The Cusanus Game

  With decisive blows, Auerbach cut clusters of bristles off his projected bristle worm.

  “Though we are unable to say so conclusively, it is possible that a permanent revision takes place, with the goal of an optimally edited universe, an evolution from labile to more stable states in all regions of the cosmic chronology.”

  He now drew a curved arrow above and below the bristle worm.

  “Mockers call it cosmic fitness training. They’re not even so wrong. Professor van Waalen, on the other hand, speaks of ‘brushing out.’” Auerbach bared his teeth in a disparaging grin. “As for that, it should be noted that our colleague van Waalen is a practicing Methodist and on top of that a cat lover. He imagines the dear Lord tenderly brushing his Creation. But I will permit myself to paraphrase a famous saying of our esteemed colleague Einstein”—and he raised a finger—“God—does not—brush!”

  * * *

  “HE’S PARTIAL TO the soap bubbles for the osmotic tendencies of parallel realities. I don’t find the image helpful at all,” Ernesto said after the lecture. I had asked him a few questions because I did not fully grasp some of the hypotheses Auerbach had hurled at us. “With a simple experimental design, a parallel universe can be produced for a short time by means of a laser and a semipermeable mirror, only to disappear the next instant—or, to be precise, both universes merge again into one.”

  “That may well be. But it’s still not clear to me how that’s supposed to work,” I replied.

  “It’s not easy to understand,” Ernesto confirmed. “But it’s a fact that the realities that arise from an Everett split, when they differ only marginally, have the tendency to reunite—with interesting uncertainties in the data, as we are familiar with from quantum mechanics.”

  The shadow of a ship passed over us. I looked up. The streams of bubbles generated by the turbines dispersed, sparkling in the sunlight.

  “The multiverse seems to be as frugal as a Dutch housewife,” I stated, completely exhausted.

  Ernesto laughed. “You could put it that way. That has to do with the fact that it always strives for the state of maximum stability attainable at a given amount of energy.”

  “But those energy amounts must be gigantic.”

  “Certainly, but apparently a constant exchange with other universes is taking place. There must be an immense energy pool available, which can be drawn from for the formation of new universes,” Ernesto explained.

  “Which the energy flows back into when two universes fuse again,” I added.

  “Exactly, because the energy pool of the multiverse, as vast as it might be, can’t be infinite,” Ernesto remarked.

  “It strives for maximum order, you say. I always thought the opposite was the case—that entropy leads to chaos.”

  Ernesto shook his head. “No. It leads to maximum stability at minimum energy gradients. At the end would be a cosmos full of iron atoms, if things went exclusively according to the laws of physics. But apparently the multiverse develops according to the laws of life.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Well, I don’t know. If it’s actually a living organism, then…”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it’s much more incalculable. We wouldn’t be able to explain it.”

  “This adhesion of the universes—does that have something to do with the Goldfaden-Hargitai effect?”

  Ernesto shrugged. “The membranes are permeable for some physical phenomena, such as gravitational waves. Some claim for other signals too. There are apparently empathic people who claim to be able sometimes and under very particular circumstances to share in the thoughts of their doppelgängers in a neighboring reality. As a physicist, there’s not much I can say about that. Something like that has not so far been measurable, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “Why are you smiling? That doesn’t seem so farfetched to me,” I asserted.

  “You seem to possess that ability yourself.”

  “Who says?”

  “Falcotti hinted at it. I met him recently at a conference in The Hague. He was quite taken with your talent. He seemed to be really proud of having discovered you.”

  “I have no idea why. I told him about my nightmares; that’s all this dubious gift has brought me up to now.”

  Ernesto furrowed his brow. “Maybe you belong to the new generation of time travelers that has been rumored to exist. They supposedly no longer need us scientists and technicians.”

  “What am I to make of that?”

  He nodded gravely. “Wait and see, Domenica.”

  In my wildest dreams I never would have been able to imagine what that fate meant.

  II

  The Eye in the Sky

  What is has already been, and what will be has been before; and god brings back what is past.

  ECCLESIASTES

  The waiters—tall, robust fellows in white shirts, colored pants, and long, dark blue aprons—had freshly stocked the three massive steel rims with candles; then they had lit them and hoisted up the wagon wheels one by one on chains hanging from the ceiling. It was about 4 P.M. The barroom of the Waag was empty; in the hot weather the patrons preferred to sit out front on the square under the large sun umbrellas. I enjoyed the peace and quiet that prevailed in the high-ceilinged, shadowy interior, the massive beams of which were now illuminated by soft candlelight.

  Renata and I had picked up Grit at the institute, and then we had taken the tunnel train under the IJ to the city center to have a beer in the renowned restaurant where you often met people from the CIA. We had just sat down and placed our order when a loud male voice called over our heads: “Hey, Grit!”

  Startled, I looked up. On a gallery over the open kitchen stood a broad-shouldered man who had stepped through a curtain as if onto a stage. In his right hand he held an almost-empty glass mug, while with his left he clung to the heavy burgundy material.

  “Hello, Leendert!” Grit called up to him.

  She did not seem particularly enthusiastic about the encounter.

  “Are those the two fledgling papists you told me about?” he asked with a loud voice.

  Clearly the man was tipsy. The waiter who brought us the beer looked up with a disapproving frown. Grit’s acquaintance pulled the curtain completely open, revealing a room with a wall occupied by overstuffed bookshelves.

  “Are you three coming up to my study or shall I come down?” asked Leendert.

  “We don’t want to disturb you at work,” answered Grit, but he would not be gotten rid of so easily; carefully he held on to the railing, tottered down the steps, and came to our table.

  “Another for me too,” he said to the waiter.

  Leendert wore baggy overalls and a coarse-checkered shirt. On his left temple I noticed a deep scar, which ran from his cheekbone across the corner of his eye to the top of his head and gleamed through his bristly gray fringe of hair. An accident? The scar seemed rather to suggest a saber cut. The lid of his left eye drooped and almost completely closed the eye when he looked down.

  “Leendert de Hooghe,” Grit introduced him. “A former colleague.”

  The corpulent man nodded to us and ran his fingertip over the scar. Then he sank down into a chair and, breathing heavily, drained his mug.

  “What are you studying here?” asked Renata, gesturing with a nod to the gallery.

  “History,” he said.

  “His hobby,” explained Grit with a shrug. “Leendert searches for temporal paradoxes; he scours all the historical writings he can get his hands on to find evidence for the intervention of time travelers. A hopeless undertaking, but he refuses to accept that.”

  Leendert leaned his head back so that he could lift the drooping lid and look at her with both eyes. “Oh, Grit,” he said with an indulgent smile, “old girl. We’ll probably fight about this till kingdom come.”

  He removed his gold Rolex from his wrist and laid it on the table. “For more than ten years, ever since they’ve been digging their o
wn tunnel, the Americans have been trying to undo the 9/11 catastrophe, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the beginning of this century. Through the intervention of a time traveler, that event is to be prevented. Look at this watch. It belonged to a man who died in the terrorist attack in New York. The man disappeared. His molecules entered the hard core of Ground Zero—that baked mass of dust, glass, plastic, and metal that was produced under heat and pressure during the collapse of the towers. As if by a miracle this watch survived.” He tapped the glass over the watch face with a fingertip. “This watch got scratches and nicks, but it escaped the destruction. It works to this day. Souvenir hunters chiseled it out of the rubble or sifted it out of the debris at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island and sold it like so many other macabre finds—rings, tie pins, cuff links, and writing utensils. My father bought this watch in 2002 in New York. He was proud of the thing. Some of his friends envied him for it; others regarded it as tasteless. Be that as it may. I’ve been wearing the thing for many years now.”

  He threw his head back and looked from one of us to the other.

  “I ask you: What will happen to this watch if the Americans realize their plan? Will it leap back onto the wrist of its former owner?”

  “Then your father will not have bought it in 2002 from an obscure souvenir hunter but in one of the luxury boutiques on the ground floor of the World Trade Center,” Grit replied with a sigh.

  Leendert snorted. “This watch bears a serial number and was sold before September 11, 2001, Grit. My father would not have been able to buy it the following year.”

  “Then he would have bought a different one.”

  “With a different serial number?”

  “Of course. And you would never have known any other serial number. And the attack never would have taken place. Leendert, you overestimate the weight of the factual.”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear, you underestimate the weight of the factual.”

  “The Americans will never succeed in eliminating that fact,” Renata broke in. “Just as all attempts in connection with Cattenom have failed.”

  Suddenly I remembered what Princess Brambilla had called it.

  “A sign from God,” I interjected, instantly regretting having said it.

  Leendert curled his lips mockingly. “A lofty phrase,” he declared with amusement. “The writing on the wall, when Belshazzar gave orders to bring the golden vessels from the temple in Jerusalem so that his whores might drink from them. ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.’” His beer belly shook with laughter.

  “In any case, there seem to be things in this universe that cannot be changed, as terrible as they might seem to us, because they steered history at pivotal points in a very particular direction,” Grit asserted.

  “Things that Auerbach’s automatic repair program doesn’t want repaired no matter what,” Leendert replied with a grin; he reached for his watch and brushed it over his strong suntanned wrist. “The Americans will continue to agonize over that damn 9/11/01 and I get to keep my watch. What more could I want?”

  “You don’t believe in God, Mr. de Hooghe,” Renata interjected.

  He turned to her.

  “Young woman,” he said in a pointedly matter-of-fact tone, “I give you credit for the fact that that wasn’t a question but a statement. If you’d asked me that as a scientist, I would have felt insulted, for it would have amounted to the question: ‘Do you have the courage to be honest, or are you only a hypocrite like most of the others?’”

  Renata shook her head and replied: “I certainly didn’t intend to insult you.”

  “Okay, forget it,” he said crossly.

  “Leendert, is that really—”

  “Grit, I said it’s okay. But you know my position. I find it not only questionable but also extraordinarily dangerous that the CIA has thrown in its lot with the Pope and is sending religious people to that particular destination-time. Everyone knows that at that time after the Council of Constance the situation in questions of faith resembles a powder keg.”

  “Leendert, stop—”

  “No, damn it!” he cried, his face turning red. “You know how often I have warned of this collaboration with the papists. I’ve stated my reservations to Auerbach as well as van Waalen and Surtees. Oh! I’ve implored them. But those naive theorists refuse to acknowledge what we might wreak.”

  “You’re seeing ghosts, Leendert. You know that I don’t share your reservations. No one shares them,” Grit said, growing agitated.

  “Oho!” he exclaimed.

  “If anyone tried to travel to the fifteenth century with the intention of exacerbating or even changing the fronts in matters of faith, the transition wouldn’t work. And if, contrary to expectations, it were to succeed, then sooner or later the ambitions for power would again come to a stalemate with which the basic structure of history would be restored.”

  “I envy you your confidence.”

  “We weren’t recruited for any sort of missionary work,” I broke in.

  Leendert made a dismissive hand movement.

  “I don’t mean the two of you personally. But you know what memes are, right? And religious memes are extremely dangerous. They’re monsters with contempt for humanity. They’re selfish and parasitic—obsessed with power and bent on absolute domination. They’ll take advantage of any opportunity to expand their power, cost what it may. They’re programmed to. They can’t help it; they have to gain an edge. But it’s high time that those Furies from dark times in which people could not yet understand the world finally departed. They’ve brought nothing but disaster upon the earth. But no, now a saving back door is literally being opened for them. Feedback processes are negligently being facilitated from which they can only emerge stronger to sow further disaster in the world.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Renata objected.

  “But that’s the way it is,” Leendert replied scornfully. “Belief spawns monsters. I know what I’m talking about.” He ran his finger over the scar on his temple.

  “Unbelief too,” I asserted. “Think of the Nazis.”

  “Those weren’t unbelievers,” he replied, shaking his head emphatically. “They had their belief system. Only it was so ridiculous that one can’t even bear to think about it.”

  “But effective,” I said.

  “Of course it was effective. To be successful, a religion can never be ridiculous enough. Look at the belief system of Islamic fundamentalists, that monotheism reduced to washing instructions and degenerated into gymnastic exercises—misogynistic, self-righteous, and incomprehensibly stupid in its conceptions of the afterlife. But efficient! A clever instant religion, hatched by Salafi cynics and delivered by Wahhabi lay preachers in easily comprehensible form to the—both economically and intellectually—less-endowed people of this earth who sense their lack of sustainability and hurl their hate at the trash of the globalist Western credo.”

  “Or airplanes at skyscrapers,” said Renata.

  A rolling laugh from the depths of his throat. Leendert glanced at his Rolex. “Those were direct hits,” he remarked. But then his brow darkened again, and he bellowed, “There you see what explosive power religious memes can unleash.”

  Angrily he pushed his empty beer mug back and forth on the table with his forefinger. “Those archaic relics are the true scourges of humanity. They produce brainless religious zealots practically choking on their self-righteousness, the certainty of their faith, and their sense of mission. And those people rant not only in Cairo, in Baghdad, in Qom, or in Islamabad, but just as much in Washington, in Warsaw, and in Vilnius.”

  “God knows, yes. And yet those memes seem to be important for the course of history,” Grit noted.

  “Yes,” he said, and it sounded almost like a sob. “Like so many other monstrous things. What sort of universe is this?”

  “We have only the one,” said Renata. “We have to live in it. And if we are only determined enough, we’ll impr
ove it.”

  “If we are only determined enough…” he mimicked sarcastically.

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

  His right eye scrutinized me. It was a surprisingly light blue. The lid of the other one drooped limply, and for a moment I thought he was winking at me mischievously, but in his look there was no trace of cheerfulness.

  “Because that’s a foolish idea,” he snorted. “Free will is one of the strangest illusions human consciousness has created. It’s a scientifically untenable assumption, a self-deception, but it’s essential for survival, that’s undeniable.”

  “Why should it be an illusion? I can decide one way or another,” I objected.

  “No, you can’t, young woman. Not within one universe. There you make only one decision.”

  “Then I make the other in another universe.”

  “Oh yeah? Good old Everett says hello. Here a universe in which Hus wasn’t burned at the stake, there one in which Luther didn’t nail up his theses, or even one in which Catholicism is swept away—wonderful!” he said excitedly, and pointed up with his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve been searching for years for clues, for discrepancies in the source material, where contradictory facts might have been rearranged. Auerbach takes the easy way out. His double soap bubbles go plop and are one again, and van Waalen brushes his cat’s fur when it’s shedding. But things aren’t as simple as those gentlemen think. I don’t receive messages from parallel worlds.”

  “I do … sometimes,” I claimed bravely, and felt Grit’s and Renata’s eyes turning to me. “But I … I’m not sure.”

  Leendert threw his head back and stared at me. “So you’re the one,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Van Waalen mentioned that. He was beside himself. ‘If only Hla Thilawuntha were still among us!’ he cried.”

  I shrugged and looked to Grit for help. She nodded gravely.

  “We should go,” she suggested.