Zig Zag (75 page)

All
that was left of the old garrison and warehouse were a couple of
charred, blackened walls piled with rubble. Some seemed to have
collapsed recently, no doubt in the monsoon winds. Most of the old
metal and debris had been blown to the north end, leaving an empty
space in the middle packed with hard ground—maybe due to the
heat of the explosion—though shrubs had already sprung up in
several spots.

She
decided to wait by the walls. She left her shoes on the ground,
untied the knot in her T-shirt, and ran her fingers through her hair.
More than clean it, the rain had clumped it together. She tilted her
head back to let the rainwater wash down her face. The downpour was
dying off and the sun had started to burn through the sky's thinnest
clouds.

Blanes
showed up a second later. They spoke very little, as if they'd just
bumped into each other coincidentally. Five minutes went by, and then
Victor appeared. Elisa felt awful when she saw the state he was in:
pale, slovenly, unshaven, his curly hair all clumped and matted.
Still, he gave her a feeble smile.

Blanes
looked around. She did the same. To the north, beyond the station,
were palm trees, a gray sea, and a vast expanse of sand; to the
south, four military helicopters on the landing pad, at the edge of
the jungle. There didn't seem to be anyone around, though she could
hear the sounds of birds and human voices in the distance. Soldiers.

"We're
safe here," Blanes said.

They
exchanged glances, and suddenly Elisa couldn't take it anymore. She
threw herself into his arms and held his stout body, grateful to feel
his hands on her back.

They
both cried, though very differently from how they'd wept up until
then, with no noise, no tears. When she thought of her dead friend,
Elisa clung to one obsessive thought.
Jacqueline,
poor thing, it was quick, wasn't it? Yes, it must have been, there
wasn't enough energy to ...
But
she realized that who they were really feeling sorry for was
themselves: they were lost, broken by the anguish of inevitable
condemnation.

She
saw Victor draw near, visibly shaken, and drew him into her embrace,
resting her chin on his bony, rain-soaked shoulder.

"I'm
so sorry," he whimpered. "Please forgive me ... I'm the one
who..."

"No,
Victor," Blanes touched his cheek. "You didn't do anything
wrong. The laptop had nothing to do with it. He used
potential
energy,
and he took it from everything. This is the first time he's done
that. There was no way to defend ourselves against that."

When
Elisa could tell that Victor had started to relax, she pulled away
and kissed him on the forehead. She wanted to kiss, to hug, to love.
She wanted to be loved, and consoled, and comforted. But for now,
she'd have to postpone those desires and concentrate on the task at
hand. After Jacqueline, she'd sworn she would get rid of Zig Zag,
even if it cost her life. Eliminate him. Disconnect him. Kill him.
Annihilate him. Snuff him out. Fuck him up. She wasn't sure what
expression to use: maybe all of them.

"What
happened in the control room, Elisa?" Blanes asked, anxious.

She
recounted everything she hadn't wanted to say in front of Harrison,
including the disconnect she'd had when she saw Jacqueline
disintegrate.

"I
left the image profiling," she added. "If they haven't
touched anything, it should be done by now."

"Any
splits?"

"The
computer chair. I saw it twice. But Ric and Rosalyn didn't appear."

"That's
odd..."

Blanes
tugged on his beard. Then he started speaking in a tone very
different from the one he'd put on for his interrogation. Now he
sounded choked and spoke quickly, almost panting.

"OK,
I'll tell you what I think. First, Elisa's right, of course. Once we
hand over that report, we'll be no good to them anymore. In fact, now
that we know where Zig Zag came from, we're actually dangerous
witnesses. No doubt they'll want to bump us off, but even if they
don't, I'm not going to hand Zig Zag over on a platter so they can
turn him into a twenty-first-century Hiroshima. I think we're all
agreed on that." Elisa and Victor nodded. "But we have to
play it safe. We can't lay all our cards on the table; we need at
least one ace up our sleeve. And that's why we have to really know
what happened and find out who Zig Zag is."

"But
we
already
know;
it's Ric," Victor began, but Blanes waved him away.

"I
lied. I wanted to throw them off the track, get them to organize a
big search to distract them. I didn't really see Valente or anyone
else in the screening room."

Elisa
had already suspected as much, though she still couldn't help but
feel disappointed.

"So
we don't know any more than we did before," she said.

"I
think I know something more," he replied. "I think I know
why Zig Zag is murdering us."

"What?"

"We
had it all wrong."

BLANES'S
eyes
were shining. She knew that look: the scientist who, for a split
second, finds himself on the brink of truth.

"It
came to me after I saw Jacqueline's remains. When the soldiers took
me into the dining room and I was able to calm down enough to reason,
I thought about what I'd seen in that room... what Zig Zag had done
to Jacqueline. Why such cruelty? He doesn't just kill us; there's a
level of mercilessness that goes beyond all limits, it's totally
incomprehensible. Why? Until now we'd talked about a disturbed
person, thought Zig Zag was some kind of psychopath hidden among us
... a 'devil,' as Jacqueline said. But I wondered if there could be
some scientific explanation for that totally unwarranted savagery,
that superhuman brutality. I considered every angle, and this is what
I came up with. It might sound strange, but I think it's the most
likely explanation."

He
knelt down and used the sand like a chalkboard. Elisa and Victor
crouched down beside him.

"Just
suppose that, when the split was first produced, the person in
question was in a state of rage. Imagine he or she was hitting
someone. Or not even that: just some sort of intense, aggressive
emotion, maybe directed against a woman. If that were the case, then
when the split first appeared the emotion couldn't be changed,
couldn't even be
tempered.
There
wouldn't be enough time. In a Planck time, not one single neuron
could send any information to another. Everything would stay the
same, totally unmodified. If the person were experiencing violent
urges, or the desire to abuse or humiliate, then that's exactly how
the split remains, frozen in that desire."

"Still,"
Victor objected, "the person would have to be pretty
disturbed..."

"Not
necessarily, Victor. That's where we went wrong. Ask yourself this:
what is our idea of goodness based on? What makes us say that a
person is 'good'? Anyone might think terrible thoughts for a moment,
even if they repent a second later. But repenting takes
time,
even
if it's only a millisecond. Zig Zag never got that chance. He lives
in
one
single
time
string, a minute fraction of time, isolated from the course of
events. If the split had been produced a second later, maybe Zig Zag
would have been an angel instead of a demon."

"Zig
Zag is a monster, David," Victor murmured.

"Yes,
he is. The worst kind: a run-of-the-mill human being frozen in time
at a random moment."

"That's
absurd!" Victor laughed, agitated. "I'm sorry, but you're
wrong. Totally wrong about that!"

"I
find it pretty hard to believe, too." Blanes's idea upset Elisa.
"I understand what you're saying, but I just can't believe it.
All that torture, the pain he inflicts on his victims ... the obscene
'contamination' of his presence ... those ... sickening
nightmares..."

Blanes
stared fixedly at Elisa.

"Everyone
has those desires for brief, isolated intervals of time, Elisa."

She
stopped to think. She couldn't conceive of Zig Zag that way. Her
whole body rebelled at the idea of her torturer, her merciless
executioner—that
thing
she'd
dreamed about for years and was scared to even contemplate—could
be anything other than Absolute Evil. But she couldn't find fault
with Blanes's reasoning.

"No,
no, no..." Victor refused to accept it. The light rain, falling
more gently now, studded his glasses with tiny dots. "If what
you're saying is true, then what becomes of ethics, what about good
and evil, all of that? You're saying it's all just our conscience in
some state of
evolution?
You're
saying that our morals are random, that they bear no relation to
personal decision, to strength of character?" Victor's voice
grew louder and louder. Elisa tensed up, afraid the soldiers would
hear them, but there didn't seem to be anyone around. "This is
absurd! So in your judgment, any man, the most moral of men ever ...
even ... even
Jesus
Christ,
could
be a monster for an isolated period of time?! Do you even
realize
the
implications of what you're saying? So anyone could have done ...
what I saw in the screening room! Anyone. What I saw ... what you and
I both saw that he did to that poor woman..." His lips had
curled into an expression of horror and disgust. He took off his
glasses and ran his hands across his face. "I know you're a
genius," he said, more calmly now, "but you're a
physicist.
Good
and evil have nothing to do with
time,
David.
They are stamped onto our hearts and souls. We all have urges,
desires, temptations. Some people control them and others lapse: that
is the key to religious belief—"

Blanes
cut him off. "Victor, what I'm trying to say is, it could be
anyone.
It
could be
me.
I
didn't think that before. Deep down, I always thought I could count
myself out because I know what I'm like inside, or at least I think I
do. But now I think that no one can count themselves out. We have to
include all of humanity in this draw."

"Still,"
Elisa interrupted, "we have to find out who it is. If it wasn't
Jacqueline, then he's got twenty-four hours to strike again."

"True.
Stopping Zig Zag is our top priority," Blanes agreed. "We
need that profiled image."

"We
could go now," she suggested.