The Cusanus Game

First supersonic flight of a rocket-powered clipper from Savannah to Sydney in less than six hours.

  1881

  First orbital flight with circumnavigation of the Earth by Major Brian McLaughlin with the rocket plane Thunder.

  1883

  Approximately half a million dead in the vast and populous vacation areas along the coasts of Sumatra, Surabaya, Siam, and Malaysia due to a catastrophic flood of indescribable magnitude, caused by the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait. Richard Burton, the famous British explorer and man of letters, who was staying in Bandung at the time and the next day traveled by helicopter to the southern coast of Surabaya, present-day Java, and took a direct look at the disaster area, wrote in the face of the immense destruction: “It was as if the fist of a wrathful God had swept across the land” (London Times, Thursday, August 30, 1883).

  1886

  “Inexhaustible Energy out of Nowhere,” announces the April 28 edition of the Washington Post on the occasion of the opening in New York of the first electricity-generating station powered by the Maxwell forces dormant in matter. Thomas Alva Edison, the builder of the facility, was honored with the Thomas Jefferson Award by President of the American Federation Grover Cleveland, the highest distinction for a scientist.

  1897

  The states of the North American Federation, with California leading the way, complete the construction of numerous Maxwell power plants, with the help of which gigantic irrigation projects are to be undertaken in order to counter the increasing dryness in the agricultural areas of the continent.

  1899

  Catastrophic drought in India. For the third year in a row the monsoon rain doesn’t come. Sixty million people flee the country. Aid deliveries from all over the world prove unable to ease the hardship. In the face of deaths in huge numbers, the World Confederation compels by force of arms the opening of the borders to Burma and Siam.

  1906

  Earthquake in San Francisco. Two Maxwell power plants heavily damaged. Samuel Ruben, the president of California, declares a national emergency and asks the neighboring states for help.

  1907

  A mysterious epidemic spreads from west to east across the North American continent. The midwestern states close their borders and adopt rigorous quarantine measures after the prohibition of the transport of livestock achieved no effect. The epidemic causes illness and deformities not only among animals, but also increasingly among plants and even among people. Scientists are baffled.

  1908

  Ernest Rutherford, professor in Manchester, who until recently taught at McGill University in Montreal, is awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Rutherford claims that there must be a direct connection between the radiation released by the destroyed Maxwell power plants in San Francisco and the occurrence of deadly illness among people and animals as well as deformities among newborns and plants; that the affliction is thus by no means an infectious disease, but rather a “radiation sickness,” which, though it remains medically unexplored, is in no way contagious. Nonetheless, in rural areas pogroms are repeatedly directed against the sick and dying in the guise of “protective measures.”

  1909

  “Political Gambit or Technical Breakdown?” asks the October 26 edition of the Manchester Guardian. “The German moon expedition ended in disaster. The launch of the Helmuth von Moltke, prepared in secret for months, apparently went off according to plan. After a three-day flight the spaceship touched down in one piece in the Mare Imbrium, but a return lift-off to Earth either was not attempted or failed. Suspicions of some foreign experts who claimed that bringing back the four moon voyagers had never been planned in the first place—indeed, that it had scarcely been technically possible—were sharply countered by the German Admiralty and the Imperial Naval Office. Political observers likewise assume a technical breakdown and regard the speculations as absurd. They believe that the risk was criminally underestimated because no one dared to argue the Kaiser out of this propagandistic technological undertaking. The unexpected resignation of the Imperial Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow certainly shed no light on the dubious ‘conquest of the moon by the German Empire,’ heralded with aplomb by Kaiser Wilhelm II but shamefully executed. From Potsdam itself no comment has been forthcoming.”

  1914

  Famine refugees from Africa and Asia stream into Europe. Italy and Spain appeal to the remaining European states with an urgent request for help. First Pan-European Conference in Geneva.

  1915

  Despite strong protests by the World Confederation, intensified regulations on foreigners in the European countries. Increased deportations; closing of the external borders. Pogroms against illegal immigrants, particularly in Austria, Germany, France, and Switzerland.

  1917

  Second Pan-European Conference in Vienna. Common immigration policy decided. Exemptions only for “homecomers” from the states of the former North American Federation and the South African Republic, who are classified as racially and genetically unobjectionable. Concrete plans for a unified economy, currency, and defense. Decision to erect a North Atlantic dam.

  1918

  Third Pan-European Conference in London. Winston Churchill acclaimed as the “Unifier of Europe.” The demand of the World Confederation for a relaxation of European immigration regulations is unanimously denied, the proposal “oil for immigration” rejected as an extortion attempt.

  1923

  During an anti-European rally in Munich, an armed confrontation takes place between militant nationalists, the so-called Kampfbund, and law enforcement officers. The ringleaders of the radicals, Erich Ludendorff, Max von Scheubner-Richter, and Adolf Hitler, meet their deaths.

  1924

  The Fourth Pan-European Conference in Berlin adopts autarky measures. The Berlin resolutions outline plans to build a fleet of orbital power plants in order to secure the energy supply and to be armed against “extortion” on the part of the World Confederation.

  1925

  Founding of Eurospatial in Paris. Decision to build the first permanently manned orbital station.

  1933

  Formal signing of the charter of the United States of Europe in Versailles.

  1936

  Withdrawal of the “volunteer” forces under General Francisco Franco from Ceuta and Tangier and the troops of Field Marshal Benito Mussolini from the Mezzogiorno. Erection of a “Secure Border” in central Italy (Gaeta-Termoli line), which is later moved to the southern edge of the Po Plain (Abruzzo Wall).

  1937

  Extension of the Bastion Midi along the Spanish-French-Italian Mediterranean coast, of the Southern Atlantic Wall and the Santiago Wall along the Portuguese and Spanish west coast, and of the Eastern Wall between the Adriatic and the Gulf of Finland (Trieste-Lemberg-Helsinki line).

  1944

  Erection of a floodproof Atlantic dam along the edge of the European continental shelf between Bilbao and Kristiansund, past Brandon Head and Erris Head, enclosing the Hebrides and Shetlands, completed after a twenty-five-year period of construction.

  1945

  President of Europe Charles de Gaulle declares the Old Continent an “impregnable fortress.” In his official speech, he calls Europe an “ark that will bear our Western culture into the future.”

  * * *

  DON FERNANDO DIPPED his paw in the ashes to which the notes had been reduced. He sniffed at the gray flakes and licked them off his claws.

  “Real paper,” he said appreciatively. “What an odd bird!”

  The man some time-natives called the angel brushed his hand across the table. The wind carried the ashes away.

  “We’ll have to return again,” he said.

  “Probably several times,” said Don Fernando. “It’s as if I smelled it.”

  The man some called the angel leaned back in his rocking chair and closed his eyes. “We have to proceed carefully,” he said. “The fabric is very thin at that point.”

  He sensed the
approach of a soliton and turned his head.

  “Are you ready?”

  “At all times,” replied Don Fernando.

  * * *

  THE OCEAN HAD returned. A wave washed against the beach. And the next was already raising its head, rising, inclining its crest in order to break, but it didn’t crash down. It stopped. It was as if it had suddenly decided to change its state; it became viscous and congealed into a shape that was frozen in time, as he had seen in one of the replications in the Palace of Karabati. The wave, which had paused in its movement, now threw back its mane and sank backward into the sea from which it had risen.

  The coast was marshy and covered with reeds. The sea, now farther away, rushed weakly toward the shore. It was a cold sea. The air too was cold. Poured out over the sky were stars, strange constellations. A thin fog lay over the inland valleys. Somewhere a wolf howled.

  “Carry me,” requested Don Fernando.

  The angel picked him up and held him against his breast.

  The dull sound of hooves on soft ground could be heard, then the anxious snorting of a horse. A white horse. Two boys sat on its back; they had reined it in and were staring. Again the wolf howled, this time closer.

  “Old monster,” hissed Don Fernando.

  “Stop scratching my chest with your cold wet paws, Fernando,” said the angel.

  “Forgive me.”

  The white horse flailed its head and turned to flee. The boy riding it tightened the reins; the other held on to his companion and looked mistrustfully over his shoulder.

  “Don’t be afraid!” the angel called to them. “We have arrived,” he then said to Don Fernando.

  “I should hope so.”

  They approached the hut. The hooded man stepped out and pushed back his cowl.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  III

  Padania

  Turn the key the other way, and the dancers would dance backward, the music play backward, vanished nights reappear.

  GENE WOLFE

  My departure was set for April 17. I was to go to Salzburg first. Falcotti would be there and would personally deliver and explain to me the final instructions of the Istituto della Rinascita for my mission. That had to be done in private, the e-mail indicated.

  Frans brought me to Santa Lucia. He stowed my luggage and sat down opposite me.

  “I’d like nothing better than to go with you,” he confessed. “Sometimes I get a bit homesick. My contract here expires in the middle of the year; then I’ll come to Amsterdam and show you a few tricks you can use to get primed for a transition.”

  I had trouble “getting primed” for the departure. The train was about to leave, and Frans had to hurry to get out of the car in time. As the train slowly started to move, he knocked on the window from outside, but it wouldn’t open.

  “See you in Amsterdam!” he shouted.

  I read his lips. The train accelerated. Frans trotted after it a bit, then remained behind.

  Beyond Mestre began old cultivated land. Old farmsteads rolled by; umber brick buildings with caved-in roofs, between them modern factory farms. Cypresses lined driveways to country houses and villas, screened by walls and parks. Old willow trees stood along winding brooks, clad in fresh green and gilded by the spring sun. Then the flashing, dead-straight canals of an unbroken irrigation system appeared more and more often, between them fields of turbo rice, intensively applied genetics, quadrillions of tiny nanomachines, which spun sugar out of water, air, and sunlight—each a submicroscopic robot-mechanic dismantling and reassembling molecules in its own way.

  On the outskirts of the cities from Padua through Verona to Trento were thousands of stacked-up container homes full of refugees from Alto Adige. Air-supported domes had been erected between them. Grapevines with tendrils reaching upward like columns of the desperate lined the railroad embankment. The visions of Padania had been dashed—a distressed area, beset from the south and from the north.

  Beyond Trento the world narrowed.

  A group of four lattice towers stood, painted red and white and pressed close together, on a rocky ledge above the valley; it seemed to me as if they had escaped there during a flood and awaited rescue. I thought of angels plunging into the valley spraying sparks like Lucifer, and of Renata’s mutilated hand.

  The train slowed down. We were approaching the border. In Bolzano I had to change trains. The Austrian magnetic levitation train was enthroned on an elevated platform. Everywhere were the flags with the red, white, and red stripes and the emaciated eagle. They should have exchanged their eagle for that of the Germans a long time ago, Renata had once said mockingly. The fat bird would have suited them better by now.

  BOZEN. On the painted-over station signs the old BOLZANO showed through.

  The inspection of IComs, travel documents, and luggage took its time. The older official with his gray uniform cap nodded at me with a smile when the papal visa appeared on his screen. My luggage was brought over. It had obviously been examined more closely. An official in civilian clothes placed the paperweight with the Mars sand on the counter.

  “What’s this?”

  “It says on the label,” I said brusquely.

  The border official reminded me of my geography teacher in high school, whom I could never stand. The same arrogant type: slender, short gray hair, gray-streaked mustache, mocking blue eyes. And just as vain. He flicked the bottom of the paperweight with his finger. Red sand flew up between the domes and clouded the sky over Port Abret.

  “Pretty,” he said, putting the half-sphere down on the counter; his fingernails were very well tended.

  “A souvenir,” I explained. “A gift.”

  “From Renata Gessner?”

  Oh, damn! Damn! Damn!

  “Tissue traces from her skin,” he said, pursing his lips, and added with casual condescension, “We have our smart nanobots too.”

  I felt that tingling in the muscles at the back of my thighs that always overcame me in panic situations. A flight reflex? What could the guy do to me? I hadn’t committed any crime just by having that thing in my luggage. Still, I felt cold inside. He enjoyed my shock reaction and watched me mockingly.

  “We haven’t heard from Frau Gessner in a long time,” said the border official. “Is she doing well?”

  “Yes, she is,” I stammered, intimidated. “I don’t think she’ll cause you any more trouble,” I added stupidly, hating myself for it.

  “Trouble?” Under his mustache he twisted his mouth into a mocking smile. “I doubt that, Fräulein Ligrina. Have a pleasant journey!”

  The border official turned away and disappeared through a glass door.

  Fräulein. I hastily pulled the zipper of my travel bag; it got stuck. The kind older official helped me force it closed. Then I hurried to the escalator that led to the platform of the Austrian State Railroad.

  * * *

  THE EXPRESS MAGNETIC levitation train to Salzburg was luxurious and spacious. The dove-blue upholstered seats could be converted into lounge chairs. On the screen in front of me appeared a route map indicating times and distances.

  Austria-Hungary had become a great and wealthy land; there was no reason to hide the light of national pride under a bushel. Ever since the withdrawal from the EU and the annexation of Hungary, Slovenia, Friuli, and South Tyrol under a liberal regime, things had been going uphill. Vienna had managed to leapfrog a century and a half and connect to the dubious glory of the old imperial monarchy—indeed, as some believed, even to the glory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

  We plunged into a tunnel and reemerged from it, shot up a slope and soared into a mountain panorama. Ten minutes later we stopped in Brixen.

  The railroad line ran straight through the city. The new train station floated like a blimp high above the houses between the cathedral and the monastery. I looked down at glistening wet slate roofs and the countless sooty mouths of the chimneys. The shadows of the clouds scudded across them. It was a smal
l world: the streets and squares, the monastery, the cathedral. A gusty northwest wind swept down over Monte Quaira and tugged at the cables of the train station. For a moment, I felt dizzy. I felt like an insect caught in a spiderweb and looked around involuntarily as if a spider were about to come scurrying from somewhere to kill its prey.

  Very nearby tolled a clock—a single ringing stroke. The air had a different taste here, raw and yet smooth and cool like a blade. Was it due to the altitude? A zeppelin, the Archduke Ferdinand, had moored between two futuristically styled pylons made of carbon fiber composite materials and lowered its passenger gondolas onto a platform. The laser-guided airscrews fought with the wind, constantly changing the number of revolutions to keep the airship in position. Its shadow fell onto the eastern bank of the Isarco. The platform was already teeming with people, and still more followed through the connecting tubes to the train station.

  Beyond the great valley basin stretched vineyards on the southern slopes. They looked like vigorously and crudely crosshatched black-and-white drawings. The sunlight was pale, unable to ignite any colors. Wood stained silver by sun and snow. Defiant houses, huddled, turned inward. Here reigned narrowness and rejection. In this basin the world passed through; it never came here. “Here we are,” said the inhabitants of these valleys. “Strangers, stay out, stay strangers.”

  Nicolaus Cusanus had been confronted with this narrowness, as I had learned. He, a man of the world, farsighted and full of transgressive ideas, had been the first modern thinker to reflect on experimental science, on mathematical infinity and that of God, on the infinity of the world and the nature of time and eternity. With these people here he did not get along. He, the intellectual, exhorted them to practice a Christian lifestyle, tried to force them to do so with ecclesiastical penalties. He, the theorist, failed to grasp that he was not dealing with Christians, that their crosses, their processions and pilgrimages were only a veneer, varnish on heathen, militant traditions thousands of years old.

  They didn’t like him, that—German?—Roman? A stranger, in any case! That supposed friend of the Pope. He thought too much for them, knew too much, saw through too much, expected them to think about things they did not even grasp, did not even wish to grasp. They defied him, ignored his instructions, sabotaged, deceived, and denounced him. They preferred to make common cause with his opponent, the Habsburg duke, whom they actually hated even more, but whose greed they nonetheless comprehended, whose tricks they could calculate, because his imperious and quick-tempered style corresponded more to their nature. The Cusan remained incomprehensible to them, unsettling, uncanny. He lived and acted in a world whose horizon lay far beyond their mountaintops, behind which the sun set for them each day.