“So you’ve got zero-point energy MEMS chips,” I said.

He chewed more bread and pickle. Then he nodded.

“You’ve got MEMS chips and you were offering me some fucking lousy memristor? You must think I’m a real chump!”

“You’re not a chump.” Massimo sawed a fresh slice of bad bread. “But you’re from the wrong Italy. It was your own stupid world that made you this stupid, Luca. In my Italy, you were one of the few men who could talk sense to my Dad. My Dad used to confide in you. He trusted you, he thought you were a great writer. You wrote his biography.”

“‘Massimo Montaldo, Senior,’” I said.

Massimo was startled. “Yeah. That’s him.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not supposed to know that.”

I had guessed it. A lot of news is made from good guesses.

“Tell me how you feel about that,” I said, because this is always a useful question for an interviewer who has lost his way.

“I feel desperate,” he told me, grinning. “Desperate! But I feel much less desperate here than I was when I was the spoilt-brat dope-addict son of the world’s most famous scientist. Before you met me-Massimo Montaldo-had you ever heard of any ‘Massimo Montaldo’?”

“No. I never did.”

“That’s right. I’m never in any of the other Italies. There’s never any other Massimo Montaldo. I never meet another version of myself-and I never meet another version of my father, either. That’s got to mean something crucial. I know it means something important.”

“Yes,” I told him, “that surely does mean something.”

“I think,” he said, “that I know what it means. It means that space and time are not just about physics and computation. It means that human beings really matter in the course of world events. It means that human beings can truly change the world. It means that our actions have consequence.”