Zig Zag (66 page)

"I
can't get my head around that," Jacqueline murmured.

"Professor,
you know what?" Carter scratched his head, smiling. "I was
one of those kids at school who always wanted results. I never
bothered with the fluff, the process, I just wanted the answer. Your
documentary is fascinating and everything, but what I want to know
is, who's been taking us out one by one for the past ten years? Who
makes us all have nightmares every damn night, and how can we butcher
him?"

"We'll
get to that in a second," Blanes replied, opening another file.
"Marini and Craig had worked with animals and objects, but never
humans. That was too risky: who would ever volunteer to be split? And
that's when they thought of Ric Valente."

The
next image, totally unexpected, made Elisa's stomach lurch. On the
screen, surrounded by numbers, sat Ric Valente, in front of a
computer. Elisa recognized the setting immediately.

"Ric
started filming himself at night, in the control room, and he used
those images to study
his
own
splits.
He proved that human beings appeared in different time periods; it
was an area twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. Ric told Marini that
those apparitions really affected him."

She
remembered the afternoon she'd come upon him on the beach, utterly
engrossed in God knows what. Could he have been watching one of his
own splits? When he saw her, was
that
the
cause of their argument, when she thought it was about his not having
turned in his results yet?

"One
night in September, something else happened. Ric was exhausted, and
he fell asleep while the camera was filming. When he woke up, he
continued the experiment and opened a time string from ten minutes
earlier, when he'd been asleep. A totally different kind of split was
produced." Blanes's voice was more anxious now. He showed
several slides full of equations. "The first difference was that
it appeared almost immediately after the experiment, much faster than
Ric was expecting. The area affected was far greater, too: the whole
control room lost power. But that wasn't all. It actually
sucked
Ric into the time string.
For
that brief period of time, the room became a dark world with strange
holes in the walls and floor..."

"Holes?"
Jacqueline asked.

"Yes,
produced by the electron movement," Elisa answered, "like
those supposed cuts on the face." Her chest was tight with
anguish. Now she understood the meaning of the hole in her wall
during that awful "dream."

"'Lags
in the matter' is what Marini called them," Blanes said. "From
the perspective of an observer who's actually
inside
a
time string, the world looks incomplete. There are certain 'defects'
that get filled when enough time has passed to situate all of the
particles in their corresponding places, though other holes will
open..."

"So
Ric would have seen these holes, these 'lags in the matter,' in his
own body," Victor said.

"No,
he didn't see himself that way. His
split,
yes,
but not himself. For him, it was just being naked in a world that
came to a halt."

Like
me, in my dream,
Elisa
thought.

"Naked?"
Jacqueline asked.

"He
couldn't perceive his clothes, jewelry, or anything else he wore.
Just his body. Everything else was on the outside. The split brought
only
him
into
the time string."

Elisa
turned to Blanes.

"Ric
isn't the only one who's had that experience."

She
felt all eyes turn to her. Alarmed, her cheeks burning in the dark,
she added, "Nadja and I had it, too. And Rosalyn..."

"I
knew about Rosalyn," Blanes confessed. "She told Valente.
Her split occurred the same night as his, and she was inside the time
string, too. Of course, Rosalyn thought it was just an incredibly
vivid dream, but Ric noticed that the lights in her bathroom had
burned out and realized what had really happened."

Elisa
stared at the equations on the screen without taking anything in. The
mysterious jigsaw puzzling her all these years was starting to piece
together.
That's
what the man with no face was, the white eyes.
She
recalled that she and Nadja had both thought it was Ric. What about
everything else? How real was that attack she thought she'd suffered?
She decided not to bring it up; it just wasn't something she could
talk about. But then Blanes said something else.

"Rosalyn
told Ric she'd dreamed that his double
attacked
her.
He wasn't sure whether she was just exaggerating to make him feel
guilty since he'd stopped showing any interest in her, but it worried
him. What could have caused that difference? Before, the splits had
hardly even moved, just floated like ghosts. He told Marini about it,
and they put their heads together. They took long walks by the lake
to discuss things in private—"

"Sometimes
they talked at the garrison," Carter broke in. "They knew
none of you would sneak up on them there."

"Finally,
Marini thought he found the explanation. The split, in this case, had
come from one of the multiple 'personalities' that Ric had
while
he was asleep.
So,
in fact his
unconscious
was
what split then. Sleep is a much more violent activity than we tend
to think. Reinhard Silberg thought that the idea that we 'rest' while
we're asleep might be an illusion produced by the passage of time. If
seen isolated at every interval, our sleeping bodies are much more
active than our waking ones: we move our eyes, hallucinate, become
sexually excited ... Sergio deduced that either sleep or the
unconscious produced a split of the most intimate, brutal part of
ourselves."

"So
... that's what Zig Zag is," Jacqueline murmured. "A split
produced from Ric's unconscious..." Blanes shook his head.

"No.
Zig Zag appeared later, not until the night of October 1. That was an
even more powerful kind of split. It can't be the same thing that
Rosalyn, Elisa, and Nadja saw, because it used such a small amount of
energy, and Zig Zag, in contrast, burned out both generators when he
appeared. And he's been visiting the present for ten years now, at
erratic intervals. That never happened in any of the other cases. We
don't even really know if Ric produced him, though all indications
would point to that. Valente kept a detailed diary, which Marini got
hold of. In it, he wrote that even though Marini had asked him to
stop testing with anyone who was asleep, due to the apparent risk, he
planned to keep doing it on his own. He was very excited at the
prospect. He wanted to find out more about those aggressive splits.
They were something that
he'd
discovered.
He said that for the first time in history, there was proof of how
closely intertwined particle physics and Freudian psychology were. As
much as I'd like to, I can't judge him too harshly on that. His last
entry is from September 29, and in it he claims that on the night of
Saturday, October 1, when the storm was at its most fierce, he was
going to produce another split using a new image."

Jacqueline
asked the question on everyone's lips.

"What
image?"

Blanes
closed down a few files and opened others. "In his last entry,
he wrote that he was thinking of using these..."

He
projected several blurry enlargements. Elisa and Jacqueline jumped
out of their chairs at almost the exact same time.

"Holy
fuck," Carter said.

The
photos were all very similar. Each one showed a room with a bed and a
sleeping figure. Elisa recognized herself immediately, as well as
Nadja. The pictures had somehow been taken from the ceiling. It was
them, in their bedrooms on New Nelson, ten years ago.

"The
lights in our bedrooms had hidden cameras with infrared," Blanes
explained. "Ric had live images of all of us at his disposal
every night. Even you, Carter."

"Eagle
wanted to spy on us," Carter said, nodding. "They were
paranoid about the Impact."

It
was all falling into place. Elisa now understood that when Ric
mentioned her solitary pleasures during their argument, he hadn't
just been showing off. He really
had
seen
her. He could see all of them.

"But
which one of the damn pictures did he actually
use?"
Jacqueline
almost shouted. More than asking Blanes, she seemed to direct her
question at the screen.

"We
don't know, Jacqueline. Ric carried out the experiment alone; he
didn't even tell Marini about it."

"But...
there must be ... some documentation ... a recording..."
spluttered Carter, suddenly nervous. "There were hidden cameras
in the control room, too...," he added. But Blanes just shook
his head.

"All
records from that night were deleted when Zig Zag produced the
blackout. He used all the energy around him and erased everything in
the circuits. Ric might even have used another image of himself,
though I doubt it. I think he tried one of these. He could have used
anyone. But who knows
which
one?"
He clicked through them again in reverse order.

"It
couldn't have been just
any
of
them..." Elisa could hardly speak. "It couldn't have been
Nadja, Marini, Craig, Ross, Silberg, or any of the soldiers."

"You're
right. They're all dead, and you can't produce a split of anything
dead. So that only leaves"—in that half-lit room, Blanes
looked at them each in turn—"Elisa, Jacqueline, Carter,
and me. And Ric, who's disappeared."

"But
that means..." Jacqueline had grown pale.

Blanes
nodded gravely.

"Zig
Zag is one of us."

THE
female
soldier's name was Previn, or at least that's what the nameplate on
her uniform said. She had blond hair and blue eyes and, despite being
plump, was attractive. Her most attractive quality, though, was that
she kept her mouth shut. Lieutenant Borsello, on the other hand, the
man in charge of the Tactics Division at the Imnia base in the
Aegean, sat ensconced behind his desk and ran his mouth nonstop. They
had one thing in common, though: they both pretended not to see
Jurgens. The female soldier did not even glance in his direction, and
the lieutenant did even better. He winked furtively at Jurgens and
then turned quickly back to Harrison as if to say that he was a man
who'd seen it all.