The Cusanus Game

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  MIDDAY ON HIGHGATE—the time when the blaze reaches its zenith. The sepia haze of the depths is gone, and from the salt of the dried-out ocean a light bursts forth that extinguishes all colors, consumes all shadows, and turns the contours of reality into trembling chimeras, which melt over the desert into pearly puddles and seep into the sand.

  “What is it like when a universe disappears?” I ask the widely traveled man, who sits beside me in his rocking chair under the pergola. “Does it go fast?”

  “Very fast,” he says, without opening his eyes.

  “The speed of light?”

  Don Fernando stops licking his paws and squeaks. “Do you think the end comes creeping through the galaxy?” he teases. “No. It’s like a hand going through cobwebs.”

  “And how does it happen?”

  The widely traveled man shrugs. “An additional force decouples—or one of the curled-up dimensions unfolds. One of the physical constants changes or begins to oscillate. The elementary particles decay. Vacuum bubbles tear apart space-time, and matter evaporates into vacuum energy. A moment of motionlessness—then: nada. You wouldn’t feel a thing, Domenica, wouldn’t notice a thing.”

  I gaze into the distance. No shadow darkens the landscape. No eye stares indifferently down at us. The sky is empty. It’s the hour of absolute stillness, no sound can be heard, only the soft creaking rhythm of the rocking chair. It’s as if time itself were moving—forward … and back, forward … and back—a swell like the breath of someone peacefully sleeping.

  But sometimes, when the heat becomes almost unbearably stifling, the fear creeps up on me that this soft rhythm, this soft breathing could stop—and with it the very last sound would go silent.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel makes forays into several fields in which I’m not—or not sufficiently—adept. I’m grateful to everyone who helped check the data I compiled and answer questions, among them Fariborz Abedinpour (immunology), Willi Geier (botany), and especially Alexander Seibold (religion and Church), who also gave me valuable insight into the work of the Cusan and taught me in the park of the Catholic Academy in Munich how the balls must be released onto the board of the Cusanus game. For numerous details about Rome I am indebted to Manfred Fischer, former director of the Bad Boll Protestant Academy, with whom I had the privilege of taking several interesting trips to Rome. With respect to Holland and the city of Amsterdam, Carla Remé, who resides there, was helpful to me. Her husband, the artist Jörg Remé, called my attention to many details in Venice. Should mistakes or inconsistencies have nonetheless crept into the text here and there, I am responsible for them.

  My thanks are also due to the literary models from which I made borrowings—the connoisseurs will have identified them easily: Time and Again, by Jack Finney, must be mentioned, as well as Hard to Be a God, by Arkadi and Boris Strugatski. Dieter Kühn, with his subtle approaches to a world that is absolutely foreign to us in Ich Wolkenstein and Neidhart aus dem Reuental, emboldened me to enter the exotic terrain of the fifteenth century and take on the narrative challenge of depicting it. And, of course, Carl Amery’s Königsprojekt (The Royal Project) was and remains the origin and wellspring of all speculations about dark machinations of the Vatican along the timeline. From the conversations he and I conducted over thirty years about the endangering of Creation through carelessness and rapacity, a great deal found its way into this book. How I would have loved to press this novel into his hands with a wink and hear his laughter when he read one passage or another. It wasn’t meant to be, but I tried to weave in for him, who came up with a fitting verse for every occasion, a small tribute here.

  Finally, for their work on the original German version, I offer my thanks to Friedel Wahren, who took on the task of line-editing the voluminous manuscript; Sascha Mamczak, who provided helpful editorial input; and Erik Simon for his suggestions and improvements to the text of the most difficult chapter, “The Cusan Acceleratio,” which he published in advance in 1999 in his anthology Alexanders langes Leben, Stalins früher Tod (Alexander’s Long Life, Stalin’s Early Death) and which was awarded the Kurd Lasswitz Prize for best story of the year. Thomas Schlück, my agent, managed to place the book with a German publishing house where I could be proud of it. Hans-Peter Übleis took it upon himself to read the manuscript, though he is a very busy man, and then made a flattering judgment and gave the green light. Thomas Tilcher put the finishing touches on the German text, went through it with a fine-toothed comb, and gave me wise counsel and practical advice on the final draft.

  For the present edition I have above all to thank Ross Benjamin, who translated the novel into English. I have never before worked with such a knowledgeable and precise translator. He dissected every sentence, and the e-mails flew back and forth across the Atlantic for a year. In addition, I am grateful to David Hartwell, who oversaw the project and made sure that the novel would be translated by a first-class man. I’m enthusiastic about this edition, and I think readers will share that enthusiasm.

  And of course, I thank my wife, Rosemarie, who was always my most merciless critic and over the eight years I spent working on this book gave me heart again and again, and was convinced of success from the beginning, as well as my son, Julian, because the thought of him repeatedly inspired me to contribute with my writing to a better future, which would, of course, be his.

  WOLFGANG JESCHKE

  Munich, Summer 2012

  About the Author

  Wolfgang Jeschke is widely recognized in German science fiction as the most important editor and anthologist of his generation, and is also a distinguished German science fiction novelist. Originally published in Germany in 2005, The Cusanus Game is his latest work.