Zig Zag (19 page)

"But
that's basing it all on a false premise," Valente retorted
immediately. "You yourself are creating an artificial limit.
That's like just changing a number when you're doing sums to make the
figures add up to the total you need. It's absurd. Why pick the start
of the universe as your time and not any other time? It's
ridiculous..."

A
marked change had overcome him. Elisa noticed that he'd lost his
sneer and his cold tone, and now he was speaking animatedly.
Now
I've got you by the balls.

"You
just don't get it, do you,
sweetheart?"
she
replied calmly. "If we can select the time variable, we obtain
concrete solutions. It's a renormalization process." Valente
pulled a face and she continued, excited. "I'm not proposing we
use the big bang as the variable; what I mean is, we have to use
some
variable
as a reference, just to renormalize the equations. For example, the
time that's passed since Earth began, about four billion years. The
'past' end of the time strings of Earth's history end there. They are
discrete, calculable longitudes. In less than ten minutes you can get
finite solutions by applying the Blanes-Grossmann-Marini
transformations; I've already tried."

"And
what good is that?" Valente's tone was aggressive now. His
normally pale cheeks had turned red. "What good is your stupid
localist solution? That's like saying, 'I can't live on the salary I
earn, but look, I found a few cents this morning!' What the fuck good
does a partial solution applied to Earth do? It's stupid!"

"Tell
me something," Elisa said calmly. "Why do you just sit
there insulting me when you can't prove anything yourself?"

Pause.

Elisa
savored Valente's expression. She thought that although he might well
be a clever snake in the world of human relations, she was a shark in
the world of physics, and she would be happy to prove it to him. She
knew she didn't have all the optimal knowledge (after all, she was
just an apprentice), but she also knew that no one could bring her
down with insults.

"Of
course, I can prove it," he spluttered. "What's more, I'll
have the proof very soon. The course is over in a week. Next
Saturday, there's an international meeting of the minds: Hawking,
Witten, Silberg ... they're all coming. And, of course, Blanes will
be there. Rumor has it that there's going to be some kind of mea
culpa about the sequoia theory. Where we went wrong and why. And
before that, we'll have handed in our projects. We'll see which one
of us is wrong."

"Fine
by me," she said.

"Why
don't we make a bet?" Valente suggested, smiling once more. "If
your partial solution is acceptable, I'll do whatever you want. For
example, I'll give up my plan to go with Blanes and you can have my
spot, if he picks me, that is. Or you can order me to do anything you
want. I'll do anything, no matter what it is. But if I win, and your
partial variable solution doesn't solve shit, then I'll be the one
doing the ordering. And you'll do whatever I say. No matter what."

"I
don't accept," Elisa said.

"Why
not?"

"I
have no interest in giving you orders."

"Oh,
I don't know about that."

Valente
tapped a few keys on his screen and the equations were replaced by
pictures.

Seeing
them right after the cold numbers was quite a shock, like the
contrast between the naked woman and the portraits of famous
physicists. One by one, the images flashed by, and all Valente did
was turn to watch her face, smiling.

"That's
a very interesting collection you have there on your hard drive ...
Those chat rooms you go into are pretty kinky, too..."

Elisa
was speechless. She couldn't believe he'd violated her privacy that
way, but the fact that he boasted about it to her was even more
humiliating.

Be
careful with Ric.

"Don't
get me wrong," he said, as a year's worth of her private files
flashed up on the screen like old dirty laundry— or dirty
lingerie. "I couldn't care less what you do to relax in your
free time. Let me make myself perfectly clear: I don't give a shit if
you jack off or not, if you get your rocks off alone, whatever. I've
got a private photo album myself. In fact, sometimes I even
take
the
pictures. You saw my studio in the other room, right? I've got
friends, girls who will do anything... But up until now I'd never met
anyone who took... Oh, I love this one," he said, pointing to
the image on screen. Elisa looked away.

Be
careful.

"Who
took such extreme pleasure in passion, if you know what I mean,"
he continued, stopping the slide show with a click. The equations
returned. "Imagine. I've found a soul mate, someone whose mind
is as warped as mine, and that makes me very happy, because honestly,
I thought all you liked to do was show off in front of Blanes like a
snot-nosed little girl, like you did today. So. You're wrong. You
do
want
to give me orders. For example, you could order me to stop snooping.
Or to not tell anyone else how to get into all your private files."

What
the hell? What kind of sicko is this guy?
she
wondered. She looked at his pointy face, white as a skeleton, his
feminine nose and lips, his huge green eyes, half hidden behind that
wispy, blondish hair. Revulsion was the only thing she felt for him.
And suddenly she realized that she'd overcome one of his magic
powers: she was now able to react.

"So,
do you accept?" he asked. "Your will against mine?"

"I
accept."

She
realized Valente hadn't expected that answer. "I warn you, I'm
being serious."

"I
can see that. So am I." Now he seemed more hesitant. "You
really think your partial solution is correct?"

"I
know it is." Elisa pursed her lips. "And I can think of a
fair few things I'd like to order you to do."

"Like
what?"

But
Elisa just shook her head. She realized, all of a sudden, that she
understood something about Valente and stood up without looking at
him.

"You
didn't tell me we're being watched to
help
me,"
she said. "You told me to
hurt
me.
But there's something I still don't understand..."

Instantly,
Ric stood, too. She noticed that they were the same height. They
stared at each other.

"Well,
now that you mention it," he replied, "I did lie. I don't
exactly think it's 'surveillance.' The questionnaire, the questions
people asked our families about us. It's pretty obvious. They're not
spying on us in order to track us; they're doing it to get to know
us. It's a secret selection process. They want to pick one of us, to
participate in something. I don't know what, but judging by how much
effort they've put into it, it must be very important and very
unconventional. In this type of case, if they realize you know
they're watching you, it automatically disqualifies you from the
selection process."

"So
that's
why
you threw out my cell phone," she murmured as the penny dropped.

"I
don't think that's a particularly decisive detail, but yeah, it's
possible they might be a little pissed at you. Maybe they think
you're hiding something and they already struck you off the list."

Elisa
felt a sort of calm descend, listening to him.
So
now I know what you really want.

But
she was wrong. He didn't only want to shove her off the path that led
to Blanes. That became clear when, with no warning whatsoever, he
reached his bony fingers out to touch her breasts.

Every
fiber in her body screamed, ordering her to jump back. But she
didn't. Nor did Valente touch her. His hand slid through the air,
millimeters from her T-shirt, down to her hips, outlining her with
his hand. She stood stock-still, not breathing for the duration of
that humiliation.

"My
orders won't be easy to fill," he said, "but they'll be a
lot of fun."

"Right.
Can't wait." She grabbed her cardigan. "Can I go now?"

"I'll
show you out."

"I
can find the way, thanks."

On
her way back down the dark stairs, listening to that ancient voice
moan ("Ishtar..."), she felt tense and nervous. Once back
out on the street, Elisa stopped to take in some air, opening her
mouth wide to gulp it in.

Then
she looked at the world as if for the first time, as if she'd just
been born under the city's dark shadows.

10

TIME
is
a strange thing.

Its
strangeness derives, paradoxically, from the fact that it seems so
familiar. Not a day goes by that we don't think about it. We measure
it, but we can't see it. It's as fleeting as the soul, and yet it's a
universal, demonstrable, physical phenomenon. Saint Augustine summed
it up thus:
Si
non rogas, intelligo
("If
you don't ask, I understand").

Scientists
and philosophers have debated it without ever coming to any
agreement. And that's because time seems to take on different forms
depending on how we study it, even how we experience it. For a
physicist, a second is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations or
cycles of the cesium atom's resonant frequency. For an astronomer, a
second might be that unit divided by 31,556,925.97474, which is the
time it takes Earth to make a complete 360-degree revolution—that
is, a tropical year. But, as anyone who has ever waited for a doctor
to announce whether an operation has been successful or not, whether
a loved one has lived or died, knows, a cesium second and an
astronomical second are not always a second. To our minds, seconds
can stretch on for ages.

The
idea of time as a subjective phenomenon is not something foreign to
either science or to ancient philosophy. The wise ones have never had
a problem accepting that psychological time could vary from subject
to subject, and yet they were sure, at the same time, that physical
time was immutable, the same for everyone. But they were wrong.

In
1905, Albert Einstein dealt the definitive blow to that belief with
his theory of relativity. There is no
one
privileged
time; there are as many times as there are perspectives, and time and
space are inseparable. It is not a question of subjectivity or
entelechy, but an indispensable component of matter.

This
finding, however, still comes a long way from clearing everything up
about our evasive Father Time. Think, for example, about the moving
hands of a clock. Intuitively, we know that time moves forward. "It
goes by so quickly," we complain. But does that really make any
sense? If something moves forward, it does so at a certain
speed.
So
how fast does time go? High school students sometimes fall into the
trap of trying to answer that question with this deceptively simple
sentence: "At one second per second." But, of course, that
makes no sense. Velocity always relates a measure of distance to a
measure of time. So it's impossible for a second to travel "at
one second per second." Although our enigmatic friend Father
Time
moves,
we
can't seem to agree on how fast he travels.