The Cusanus Game

by Wolfgang Jeschke

  In Zandvoort the Old Sea, as it had become known, lapped the broad, flat, sandy beach with small waves. The children could splash around in it without danger, and the water in June was already as warm as in a bathtub. Indeed, due to the elevated horizon formed by the structure growing into the sky, when you looked west in clear weather you felt as if you were on the bottom of a massive bowl; along its rim crawled ceaseless columns of army ants—the remote-controlled one-hundred-ton robotrucks, transporting their cargo to the construction sections and unloading it there.

  When our training left us enough time, Renata and I usually headed out to Zandvoort. Sometimes Grit came with us too. Then she would tell us about the experiences she and others had had on their travels through time.

  “Can I treat you to a port wine?” I asked Renata.

  “No, thank you, Domenica. That’s sweet of you, but I don’t want to drink any alcohol. The medical treatment is having a worse effect on me than I expected. I feel as if I were coming down with the flu. I have splitting headaches.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, according to Dr. Hekking. I’m having an intense reaction, but that’s all right. I’ll be glad, though, when I’ve finally gotten it over with.”

  “When?”

  “If everything goes according to plan, I’m supposed to attempt my first transition on August 18. There and immediately back. That’s in two weeks,” replied Renata.

  “And that’s the reason for the whole ordeal?”

  “No, the medical conditioning lasts for the rest of your life. You just mustn’t forget on your return to take the necessary medications right away so that you’re armed against infections.”

  “If I understood Grit correctly, the danger comes from us,” I interjected.

  “That’s right,” said Renata. “They can’t simply send us into the past in our normal condition. For people in the fifteenth century we’d have the impact of bioweapons, according to Dr. Hekking. We have the plague on board—the measles, smallpox, scarlet fever, and God knows what else. But all those vile pathogens are so surrounded by defense units that they can’t harm us. People in that time, however, don’t yet have those antibodies. They would be defenseless against those pathogens, like the Indians in the days when the European conquerors came, and even more so when the black slaves came from Africa. We would cut a swath of death, the doctor explained. So we have to be disarmed, as it were. The immune system is shut down. But that means that after our return we’re as vulnerable as people infected with HIV, whose immune defense has to be supported.”

  “I had no idea you were so well versed in immunology, Renata,” I remarked.

  “Didn’t I ever tell you about that? Before I got the job at the Ospedaletto on Barbaria delle Tole, I had worked at the infirmary of a refugee camp near Verona. At one point a strange strain of flu surfaced there; it afflicted mainly undernourished children who had a very particular genetic makeup. There were suspicions that it came from a laboratory, but no one could prove it. I had helped identify the at-risk children to be vaccinated. I learned a lot about infectious diseases from that. I would have liked to study medicine, but my grades were too poor,” she said with a smile. “For botany they were good enough.”

  “The idea of the medical conditioning unsettles me. Honestly, I don’t like when people fiddle with me.”

  “But it’s in the small print of our contracts, Domenica: ‘The best possible medical monitoring and attention shall be provided.’ Dr. Hekking will explain all that to you when you’re lying in his ward for a few days. It’s not at all threatening. I have the sense that the doctors at the CIA have things well in hand. After all, they look back on more than twenty years of experience with time travel,” Renata reassured me.

  “I’m going to order myself a port wine now anyway,” I said. “What would you like?”

  “I’ll have a bitter lemon or a tonic.”

  “Okay. My treat.”

  Renata nodded. Her cheeks were flushed. Was it from the sun or did she have a bit of a fever?

  “Ultimately, it’s all even far more complicated,” she went on, after the waiter had brought the drinks. “Between the destination time of 1450 and the present there are almost exactly six hundred years. For the pathogens that’s a time period of several billion generations. They’ve gone through many mutations since then. As a traveler you encounter, so to speak, the stegosauruses among the plague bacilli and the archaeopteryx of the smallpox virus. Dangerous, but not particularly refined. That’s different now. The pests have learned new things. In their genome they’ve accumulated experience. On top of that, they increase in number every year. They come from destroyed biospheres and from laboratory blunders. At present our organism is threatened by more than a hundred and fifty different pathogens, most of which surfaced only in the past two hundred years. That’s the greatest challenge the human immune system has ever faced in its millions of years of evolutionary history. Without modern nanomedicine things would look pretty bleak for humanity. We need mercenary forces. Without the refined nanotects in our cells and in our circulation our chances of survival would not be particularly good.”

  “And you’ve been pumped full of such nanotects.”

  Renata rubbed her forehead. “Yes, I now have a billion firefighters on board, looking out for me, keeping my cell armada on course and making sure I don’t turn into a bioweapon. A guard regiment at each pore.”

  I thought with a shudder of the diligent nanotects that had run amok on the boy in Venice and turned his brain within an hour into Stilton. Suddenly I had the overwhelming need for a hefty sip and emptied my wineglass in one gulp.

  “My God, Renata, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

  She smiled and patted my hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. Her skin felt hot and dry. “Dr. Hekking says sooner or later all humanity will have to be reequipped in this way if it wants to survive. We’re just the avant-garde.”

  A supertanker came out of the High Sluice near IJmuiden and glided south toward Rotterdam through the evening sea as if on a runway made of jade-colored light. It was one of those massive old ships that had been chartered by Caritas and Bread for the World and sailed under the flag of the United Nations. The deck looked as if it were encrusted with clay, as if sediments had been deposited on it, from which withered brown undergrowth grew. It was a slum. Between pipes, pumps, and ventilators lived four or five thousand people. They were climate refugees, mostly from Bangladesh, Indonesia, or the Philippines. The tanks were released for unloading only once the immigrants had been brought to the camps of Landsmeer and Monickendam; from there, after their identity check and a medical inspection, they were brought to the sufficiently decontaminated areas of Central Europe and settled there. Oil for immigration quotas—that had been the motto of the UN since it had been dominated by an angry majority of developing countries, which were literally up to their necks in water. The tanker was escorted by three EuroForce combat helicopters to protect the people on deck from terrorist attacks by the KICOB and other militant racist groups.

  “You know,” said Renata, “I have the feeling that the gigantic self-repair program of the universe, which Auerbach is convinced exists, is beginning to take effect. And it doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s happening in our time, of all eras.”

  The huge ball of the sun rested on the crown of the New Dam; it seemed to collapse under its own weight and disperse. The heavy robotrucks crawled across the fiery river like an endless chain of ants. A streak of trembling red-gold lay over the water, as if applied with a thick paintbrush.

  The whipping of the helicopter rotors had meanwhile gone silent. Shadows fell over the Old Sea. A thin crescent moon stood like a trophy over the sarcophagus. The army ants now bore lights in front of them. The sand was cool under our feet as we walked across the beach to the train station.

  At the Centraal Station we had to transfer to a bus. Even before we had reached Java, Renata was aslee
p on my shoulder. I brought her to bed.

  “That thing with the mirror,” she said, without opening her eyes, “does that frighten you?”

  I shrugged. “No, not really.”

  She nodded, satisfied, and immediately fell asleep again. I placed my hand on her forehead. She was hot. I sensed millions of guards swarming out and attacking my palm with concentrated defensive fire. Then I looked for a blanket and prepared a bed for myself on the sofa. I toyed with the idea of going home again for a little while—I lived on the same block, in the Archimedes House, while Renata’s apartment was in the Diogenes House—but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I felt the effects of the wine. I undressed, lay down next to her, and nestled against her.

  “We shouldn’t get into such close relationships, you know?” she said, laughing softly.

  “I know,” I said, pressing her to me and enjoying the warmth of her body.

  “Hold me tight,” she whispered. Then she fell asleep again.

  The night air blowing in from the IJ was pleasantly cool. On the opposite bank of the river, in Noord, the brightly illuminated buildings of the CIA, which extended into the riverbed, could be seen. Supposedly, a refinery had once stood there, but it had been shut down and demolished when oil became scarcer. I looked out for a long time into the dark water, on which the reflections of the many lights were in constant motion, and abandoned myself to the hypnotic effect of that dance.

  Suddenly the water became choppy. Straggly patterns formed in the chaos of the reflections. A ship passed by, shadowy, almost soundless; its machinery could be felt more than heard, like the pulse of a large animal.

  When I finally fell asleep, I had a strange dream. I was at the edge of a sandy desert. The dunes stretched to the horizon. It was an ancient, dead world. I stood on the ridge of a dune and looked down on a small oasis—a tiny blot of green in the terrible emptiness. It was on the shore of a dried-out sea, which fell away sharply and got lost in depth and darkness.

  The gigantic blazing ball of the alien sun sank toward the horizon. The steep slopes of the canyon, black rock faces many thousand yards high made up of petrified sediments on which mats of pale drift sand hung like dead lichens, were covered with a soft pink. The shadow tide rose. In the depths it was already darkening. Could lights be seen down there between the salt domes on the bottom of the sea? Were they reflections on the last traces of water on this old world? Had its inhabitants burrowed deep down in order to huddle against the dwindling warmth at the heart of their cooling planet? Or had they long ago set off for the stars? Was this the Earth in the distant future?

  The sun had set. A cold wind stirred. The stars burned over the desert. In the oasis there wasn’t a glimmer of light to be seen. No moon.

  I awoke. Renata was fast asleep under the protection of her bodyguard regiments. In the west a lone deep ship’s siren sounded. Two or three higher-pitched ones answered.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER I stumbled unawares into a demonstration on the Dam. I had bought a few household items in the large department store Amsterdam residents amusingly call De Bijenkorf, the beehive, and had allowed myself time to stroll through the floors. When I stepped back out onto the street, more people than usual were on the large square. They were all shouting at once, excited, though not in a hostile mood, but rather in high spirits. In front of the royal palace a few hundred seniors had gathered, holding up banners with inscriptions:

  WE REFUSE TO BE SHUNTED ASIDE!

  GRATIS CYBERSEX VOOR BEJAARDEN!

  YOU WON’T WIPE US OUT!

  WE KNOW HOW TO DEFEND OURSELVES!

  I had repeatedly heard about attacks on old people’s homes by young rowdies. There was talk of fatalities. A vial of Legionnaires’ disease bacteria in the air-conditioning and the old people coughed and gasped themselves to death.

  From the Damrak the rumble of heavy motorcycles could be heard. Oh God, I thought, so they’re already here too, the Praetorians. No, it was a mixed bunch—a march of mainly dark-skinned youth. Most of them came on foot, with a few Harleys protecting the flanks and with threatening background music. In front banners were carried:

  CROAK ALREADY, YOU OLD FARTS!

  DISPOSE OF YOURSELVES! WE CAN’T STAND YOUR STINK!

  YOU TURDS, DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?

  On the other side intense indignation vented itself when the seniors in the front rows were able to decipher the slogans. At the head of the crowd I saw a dense phalanx of rolling walkers; involuntarily I thought of siege machinery. They were pushed by women with gray ringlets and grimly determined faces. Motorized units flanked the contingent—they were electric wheelchairs. Their drivers wore petrol-colored baseball caps and vests of gray-green Kevlar.

  The banners billowed toward each other; the confrontation was unavoidable. From Rokin and Raadhuisstraat police sirens could be heard. I walked to the left and rounded the massive national monument of pale stone. It looked to me like an oversized fertility symbol, adorned with escutcheons and guarded by two young men with raised hands whom a vandal had beheaded.

  Suddenly a police van came speeding from Warmoesstraat and stopped with squealing brakes. Police with man-sized shields, rubber batons, and flipped-down visors jumped down and charged across the square to throw themselves between the fronts. The people all around me began to run; I was carried along by the tide toward the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky.

  “Come in, young woman! Hurry, hurry!” the doorman called to me when I hesitated at the steps—a tall, robust man whose midnight blue suit stretched over his chest and belly.

  I fought my way through to the revolving door as a security screen unfolded with deafening rattling and hissing at my heels, pushing back the pressing crowd. They hammered furiously with their fists against the springy plastic segments, which had been fully inflated with a gas mixture and made opaque. The shrill voices of the passersby who had escaped into the lobby were quickly hushed in the light of the elegant, air-conditioned ambiance. A liveried bellboy directed us into a tiled corridor with seats in front of a glass wall surrounding a winter garden. The few benches were occupied in no time by agitated people, mainly tourists, who complained and chattered into their IComs because they had been separated from their family, or bemoaned the failure of the police. They calmed down when two bellboys appeared with trays and served water and fruit juices—on the house, they assured everyone, which drew a jostling crowd, especially among the locals, it seemed to me.

  I seized the opportunity to look around a bit and entered a gigantic dining hall decorated entirely in lime green with dozens of tables laid with damask and silver and surrounded by palms in large pots. Over the hall vaulted a glass roof; from its girders hung large art deco chandeliers. I looked to the left and saw myself reproduced a hundred times in mirrors reflected in endless illuminated rows.

  When I went out into the street again an hour later through the massive revolving door, the protective screen was retracting with a sighing and scraping into its slot in the ground. The doorman greeted me with a friendly nod. I thanked him; he nodded again, but seemed not to remember me.

  Water cannons had apparently been used, for the pavement of the square was wet. The national lingam was covered with yellow foam, which also wafted onto the spread arms of the decapitated young men. The tattered banners had been heaped up next to the monument.… WIPE US OUT! I read. GRATIS CYBERSEX and … LIVE FOREVER? The wreck of a rolling walker lay nearby. A sweet smell hung in the air; probably one of those designer psychopharmaceuticals that were sprayed as tranquilizers during riots. I saw a fleet of a dozen electric wheelchairs with seniors hurtling at breakneck speed across the pavement and disappearing in orderly formation on Rokin.

  “They can take care of themselves, the old people,” said the doorman, nodding confidently; he bowed in perfect form as an older couple went outside through the revolving door.

  “What’s that smell?” asked the elegant old woman, who despite the warm weather wore a mink, wi
th a shrill note in her cracking voice. She stopped and craned her wrinkled neck uneasily. Her companion, a trench coat over his arm, a cane with a silver knob in his hand, raised his white mustache to sniff the air.

  “Vanilla,” he remarked with surprise.

  “But Ragni!”

  The man opened and closed his fist in front of his nose as if he were pumping a rubber ball. “I’m telling you, princess, it’s vanilla!”

  * * *

  “PLEASE UNDRESS, MS. Ligrina,” Sibyll van Campen instructed me.

  “Completely?”

  “Yes, completely. But if you wish, you can keep your underpants on. We’ll be able to imagine them away. In the future you’ll have to do without them, there’s no way around that, my dear. But I can assure you—it’s a liberation! I haven’t worn them for years.”

  No, Sibyll van Campen didn’t wear any underpants, but a see-through one-piece suit oscillating between silver and violet, which she could not possibly have put on in a normal way. Perhaps it had been sprayed on or somehow secreted through the skin like a film of sweat. In any case, it was on so tight that her shaved genital area showed clearly underneath. Her head of tousled red curls was gathered and pinned into a tuliplike shape, and over her surgically relentlessly lifted cheeks sat boldly curved glasses adorned with glaring holograms, behind which two extraordinarily alert green eyes flashed.

  Sibyll van Campen was a star designer of orbital significance, a world-renowned expert on the fashions of all countries and times. She was director of the legendary Gillian Vogelsang Institute for the History of Textiles and Dress in Leiden and the highest authority for historical productions on all the great stages of the world and the studios of the entertainment industry from Hollywood to Mumbai. For the CIA, as she assured initiates, she worked out of passion and of course without remuneration. Every transition was an honor for her and a validation, because if there were even the slightest discrepancy in the outfit with respect to the material or the accessories, a transition would not be achieved.