The Cusanus Game

  All around people were running away, tables were overturning, dishes and glasses were smashing on the pavement. The sound in the sky was approaching with immense shock waves.

  “Halt! Halt!” the old man shouted loudly. “There’s an octopus here. I sense an octopus!”

  “Let me go!” I screamed at him, but he held me with an iron grip.

  Above us a gigantic transport helicopter appeared; its shadow swept across us. It flew so low that you could make out the dark faces crowded together behind the windows of the passenger cabin. Their eyes wide with terror, they stared down at the burning motorcycle.

  From the chaos of smoke and flames on the bike path a face emerged. It was absolutely surreal, as if it had been cut out of a backdrop—no, as if it had glided across it, as if it had moved in front of a screen on which a film was projected.

  It was a hard, young face, and it wasn’t bodiless. I registered a low wave, which slightly shifted the background, as if a large fish were moving under the surface of a still stretch of water. He must have been wearing a camouflage suit, which adapted to the background in a split second, like the skin of certain fish—or an octopus.

  Finally the old man let go of my hand. I stood up halfway and groped for my overturned chair. The face was approaching me. It grew larger, more distinct, but it was impossible to gauge the distance. At that point I felt a light touch on my cheek, the touch of an invisible hand. Then, from one second to the next, the face had vanished. The rotor noise receded slowly northward and ultimately died away.

  “Won’t you help me up?” the old man asked with a chuckle.

  He was lying next to his vehicle, quite helpless and also rather pale. I stood his wheelchair on its wheels. The waiter helped me lift him up and heave him into it, and handed him his shotgun. The old man snapped open the barrels and took out the empty cartridges. Meanwhile the other two seniors inspected the jeep.

  “Surface-to-air!” one of them called over. “Quite a nice caliber. They wanted to blow the refugees down, in the middle of the city.”

  “They did blow them down,” murmured the old man.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of an octopus? They’re emergency helpers, but they come only—how should I put it—when something has already occurred, a catastrophic event. Then they turn back the clock a few seconds and intervene so that the event doesn’t take place.” He turned his turtlelike neck and looked at me. “Strictly speaking, that octopus didn’t save our lives but raised us from the dead. Probably all of us here were dead. Otherwise he would not have had the authorization to strike so hard. Those vile fascists were firmly resolved to make a big mess—a really big one.”

  From Prins Hendrikkade the wail of sirens could be heard; police and rescue vehicles turned with squealing tires onto Geldersekade, followed by fire trucks. The seniors made a retreat.

  “Time for a beer in the Waag,” my aged protector said with a wink and a grin. “Was nice to be raised from the dead with you, young woman.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

  The burning tires of the destroyed motorcycle gave off greasy black smoke. Foam extinguishers hissed. The fire fighters cordoned off the street with orange and white plastic tape. Smoldering rubble was heaped up.

  “Are they dead?” I asked the waiter.

  “I don’t think so. The two of them are apparently still alive. The old man seems to have flattened the man with the steel helmet with his tranquilizer ammunition,” he said with a laugh. “They’ll fish the third out of the canal soon. If they immediately pump out his stomach, he might have a chance to survive … None of those fascist dirtbags would be a great loss. In a few weeks they’ll be free again.”

  More vehicles arrived—officers in uniform and in civilian clothes.

  “You’re not wearing an ICom, young woman?” one of them asked me with a glance at his Wristtop.

  “I’m wearing an NEA chip.”

  He nodded and moved on.

  So that’s a “Uitborstelen,” as Professor Dorit van Waalen so wittily calls it, I thought; so that’s how the great beast that is our universe is groomed. But it seemed to me more like the brutal stroke of a bullwhip to keep yoked animals on course.

  * * *

  “SO THERE’S A universe in which I’m no longer alive right now.”

  Grit scraped out her pipe over the light blue bowl she used as an ashtray.

  “There must be a great number of those,” she replied. “And there’s a universe in which that terror attack succeeded.”

  She lifted the lid of a porcelain pot, plucked tobacco out of it, and stuffed the pipe. A pleasantly sweet, aromatic scent reached my nostrils.

  “Probably there were hundreds of victims,” Grit added. “As many as two hundred people fit in a Colossus 6006. And if it crashed down in the middle of the old town…”

  “Does that universe still exist now, or was it … brushed out?” I asked her.

  Grit shrugged and lit her pipe. “Maybe not. We don’t know.”

  “What did you actually smoke when you were in the fifteenth century?”

  She took the pipe out of her mouth and looked at me. “Believe me, I would have liked nothing more than to set off and discover America myself. I had tried all sorts of things—yarrow, whatever, and burned my tongue. I had even smoked the stem of Clematis alba.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Oh, we used to do that as kids, until we got an upset stomach and had diarrhea. There’s no substitute for tobacco. And cannabis is different. You can’t just get stoned all the time. On top of that, you can smoke only secretly at that time, or else people will think you’re a fire-breathing dragon or even the devil himself and run away screaming.”

  For a while we were lost in our thoughts.

  “Why can’t terrorist attacks like that be prevented in a less violent way?” I asked.

  She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “That’s not so simple. History is a chaotic system. It requires astronomical processing power to calculate only a few steps. The critical event knot would only be displaced and tied elsewhere. Not to mention the side effects that you can inadvertently set in motion. You kick a pebble loose somewhere and in the blink of an eye it turns into an avalanche.”

  “But those three people yesterday … they could have been arrested for illegal possession of firearms.”

  “Yes. But if no crime was committed, they would be out again after a few days and would plot a new attack. The octopuses act post factum: They intervene in a universe in which unwanted developments have been set in motion and try to cause it to collapse. Often enough, however, the intervention isn’t even possible. The Cattenom disaster, for example, which ravaged Central Europe. How many attempts do you think there have already been to prevent that catastrophe? But no one has come even close to that date. No one knows why. In the run-up to the disaster, a few clever people gave propaganda a try. Stood in marketplaces, sermonized and distributed leaflets. People laughed themselves silly at the supposed crackpots. Check out their reports at the institute. No one believed a word they said. People tapped their foreheads when they even listened. Those voluntary saviors felt like weeping. And you can also get to the time after the accident, though you can travel to the immediate vicinity only clandestinely and at the risk of your life due to radioactive contamination and the barriers. But the event itself—the catastrophe—stands there like a mysterious dark fortress, impregnable. And there are unfortunately a lot of those enigmatic bulwarks in the timestream.”

  We were sitting in Zandvoort in her living room. Grit had invited me to visit her over the weekend. Outside it was getting dark. She now placed her finished pipe in the porcelain bowl.

  “I remember my first tentative steps,” she went on wistfully. “Back then Hla Thilawuntha was still at the institute.”

  “The inventor of time travel?”

  Grit shrugged. “You can’t actually call it an invention. It’s more like something hand
ed down.”

  “How so? Was there already in the past—”

  “Well,” she interrupted me, “time travel has by definition always existed. It was, so to speak, imported from the future. Thilawuntha created the mathematics that gave us access to the mysterious transport system.”

  “What sort of person was this Thilawuntha actually? Did you get to know him personally?”

  “Yes, of course I knew him. He was a very gentle, kind, modest person. Everyone liked him. But he was rather shy and didn’t talk much. His language was mathematics. Some regarded him as a reincarnation of the legendary Ramanujan.”

  “Ramanujan?”

  “A young man who in the early twentieth century came from India to Cambridge with a notebook in his bag in which he had written the most important proofs from three hundred years of mathematical history. He had produced them himself and didn’t have the slightest idea that they had already been established by the most famous mathematicians of Europe. He had on his own accomplished what had taken the greatest minds in the field centuries. And Hla Thilawuntha was an even greater genius, for what he provided were answers to questions that had not even been asked previously. He was sometimes incredible.”

  “He was Burmese, right?”

  “Yes. His elaborations first appeared on the Internet under the initials H.T.—and caused a stir among specialists. It took years before people found out who was hidden behind them. Hla Thilawuntha declined an invitation to MIT. He went to Bangalore and later came to Amsterdam. In the early forties, he returned to his country, supposedly because his father had died and he had to take care of his mother. There his tracks were lost. In Burma at the time there was civil war. It’s assumed that he died in 2043 in the massacre at the University of Yangon.”

  “Has no one tried to find out more precise details? Why wasn’t an octopus sent there?” I asked Grit.

  “His friends and colleagues had at that time exhausted all possibilities but found no trace of him. That has contributed a great deal to the formation of legends.”

  “Legends?”

  “There are some time travelers who claim to have encountered him and his talking rat on their journeys to other centuries,” Grit replied.

  “The talking rat … I read about that.”

  Grit nodded. “Yes, that’s part of his legend. It’s said that he kept a rat as a pet. I never saw it, but it was supposedly a real Rattus papagomys, a gigantic spotted animal he had brought with him from his country. Many people assert that he would talk to it about mathematical problems.”

  “He must have been talking to himself.”

  “There are people at the institute who swear that the animal answered him,” Grit maintained, stuffing her pipe again.

  “Maybe he traveled to the future and brought the secret of time travel back from there,” I said.

  “No one can travel to the future, my dear. We can only travel to places that can be simulated. The future can’t be simulated. It’s unknown to us.”

  “But when you returned from the fifteenth century, you traveled to the future.”

  “True, but that future was known to me.”

  “Couldn’t future situations be extrapolated from the present?” I asked.

  “In a chaotic system? Domenica!”

  “But if someone who comes from the future describes it to me, provides reference points…”

  “From which future? There are countless ones.”

  Silence spread between us. I ruminated, but I felt like a hamster on its wheel.

  “How did this Thilawuntha come up with the idea in the first place that something like time travel might exist?” I asked.

  “I assume he derived it from his mathematics,” Grit replied. “But the idea is not that much of a stretch. He proceeded from the hypothesis that time travel would someday be discovered—whether in a thousand, in ten thousand, or in a million years. Given that, it’s presumable that such journeys, when they lead to the past, must traverse our present. So there must be, so to speak, under our feet—or over our heads, behind our backs, what do I know—a higher-dimensional tunnel system in which those movements take place. If there were a way to plug into that transport network, we would be able to use it.”

  “As freeriders, so to speak. And he found one of those tunnels?”

  “He discovered the principle of the tunnels and figured out how they can be used.”

  “Dogs on the subway,” I remarked in passing.

  “What did you say?”

  I explained to her what Kazuichi had meant by that when I was waiting for Frans’s return.

  “We have no clue. We don’t know the route network or the schedules, don’t understand the technology, and are completely in the dark about the terms of transport. Yes, that’s right on the mark.” Grit struck a match and lit her pipe again.

  “Maybe he didn’t even come from Burma, but from the future,” I remarked.

  Grit paused; then, as the match threatened to singe her finger, she blew out the flame. She shrugged and sucked on her pipe. “The legend claims as much. He himself never commented on it.”

  “I’ve read the Hargitai biography by Imre Enyedi. In it there’s a scene in which Urban Hargitai meets a man in Vienna around the turn of the millennium who persuades him to publish his grandfather André Goldfaden’s notes. He introduced himself as Dr. Misrun Ardita and claimed to be a Dutch man of Indonesian descent.”

  Grit pursed her lips and formed a few smoke rings.

  “The description could apply to Thilawuntha,” I went on.

  “At that time Thilawuntha wasn’t even ten years old.”

  “They sat outside in front of Café Schwarzenberg, Imre Enyedi writes. Between them, on a chair, was an open travel bag. For a brief moment Hargitai thought he perceived a movement in it out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned his head, he glimpsed the intelligent eyes of an unusually large spotted rat.”

  “Yes,” said Grit. “And what do you conclude from that?”

  “Thilawuntha is a traveler. He came from the future.”

  Grit nodded.

  * * *

  I WAITED FOR my assignment. Gradually, summer turned to autumn. I spent the beautiful sunny days at the café of the Hortus Botanicus, in the shade of a sprawling Quercus x turneri next to the greenhouse of the orangery. There I sat between a veteran of evolution, a Podocarpus macrophyllus, which had unflaggingly held its ground for 290 million years, and a gently fragrant little lemon tree, which was spending its last sunny days outside, and recalled the forms and colors of those species I was to search for, which would be in my care, because they hadn’t managed to survive: the umbellate wintergreen, the spring pasque flower, the bug orchid and the early spider orchid, the dwarf water lily and feather grass, northern running pine and stag’s horn clubmoss, the ghost orchid, the autumn lady’s tresses and the pheasant’s eye—all of them wiped out over the past hundred years, gone.

  * * *

  DON FERNANDO RAISED his nose to sniff the air.

  “She’s in the dunes,” he said. “At some point we have to bring her in. So that we don’t lose her.”

  The man some time-natives who had encountered him on his travels called the angel said, without opening his eyes, “I know. But it’s still too early. She still thinks she’s dreaming, because the things she touches appear so fleeting to her. She is not yet able to recognize that she’s gliding through strange, remote realities. But she’ll learn. She has the ability.”

  His rocking chair moved back and forth, softly creaking. Don Fernando scurried restlessly across the dark polished stone tabletop and finally plumped down with a sigh.

  “Yes,” he said, “she’s still a bit naive, but she has kindheartedness and sympathy—and she is a really extraordinary talent. Only she still knows nothing of it. It frightens her.”

  The man some who had encountered him called the angel said with a smile, without opening his eyes, “She’s won your old rat heart, Fernando, admit it!�
�

  Don Fernando rose and again scurried back and forth and forth and back, and finally he said, “Yes, you’re right. I’m fond of her and I’m going to look after her.”

  V

  Transitions

  It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.

  FRANK HERBERT

  Was I through?

  I looked around. Was I still in the simulation? Dr. Coen was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t detect any difference in the immediate vicinity. The air was damp. The man-sized rushes rustled in the wind. Nearby I heard the surge of the sea. I stood in a clearing in dry grass bleached by the winter cold.

  I looked up at the sky—pale blue. The position of the sun had changed. It was lower in the southwest, veiled by thin, high fog—as if it were cocooned in copper wire. And it was noticeably colder, I realized. In the studio it had been warmer; there it had felt like an early spring day. What surrounded me here felt more like a late afternoon in February. I pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders and was thankful for the lining of rabbit fur.

  A slight wind came from the lake. I had studied old maps and knew from them that after the St. Elizabeth’s Flood of 1421 in the southwest the Zuiderzee reached almost as far as Amsterdam. If the transition had worked and I was in the year 1450, the city was less than a mile west of me—or rather, it was more a small market town, covering an area of perhaps a square mile.

  It would be easy for me to orient myself spatially and temporally by the church towers, Dr. Coen, my head of operations, had assured me, showing me the panorama in the simulation. The Nieuwe Kerk had been built in 1408, but burned down during the great conflagration of 1452. The Oude Kerk, already erected at the beginning of the fourteenth century, had been spared by the flames, and in 1452 the construction of a bell tower had begun there—recognizable by the temporary wooden cap from which a crane jutted. Thus I had committed it to memory: If I didn’t see the Oude Kerk in the west as a construction site with wooden cap and crane and if I saw to the south of it the not-yet-burned-down Nieuwe Kerk, then I had reached my target time period: 1450 or earlier. If I saw a ruin destroyed by fire and to the north of it a construction site with wooden cap and crane, then I had arrived in the year 1452 or later.