The Cusanus Game

  “Do you think that’s possible? I mean, that both of us are back by Christmas,” I asked her.

  “You can stumble around for two years in the past and still be back after two hours. I’ve experienced that often enough.”

  “I understand it intellectually, Grit, but it confuses me anyway.”

  “It confuses everyone. It has destroyed many people, especially when they’re in love. I know a case like that. There was once a woman who brought her boyfriend to the institute and said good-bye to him; he departed. She then went home and had scarcely closed the door when the telephone rang. It was him; he had returned. She went back to the institute, still completely filled with the emotions of a loving good-bye that had taken place not even two hours before, beside herself with joy that they would be reunited after such a short time—and encountered there a man who had spent three years in another time, a terrible time … That’s a devastating experience. The two of them never found their way back to each other.”

  “Leendert?” I asked softly.

  She nodded and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. I took her in my arms. The undulating streaks of the November sun on the water of the IJ enmeshed us in a net of light.

  “I promise you I’ll be back by Christmas,” I said.

  But then I remembered that Mother was planning on getting married at Christmastime, and had to disappoint Grit.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said to her, “I made her a definite promise.”

  “Where’s the wedding going to be held?”

  “In Genoa.”

  “Then we’ll just roast the bird earlier. As travelers we have to be flexible about time. I always stuff it with apples and chestnuts,” she replied, somewhat apathetically.

  I kissed her on both cheeks. “By the way—I absolutely have to tell you: On my second leap I met an odd person—if he was a person at all. He had such strange eyes. I met him in the hut, where Wouter, our man on site, lives.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know. He was a good-looking guy. He looked somewhat Oriental. Wouter seemed to know him, but he gave no name—though he hinted that he was a traveler.”

  “What a coincidence. Travelers rarely encounter each other,” Grit said with a frown.

  “And you know what? He had an animal with him. He carried it around with him in his shirt.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. Could that have been Hla Thilawuntha with his rat?”

  Grit shook her head. “That can’t be ruled out.”

  “He looked it, but … tell me, Grit, was Thilawuntha a human being?”

  She shrugged. “We never found out.”

  * * *

  THIS TIME I sensed the monster approaching. I felt it in every fiber of my body—a vibration, then an inner flash, as if the first molecules of a strong drug had reached my brain. A feeling of clarity, of euphoria, which swept me up and flung me into chaos.

  I was surrounded by acrid smoke; hissing flames soared several feet high where the reeds were ablaze. Shouts over the crackling of the fire, the anxious whinnying of a horse.

  “Here!” cried a male voice. “Someone must have arrived. Over in the clearing. I can’t get through from here.”

  “I’m here,” I called; then a cough choked off my voice. A boy emerged from the smoke. Joop, the older one. His face was blackened with soot, his hair full of ash flakes. Two blue eyes flashed at me as if out of a mask. He held a damp cloth over his mouth and nose.

  “Here she is! I found her!” he exclaimed with a rasping voice.

  Joop took my suitcase from me and grabbed my hand. “Hurry!” he said to me, handing me the sooty, damp cloth.

  The smaller boy appeared—Wim, just as covered with soot and ash, his legs encrusted with mud. He took the rest of my luggage, a basket. Then the two of them pulled me deeper into the bog. I saw open water in front of us; already I had sunk into it up to my knees. It was ice cold, and my boots got sucked into the mud. I was afraid of losing them and hitched my skirts up over my hips to avoid tripping. The boys tugged me into lower water, slipping barefoot through the bog and heading from one shallow area to another, to a point where the fire had already burned down the rushes. The stalks were still smoldering. The air hung full of yellow-brown smoke clouds in which sparks swirled. Glowing pinnate panicles rained down. Countless roused birds flew away above us. The sun sailed like a bronze eye blinking angrily through the ash-clouded sky.

  We got lucky; the wind drove the fire past us. By a roundabout route we reached the log road that led to the hut. Horse hooves clip-clopped toward us on the damp wood.

  “Somewhat exciting, the reception today, huh?” Wouter exclaimed, swinging himself off his saddle and lifting me up.

  The horse rolled its eyes, which were wide with fear, and tried to swerve sideways. I held on with both hands to keep from sliding down. Wouter led it by a short rein, placed a hand over its nostrils, and kept talking soothingly to the animal.

  “I see you’ve bought the white horse,” I said with a rasping voice. “So I’ve arrived at the right time.”

  “It’s 1451, if that’s what you mean. Next week is Easter,” he replied.

  The sky in the southwest was brown with smoke. Flocks of birds were still flying over us: coots, snipes, avocets, tufted ducks—I had never seen such diversity before.

  “The birds are flying away from you,” I said.

  Wouter eyed the withdrawing fire front. “In a few days they’ll be back,” he asserted. “They haven’t brooded yet. It’s still too early. Good thing the fire came so early.”

  “It almost got me, but I agree.”

  He laughed and lifted me out of the saddle. I looked down at my skirts and boots. They were so sodden and mud-covered that Sibyll van Campen would no longer have recognized her creations.

  “We’ll fix that,” he reassured me when he noticed my horrified look. “You can wash up in the hut. Fetch water!” he commanded the boys. “And clean yourselves as well.”

  Later we sat together in the main room of the hut—I at the open fireplace, wrapped in a wool blanket, he at the table, a tub of hot water next to his chair.

  “Tell me, Wouter, has Renata been here? Renata Gessner?” I asked.

  “Yes, twice. During her trial transitions.” He dunked the tufted duck in the steaming water and began to pluck.

  “Not a third time?”

  “On her mission?” He shook his head slowly and raised his hand covered with red-gold feathers. “That must have been before my time,” he said in passing.

  “How long have you served here?”

  “Since the summer of ’forty-four.”

  “Continuously?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And in those seven years, she’s never showed up.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  I shivered. It wasn’t the cold. The glowing peat bales in the fireplace emitted enough heat.

  “They must have slipped up with the destination time,” Wouter remarked.

  “Slipped up?”

  “Yes, that happens sometimes. It doesn’t always work the way the physicists at Casimir reckon. Sometimes the scattering is greater than calculated—when the soliton is very energy-rich and breaks through the membranes more forcefully. That’s the way it is.”

  Ernesto had mentioned something about a powerful wave that had passed through during her departure.

  “That would mean that she arrived here before 1444.”

  Wouter nodded. “Or she is about to arrive. Though that strikes me as less probable.”

  “Are there notes? Your predecessors might have—”

  “Nonsense,” he replied brusquely. “No notes are taken. The tenth commandment for travelers: leave only unavoidable traces. That was hammered into you during the mission preparation, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  Wouter nodded and dipped the tufted duck into the tub.

  I recited:

&nbs
p; 1. Keep a low profile.

  2. Act naive and slow-witted.

  3. Make as few contacts as possible.

  4. Ask questions only when absolutely necessary.

  5. Avoid disputes and quarrels.

  6. In word and deed, use only means native to the time.

  7. Carefully consider the unleashing of possible consequences before you act.

  8. Keep away from all VIPs.

  9. Beware of polluting historical sources.

  10. Leave no traces apart from the unavoidable ones of your stay.

  “I find those rules somewhat excessive,” I said, “for if history were seriously violated or the source material were even changed, a transition would not be achieved in the first place.”

  “Aha. Would you like to put that to the test? I’m warning you, Domenica. A few stupid blunders, and you’ll come back here and find nothing left—not me, not the hut, perhaps not even solid land, because you’ll have ended up in another universe, in which perhaps no one ever tunneled.”

  The wet gray and red-gold feathers of the tufted duck clumped between his boots into unsightly heaps. The bare pale yellow skin of the bird was revealed, darkly speckled by the remains of the plumage.

  “What actually became of your predecessor?” I asked Wouter.

  “No idea. One day he was gone. Maybe he died. Maybe he went to the Reich to make his fortune.”

  “To the Reich?”

  “To the Kaiserreich, up to Germany. Or maybe a time-native turned his head and he moved somewhere with her. Who knows?”

  He laid the bare bird carcass on the table and dunked the second duck in the tub.

  “And you?” I asked. “Will you return to the future?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I like living here. You know a lot more than the people. That pays off.”

  “The sixth commandment…”

  He blew a few feathers off the back of his hand and grinned. “You have to proceed carefully, as when you’re stalking an animal.”

  “You like to hunt, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I like to hunt,” he replied.

  Wouter went on silently with his work. Eventually he threw the two bare carcasses on the table, washed the feathers off his hands in the tub, and drew a short curved blade from his belt. With a quick cut he opened the body of the bird and disemboweled it. Then he got to work on the second one. Finally he decapitated both birds. The blade forced its way with a crunch through the vertebrae. The two beautiful golden-feathered heads with the long beaks he brushed thoughtlessly off the table.

  VI

  A Spring, a Summer …

  But what prevents the good, corporeal and existing infinite from being equally acceptable? And why should not that infinite which is implicit in the absolutely simple and individual first principle become explicit in his own infinite and boundless image, quite capable of containing innumerable worlds, instead of within such narrow bounds that it appears shameful not to think that that body which seems to us so great and vast is in view of the divine presence a mere point, even a nothing?… For I believe that there is no one so stubbornly perfidious as to deny that, because space can contain infinity and because of the individual and collective goodness of the infinite worlds that can be contained in it no less than this world which we know, each of these worlds has a proper reason to be.

  GIORDANO BRUNO

  “It’s possible to get to the Rhine from here via waterways?” I asked with astonishment. “I thought I’d have to go by land to Utrecht or by ship to Rotterdam…”

  Wouter shook his head. “After the great flood of 1421 the Rhine dug itself half a dozen outlets toward the northwest. Even the IJ and the Amstel were for many years among its branches, and to this day there are connections that can be navigated with shallow boats if you know exactly where to enter. Kapitein Mulder is a good, knowledgeable boatman. He goes up to Cologne three or four times a year and knows the through routes. He knows exactly where he has to be careful. You’ll be safe with him, and you can trust him. On top of that, he has a crew who know how to use their fists and if necessary a knife. He pays his people well. They stay loyal to him.”

  We rode off before daybreak, Wouter leading the way, my horse on a long rein. We followed the system of embankments and ditches south through man-sized reeds. Fog hung over the plain. Finally we reached a cart road, which followed an open stretch of water westward.

  “Is that the IJ?” I asked.

  Wouter reined in his animal. “Yes,” he said. “And that’s Amsterdam.”

  In front of us a river flowed from the left into the IJ. The Amstel? The sun broke through the fog. Ducks and geese floated on the water. Pigs soiled with black filth rooted around and wallowed on the muddy bank. Cows grazed the withered grass on the slope. On the river a few boats could be seen.

  I straightened up in the stirrups. Beyond the mouth of the river I spotted on the heaped-up embankment stabilized by logs a row of houses with reed-thatched roofs. In front of them stretched gardens, enclosed by fences made of brushwood and woven straw, which were probably meant to keep pigs and cows away from the beds. Over the roofs an imposing new building could be seen—built out of clay bricks and with numerous gables punctured by large arched windows. That must have been the Oude Kerk. Finally I was setting eyes on it. The massive rectangular bell tower I had seen in the pictures was not yet there. It would only later be erected. About three hundred yards to the west of it, the new construction of a second church could be seen. The narrow nave was overarched by a temporary wooden roof from which two building cranes jutted.

  “That over there is the Nieuwe Kerk,” explained Wouter, as he steered his horse down to the dock. “It will burn down next year. A great fire will break out. The houses you see there will all be destroyed. Only the Oude Kerk will be spared by the flames.”

  Wouter said that with equanimity, as if it had all happened long ago and were inevitable. Had it happened long ago? My eyes darted involuntarily to the east, toward Java, where I would live, and to the northeast, where the building of the Casimir Institute would be. I saw only water. In the west too, where the Centraal Station would be built in half a millennium—nothing but water. The mighty IJ, streaming along imperceptibly, dammed up by the rising tide of the nearby sea.

  Two large, shallow boats were moored to the dock. Both belonged to Kapitein Mulder, a stout, thickset, middle-aged man, who stuck out his reddish blond beard pugnaciously. With a loud voice he gave orders and struck with a short braided leather whip against his boot shafts when he found no other target nearby. Wouter spoke with him and then came back to me.

  “He won’t ask you a lot of questions, and you will speak as little as possible,” said Wouter, carrying my suitcase and the basket with my belongings on board, along with a bundle of provisions and the bare necessities for a traveler: a blanket, a pot, a cup, and a knife.

  “Keep an eye on the money I gave you. Have you memorized the value of the coins?” he asked me.

  “I’ve written it down and memorized it. The Rhenish guilder is worth about fifty euros,” I recited. “The stuiver corresponds to roughly two euros, and there are twenty-four stuivers to a guilder. The albus, the Rhenish white pfennig, comes to two and a half stuivers, or five euros. Right?”

  “Good,” he whispered. “You’re carrying two hundred guilders with you. That’s a fortune. Until autumn that will be more than enough. You won’t need to worry about earning anything and can devote yourself entirely to your mission. Don’t let anyone steal it from you.”

  I felt for my belt. The rest was sewn into my cloak. If I fell in the water, I would drown.

  “Make sure you’re back by the end of October. The winters come earlier at this time than they do in the twenty-first century, and they’re colder. We’re at the beginning of a little ice age. Branches of the Rhine can freeze already in November. The boatmen want to be home before that happens.”

  “The autumn is of course the most important time
to collect seeds,” I pointed out.

  Wouter nodded; then he walked to his horse and swung himself into the saddle. He raised a hand in parting and rode away. I suddenly realized that that introverted, somewhat grumpy, even unfriendly man was the last link to my world, to my civilization. Now that connection had been severed. From now on I was completely on my own. My throat constricted. I suddenly had trouble breathing. I would have liked nothing more than to run after Wouter. But he didn’t even look back. To be marooned on a desert island in the ocean couldn’t have been worse. I hid myself away in the round hut made of woven rushes in the middle of the deck. As a woman traveling alone I was permitted to stay in it. Usually pigs were transported in it; the smell was distinct, although it had been rinsed and scrubbed. I sank down onto the sack stuffed with hay that was to serve as my bed and indulged in self-pity. I was afflicted by profound homesickness for my world. I wiped the tears from my face. Dozens of women and men had taken this on before me and gotten through it. I thought of Grit—and of Renata. She was somewhere in this world, possibly for many years already. She hadn’t returned to Amsterdam, or else she would have showed up at Wouter’s. Could something have happened to her? Had she gotten into trouble? She would be able to fend for herself—I was certain of that. Perhaps I would manage to find her. I would keep an eye out for her and ask after her wherever I went, for she had been assigned fieldwork in the same area as I had: From the Cologne basin we were to head south and, along the tributaries on the left bank of the Rhine, penetrate into the Eifel and the Hunsrück and, on the right bank of the Rhine, into the Siebengebirge, the Westerwald, the Taunus, and the Odenwald.

  * * *

  IN THE COURSE of the morning the wind from the west strengthened and dispelled the fog.

  Kapitein Mulder gave the order to cast off. The yard with the large square sail was hoisted up the mast. It billowed. The second boat followed us at a distance of six to eight lengths. Amsterdam fell behind us. We sailed eastward up the IJ, hugging its southern shore. Rushes as far as the eye could see. In the north the shore receded; it opened to the Zuiderzee, which had formed in the heart of the land during the great flood on St. Elizabeth’s Day in the year 1421. Half of the inhabitants of this region had died in the flood.