Zig Zag

  "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 defin
ed 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.

  And what's more, if time really is the fourth dimension, as relativity claims, it's a lot different than the other three. Because in space we can travel up and down, left and right, and back and forth. But in time, we can travel only forward. Why is that? What keeps us from being able to go back and live what's already been lived, or see it? In 1988, David Blanes's sequoia theory tried to answer some of these questions, but he barely scratched the surface. We still don't know almost anything about this "indispensable" element of reality that travels in only one direction, at an unknown speed, and which we only seem to understand if no one asks what it is.

  Very odd.

  With those words, Reinhard Silberg, professor of the philosophy of science at Berlin's Technischen Universitat, began his opening remarks at the UNESCO hall in Madrid's Palacio de Congresos, where the international symposium "Modern Theories on the Nature of Space-Time" was being held.

  The modest hall was overflowing with attendees and journalists who were hanging on his every word, and waiting to hear from Witten, Craig, Marini, and the two "stars" of the show: Stephen Hawking and David Blanes.

  Elisa Robledo had other reasons to be there. She wanted to know if her theory of local variables had any chance of success and, if not, she wondered what Ric Valente planned to try to make her do.

  She was almost sure of two things: first, that she'd lose the bet, and second, that she'd refuse to do whatever it was.

  THE whole week had been a race against time. Which was ironic, given that she'd spent the whole time studying time.

  Passion and intellect went hand in hand in Elisa. After the emotional upheaval that her encounter with Valente had turned out to be, she sat down to reason things out and made a very simple decision: whether or not she was being watched, and regardless of any bet, she was going to do her homework. She'd already given up all hope of coming out first in Blanes's course. But she still didn't want to slack off at the end, especially on her final project.

  She wholeheartedly threw herself into her work. For several nights in a row, she didn't sleep more than a few hours at a time. She felt sure she wasn't going to be able to prove anything with her local time variable hypothesis and became increasingly convinced that Valente had been right when he questioned her premise, but she didn't care. A scientist had to fight for her ideas even when no one accepted them, she thought.

  At first, she didn't think about the bet. In fact, although she thought for a second that she might faint when she had to face Valente in class that Monday (they didn't look at each other, they didn't say hi, and both acted as if nothing had happened), and despite the fact that she was aware of his slimy presence at every second—like a persistent odor—at no point did it occur to her to worry about what might happen (or what she would agree to do in order to keep her word) if she lost. She'd met few people as arrogant and churlish as Ricardo Valente Sharpe and she was not impressed with the vile, juvenile hacking into her computer he'd done or the way he tried to blackmail her with her own bedroom secrets.

  Or at least that was what she was trying to convince herself of, at all costs.

  She wasn't even sure she was being watched, as Valente claimed. On Tuesday afternoon, the police had called. They scared the living daylights out of her, but it turned out they only wanted to tell her they'd found her cell phone. An upstanding citizen had found it Friday night when he threw out the paper cup from his ice cream on a narrow street in Chueca. Since he had no idea whose it was, he left it at the downtown police station. After a few inquiries (an abandoned cell phone was suspicious, even alarming these days, the police had told her), they had tracked down the owner: Elisa.

  That afternoon, after stopping by the station, Elisa used a tiny screwdriver to pry it open. She didn't know exactly what the inside of a cell phone was supposed to look like anyway (pen and paper were more her style), but she couldn't see anything that seemed particularly out of place. The man who'd found it could be the same guy who she'd seen from the back door of that bar; maybe it was just a coincidence, and Valente had taken advantage of it.

  Wednesday, she went to the registrar's office at Alighieri to get her certificate of attendance for Blanes's course, and while she was there she asked a few questions. The girl behind the counter verified everything she wanted to know: Javier Maldonado was a student there, he was studying information science, and there was a statistics professor named Espalza. Didn't sound like much of a conspiracy, then.

  She started to think that maybe Valente himself was responsible for the whole charade. It was clear that he wanted some kind of "special" relationship with her (given that he found her—what had he said?—"so interesting"). He was very clever, there was no doubt about that. So he'd probably taken advantage of certain coincidences and spun that tale about surveillance just to scare her. Curiously enough, Elisa wasn't the slightest bit scared of him.

  She handed in her project on Friday. Blanes took it without a word and then said good-bye to the class, summoning them to the symposium the following day, where they would talk about "some of the thornier aspects of the theory, like the paradox of the 'past' end of the strings." He didn't say anything about the possibility of resolving the paradox. Elisa turned to look at her rival. He sat there smiling without looking back at her.

  Fuck Valente Sharpe.

  So there she was, at the symposium, waiting to hear what the Wise Ones had to say about it all and to find out who'd win the bizarre bet.

  Things, though, were about to take a totally unexpected turn.

  SHE'D been listening to late twentieth-century physics mumbo jumbo for hours, and it was all old hash: Branes, parallel universes, black-hole fusion, Calabi-Yau spaces, tears in reality ... Almost every speaker at least mentioned the sequoia theory, but no one talked about any possibility of identifying isolated time strings as a means of resolving the "past" end paradox with local variables. Sergio Marini, the experimental physicist and Blanes's collaborator in Zurich, whom Elisa had been anxiously waiting to hear, declared that it was essential to accept the theory's contradictions, and as an example put forward the infinite results of relativistic quantum theory.

  All of a sudden, amid an expectant, respectfu
l silence, she caught a glimpse of Stephen Hawking, making his way toward the stage in his electric wheelchair.

  Pressing himself against the back of his chair, the illustrious Cambridge physicist (who held the same post Newton had held centuries before him) looked like little more than a sickly man. But Elisa knew that he was not only blindingly intelligent and surprisingly witty (his eyes, hidden behind enormous glasses, radiated personality), but also that he had an iron will that enabled him to become one of the world's foremost physicists of all time, and this despite suffering from a crippling motor neuron disease. Elisa realized that she didn't admire him nearly enough. Hawking was living proof that you should never give up on anything in this life.

  Using the controls on his voice synthesizer, Hawking transformed written text into intelligible speech. The audience was instantly captivated. People laughed heartily at his scathing, witty commentaries, pronounced in a mechanically precise English. However, to Elisa's displeasure, he spoke only about the possibility of recovering information lost in black holes, barely even mentioning Blanes's theory in passing at the very end of his talk.

  He concluded, "The branches of Professor Blanes's sequoia stretch toward the future in the sky, while its roots bury themselves in the unreachable ground of the past." The electronic voice paused. "Nevertheless, as long as we're hanging on to one of those branches, nothing stops us from looking down at the roots."

  That sentence made Elisa think. What was Hawking talking about? Was it just a poetic closing statement, or was he trying to cast doubt on the possibility of identifying and opening isolated time strings? At any rate, it was clear that the sequoia theory had lost a lot of cachet among the great physicists of the world. All that was left was to wait for Blanes himself, but it wasn't looking too hopeful.

  When the lunch break was announced, everyone in the auditorium stood as one to head for the exits, causing an almighty traffic jam. Elisa got in line just in time to hear a voice whisper in her ear.