuichi had explained to me that the arrangement of the target point was left unchanged in order to ensure the “association.” It was required for a safe return. Now they were apparently trying to simulate the same target point at a later time—the image of the monastery courtyard in late summer or autumn of the year 1572, which was stored in the computer as a result of a previous trip—to create an emergency entrance into the tunnel for Frans, if he had been delayed for some reason or prevented from a timely return to the target site. A “virtual fan” had been opened, as one of the technicians present explained to me, a young freckled Dutch woman. She was tall and lean, almost bony, but had strikingly large breasts. Over the right one, on her light blue coveralls, was a white sticker on which RIET SWEELINCK was written in red. The computer, she explained to me, was now constructing a series of various eventualities of later, well-documented points in time and offering them to the traveler.

  She denied my objection that that was a pure game of chance. The original point in time was still being maintained, she argued, and Mr. van Hooft had the alternative points i
n mind. On top of that, a second site was being prepared. She pointed to the stage in the third studio, on which there was not much to see, however—nothing but an unoccupied, half-ruined, single-story building, whose window frames had been torn out and whose roof trusses had apparently been destroyed by a fire. In front of it, a strip of land overgrown with weeds was taking shape.

  “Where, for heaven’s sake, is that?”

  “That’s the monastery on the island San Francesco del Deserto south of Burano, abandoned in the fifteenth century,” she explained. “Not until the nineteenth century did monks resettle there.”

  “Why aren’t the travelers sent to that inconspicuous place right away?”

  She shrugged. “How are you going to pinpoint a target when nothing changes for years?” she asked me with a laugh. “Mr. van Hooft would first have to inquire in what century he had landed. Besides, how would he get away from there without attracting attention? The fishermen would capture him and turn him over to the authorities in the hope of snagging a reward. Bounties are put on spies’ heads. With the time-natives it’s not so simple here, I can tell you that. We have it easier in Amsterdam. Our tunnel is secured by our own people, deep into the Middle Ages. Someone is always nearby.”

  She gestured with a nod to the half-ruined monastery building in the simulation and added: “For a return the place is ideal, however. That’s why we have it in reserve.”

  “Do you know Marcello Tortorelli?” I asked the Dutch woman.

  “The guy with the black curls who came here from Rome this fall? Yes, I know him,” she replied, turning red.

  Look at that, I thought. That rascal.

  “He’s going to work here as a tunnel guard, he told me. In the eighteenth century,” she said tersely.

  An interesting job, no doubt, I reflected, but probably not simple. Marcello would have to learn to rein in his temperament. To have all that knowledge and not be permitted to use it would be particularly hard for him. Occasionally he would travel home to the twenty-first century to let off steam and also present the fruits of his botanical excursions to the Rinascita della Creazione.

  What would my job look like? I wondered. Probably not so different. Just three hundred years earlier.

  “I see that you like him.”

  The young technician looked at her worn-out sneakers and smiled. “He’s good-looking, yes,” she said with a shrug, adding a bit snippily, “but he still has a lot to learn.”

  “Will Frans come back soon?” I asked.

  She looked at me with surprise.

  “He won’t get lost,” she replied with a laugh. “Not him.”

  * * *

  “HELLO, MAMA! BUON Natale!”

  “Buon Natale, child! Where are you?”

  “In Venice.”

  “What are you doing there? Why aren’t you spending the holidays with us?”

  “I have things to do, Mama. I’ve accepted a job. I’m being trained for it here in Venice. How are you doing, Mama?”

  “I have a lot to do too. If I didn’t have Chalid…”

  “Who’s Chalid?”

  “A charming person. He’s staying with us. We’re now renting rooms in winter too. To extended-stay guests, you know? Otherwise, there’s not enough money. And Chalid helps me a bit in the café. He’s such a kind person.”

  “How’s Grandma doing?”

  “Oh, she’s doing fine, but she leads a more withdrawn life these days. She prefers to be in her room.”

  “Aha.”

  “She doesn’t like Chalid that much, even though she has no good reason not to. But you know her prejudices. A bit pigheaded, you know. And she’s not the youngest anymore.”

  “Give her my regards. I wish her all the best.”

  “Yes, my child. A lot has changed here in Genoa…”

  So it seems, I thought.

  “You should see it. The old town here is half underwater, despite the dam they built last summer along the harbor promenade. You remember where we used to have the café—no, you were still too little back then—down on Piazza Caricamento. Now there’s an antiques dealer in there. Everything destroyed. All the old furniture and pictures. But we don’t have to worry about that. There hasn’t been a flood like that in their lifetime, the people say. Probably it’s due to all the refugee ships in the harbor—so they claim anyway. The whole gulf is full of them. Where are they all coming from? Mainly Moros, of the inferior sort. Chalid is completely different.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Oh, he’s Italian. Though your grandma has somewhat different views. His parents come from Benghazi. But he was born and raised here. A typical Italian man. So friendly and helpful. I don’t know what I’d do without him. It all depends on me now.”

  Did this Chalid sit at the cash register? Or on the high seat next to the espresso machine, in front of the warmly soaked drawer giving off the scent of coffee, on the edge of which, day in, day out, Grandfather had knocked countless batches of coffee dregs out of the metal filters? I closed my eyes, heard the dull beat of metal on damp wood and smelled the scent, which spread immediately when the steam was pressed with a stifled sigh into the metal cylinder packed with ground coffee, saw the darkly stained leather apron he had draped over his shattered knees.

  “… to me at all?”

  “Yes, I am, Mama. I’m listening to you. I wish all of you a happy holiday…” Oh, what the heck? I said to myself. Grant her the little bit of happiness with her Chalid! “… and give Chalid my regards too, even though we haven’t met.”

  “I’ll do that, child. And you have a wonderful holiday too, if you really can’t come.”

  “Another time, Mama. Ciao!”

  * * *

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS; forty-eight days had passed since Frans’s departure, and the efforts at the institute to bring him back had so far come to nothing.

  “We’ve never had as few passages as we do at the moment,” Kazuichi said in a troubled tone when I ran into him on the way to Mondoloni’s language laboratory at the institute. “In December we had only eight altogether—five down into the past and just three upward. Going by experience, a phase of increased activity should now follow.”

  But his optimism was less convincing than usual. Or was I only imagining that?

  * * *

  IN THE LATE afternoon I went to the Ospedaletto to visit Heloise Abret and deliver Renata’s Christmas gift to her. As I walked down the corridor through the housekeeping wing toward the cafeteria in the back, Abe approached me—empty.

  “Hello, Abe,” I said. He stopped.

  “Please forgive me, but I should know you, right?” he said softly. “I’m afraid that not much was invested in my optical recognition system. Regrettably, I therefore cannot…”

  “I’m Domenica Ligrina. I’ve visited Madame Abret a few times.”

  “Now I recognize your voice, Signorina Ligrina. More care was taken on the audio system.”

  “Is Madame Heloise here?” I asked him.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. She was taken away, and since then I have had no more contact with her.”

  “Are you familiar with that thing?” asked someone behind me. I turned around to face a short, stout man in a black suit.

  “What thing?” I asked.

  “The handicap chair.” He patted the wire mesh of Abe’s backrest.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s been shuffling around the house for three days. No one dares to switch it off for fear of breaking something. The thing is outrageously expensive, I’ve been told, and I have impressed on everyone to keep their hands off the electronics, for heaven’s sake. Someone from NASA is supposed to come and pick it up, but that can take weeks.”

  “To my knowledge, Madame Abret relies on it…”

  “No. Not anymore. She died yesterday. For two days we had her in the intensive care ward over in the Ospedale. Heart failure. Did you know that the woman had scarcely half of her bone mass? She almost crumbled
through our fingers when she had to be moved to another bed. The poor thing screamed her head off before the sedation kicked in. Well … anyway. Are you a family member? My condolences. — No? Well, her suffering is over. But I ask you: Does it have to be on Christmas of all times, when all hell breaks loose here? Please excuse me, signorina,” he said with a wave, hurrying away.

  Abe had heard our conversation, but had apparently not entirely comprehended it.

  “When will it be possible to resume contact with Heloise?”

  “That will … I’m sorry, Abe, but that will probably no longer be possible.”

  “Oh…” said Abe. “But she needs me.”

  “I’m afraid…” I could not go on.

  When I stood later in front of the portal on Barbaria delle Tole, tears came to my eyes and my hand clenched around the small gift packet in my jacket pocket. What stupid questions that robot had to ask!

  At home I untied the ribbon and unpacked the gift. It was one of those small plastic half-spheres that used to enclose a little house in a wintry landscape. When you shook it, thick snowflakes came down from the sky. This one was different: A few elongated drop-shaped buildings that were half embedded in the ground of a barren, rust-brown landscape. When you shook the half-sphere, its interior became opaque with surging red dust, which only slowly sank down. PORT ABRET was written on a little label on the wooden base, and SAND FROM MARS—with a guarantee of authenticity from NASA.

  * * *

  IN THE AFTERNOON I made a pilgrimage to Santa Maria Gloriosa, my favorite church. What large-hearted patrons the friars must have had in that greedy, stingy society!

  I entered the vast nave. The Titian altar shone under the chancel screen. The Assunta’s garments were in flames, seemed to fly blazingly upward. I walked toward her under the beams that had been stained by the light into silvery silk and slid my hand over the polished wood of the Coro dei Frati. In the high window over the altar six stars twinkled green, blue, and red in the light of the low sun like the pattern in a kaleidoscope.

  “Please,” I said silently. “Protect him and bring him back.”