The Cusanus Game

  As I strolled down Rio dei Mendicanti, the fog thickened again. The crews of the ambulance boats with their yellow-green and orange SANITRANS uniforms stood on the dock and smoked. One of them whistled at me; the others laughed. The water in the canal smelled fresh, as if the city had taken a deep breath that night and flushed its gills with clear water.

  Half frozen, I entered the Cavallo; it was full of noise. Half the district seemed to be flocking there, but I managed to get a seat at the counter. I ordered an espresso macchiato and then another. Fabrizio poured a cognac as well and put it down next to my cup. I knocked it back. Gradually I was getting warmer.

  “Is your flying Dutchman still not back? He hasn’t shown his face for ages. Away on travel, I heard!” Fabrizio shouted to me over the noise.

  I nodded.

  “I bet he comes back today. I just have a feeling!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t find those little jokes particularly funny, Fabrizio.”

  Someone covered my eyes from behind and growled into my hair: “Guess who.”

  I spun around. “Frans!”

  “Hey! You’re strangling me.”

  “Where have you been for so long? You were gone for over three months!”

  “For me it was far more than three months, my dear. The ascending soliton carried me out quite a ways beyond the target.”

  “And today I was looking for your grave.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was over on San Michele, checking the gravestones for your name.”

  Frans didn’t laugh. He nodded.

  “I know the feeling,” he said in a low voice, more to himself. “But now it’s time to celebrate!” he announced, and then whispered in my ear: “I have to make up for Christmas and New Year’s Day.”

  I do too, I wanted to say, but I was silent.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A hint of hardness and bitterness around Frans’s mouth that I didn’t remember. Had I overlooked it before? I sensed a tinge of strangeness about him after he had returned, and I thought about what Renata had said about travelers who came back from the past and had trouble dealing with their own past.

  Had he met another woman where he had been?

  I wasn’t sure. But a certain distance had arisen, which both of us sensed, but which I could not pin down. When he was affectionate toward me, smiled at me, that bitterness disappeared from his eyes, and I was almost certain that I had been mistaken. But then there were again moments when I sensed that we were drifting inexorably apart. Moments I resisted acknowledging, because I loved him.

  “How are the women—back then?” I asked him, and my throat constricted.

  “Back then?”

  “Where you were.”

  He looked past me into the distance. “Strange,” he said. “And a bit unreal. Because you know that in the meantime they are long dead.”

  “Are they beautiful?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, “some are. But you look at them differently. Like flowers shortly before the frost.”

  “How elegiac.”

  Frans gave me a thoughtful look and nodded. “Time is a wilderness, Domenica. You’ll see.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions.

  * * *

  “WHAT’S THIS?” I asked, placing my finger gingerly on the freshly healed scar under his left collarbone. I felt him slip out of me without either of us having climaxed. Frans lifted his head from the pillow and opened his eyes.

  “Some guy tried to kill me,” he said.

  “A jealous husband?” I asked.

  He sighed. “A patriot who thought I was a spy.”

  “So you were in trouble. The whole time you were away I had a bad feeling that something had happened to you. Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “I’ve been conditioned too, my dear. Don’t forget that.”

  I slid down, stroked his taut flat belly, and took his member between my lips. But all effort was in vain.

  “What’s going on with the two of us, Frans?” I asked, sitting up.

  He shrugged. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m not in a good mood at the moment.”

  I didn’t want to press him further, stroked his chest and fingered the soft, puckered tissue of the scar.

  “Was it a stabbing?” I asked him.

  “With a dagger, yes. But my nanotects helped the wound heal quickly. No infection. Nothing.”

  “Your nanotects? Do you have that stuff inside you too?” I asked, disgusted.

  “Every traveler has them inside him. What do you think, with all the pathogens you encounter? The filth everywhere. The decay. Without nanos you wouldn’t have much chance of surviving if anything serious happened to you. They definitely helped me get back on my feet fast,” said Frans.

  “So why don’t you let them help you up some more?”

  “I love your sarcasm, Domenica.”

  “Oh, I mean it entirely seriously.”

  He reached for my hands and held them tight.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He sighed. “I’m afraid the psychologists always seem to end up being right.”

  “No committed relationships for the responsible traveler.”

  He nodded.

  I tried to wipe the tears from my eyes with my bare shoulders. I failed.

  “I thought it would be different with the two of us. I had so wished it. And I was even quite certain, but…”

  He averted his face.

  “Why, for heaven’s sake, would it be different for the two of us, of all people, than for everyone else?” I asked him.

  “Because…” He broke off. “One day you’ll understand.”

  Book

  THREE

  I

  Highgate

  If the recollapse were to happen before stars had all expired, our remote descendants could find themselves in a universe where cosmic and local arrows of time pointed different ways.

  MARTIN REES

  He was always happy to return to Highgate, the man some time-natives who had encountered him on his distant travels called the angel. He was fond of this world, because it was ancient and mysterious—full of interesting phenomena. He liked it best of all the worlds he had seen, and in his life he had indeed seen a great many.

  Early in the morning, when the vegetation took a deep breath once again and loaded the air with quadrillions of chemical messages before it closed itself off and braced itself for the onslaught of light, he loved to roam the high-built cities and the castles striving toward the heavens and to fly through the artfully ornamented arcades. Like finely spun lace of stone and glass, they presented themselves to the rising sun and broke its light into multihued fans, filling the shadowy interiors with fleeting colors. He had discovered a hall in the airy Palace of Karabati where the frescos had regenerated and regained their original magnificence. They were rendered in the style of a very early epoch of this planet, as returning time travelers had described it: two-dimensional images of astonishing expressiveness, in which a world was reawakened that had been gone for billions of years. He often lingered there and viewed the artworks, studied the intensity of the colors in varying brightness and the nuances of their expiration when shadows fell over them.

  Plants climbed up the arabesques of the palace’s arches and towers; they turned autumnally sienna and crimson, only to green anew when the tides changed. Then the colorful flowers returned, borne back by the wind, and gathered like swarms of butterflies among the fresh foliage before they folded into buds and withdrew into youthfully contracting vines.

  For millions of years, buildings had been erected on Highgate. Young architects from all parts of the galaxy had realized their visions—or found them realized, for many an architect who had arrived and moved out into the wilderness intoxicated with genius to seek in the vast plains or on the massive remains of former mountains a location for his ambitious buildings had returned disheartened to the capital and had reported despondently
that he had seen his plans realized by a stranger’s hand—long since carried out in all their particulars and already marked by decay. The unhappy ones had beaten their heads bloody in despair against overgrown walls and recounted in confused words how their visions had changed strangely into memories, how in their dreams images haunted them of collapsing scaffolding, of bitter sacrifices they made, of triumphs and outrageously daring solutions with which they overcame seemingly insurmountable problems. Over wine they brooded about the years that they had unexpectedly lost, while others had somehow mysteriously taken possession of their ideas and their lives and realized their plans.

  They encountered the cosmologists who had come to Highgate specifically to study the conditions along the temporal fault lines. Skepticism and opposition stirred in them when the cosmologists tried to explain to them that due to the muddled time patterns on this planet it might have been they themselves who had erected those buildings at some point in the future.

  Some who heard that tapped their foreheads and asked with a laugh: “How is that possible?”

  An older scholar, however, who had already lived for many centuries on Highgate, raised his hand and said, “The scientists are right. We have to learn to tell of the future as if it had been, or else the world will slip away from us.”

  “But we can tell only of the past,” someone countered. “Of what has happened. What we have experienced.”

  The old scholar reflected on this objection for a while, and then shook his head resolutely.

  “What do you really know about the past?” he asked. “How can you know what really happened? Are you so certain of what you have experienced that you can say: ‘Thus it truly was and not otherwise’? Think hard about it! I assert that only what is told is real. And even that for only a brief time.”

  * * *

  THE MAN SOME time-natives who had encountered him on his travels called the angel also loved to fly over the dry white floor of the vanished ocean. Sometimes, while doing so, he saw one of the brains, those soft, semitransparent forms, which had at some point found the strength to rise into the air—huge gelatinous creatures that consisted of millions of individual beings. Since primeval times they had populated the seas of the planet, and as the water grew increasingly nutritious due to the proliferating life on land, the creatures multiplied and multiplied, until finally whole bays and ocean basins were filled with monstrous masses of their soft, beautiful protoplasmic bodies. Herds of whales ate their way through them in rapturous orgies until they suffocated in them and, engulfed in billions of tons of protein, found no way out.

  Around that time the planet had long been regarded as uninhabitable, and its original population had abandoned it. Only a few had remained, as some always remain and hold out, no matter what might happen. And soon visitors appeared—descendants of those who had left—to dig for the traces of their ancestors. But they too left again, for the past had turned to dust, and the wind, which unrelentingly ground down the stranded continental shelf, had long blown away all traces.

  And finally came the architects, who were always in search of places of dwindling gravity, where they could erect the boldest of all buildings and realize their ambitious visions—but that has already been recounted.

  Only the mollusks remained and took advantage of the conditions in their way. Over millions of years they had merged into monstrous creatures: the brains, which were capable of considerable intellectual performance. They drifted over the continents, resembling balled masses of clouds, milky white, semitransparent forms, domed by red-veined cranial roofs protecting them against the rays of a sun that had become merciless, burning furiously through a thinned-out atmosphere. At the same time, however, the sunlight was their nourishment: it gave them the strength to rise and maneuver sluggishly to avoid dangerous gravity depressions. Millions of visual organs had gathered in their nadir and formed there a large, dark eye. Imperturbably it stared down, on the lookout for the last damp hollows that might serve as a laying place and settlement area for their spawn—their young, which for a while led a life of their own before they rose and, seeking shelter, attached themselves under the cranial roof of the mother body.

  Sometimes, when the setting sun shone through the huge body of the brains, one or another encapsulated whale herd could be seen, which had been buried in it for many millennia. They were mummified, some claimed. But there were scholars who were firmly convinced that those primeval mammals were only frozen in a long-lasting sleep and would one day awake and burst forth, when the sea returned, in order to plunge into their ancestral element. Some of those scientists thought that they had occasionally registered movements suggesting that the enclosed creatures were already eating their way through toward the forehead, in order to spring from it one not-too-distant day—and fertilize the world with new life, for in their genes, those scientists asserted, they bore the inheritance of the planet’s entire ecosphere.

  Sometimes one of the brains was stranded; it stumbled into gravity depressions and was forced to the ground. When it no longer found the strength to rise, it collapsed under its own weight. It did not take long for sun and wind to erode it. What remained were deposits of a tough glittering substance that had hardened and turned into an island of brownish mirror shards—and in it were hills of white, interlocked, impacted whalebone.

  Highgate was regarded as the strangest world in the old galaxy. Scientists who had traveled there from afar regarded it as the world in the universe on which signs could be discovered that time had fulfilled itself and was preparing to change direction. It was as if the universe had reached its greatest expansion and in some border regions the fractal pattern of the cosmos seemed to have paused in the process of unfolding and expansion that had lasted for billions of years, only to turn around hesitantly and sink back into itself, while the arrow of time, like a compass needle over the magnetic pole, pointed without orientation vaguely in this or that direction.

  Highgate was in one of those regions on the outermost edge of time where solitons swung around to plunge back into the past. There were on the planet chronotopes, in which the flow of time was jammed or came to a complete standstill. Those were areas in which, according to reports, the sun had not set for years but moved on an erratic course this way and that and kept stopping indecisively, where its light lay like a honey-colored haze over the land and covered the rock masses with a brown glaze, where nature froze in dreamy immobility. Elsewhere the living world seemed already firmly resolved to reverse, the plants gathered up their leaves, trees withdrew overnight into the soil as if in the face of imminent disaster, and the fledglings in the nests spat the food into their parents’ beaks and shut themselves up in the fragments of their eggs as if they were already tired of the world at first sight. This, in any case, is what the scholars reported who believed they had observed such things. They also told of bizarre rites that the people who lived in those areas celebrated—such as the resurrection of their dead or the homecoming of those whose lives had been fulfilled into the bodies of their mothers, where they saw the light of the world go out behind them and curled up, only to be immediately absorbed into nothingness. Those natives told the visitors in an exceedingly strange way of the future in all its particulars, as if they had vivid recollections of it, while they had only rough ideas of their past, as if they had completely lost the memory of what had been reality and what had not. Such accounts were sneered at by only a few, for on Highgate everything was possible.

  Native prophets also emerged regularly announcing a return of the moon. Highgate once had a large moon, the astronomers had claimed for a long time. But it had left its orbit and was eventually attracted by the sun and consumed by it. It would be reborn from the sun, declared those who remembered the spectacular event in the future. It would rise, ablaze, from the sun and, after it had sufficiently cooled, reclaim its rightful place in the sky. It would also soon resume its reign over the tides, for the sea too would return. First a haze would accumulate in t
he high atmosphere, gradually condense and then descend, and eventually the enormous hollows that had once been oceans would refill with water. People believed those prophets as people always believed prophets—only half and not without mockery and yet with a secret spark of hope and a tinge of fear.

  Thus it was on Highgate, and the man some time-natives called the angel loved this world, which, as he knew firsthand from many travels, was the oldest of all human worlds. And he lived there with his friend Don Fernando, who chose to remain in the form of a large rat, a Papagomys. From an early age, this had been his wish, for he enjoyed being hated by idiots and hounded by prejudice and leading a life characterized by resourcefulness, courage, quick-wittedness, and decisiveness.

  * * *

  IT WAS MIDDAY on Highgate, the time when the blaze reached its zenith. Light burst forth from the sabkha, a sharp, bitter light—like the evaporites of the dried-out ocean itself—which corroded the edges of reality, dissolved them, and assembled the fragments into trembling chimeras that seemed to float on pearly puddles before they melted and seeped into the sand.

  The man some time-natives who had encountered him on his travels called the angel loved this hour. He sat in a rocking chair on the shady porch and gazed into the distance. Sometimes, but only rarely, a shadow dimmed the landscape, when a brain passed over it, staring down indifferently with its eye.

  He enjoyed resting on this narrow seam between all-crushing light and the icy emptiness and darkness into which the bright vast sky imperceptibly slid not far above him. He knew that he found himself in the unsecured no-man’s-land between chaos and entropy, but could life ever have had a greater chance? Here it had emerged. Here it had unfolded. Here it had endured, thanks to its characteristic tenacity and its inventiveness.

  He closed his eyes and yielded to the feeling of fragile security. He heard Don Fernando’s cry and directed his eyes upward.