Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  As if to confirm this, Einstein tells a joke. “An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says: ‘What’ll it be, boys?’ The first mathematician: ‘I’ll have one half of a beer.’ Second mathematician: ‘I’ll have one quarter of a beer. Third mathematician: ‘I’ll have one eighth of a beer.’ Fourth mathematician: ‘I’ll have one sixteenth of a—’ The bartender interrupts, ‘Know your limits, boys,’ as he pours out a single beer.”

  Charlie does not follow it but laughs anyway. To Charlie’s surprise, the chevalier seems to get the joke.

  Relax, ease off. Don’t press these learned gentlemen from out of time. He listens dutifully as Einstein just jumps into conversation, ignoring niceties, telling more obscure jokes about physicists, as if everybody knows them on a first-name basis. Charlie already understands Casanova well enough to realize that he prefers things lively and convivial. And maybe with his guests a bit off balance? To add to the metaphysical fun? Charlie resolves to try to be engaging for the sake of the chevalier.

  Albert smiles again, perhaps more amicable, certainly less cryptic. “I am not as intelligent in this incarnation, and I wasn’t so bright in my first life either.”

  “But you were Einstein, good fellow!” The chevalier frowns. “Surely all modesty is false, for otherwise it would not be modesty.”

  Albert allows himself a thin smile. “I still seek the truth, even about myself.”

  “I am not one for word games,” Casanova says.

  “The original Albert Einstein had an extremely fine brain,” Einstein says. “Quick, intuitive, infinitely curious. As a boy, he stared at objects to figure them out, until his parents thought he was abnormal. Of course, he was. I am afraid I could only make a little use of that mind.”

  Casanova frowns again. “But that Albert was one of the creators of our world, dear man. Or at least he was while in your hands.”

  Albert spreads his palms far apart in a gesture that combines supplication with apology. “I will only take credit for realizing what a fine opportunity he was for me, as a reincarnate.”

  Casanova waves this away irritably. “But all that work you did, taking the natural philosophy—as they say now, the physics—of this century from 1905 onward, and as well finding a way to communicate it to the world.”

  Charlie is dizzy. What was that about 1905? He tries to recall what he read about Everett’s work, and what the man said to him. Then there were Benford’s ideas. He is struggling.

  “It is not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer. You know very well, Giacomo, that I leaned heavily on everyone around me. On my wife, on Marcel Grossmann, that good man, and upon my former professors. The mathematics were very hard for me. I completely missed the entire idea of space-time as a fundamental, and left it to Minkowski—one of my own professors, during my faltering graduate student years!—to point it out, years after the 1905 paper on relativity. What a blunder.”

  Casanova turns to Moment with affected pique. “Well! This is the man, Charlie. This is the man who is getting a grasp on how this strange universe brought us back to our times. He may finally unravel our cycles of time. He was the one who explained to me what I was, why what I had gone through mattered.”

  Einstein’s expression is patient, almost beatific. “No, not really, Giacomo. I have made only a crude fumbling at the whole problem of how we are reincarnated. The why of it eludes me.”

  Charlie frowns and then speaks. “So it . . . it’s got something to do with Everett’s multiverse?”

  “Worse, it lies deep in the swamp of quantum mechanics.”

  Another street sign. “And that relates to your relativity . . . how?”

  Einstein stares into space as if someone else has entered the room, but the three of them are alone together. His voice comes out as a whisper, echoing down a long corridor of reflection. “Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.”

  Charlie just stares at him.

  Einstein comes out of it and says, embarrassed, “Subtle the Lord God is, but malicious he is not.”

  As he says this in English, Charlie catches a slip into a thicker, solemn German accent, as if using the language again brought back muscle memory.

  “Uh, is this some sort of . . . transcendental thing?”

  Einstein blinks. “I have problems with this word, ‘transcendence’—it lies only a few doors down the street from ‘incoherence,’ and it’s easy to get the wrong address.”

  Casanova laughs, and Charlie wonders if he can keep up with these two. Einstein smiles at his confusion and launches into a line of patter, eyes dancing. “On my seventy-fifth birthday, that of Albert, I should say, out of the blue I got a pet parrot delivered to my doorstep on Mercer Street.”

  Casanova chuckles, knowing what is coming.

  “The parrot, it was fretful. I tried to cheer the parrot up with jokes.” Einstein takes on an American wise-guy voice. “How do I order beer in a bar? I say, ‘Ein Stein for Einstein.’ Then I ask the parrot, ‘What’s the difference between a wild boar and Niels Bohr?’

  “Answer: When I say that God doesn’t play dice, a wild boar doesn’t tell me to stop telling God what to do.” Al shrugs.

  The two older men laugh heartily, and Einstein spews out the next lines. “I hated the one who developed the exclusion principle—Wolfgang Pauli, he was. I wanted to exclude him! The guy who thought I was wrong about quantum mechanics? So I taught the parrot to say, ‘Pauli want a cracker?’ ”

  They laugh again and Charlie sort of gets it. “Al—uh, Albert . . .” He can’t call this man Al, so Albert will have to do. He begins uncertainly, “You said, about relativity—”

  Einstein talks right over him. “I had a dream where I made love to Rita Hayworth for an hour. Well, for her it was an hour. For me, thirty-five seconds. That’s relativity.”

  Charlie finally actually laughs. Einstein surges on. “You know the history of science. Newton is standing on the shoulders of a giant. The giant says, ‘How much can you see from up there? Can you see this guy I keep hearing about, this Einstein?’ ”

  Einstein thinks this uproarious. He sits back, gleeful, satisfied, and Charlie senses a despair behind the jokes, a fatigue that comes from vast, lived time.

  “I was there at the beginning,” Einstein says suddenly. “Let me explain some things to you, Mr. Moment.”

  “Call me Charlie, please.”

  “Ah yes, I recall—as you wish.” His eyes regard him across an abyss Charlie can sense but not define.

  28 Albert’s story in some ways is like a class, in some ways like a confession.

  His tale grew out of a lonely Jewish art student’s remorse, his infinite lingering regret over the Jewish Holocaust of the twentieth century. He had been born into the twenty-second century. When the man who would eventually become Einstein was young, Casanova’s discovery, or rediscovery, of reincarnation was well known. It was, or would be, one of the foundations of twenty-second-century psychology as well as physics—that time loops in multiple cycles of recurrence. Mortals knew only linear time, the temporal ordinaire that they experienced as they proceeded over the four-dimensional manifold that was all of known reality before the twenty-first century. They lived and, more importantly, died with a worldview that included only three dimensions of space and one of time.

  Albert tells Charlie that in his time, his first life in the twenty-second century, they already understood quite well the labyrinths of time. We live our lives in cycles of reincarnation, he explains, but in most people the cycles are unconscious. For most of us, we only experience these cycles in déjà vu moments, at times when we seem to know vastly more than we could possibly have learned from our terribly finite lives. Sometimes our dreams will betray our more tangled journeys through time, but even then most people are in no position to make sense of such visions, of the full complexity of the universe. They had the firm feel of reality. Charlie thinks of his dreams of the previous nigh
t and has to agree.

  Albert apologizes for the vagueness of his explanations. “You see, Charlie, this body is not very bright. It used to belong to the son of Einstein’s gardener, a boy that I made a great impression on so that I could enter his mind around the time Einstein’s body died.”

  Charlie feels uncomfortable upon hearing this. He looks back and forth at Albert and the chevalier. “So both of you reincarnate in other people’s bodies?”

  Casanova chuckles. “Of course, dear boy! How else could we be here? My original body never made it to the nineteenth century, and Albert here was born after 2100.”

  “So how does that work?” If you’re in a dumber brain, how does that feel? And are you really you any longer? He knows that these are people who understand him, but he is not sure that he wants to understand them, to understand what he has become . . . or what farther reaches of temporal perversity will come next.

  The chevalier leans forward and puts his hand on Charlie’s upper arm, patting it. “It was only with the greatest difficulty that I escaped my cycling through my original body, the original Casanova.”

  Albert speaks warmly: “Better to think of it as a time-loop, Mr. Moment.”

  “Charlie.”

  “Ja Charlie.”

  “So this quantum thing—”

  “Ah, that is question, yes. Quantum mechanics in the time of the original Albert was always talking about ‘reducing the wave function’ and other hand-waving exercises. There was no theory of what that phrase meant. None! Bohr—remember my boar joke?—said that the mind, making a measurement, reduced the many possible worlds that could be, down to the one that is. To me, that was magic.”

  It sounds that way to Charlie, too, so he nods.

  Einstein gazes wistfully into the distance. “Nature wants the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. But God knows more mathematics than we do, and always will . . . perhaps he does not even need it.”

  Charlie was still lost. “But Everett’s ideas sounded pretty complicated to me. In a multiverse ‘quantum’ means . . . what? That lots of things could happen, but . . .”

  “God might like to play dice, as people like Bohr and Pauli the Parrot thought. God might like complexities, as Everett does. I have very nearly given up on this God.”

  “God?”

  “For some, miracles serve to prove God’s existence. For me, the absence of miracles proves the same thing. All we need is that the cosmos is comprehensible. That it follows laws. That itself deserves our awe.”

  “So God reveals himself in some kind of harmony of all that exists?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie drills on. “Even if we can change it? Alter our lives, over and over?”

  Einstein looks irked, then shrugs. “This is what I struggle with. Every day.”

  “And reincarnation makes it harder to understand anything!” Charlie says forcefully. He hears the strain in his own voice, thin and beseeching. “I mean, you seem to be hinting—”

  “I am sorry to be so vague. I do not know the answers and am unsure of even the questions.” He laughs, a rueful bark. “When I was a professor, my lectures were disorganized. Until I became famous, of course—then my every stumble became a charming anecdote.”

  Charlie gives a dry chuckle, but for once Einstein was not trying to be amusing. The deep eyes crinkle. “Finally I saw that rather than be ‘the sage on the stage,’ it was better to be ‘the guide on the side’—for that is how we may understand this perversely strange universe.”

  “Strange, sure, but . . . perversely?”

  “Why . . . ,” Einstein says cautiously, “why does this quantum mechanical universe want to let us few hold on to our awareness as we cycle?”

  The chevalier shifts irritably, distracted. “Every time I died, Albert, I would go back to that moment when I was arrested in Venice, pissing myself, to be put into the Leads prison, travel across the Bridge of Sighs. Over and over I had to escape from that pestilential hole in the roof. Sometimes I would miscalculate and end up in the flooded dungeons. So: the universe wants to torture me?”

  The chevalier shudders slightly, while Albert’s face softens as he looks at his friend. Charlie sees that they are brothers in their predicaments of time, and he has a dim apprehension that he is being drawn into their fraternity. If God runs the world, why is there so much evil in it?

  “But let us not even talk about that.” Casanova sweeps a hand through the air. “I decided that if I could reenter my own earlier self, then it should be possible to enter into other selves—to slide sideways, as it were.”

  Albert nods slowly, almost smiling. “The dimensionality of this is quite complex, Charlie, but to explain it properly requires knowledge of quantum computation.”

  “Not to mind, not to mind, dear friend. Far beyond us, I am sure. Best to see this as a skill, eh?” Casanova beams, and Charlie sees again how the man can suddenly focus his charisma at will. No wonder women toppled. “I made a study of my life, developed my skill. Where could I reenter again, in my next life? I studied Kabbalah, Taoist writings, the entire literature of reincarnation.”

  Albert says mildly, “Suggestive, perhaps. Quantum—”

  “Not again, please!” Casanova waves this quibble away. “I took a position as a librarian at Dux, to research, to accumulate books. I told powerful friends my plan to master reincarnation. Many of them thought me a fool, but some still had a burning hope in their eyes—the passion to escape death. A common affliction among their accustomed company—those who compete to see who can be the least devout.” The chevalier laughs with both derision and merriment, eyes bright. “When of course I only wanted to escape my own life.”

  Albert speaks softly. “What a life it was, Giacomo. A life any man would envy.”

  The chevalier turns to Albert and puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. “All pleasures of the flesh, even of the heart, become tiresome through repetition. When I died, my last words were, ‘I have lived as a philosopher, and I die as a Christian.’ For I knew I was at my end. Wrong! My sensual exploits came as naturally as slurping oysters from the bodice of a nun in a Venetian casino. No, my goal was freedom. Even as I was a prisoner in the dire prison of Leads, yearning to escape, I grew to understand that each of us is trapped in our own eternal cycle, whether we are aware of it or not, endlessly repeating our lives. God laughs at us as we flail about in his damnable creation!”

  Al says dryly, “When you emptied fools’ purses, it was to cure them of their folly by opening their eyes, no doubt? You could win over old popes as well as young girls.”

  An eager nod. “When I did so, they enjoyed it. I swindled hordes of nobility, met Benjamin Franklin, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Pope Clement the Thirteenth, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Mozart.”

  Casanova smiled fondly. “Madame d’Urfé was my first effort. France’s richest woman, an occultist fruitcake of the first water. She became convinced that my skills could procure her eternal life, by enabling her to give birth to an immortal child to which her own soul would be transferred. I tried again and again to assemble the circumstances, to prepare her for my entry into her mind.”

  “Even though she was a woman,” says Charlie.

  “Dear boy, it didn’t take me long to realize that women were my only hope. I was never close to other men. My own brother I fought with over and over again—we never got along, and through so many cycles I became utterly weary with him. Immortality’s truest enemy is boredom.”

  “Ah yes,” Albert says with a sigh.

  The chevalier speeds on. “The older men who were my protectors or sponsors—I never saw myself in them. The younger men with whom I shared my fascination with the pleasures of the flesh, they were mere objects to me, assistants in intrigue and at times paltry accessories to my carnal passions. I had grown tired of them, as I was tired of myself.

  “I recall my resonance with a woman named Leonilda, who I finally realized was my daughter
by one Lucrezia Castelli. Dear Leonilda was married, alas, to an impotent old marquess and badly wanted both a lover and a child.” A lingering, whispery sigh. “So . . . I obligingly impregnated her, more or less with her mother’s approval. Two decades later I encountered a young marquess in Prague who was probably the product of this union, and thus both my son and my grandson. You see, life can be complex—even before you relive it!”

  Charlie watches carefully as this man from another era whirls through innumerable pasts, eyes dancing with memories. He recalls the Hollywood cliché for time passing, a whir of calendar pages. But this—a man of vast age, experiencing it all with flickering eyelids. Then the chevalier’s face turns from purple overcast to bright as his memory returns to his evident passion. “And of course, love itself saved me. That there was someone who would welcome me into her brain, give herself over, out of love, sympathy, consilience—union.”

  Charlie feels almost embarrassed to listen to the man discuss what for Charlie seems like a transcendental sex change, but Charlie says nothing. He is aware, though, that Albert is looking at him quizzically yet with sympathy in the large brown eyes.

  The chevalier’s palm smacks the table, startling Charlie. “Henriette! It was her. Don’t you see, Charlie? Love is the solution, to truly love and be loved.”

  The man’s hand is on his arm, but Charlie is entirely under Casanova’s control now, unable to turn away.

  “I had lived it so many times in my mind, though it had come before my arrest and imprisonment. But the vision of Henriette had never left my mind.” Casanova’s voice lilts with passion. “And that day! That magical day when I saw her under the covers in the count’s room, imagining those thighs shifting beneath the sheets. She was my destiny.”

  Albert breaks in. “So his mind-loop intersected with hers as he was dying, and he found himself in her body, looking out from under the sheets to see his younger self.”

  Casanova nods vigorously. “And it was love, dear boy! I loved her so much, and she me, that we could give ourselves to each other. I became my own lover, and Henriette’s lifestream joined mine.”