The Cusanus Game

  IN CAFÉ GLOCKENSPIEL I bought ice cream to go and took it with me to my hotel room. The bed of nails had been folded and tied up. The boy was sitting on it and guarding it. He looked hungry. Full of sympathy I handed him the ice cream.

  “You eat that now!” I said, when he hesitated.

  As I turned to the door, I saw that he was greedily spooning it. Probably he had held out all day at the old man’s side and gotten nothing.

  At the hotel bar the fakir sat with Roblacher, holding a large cognac glass in his hand and smiling somewhat absently. His eyes shone. The turban had slipped down over his forehead.

  The porcelain figures with their rococo costumes in the showcases along the corridor, which had that morning still exhibited innocent bucolic revels, had evidently been switched in order to put the guests in the mood for another wild evening. The scenes now had a completely unambiguous erotic character, and some of the figures displayed monstrous priapic attributes. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I glimpsed sexual movements. Indeed! My newly trained eye caught in the almost imperceptibly flickering edges of the colors that these were mobile holographs staging a computer-operated orgy. Mozart trickled faintly from hidden speakers: The Marriage of Figaro.

  * * *

  NO SOONER HAD I fallen asleep than I was awakened by shots. But this here wasn’t Rome. From afar I heard a dull pounding, but it wasn’t the drumming of the Hobbits. I wasn’t in Rome here, but in Salzburg. And the sounds were coming from the other side of the river, from the Kapuzinerberg. I opened the door of my room and looked through the glass dome. It was fireworks—the screeching and buzzing of rockets and other pyrotechnic devices. Multicolored fans sprayed upward, dandelion heads bloomed in the sky and showered the city for a few seconds with unreal light.

  In the hotel things seemed to be quite lively, but it didn’t sound like a Mozart party downstairs in the rococo hall. Rather, the shouts and laughter penetrated from the Kaiser Suite next door. Champagne corks popped, glasses clinked against the wall. What nerve! It was now past midnight.

  The entrance to the Kaiser Suite was opened; a loud hubbub, laughter, and a gust of smoke- and alcohol-infused air wafted out. A waiter in a tailcoat walked backward out the door; he had a tray with dirty glasses in his hand and a napkin over his arm. Then he bowed to the guests inside the suite and underscored that gesture by striking the heels of his shoes together with a strange scissorlike movement of his feet, making a hard clicking sound. An expression of politeness? A submissive gesture? A courtship ritual? I couldn’t interpret it. Then he closed the door and turned to me. I didn’t know him, had never seen him in the hotel before. A tall, thin, bald man, whose head shone waxily in the light of the stairwell—probably a temporary worker hired for a private party. His narrow face looked sickly pale. He raised his eyebrows when he noticed me. Then he eyed me up and down, as if he disapproved of the fact that I was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and asked: “Is there something I can do for you, Fräulein?”

  “May I ask what’s being celebrated so boisterously here?”

  His eyebrows rose even higher. “You’re not German, are you?” The waiter pulled at the napkin hanging over his arm.

  “No,” I said. “But what does that have to do with my question?”

  “Today is April 20.”

  “Was the foundation stone laid for the Vatican?”

  “The what?” He leaned forward and tilted his head as if he had not heard correctly.

  “Over on the Kapuzinerberg. I was told that they were going to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the new Vatican one of these days.”

  Now he seemed really dismayed. “Over on the Kapuzinerberg?” he repeated.

  Then he threw his head back and let out a whinnying laugh that almost made him drop the tray.

  “That’s the best joke I’ve heard in a long time,” he gasped. “The Vatican!” He shook his head as if he had to struggle for composure. “They are going to tear down the Gauhalle and the Gauhaus with it and demolish the Gauforum to build the Vatican there! The two Ottos are turning over in their graves.”

  He closed his eyes and doubled up with laughter.

  “That’s good! I have to tell them that!” he said, gesturing with a nod to the door of the Kaiser Suite. “No, Fräulein, today is the Führer’s birthday.”

  “What Führer?”

  The man suddenly became serious.

  “Now hang on,” he said sternly, looking down at me reprovingly. “You’re Italian, right? The Führer has been dead for over a hundred years, but we preserve his memory. He means something to us Germans.”

  Suddenly I felt dizzy. Amid shouts, glasses again shattered against the wall in the suite.

  “Sie Hai!” squawked the macaw.

  The waiter turned to the cage. “That’s our Joseph. What did the old boy once say? ‘Our end will be the end of the universe’—a bit grandiose as always. Who knows what he meant by that?” He bared his long yellow teeth. “Did you know that the old stallion could look down on more than a hundred children and grandchildren when he died? There’s a photo of him and his whole clan on his ninety-ninth birthday. He’s in the middle, in a wheelchair, surrounded by a brood of diligent bucks. That was his universe.” The man flicked the bars of the cage with his finger. “Sieg Heil!” he said, again making that strange clicking sound with his heels, the meaning of which remained impenetrable to me.

  V

  The New Vatican

  Is the universe in the end nothing but a gigantic computer, which permits reversible and irreversible time evolutions?

  KLAUS MAINZER

  “Well, it’s not exactly a pilgrims’ hostel, I admit,” said Falcotti, smiling at me from under the brim of his panama hat, “but I hope you’ve nonetheless slept well.”

  “I’ve slept badly and had even worse dreams,” I replied. “Though I’m not even entirely sure whether they’re dreams.”

  He leaned forward with surprise. Was there worry in his eyes?

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I can’t quite classify it,” I confessed. “Was it a sort of waking dream? In any case, I thought shots woke me in the middle of the night. But it was fireworks.”

  “Fireworks? I didn’t see or hear anything about fireworks.”

  I looked at him aghast. “There weren’t any fireworks last night? Over there, above the Kapuzinerberg?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then I must have dreamed that too. But that was only the beginning of a weird experience I can’t make sense of.”

  I told him about my nighttime encounter with the ghostly waiter, about the Nazi celebration I believed I had witnessed. I described to him my confusion when I complained in the morning to the hotel management about the disturbance and was told with a shake of the head that there had been no party in the Kaiser Suite that night. Roblacher, the man from reception, had taken the elevator up with me, and I had cast a glance into the rooms. I really must have dreamed it. Nor was there a waiter in the house who would have fit the description I provided. Roblacher had given me a disconcerted look and shrugged helplessly.

  Falcotti listened to me with growing concern.

  “Only that Joseph, the ‘Sieg Heil’–squawking macaw, scurried fearfully away from me on its perch in the cage as I approached. You see, Signore Falcotti, that’s a point I don’t comprehend: How did I suddenly know that ‘Joseph’ was an allusion to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels? And suddenly I also understood what that wretched creature was screaming. I can’t remember anyone in the hotel hinting that to me—besides that waiter who supposedly doesn’t even exist. Is it possible to dream something like that? But it can’t be. I really don’t know how to explain it.”

  Falcotti thoughtfully bit his lower lip, stared across the square, and pushed his VR glasses back and forth on the table. The two flip-down dark screens looked like small blinders.

  “There’s another thing that’s odd. A Gauforum, you said?” Falcotti asked.<
br />
  “The waiter mentioned not only a Gauforum, but also a Gauhalle and a Gauhaus. And he said the two Ottos would turn over in their graves.”

  “That’s really strange. For there actually were plans of that sort for construction on the Kapuzinerberg more than a hundred years ago, during the Third Reich.”

  “That was the time of that Führer?”

  “Yes. Adolf Hitler. The so-called Third Reich. The Nazi era. And there was at that time a detailed plan to build on the Imberg. I’ve seen a model. The plans were designed by”—he closed his eyes—“by an Otto Strohmayr and an Otto Reitter, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “The two Ottos!”

  Falcotti nodded and gave me a serious look.

  “Those plans—they were never realized, though,” I said, shrugging uneasily.

  Falcotti shook his head, reached for his cup, and took a sip of his großer Brauner, which had in the meantime gotten cold. “No, thank God! They were supposed to be impressive monumental structures. They would have given Salzburg a completely different face. That architecture had something … something bombastic about it. The planned buildings exceeded all human measure, but nonetheless lacked any grandeur.” He carefully put down the cup. “But tell me, Domenica, have you ever heard of those architectural projects or seen any photos of the models, in a museum here, in a travel guide or a city history?”

  “No.”

  “Or did you consult your Scarabeo?”

  “I did, but I neither saw nor heard anything about such planned structures,” I said.

  “Are you completely certain?” asked Falcotti.

  “Absolutely.”

  His eyes wandered to the gables of the houses on the other side of Makartplatz, over which the slope of the Kapuzinerberg rose, as if he had to make sure that the small monastery really still stood there. He was visibly nervous.

  “Is something bothering you?” I asked him.

  He puffed out his cheeks, shrugged, and replied: “Indeed.”

  “Do my dreams give you cause for concern?”

  “If they were dreams—no. But I’m afraid, Domenica, they weren’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the game we played together in my office at the university? The globus game?”

  “Yes, I remember. The Cusanus game with the crazy balls.”

  “You are apparently on a rather erratic course, Domenica.”

  “Heading where?”

  “No one knows. But it frightens me a little.”

  “Frightens you? Why?”

  Falcotti spread his hands. “Have you ever heard of the so-called Goldfaden-Hargitai effect?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “What is it?” I asked him.

  “A quite peculiar psychic phenomenon. A sort of empathy. It used to be considered a strange form of schizophrenia, and to this day many psychologists mistake the effect for heautoscopy. But it’s not a projection of one’s own body outward, as is usually the case with doppelgänger appearances. Heautoscopy frequently occurs at times of intense stress and in states of anxiety and exhaustion. It can originate in physical defects: lesions in the right half of the cerebral cortex, tumors on the hypophysis, or temporal lobe epilepsy. But with GH all this is not the case.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand much about such illnesses,” I admitted.

  “Excuse my psychologist Latin,” said Falcotti. “GH is not a dissociative disorder, as André Goldfaden and Urban Hargitai already proved in the second half of the twentieth century, but a rare ability, which … Well, it’s hard to explain. It’s the ability to establish contact at certain moments with one’s doppelgängers in parallel universes, to participate in their experiences, so to speak, or even to exchange one’s consciousness with them.”

  I shook my head incredulously.

  “You’re looking at me skeptically, Domenica, but these are facts. The effect often causes us a lot of trouble during time travel. When travelers, as a result of multiple transitions, are close to their doppelgängers or even encounter them, that can become an unbearable psychic strain, for interferences occur between their brain functions.”

  “But what does that have to do with my experience last night in the hotel?”

  “A temporary exchange of perceptions might have taken place between your self here and another that lives in a parallel temporal dimension—a universe in which the history of National Socialism and the Second World War took a different course.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. So there was a version of me that had to live in that terrible world. Did she feel the same way as I did? Did she share my perceptions as well? I remembered the disturbing dream with the unknown but strangely familiar nocturnal visitor, which had often haunted me as a teenager. Had I partaken in the pleasure of a doppelgänger?

  “You need not be afraid, Domenica. You’ll learn how to deal with these unusual experiences,” said Falcotti. The cross in his temple pulsed. He flicked the handle of his cup with his forefinger, then said with a shake of his head: “Perhaps our difficulties are due to the fact that you possess an extraordinarily strong GH talent. The conditions for it are present in you. If I remember correctly, your right temporal lobe is quite highly developed.”

  “How would you know that?” I asked.

  “During the preliminary medical examinations of the candidates, things like that are already taken into account. Highly developed visual memory and things of that sort.”

  Falcotti lifted his hat and rubbed with his fingertips the temple in which he wore his cross implant.

  “You spoke of difficulties, Signore Falcotti. Do they concern me or my planned work?”

  He shook his head slowly. “There’s no reason to keep it from you. During our preparations for the Rinascita Project we have recently stumbled on a few facts with which the technicians in Amsterdam have problems. For historical and geographical reasons, we chose northwestern Europe around the middle of the fifteenth century as the field of operation for you botanists. The destination time is after the great plagues and before the excessive witch-hunts, which, as we have come to realize, pose an extreme danger to time travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There’s also the fact that around the middle of the fifteenth century an unadulterated European flora can still be found: The age of exploration has not yet dawned; from Asia barely any species have been introduced, and from America none at all. We have envisaged a topographic profile from the marshes of the North Sea to the higher regions of the Eifel and the low mountain ranges: a rather unadulterated ecology. On top of that, the area is politically tranquil. From the perspective of Ghent or Cologne, the fall of Constantinople might as well have taken place on the moon—and still, with transitions to that destination time, we keep running into difficulties, which the Amsterdam tunnel technicians can’t explain.”

  “But what does all that have to do with me? I haven’t traveled yet,” I said.

  He smiled indulgently. “Oh yes, you have, Domenica. You’ve done so a long time ago—from a chronological perspective. If everything proceeds according to plan, you have already existed before in this universe, six hundred years ago—and perhaps more often in the time that has passed since then. You’ve done important work to secure the future of this world.”

  I looked at him in confusion. But … of course. What he said was completely logical—and nonetheless inconceivable. But what did it mean? I shook my head.

  “Then it’s not even necessary to send me to the fifteenth century anymore, if I … I mean…”

  It dawned on me that the objection I was about to bring up was absolutely senseless, and I broke off. I would have to travel in order to … Falcotti’s smile had vanished.

  “That would be theoretically possible, but then the two of us would now find ourselves in another universe. A universe that might not last.”

  “And what sorts of difficulties have come up, exactly?” I asked.

  “Again and again, well-conceived and metic
ulously prepared transitions turn out to be unrealizable or fail to achieve temporal precision. Either the tunnel doesn’t open at all, even though all the settings appear to be correct, or the travelers return and report that they missed their target by years. It’s as if the destination time of 1450 were a ‘sophisticated area,’ as the tunnel technicians call it. It’s a mystery to the theoretical physicists at the Hendrik Casimir Institute. The computers are working on dozens of simulations to figure out the cause.”

  “And I could be the cause of those difficulties, you think?”

  “That can’t be ruled out,” Falcotti replied with a shrug. I had a feeling that, even though he was concerned, he was somehow proud of me. “A lot of this is still uncharted territory, Domenica. About the Everett multiverse there are countless speculations. Each of us seems to live in many, probably very many parallel universes at the same time. These universes are probably only nanometers apart, and the membranes between them are perhaps only Planck lengths thin. And yet for most people contact with their other consciousnesses, which exist beyond the barriers, is impossible. There are, however, people—”

  “Like me.”

  Falcotti nodded and went on, “GH talents, who can penetrate those barriers, mostly in dreams, but sometimes also in reality—if the concept of reality still makes any sense here. They seem to somehow disturb the symmetry of the multiverse. Certainly, it could also be something entirely different causing the technicians difficulties: historically important events in parallel worlds that cannot be registered in ours but bring about turbulences in it. But it could also be events of historic significance that have happened at some point in our universe but were subsequently corrected and therefore never happened, were never recorded, or have disappeared from our records.”

  “That’s over my head, Signore Falcotti,” I interjected. “I’m sorry but I don’t understand a word of what you just said. How can something disappear from historical records? Does a section suddenly go missing from a text or a whole page from the books?”

  “It’s much more complicated,” he replied. “But basically it’s like this: The past is not set in stone, Domenica. We have to learn to grasp it as a living, breathing organism, which changes, regenerates, and constantly sprouts branches. We’re part of a multiverse that grows through space-time like a plant, a tendril or liana. Some cosmologists compare it with a coral reef, which stretches over hundreds of miles but every centimeter of which forms an independent biological realm with a complex architecture, which is continuously built on.”