The Cusanus Game

“Is this Koblenz?” I asked.

  “We were in Koblenz shortly before midnight. You were fast asleep, my dear. Now we’re almost in Cologne.”

  My God! I had slept through Koblenz! But I had been so curious about the city, the towers of St. Florin, where Nicolaus Cusanus had been dean.

  “You didn’t miss anything,” said the princess. “Koblenz is still an empty city. Cleaned up to a large extent, but it will still be a few years before people can live there again.”

  I looked out and saw portal cranes on which spotlights blazed, containers, freight trains. KÖLN EIFELTOR was inscribed on the cranes. A troop of workers with breathing masks sprayed solvent on the sealant of the doors.

  “Cologne too had to be abandoned for ten years. Do you know how many rats were collected after the gassing of the houses? Over two million! Can you imagine that? The radioactivity hadn’t afflicted them—on the contrary. Barely any sick specimens. The scientists think that the ones that fell ill had been devoured by the healthy members of their species. Only the best and healthiest survived. But there had been horrible mutants among them, people said. Large as beavers and fiendishly intelligent. The future belongs to those beasts, my dear. Not us.”

  “Let’s wait and see.”

  “Wait? For what? For a sign from God?” she asked, shaking her head. “If that wasn’t a sign, young woman!”

  Brambilla was right. Satisfied, she pulled the modules out of the contacts on her ICom and stowed them in her handbag.

  “Have you put the ravens to flight?”

  “Certainly. I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Laser flashes. They still have respect. But for how long?”

  We stepped out onto the platform. The air was fresh and cold. I shivered.

  Tracks stretched into the darkness. Spotlights cast a radiant glow over stacks of containers. Cranes hummed and whirred. And from all sides I heard the groaning and screeching of metal scraping against metal. Brambilla held on to her hat as an electric cart rushed by us with a whine. Nearby the whistle of a locomotive could be heard.

  * * *

  HALF AN HOUR later we were instructed to board a new red-painted commuter train that was to bring us to Cologne. The upholstery was new and gave off the slight ammonium chloride smell of fresh synthetic fibers.

  When we reached the Cologne central station, morning was dawning. Despite the early hour, the platforms were teeming with people. There was almost no way through. A din of voices, mainly French. Tour guides tried with shouting and pennant waving to hold their groups together and conduct them through the crowd.

  “What are all these people doing here early in the morning?” I asked my companion.

  “Those are Ursuline pilgrims. Some have just arrived, the others are returning home. Every day more than a dozen special trains are running.”

  “Ursulines?”

  “Don’t you know the Ursula legend?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, remembering the paintings by Carpaccio I had seen in the Accademia. “The one who set out for Cologne with her eleven thousand virgins, where they were all massacred by the Huns.”

  “That’s the medieval legend. But there’s a new one, according to which the first people who around 2035 dared to return to the city found the saint praying in her church before the altar. She prayed for the souls of all who had died in the disaster and for the souls of those who had through their negligence and carelessness brought disaster upon the people.”

  “The French…”

  “A hysterical need for atonement arose, which set off a wave of deep religiosity in France. This gives those people an outlet for their excessive guilt. Do you see the vials some of them wear around their necks?”

  I noticed that many of the departing pilgrims had small glass containers hanging around their necks, which looked like closed test tubes and contained something black, a dark liquid or dust.

  “You won’t believe it, but those people take a tiny sample of contaminated soil home with them.”

  “That can’t be true!”

  “Oh, yes, my dear. And that serves everyone well. Every pilgrim can get the feeling of a martyrdom in miniature. They dispose of dangerous waste according to the supposed polluter pays principle and bring a little bit of the fallout outside the country. And don’t ask me how much money those who had this fantastic idea make from it.”

  “But the Church…”

  “… undoubtedly has a considerable share in the business. You need only take a look at the cathedral. It shines in new splendor.”

  “Can you see it from here?”

  “Poorly. Even though it’s located directly next to the train station. But when you cross the Rhine later, take a look back.”

  We had descended the stairs to the spacious floor below the platforms. Here it was even more densely crowded—and it smelled like all the snack bars of Asia. The food service industry all around was indeed firmly in non-European hands: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia had established their culinary consulates. A Turkish and a Greek place had claimed their territory. Only the brewery business seemed to remain in European hands.

  We managed to get a place to stand and a hot noodle soup, which tasted of ginger, lemongrass, and fresh coriander. I eyed suspiciously the chunks of meat floating pallidly between the noodles.

  “You can safely eat that,” the princess assured me. “It’s flapo.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Flat pork. It’s real. Though it didn’t grow on bones, but on nutrient film. The Belgians do a good job of that.”

  Brambilla gestured with a nod to a poster in the small, steam-filled kitchen, in which two dark-skinned cooks toiled. It showed a cheerfully smiling pig about ten yards long with a four-leaf clover in its mouth, a dozen pairs of legs, and a curly tail at the end. Brussels Pigs was written above it. I tasted the meat cautiously. It was somewhat spongy, but it really did taste like pork. The genes seemed to be right. I spooned hungrily.

  Suddenly a melody, flashing and sharp as a knife, cut through the din of voices and the air laden with the smell of spices and cooking. Bach? Four young people had positioned themselves in the middle of the crowd and let flutes, clarinets, and trumpets sound. The conversations went silent; everyone listened. At the end applause thundered, and the coins jingled in the instrument cases.

  “Give my regards to Amsterdam,” said Princess Brambilla in parting.

  “I’ll do that,” I replied. “Thank you. You’ve told me a lot about your home.”

  “I’m always happy when I find someone who listens to me. Journalists are like that.”

  Without her high-tech glasses she seemed like a nice grandma. I had the feeling we liked each other.

  * * *

  HALF AN HOUR later I sat on an express train of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen and finally drank a palatable coffee. The cathedral on the opposite bank looked unreal in the morning light—somehow delicate and brittle. I was overcome by a strange unease, however, at the sight of the pointy twin towers and the huge nave, and I was glad when the trees lining the railroad embankment hid it from view. What would await me on my journey into the past, if I visited this city long before the cathedral had been even halfway erected?

  An hour later the train reached Holland. On the meadows lay rafts of mist, in which black-and-white-spotted cattle stood, sunken to their bellies. Lush pastures steamed in the morning sun. After that journey through the apocalypse it was agreeable to finally see unscathed nature again. Falcotti had been right: You had to have seen with your own eyes how endangered Creation is—how terribly simple it is to open the door to darkness.

  I knew, of course, that appearances deceived. Here too there had repeatedly been extensive killing, when the food chain, tugged back and forth by rapacity and greed, had gotten hopelessly entangled and had had to start afresh, to the extent that was even still possible on the narrow genetic basis after decades of reckless and irresponsible monoculture.

  After the hopes of breeding back
had gone up in smoke, the geneticists seemed to be at a loss. Under the pressure of selection, the animals had apparently developed some tricks of survival that were stored not in their genes but in their mitochondria, in the internal ecology of the maternal organism or even outside the phenotype in the social behavior of gregarious animals. Only an unrealistic dreamer could assume that a living creature could be pulled out of a test tube and could be expected to develop in a vacuum, so to speak, into a self-sufficient organism capable of survival and reproduction. Gradually the whole terrible magnitude of the species annihilation that had been so carelessly carried out became clear. Diversity was gone, obliterated, irretrievably lost. That was where our task began and that of the Istituto Pontificale della Rinascita della Creazione di Dio, San Francesco, for suddenly an opportunity had unexpectedly presented itself. Evidently, life itself had at some point in the future found a way to take action across time in order to secure its own existence and with recourse to the past launch a self-repair program—and we were its instruments.

  It was not about traveling to the fifteenth century to obtain a few seeds and tissue samples of extinct species so that the desolate landscapes could again be adorned with little flowers. It was about a mission that, if successful, would secure the continued existence of life on earth. Only at that moment did the whole scope of what Falcotti had meant when he took us into his confidence reveal itself to me. The vision was overwhelming.

  IX

  Message from a Cologne Witch

  The whole of physical reality, the multiverse, contains vast numbers of parallel universes.

  DAVID DEUTSCH

  The cardinal counted the leather containers that were attached to the packsaddles of the beasts of burden. In Brussels he had managed to acquire state-of-the-art astronomical instruments and in Leuven several scholarly manuscripts, which he had had carefully packed for the journey. He reassured himself that everything was still there.

  The morning dawned.

  “Get up!” the captain of the city guard shouted.

  Three darkly dressed figures, who had been cowering next to the landing, rose. Their clothing was dirty; their sidelocks curled from under their hats and hung down to their chests. The three men had been bound together with thin chains, the older one between the two younger ones. They wore wretched footgear; the toes of one of the men peeked out from his shoe. Two officers of the city guard drove them from behind with their pikes. The three prisoners eyed the weapons silently and impassively. They shivered in the morning cold.

  “They’ve known for more than twenty years that they are not permitted to stay in the city at night,” the captain declared to no one in particular, as if he had to excuse his official act, “but they try again and again.” When no one paid attention to him, he barked: “Move! Or do I have to make you?”

  “You don’t have the say around here!” exclaimed the ferryman. “This ferry is from Deutz. We ferrymen are not subject to the city council of Cologne, but to the archbishop. Bear that in mind. Remove the chains from those men!”

  At that moment, a rat crawled out from between the planks, an enormous animal of an unusual color—more grayish white with reddish spots than grayish brown. Sniffing, it scurried along the edge of the dock. One of the officers jabbed at it with his pike—playfully, more to scare it away than to impale it. Like lightning, the rat had jumped on the weapon, had climbed the shaft in no time, and stood a handbreadth from the officer’s face. The rat then made a noise that sounded to the cardinal, from where he was standing, almost as if it had spoken, hissing a warning. But that was nonsense, of course.

  The man recoiled in fright and threw the spear away from him. “The devil!” he cried, pale with horror, took a stumbling step back, and fell on his behind. “The devil!” The pike clattered to the ground, and the rat disappeared between the planks over the water.

  The cardinal turned with surprise to the man, who sat on the ground and gawked around, his eyes wide with terror. “The devil?” the cardinal asked with curiosity, scrutinizing the man.

  “Apologies, Your Eminence,” said the captain, signaling to the officer with a brusque hand gesture to pull himself together and get up from his undignified position. He then got to work unlocking and removing the prisoners’ chains. He threw them grumpily over his shoulder. Then he turned away and spat in the river.

  Nicolaus scrutinized the prisoners, who seemed not to have even noticed the incident with the rat. They made an apathetic impression as the officers drove them onto the ferry with their pikes. He had endorsed the expulsion of the Jews from the city, but the measure had not brought about the hoped-for solution. The conflict between the council and the archdiocese continued to smolder, and Hussite-influenced preachers constantly rekindled the acrimonious atmosphere between the denominations and religious currents. For many, Rome’s word carried no more weight. No one seemed to want to obey. The world was in a state of dissolution.

  The cardinal nodded to his groom to lead the horses onto the ferry. Their hooves clip-clopped on the planks, and the man tethered the four animals to the railing side by side. They were uneasy and eyed anxiously the foaming dark water of the river. The ferryman shouted a command, and the ungainly, heavy vessel cast off. With their long oars the oarsmen pushed it off from the rocking, wooden dock. It started to turn. The river was already swollen, even though it was only mid-March. In the Black Forest and in the Vosges, the thaw had probably already begun.

  “Row!” the ferryman shouted at his oarsmen. “Or do you want to dock in Düsseldorf instead of in Deutz? Row!”

  The cardinal turned to his young companion, who wore a blue beret on his thick, shoulder-length hair, on which he had boldly stuck three quills as a sign of his occupation.

  “Well?” asked Nicolaus, resuming the conversation that had been broken off for a while. “What else happened?”

  “If I may, Your Eminence, since when does much happen in Cologne?” asked Geistleben, taking his knapsack off his shoulders and dropping it next to him on the floor. “A handful of little Roman monks arrived who fled from Constantinople, because the Turk is approaching the gates. They moan and ramble on about the end of the world and scrounge and beg for benefices. Oh yes, and a little witch is about to be put on trial. But you have surely heard about that.”

  “Not a word,” Nicolaus replied, shaking his head with displeasure. “Is it spreading here too, that awful folly of torturing women and putting them to death?”

  “Yes, certainly. It is getting worse everywhere. People are afraid of the spawn of the Antichrist, who gnaw at the limbs of the Church and eat their way deeper and deeper into its heart.”

  “What sort of talk is that, Geistleben? It is not the Antichrist who gnaws, it is greed that gnaws, it is vanity that gnaws, it is lust that gnaws in the flesh of our brothers and sisters.”

  “Well, indeed, that is your affair, noble lord. You undoubtedly understand more about it…”

  “Quite true.”

  “But the East will fall, Your Eminence. Half the Empire—”

  “What else was to be expected? I saw it with my own eyes, Geistleben. Catacombs full of writings, accumulated for centuries, with the knowledge of millennia from all over the world. But no one reads it; no one can even sort through it! Schemers and empty-headed scholars swarm over it like rats. Everyone gnaws at everyone else. Often at their own flesh. No wonder, then, the enemies are lurking. That’s how it is everywhere. Here in our lands too. It was often painful, what I saw on my journey to Flanders and the Netherlands. It fills me with bitterness and rancor. As for the archbishop, however—we spoke daily during the concilium, but he did not mention a word about planning to hold a witch trial.”

  “Well, Your Eminence, he seems to be not at all so certain. He doesn’t want to make any mistakes. Once before he has been at odds with the Pope, old von Moers. After almost forty years in office—simply excommunicated.”

  “That was Pope Eugene. He held it against him that he had voted a
gainst him at the Council of Basel.”

  “But that was a deep shock for him in his old age.”

  “Pope Nicholas reinstated him. He won’t want for anything.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “When I stayed here on Christmas and New Year’s Day, I heard rumors of a woman who had been found with a strange collection of herbs. Is she the one?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “And she is to be put on trial?”

  “The archbishop has sought advice and support from the highest authority. A commission is to come from Rome, to investigate the case, whether devil’s work is actually involved…”

  “Why wasn’t the woman forced to renounce all vengeance and banished from the city, as usual?”

  “There were inflammatory speeches. A young priest was very active, a zealot from Swabia, Bartholomäus von Dillingen is his name—he is a preacher at St. Maria im Kapitol. People call him ‘Witch Bart.’ If I may, Your Eminence, an evil snooper. He watched her every step for weeks. After his sermons, an angry crowd always proceeds to the Old Market square and demands that she be made short work of. She was ultimately turned over to the episcopal judge, for the archbishop is insisting on the main jurisdiction, as the law would have it. He had her interrogated. She was found guilty, but he isn’t doing anything. He’s biding his time.”

  “What were the results of the interrogations?”

  “A serf who encountered her in the summer on the Moselle testified that, without touching him, she used devilish powers to cast him to the ground with such force that he was black and blue all over his body and felt pains in his chest for weeks. He heard laughter that sounded like the bleating of a goat and could smell the definite stink of sulfur. A citizen with whom she lodged testified that she told her that one could fly from Cologne to Rome in an hour. And under torture she spoke heedlessly. She confessed to having flown through the air herself. It was the herbs, though, that determined the outcome.”

  “How so?”

  “Over the whole summer she had gathered a collection of seeds—kernels from grain and fruit, blossoms from all sorts of flowers and plants. For medicinal purposes, she claimed. These seeds were sorted neatly into little canvas pouches and labeled and inscribed with Latin words. But these words were incomprehensible. A sort of secret system of classification, Your Eminence, which … well, so it seemed to me, is strangely coherent, but of which no one has ever heard, as the professors of medicine brought in from the university confirmed. This system points to heretical, arcane knowledge and cannot possibly be of godly origin…”