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around telling people this thing individually? Why not publish it? Post it to your blog. Or put it on a T-shirt.”
    “It has crossed my mind to publish it,” Tessimond said. “It emerged from my academic research. We usually publish our academic research, don’t we?”
    “You didn’t because?”
    “I didn’t see the point. Not just in publication, but in academia. Really, I realised, what I wanted to do was: travel.” He looked through the wide glass windows of the coffee shop at the shoppers traversing and retraversing the esplanade. Markets, temples, warehouses and wide paved streets. Tree-shaded squares where the bombastic statues of dead magnates and generals stood. Overhead, two clouds closed upon one another, shutting in front of the sun like a lizard’s horizontal eyelids. What is it the poet said? Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a little more small-talk, before he finally told me what he’d told my colleagues. It came in under five minutes, as he said. Rather less, in fact. He said: “I read your work. It’s very elegantly done. Very elegant solutions to the dark energy problem; a real... I was going to say intuitive sense of the geometry of the cosmos.”
    “Were going to say?”
    “Well, it’s—I’m afraid it’s wrong. So your intuition has led you astray. But it’s a very bold attempt at...”
    I interrupted him with: “wrong?”
    “I’m afraid so. I’m afraid you’re coming at the question from the wrong angle. Not just you, of course. The whole scientific community.”
    I laughed at this, but, I hope, not unkindly. Marija stirred. She twitched her little mitten-clad hands like she was boxing in her sleep, and fell motionless again. “You’d better let the Nobel Committee know,” I said, “before it’s too late!” It was all too absurd.
    The late autumn sky was as blue as water, and as cold.
    “Five minutes, you said,” I told him, nodding in the direction of the shop clock. “And you’ve had more than one of those five already.”
    He breathed in, and out, calmly enough. Then he said: “Why is the universe so big?”
    “ Why questions rarely lead physicists anywhere good. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why was there a big bang? Who knows? Not a well-formulated question.”
    He put his head on one side, and tried again. “How did the universe get so big?”
    “That’s better,” I said, indulgently. “It got so big because fourteen billion years ago the big bang happened, and that one consequence of that event was the expansion of spacetime—on a massive scale.”
    “All these galaxies and stars moving apart from one another like dots on an inflating balloon,” he said. “Only the surface of the balloon is 2D and we have to make the conceptual leap to imagining a 3D surface.”
    “Just so,” I told him. “As every schoolkid knows.”
    “Still: why expansion? Why should the big bang result in the dilation of space?”
    I took another sip from my chocolate. “Three minutes to go, and you’ve tripped yourself into another why question.”
    “Let me ask you about time,” he said, unruffled. “We appear to be moving through time. We go in one direction. We cannot go backwards, we can only go forwards.”
    I shrugged. “According to maths, we could go backwards. The equations of physics are reversible. It just so happens that we go in one direction only. It’s no big deal.”
    “Quite right,” he said, nodding. “The science says we ought to be able to go in any direction. Yet we never,” he said, stroking his own cheek, “ do . That’s strange, isn’t it?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “I can’t say it bothers me.”
    “Time is manifold, like space. We can move in any direction in space. But we can only move in one direction in time.”
    “This really is kindergarten stuff,” I said.
    “What moves an object through the manifold of space?”
    I was debating with myself whether to humour