The Last Theorem

8 SUMMER

By and large the school year had been a disappointment, but the summer began well for Ranjit Subramanian. Take his grades, for instance. When they were posted, he was not surprised at the gentleman’s C he got in philosophy (his grade in psychology didn’t matter, because he’d dropped it out of boredom) and not particularly surprised, either, though pleased, by his A in astronomy. But the A in statistics had been a total mystery. Ranjit could only conjecture that it was the result of the advanced reading he had picked up for himself when he couldn’t stand to see one more box plot or density histogram. The library had saved him, with advanced texts on such matters as stochastic methods and Bayesian analysis.

The bad part about the term’s end, of course, was that the astronomy course was over as well. But there was at least a postscript in the form of the party at Professor Vorhulst’s home.

Still, as he walked from the bus to the address that had been on his invitation, Ranjit was beginning to have second thoughts. In the first place, the neighborhood was refined and therefore unfamiliar to him because he and Gamini had avoided it in their browsings in the city. (Gamini’s family lived in this neighborhood, too.) Then, the Vorhulst home was not only bigger than any single-family home needed to be, it was surrounded by totally unnecessary columned verandas and set in an exquisitely maintained garden.

Ranjit took a deep breath before he pushed the gate open and climbed the couple of steps to the veranda. The first thing he noticed once inside the door was the cooling breeze from overhead fans. That was welcome in Colombo’s heat. More welcome still was catching sight of Joris Vorhulst himself, standing next to a woman almost as ostentatiously oversize as the house they lived in. The professor greeted Ranjit with a wink and a nod. “Ranjit,” he said, steering him down to where the woman stood, “we’re so glad you could come. I’d like you to meet Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, my mother.”

Unsure of what action to take in greeting a woman—and an exceedingly fair-skinned one—who towered over him by at least three or four centimeters and outmassed him by more kilos than that, Ranjit experimentally offered a small bow. Mevrouw Vorhulst was having none of that. She took his hand and held it. “My dear Ranjit, I am delighted to meet you. My son doesn’t have favorites in his classes, but if he did—please don’t let him know I said this—I’m sure you would be one of them. And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your father. A wonderful man. We worked together on one of the truce commissions, back when we needed truce commissions.”

Ranjit sent a quick glance to Dr. Vorhulst in the hope of getting some clue as to what he should be saying to this good-looking perfumed force of nature. He got no help there. The professor was already bantering with three or four new arrivals, but Mevrouw Vorhulst, well aware of Ranjit’s difficulty, helped him out. “Don’t waste your time with an old widow lady,” she advised. “There are quite a few nice-looking girls inside, not to mention things to eat and drink. There are even some of those horrid American sports drinks that Joris came back from California addicted to, but I would not myself recommend them.” She relinquished his hand with a final pat. “But you must join us for dinner one of these days, after Joris gets back from New York. He’ll be depressed. He always is after he’s tried one more time to get the UN to act on the Artsutanov lift. But of course,” she added, already turning toward the next guests, “you can’t entirely blame them, can you? People just haven’t learned how to play nicely together.”

Entering the house’s wide salon, Ranjit observed that there were indeed some nice-looking girls present, though most of them seemed to be already taken by one or more young men. He exchanged nods with three or four classmates, but what most interested him at that moment was the house itself. It was very little like his father’s modest home in Trincomalee. The floor was made of polished white cement, and the walls were punctuated with open doors leading out to the vast garden with its palms and frangipani and an inviting pool. As a precaution Ranjit had already eaten lunch, so the great spread of food the Vorhulsts had set out was superfluous. The American sports drink Mevrouw Vorhulst had spoken of he passed with a shudder, but was glad to find a supply of good old-fashioned Cokes. When he looked for an opener, a servant appeared from nowhere, whisked the bottle out of his hand, snapped the cap off, and emptied the soda into a tall glass, already iced, that also came from nowhere.

The servant left Ranjit blinking after him until, from another direction, a female voice said, “You were breaking his rice bowl, you know. If the guests opened their own Coke bottles, the beverage wallah would be out of a job. So, Ranjit, how are you?”

When he turned, he recognized the young Burgher woman from his unhappy first year’s sociology class, Mary—Martha—no, “Myra de Soyza,” she supplied. “We met in sociology last year, and it’s nice to see you again. I heard you were working with Fermat’s theorem. How is it going?”

It was not a question Ranjit had expected to be asked, especially by a young woman as good-looking as this one was. He gave her a noncommittal answer. “Pretty slowly, I’m afraid. I didn’t know you were interested in Fermat.”

She looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I’d have to say that you were the one who got me interested. After we heard that you’d stolen the math professor’s password—oh, are you surprised? But of course all of his classes heard about it. I think if the semester hadn’t been over, there would have been a movement to elect you class president.” She gave him a friendly smile. “At any rate, I couldn’t help wondering what would so obsess a person like you—is ‘obsession’ too strong a word?” Ranjit, who had long since come to terms with the technical description of his so-far-failed quest, shrugged. “Well,” she went on, “let’s just say I couldn’t help wondering what would account for your strong interest in trying to find a proof for Fermat’s claim. Wiles’s work was certainly not what Fermat had had in mind, was it? If only because nearly every step in Wiles comes from work somebody else did long after Fermat was dead and gone, and there was no way Fermat could have known—Oh, Ranjit, please be careful of your drink!”

Ranjit blinked and saw what she was talking about. He had been so taken aback by the turn the conversation had taken that he had allowed his Coke glass a dangerous tilt. He straightened it and took a quick swallow to clear his head. “What do you know about the Wiles proof?” he demanded, past the point of caring if he was being polite.

Myra de Soyza didn’t seem to mind. “Not a great deal, really. Just enough to get an idea of what it was all about. Certainly not as much as a real mathematician might. Do you know who Dr. Wilkinson is? From the Drexel Math Forum? I think his was the best and simplest explanation of what Wiles really accomplished.”

The thing that was now paralyzing Ranjit’s vocal cords was that he himself, in the days when he had just begun to try to comprehend the Wiles proof, had been really grateful for that same Dr. Wilkinson’s analysis.

He realized that he must have made some sort of vocal sound, because the de Soyza woman was looking at him inquiringly. “I mean,” he clarified, “are you telling me that you can follow Wilkinson’s gloss?”

“Of course I can follow it,” she told him sweetly. “He was very clear. I just had to read his explanation—well,” she admitted, “five times, actually. And had to look up quite a lot in the reference books. And I don’t doubt that I missed a lot, but I do think I got a sort of approximate understanding.” She looked at him silently for a moment before she asked, “Do you know what I might do if I were you?”

With total truth Ranjit said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, I wouldn’t bother with any part of Wiles. I’d take a look at what other mathematicians had done in, say, the first thirty or forty years after Fermat died. You know. I’m talking about work that Fermat might have heard some anticipations of, or perhaps even worked on himself. And—Ah,” she said, with an abrupt change of subject, looking past Ranjit’s right shoulder, “and here is my long-lost Brian Harrigan, with my long delayed champagne.”

The long-lost Brian Harrigan was another of those outsize Americans, and he came trailing a pretty girl of about twenty. He gave Ranjit a one-microsecond glance. Then, “Sorry, hon,” he said to Myra de Soyza, talking through the space occupied by Ranjit Subramanian as though it were empty, “but I got to talking to, uh, Devika? She more or less grew up in this house and she promised to show me around. It’s got some great design features—have you noticed the cement floors? So if you don’t mind…”

“Go,” Myra said. “Just give me the champagne if it isn’t warm by now, and then go.” And he went, arm in arm with the girl, who hadn’t said a word to either Ranjit or Myra de Soyza.

The best part of Brian Harrigan’s departure was that it left Ranjit in exclusive possession of the company of this surprising, perplexing, altogether quite unusual young woman. (Although Ranjit was pretty sure she wasn’t all that young. At least two or three years older than himself, he conjectured. Maybe even more than that.) He did not regard their tête-à-tête as a romantic event. He was too ill-informed on boy-girl dating to take that leap, and anyway there was the matter of this Brian Harrigan, who routinely addressed her as “hon.” Given a hint or two, de Soyza filled in part of the Brian Harrigan portrait for him. Turned out he wasn’t American after all. He was Canadian. Worked for one of those world-girdling hotel chains, currently doing some sort of planning for another luxury hotel on one of Trincomalee’s beaches. She did not, however, supply the one datum about which Ranjit was most curious. Still, he told himself, it really was none of his business whether they were sleeping together.

When Ranjit picked up on the name Trincomalee, de Soyza looked embarrassed. “Oh, of course. I didn’t think. That’s your home. Do you know the hotel Brian was talking about?”

Ranjit admitted that about all he knew about Trinco’s tourist hotels was that they were really expensive. But then she asked him about his father’s temple, about which she, again astonishingly, seemed to know a great deal. She knew that it was built on what was called Shiva’s holy hill, knew that it had—or at least the big temple that the Portuguese had sacked in 1624 had—been one of the richest houses of worship in all of Southeast Asia, with the vast stores of gold, silk, jewels, and every other sort of thing that the monks had amassed over its thousand-year history. Knew even about that terrible 1624 day when the Portuguese commander, Constantine de Sa de Menzes, ordered the temple’s head priest to strip the temple of everything of value and deliver the treasures to the Portuguese ships in the harbor, because if he didn’t, de Sa would turn his ship’s cannon on the temple. The head priest had had no choice. He did as ordered…and then de Sa cannonaded the temple into rubble anyway.

“Huh,” Ranjit said when she had stopped. “You really know a lot about that time, don’t you?”

She looked embarrassed. “I suppose, but I imagine what I know isn’t quite the same as you do. Actually, my ancestors were generally some of the looters.”

For that Ranjit had no better response than another “Huh.” They had strolled out into the garden with its frangipani and flowering ginger, and were sitting companionably side by side in a cluster of palms. They were within sight of the Vorhulsts’ vast swimming pool, where a few of Ranjit’s classmates, somehow having obtained the right swimsuits, were playing aquatic volleyball. One of the Vorhulst servants had brought refills of Myra’s champagne and Ranjit’s Coke. Other guests had greeted Myra as they’d strolled past, and one or two had said hello to Ranjit as well. Still, de Soyza showed no interest in ending their tête-à-tête. Ranjit had no interest, either. Which was, he reflected, a bit curious, since he had seldom been willing to protract any other chat with a young woman.

De Soyza, Ranjit discovered, had traveled all over the island of Sri Lanka with her parents, and loved every centimeter of it. And was astonished to hear that Ranjit had seldom been away from Trincomalee, apart from his present time in Colombo and a few school trips. “But you’ve never been to Kandy? Or seen the way the tappers climb the trees to get the palm wine they make toddy from?” And no, in each case the answer was the same. He hadn’t.

At about that time Mevrouw Vorhulst passed by, making the rounds to ensure her guests were well cared for. “You two seem to be doing all right,” she offered, peering in at them. “Is there anything I can get you?”

“Not a thing, Aunt Bea,” de Soyza said. “It’s a fine party.” And then when Mevrouw Vorhulst had moved on, she responded to the question in Ranjit’s look. “Well, all we Burghers know one another, of course, and Aunt Bea really is some kind of a relative. When I was little, I spent about as much time here as I did in my own house, and Joris was the big brother I never had. Made sure I didn’t drown when he took me to the beach, and got me back home in time for my nap.” Then she noticed the signs of puzzlement on Ranjit’s face. “Is something wrong?”

Apologetically he said, “I’m just a little confused. You called her Bea. I thought her name was—what is it?—Mevrouw.”

Myra was polite enough not to smile very much. “Mevrouw just means Mrs. in Dutch. Her name is Beatrix, all right.” Then she glanced at her watch and looked concerned. “But I don’t mean to keep you from your friends. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather take a dip in the pool? The Vorhulsts keep a selection of bathing suits in the changing rooms….”

He was sure, no doubt of that. How long they would have gone on talking, Ranjit could not have said. Myra de Soyza didn’t seem in any hurry to terminate it, but that was taken care of, sometime later, by the nearly forgotten Brian Harrigan. He reminded them of his existence by peering into, then entering, their little palm garden. He looked annoyed. “I’ve been all over this place trying to find you,” he told Myra.

She stood up and gave him a smile. “It looked to me as though you had plenty of company,” she said.

“You mean the girl who was showing me around? She was very helpful. It’s a grand old house. Walls three feet thick, all sand and coral and plaster, and what would they need air-conditioning for? But did you forget we had a dinner reservation?”

Myra had forgotten, and apologized for it, and told Ranjit how much she had enjoyed their talk, and was gone.

Ranjit didn’t leave the party. He stayed on, but it didn’t seem to be as much fun as it had been. He considered, and rejected, the idea of a dip in the pool; spent a little time in the cluster of students that had formed around Joris Vorhulst, which was discussing pretty much the whole range of things they had already discussed in class; sat in for a bit with a handful of guests who were watching, and talking about, the news program on the TV in the little tent by the garden wall. The news, of course, wasn’t amusing. In Korea some of those troublesome North Koreans had, apparently deliberately, released a pack of vicious and perhaps rabid dogs near the boundary between north and south. Nobody had been bitten. Three of the dogs died when one stepped on a land mine, and the rest were quickly machine-gunned by a Republic of South Korea guard detachment, and everybody agreed that something needed to be done about North Korea.

Actually, Ranjit found it surprisingly easy to have conversations with these strangers—on the parlous state of the world, on the need for Artsutanov skyhooks to be deployed so ordinary people could have some hope of traveling in space, on what nice people the Vorhulsts were, on a dozen other topics. What finally put an end to it was when the guests began to thin out. Ranjit took that to mean that it was time for him to go as well.

He had enjoyed the party, especially the first part of it, and he had no doubt that what had made it so good was the meeting with Myra de Soyza.

On the way back to the campus Ranjit found himself thinking—not in any boy-girl way, of course—about what an interesting person Myra de Soyza was. And wondering what the best way would be to go about murdering Brian Harrigan.

All the same, Ranjit was glad when he got back to Trincomalee for the summer. Ganesh Subramanian had assumed his son would want to spend the time on fresh attacks on that bafflingly elusive Fermat conundrum. He was only partly right. Ranjit hadn’t forgotten Fermat’s theorem. It kept popping up in his mind at inopportune moments, more often than ever since Myra de Soyza had reawakened the memories. But each time it did, Ranjit did his best to dismiss it. Ranjit Subramanian knew when he was licked.

In any case he had other things to occupy his mind. One of the monks had told him that, down on the beach, where they were refurbishing one of Trincomalee’s older tourist hotels, vacationing college students could get easy jobs that paid good money. Ranjit checked. There were such jobs. He got one, and for the first time in his eighteen-year-old life, Ranjit Subramanian was able to pay his own way in the world.

The job was, as promised, not at all difficult. Its technical title was “supply expediter.” Its duties were, one, to make a note of the contents every time a truckload of material arrived; two, to run and tell the foreman at once if any one of those trucks attempted to leave the premises with part of the goods still on board; and, three, each morning upon arriving at the workplace to quickly scan all the stacks of building material that had arrived the day before to make sure that no large fraction of them had disappeared during the night. The private security guards hired by the hotel corporation had orders to assist him whenever necessary. They were well motivated to do a good job, too, because they had been informed that any losses due to pilfering would come out of their pay.

And Ranjit also had four small but very active assistants of his own.

They weren’t on the hotel company’s payroll, and neither they nor their mother had figured in Ranjit’s plans for the summer. In fact, Ranjit had acquired them one day when old Ganesh Subramanian had given his son a couple of sacks of food that his cook had said would spoil if not eaten soon. “Take them to Mrs. Kanakaratnam,” he said. “You know, Kirthis Kanakaratnam’s wife. You remember Kirthis? He was arrested in Colombo for possession of what they called stolen goods?” Memory refreshed, Ranjit nodded. “I’m afraid the family is having a rather hard time,” his father went on. “I’m letting them use my old guest house. You remember where it is, I’m sure? Well, just drop these off for me, please.”

Ranjit had no objection. Had no trouble finding the place, either. One of his earliest playmates, the son of a railroad engineer who had done odd jobs for the temple, had lived there when Ranjit was small, and Ranjit remembered the house well.

It had not changed much. The little garden the railway man’s wife had kept up in the front yard was now partly used for growing vegetables and partly reverted to weeds. The building itself, Ranjit thought, could use a fresh paint job. It was smaller than Ranjit had remembered, though, three little rooms with a privy out back and a pumped well at the farthest edge of the property.

The house, however, was empty. Ranjit debated the propriety of going inside when no one was at home, but he couldn’t just drop the food on the ground. He knocked on the unlocked door, called a greeting, and then entered.

The first room he came to was the kitchen—propane stove; sink with no faucets but a drain and a large plastic water jug, nearly empty; table and chairs; not much else. Just off it was a smaller room, evidently a bedroom for someone because of the couch with the pillows and the pile of folded sheets at one end of it. And the third room was the largest yet, but also the most crowded: two cribs, two cots, three or four chests of drawers, a couple of chairs…

And something else.

Something was different from the way it had been when Ranjit had been there as a boy. Then he saw that in the corner of the children’s room there was a trace of something on the wall, and when he looked more carefully, he saw that it was a nearly obliterated religious poster, written in Sanskrit.

Well, of course! This was the house’s northeast corner, and this had once been the home’s puja corner, the sacrosanct space for devotion and prayer that every gods-fearing Hindu household possessed. But what had become of it now? Where was the idol of Shiva—of any one of the gods, anyway—on its little stand? Where was the incense container or the plate to hold flowers for the offering or any other of the ritual necessities for worship? There was nothing! It had been a good many years since Ranjit had thought of himself as in any sense religious, but when he looked on the heap of washed but unfolded children’s clothing in what had once been the home’s immaculate and holy puja space, he did feel a sense of, well, almost revulsion. It just wasn’t the way a proper Hindu family, atheist or not, should conduct itself.

When he heard voices approaching from outside and went out to introduce himself, he became less sure that this was a proper Hindu family. Its head, the wife of Kirthis Kanakaratnam, did not dress like a proper Hindu woman. She was wearing men’s overalls and a pair of men’s boots, and she was pulling a child’s coaster wagon that held, along with some smaller items, two of those big plastic jugs of water and one small female child. There were three more children, a ten-or twelve-year-old girl bearing another girl, the tiniest one yet, on her back and a boy, gamely shouldering a canvas sack of something. “Hello,” Ranjit said in general to them all. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian, Ganesh Subramanian’s son, and he sent me down with some stuff for you. It’s inside on the table. You must be Mrs. Kanakaratnam.”

The woman didn’t deny the charge. She dropped the handle of the cart and cast a glance at the sleeping passenger to make sure she was still sleeping. Then she held out her hand to be shaken. “I am Kanakaratnam’s wife,” she agreed. “Thanks. Your father has been very good to us. Can I offer you a drink of water? We don’t have any ice, but you must be thirsty after carrying that stuff all the way down here.”

He was, and gratefully drank the tumblerful she poured him out of one of the jugs. (All of their drinking water, she explained, had to be portaged in. The long-ago Boxing Day tsunami had flooded their well water with salt from the bay, and it had never recovered. It was all right for washing and for some kinds of cooking, but not to quench thirst.)

Mrs. Kanakaratnam, he observed, was a woman in her thirties, apparently healthy, not unattractive, not particularly stupid, either, but seriously at odds with a world that had turned against her. Another thing about Mrs. Kanakaratnam was that she didn’t especially like to be called Mrs. Kanakaratnam. She explained that both she and her husband really had not liked being stuck in this tropical nowhere that was called Sri Lanka. They wanted to be where things were happening—which was to say, probably America. But they had had to settle for another country because the American embassy had turned down their request for visas. They had immigrated to a different place entirely—it was Poland—and then that hadn’t worked out, either. “So,” she said, her tone something close to defiant, “we did the best we could. We took American names. He wouldn’t let me call him Kirthis anymore. He took the name George, and I was Dorothy. Dot for short.”

“It’s a nice name,” Ranjit volunteered. He didn’t actually have an opinion about the name. He simply wanted to cool down the hostility in her voice.

Apparently he was successful, because she became chatty, explaining that they had given the same sorts of names to the children when they came along. It seemed that for a time Dot Kanakaratnam had popped one out in every even-numbered year. First Tiffany, the oldest at eleven, then the only boy, Harold, now nine, and Rosie and Betsy, seven and five. In a very offhand way, she mentioned that her husband was now in jail; she announced the news in such a manner that Ranjit thought it best to reserve judgment.

When he did have a chance to make a judgment, Ranjit thought they were reasonably nice kids, sometimes sweet and sometimes entertainingly impudent, and always working hard at the tricky and difficult, but amusing, business of growing up. Ranjit found himself liking them. So much so that before he left the Kanakaratnam house he volunteered to take the children to the beach on his next day off.

That was forty-eight hours in the future. Ranjit spent a fair share of that time wondering whether he could handle the responsibilities that went with it. For instance, what if one of them had to, you know, go?

In the event, Tiffany took over without being asked. When Rosie had to pee, Tiffany directed her into the gentle surf, where the massive dilution afforded by the Bay of Bengal took care of the sanitary requirements. And when Harold had to do the other thing, Tiffany led him by the hand to one of the construction workers’ portable toilets without bothering Ranjit about it at all. Between times they marched splashingly around the shallows together, Ranjit leading the procession as gander of the group, the kids his gosling train. They lunched on sandwiches swiped from the workers’ buffet. (The workers didn’t seem to mind. They liked the kids, too.) In the hottest hours of the day the children napped in the palms above the high tide mark, and when Tiffany ordered a taking-it-easy time, they sat and listened while Ranjit told them wonderful stories about Mars and the moon and the great brood of Jovian satellites.

Of course, in other parts of the world things were less amiable.

In Israeli school yards ten-year-old Palestinian girls were blowing up themselves and everybody around them. In Paris four husky North Africans demonstrated their feelings about French politics by killing two Eiffel Tower guards and hurling eleven tourists off the top platform. Things just as bad were going on in Venice, Italy, and Belgrade, Serbia, and even worse ones in Reykjavik, Iceland…and those few of the world leaders whose own countries didn’t happen to be in flames—yet—were at their wits’ ends trying to find some way of dealing with it.

Ranjit, however, didn’t really care….

Well, no. He cared quite a lot about such things when he thought about them, but he did his best not to think about them very much.

In this he somewhat resembled the giddy revelers in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.” His world, like theirs, was terminally unwell. But meanwhile the sun was warm and the children were thrilled when he showed them how to capture star turtles and try to get them to race, and told them stories. The kids enjoyed hearing Ranjit’s stories very nearly as much as he enjoyed telling them.

Funnily enough, at that same time some, or all (it was rarely possible to say which), of the Grand Galactics were trying to teach a wholly other phylum of living things a somewhat similar lesson.

These other creatures of course were not turtles, though they did have turtlish hard shells and turtlishly low IQs. What the Grand Galactics were trying to teach them was the use of tools.

This was one of the many, many matters that were the self-imposed concerns of the Grand Galactics. A human might think of it as an attempt to raise the standards of the galaxy’s living things.

Their idea was that if the hard shells learned to use a lever, a hook, and a striking stone, they might be taking the first steps toward dawning intelligence. And if that happened, then under the micromanaging tutelage of the Grand Galactics they might go further. Indeed, they might go all the way to primo technology, without ever having discovered such unwanted distractions as subjugation, exploitation, or war.

Well, this program would take a long, long time. But the Grand Galactics had plenty of time to spend, and they thought it was worth a try. They considered that it would be worth their while if, in the long future history of the universe, just one species could manage to evolve all the way to matter transmission and space colonies without having learned the art of murder along the way. The Grand Galactics were assuredly intelligent and powerful. But sometimes they were also naïve.