The Last Theorem

15 INTRODUCTION TO ONE (OR MORE) GRAND GALACTICS

The first thing we need to straighten out about this Grand Galactic person is whether in fact he was a he, or indeed a person, or, ultimately, “a” (rather than some fraction of “a”) Grand Galactic.

None of those questions has an easy answer. So what we’re going to do here is, we’re going to ignore the facts and settle for answers that are no problem for us to deal with, apart from their being just plain wrong. First, we will say that this person is really a person, in spite of also being a part of that larger “person” that was all the Grand Galactics combined.

There were Grand Galactics all over the place, from the galaxy’s accelerating fringes to its relatively motionless core, and just about everywhere in between. How many Grand Galactics were there? That’s also a meaningless question. There were many, many of them, but when you came right down to it, the many were also one, because whenever he chose, every Grand Galactic was instantly merged with any or every other.

As you have noticed, we just arbitrarily assigned gender to the Grand Galactics’ pronoun. Don’t assume from this that they practiced sexual intercourse in any sense understandable by a human being. They didn’t. It is just that we can’t go on with that “it” or “he” or “they” business forever, so we just cut the Gordian knot and made him a “he.”

We have just taken one rather large liberty. Let’s take another. Let’s give “him” a name. We’ll call him “Bill.” (Not Bill. “Bill.” It is a major liberty that we have taken, and we should acknowledge that we know it to be so by the use of the quotation marks.)

Now, what else would it be useful for us to know about the Grand Galactics at this time?

For example, would it be helpful to know how big they are? Or at least, since one node of Grand Galactics may be thousands, or billions, of light-years from some particular other node, how they measure distance?

Let’s assume it would indeed be helpful, but we must also recognize that, as with all questions about the Grand Galactics, the answer is going to be complicated. Start with the fact that the Grand Galactics don’t like the kind of arbitrary units of measurement human beings use. When you track those down, they are always based on some human value, such as the distance from a man’s fingertip to his armpit, or some calculated fraction of the distance from a pole to the equator on the particular planet that humans chance to occupy. Grand Galactic measurements are always made on the Planck scale, which is actually quite tiny. The measure of a single Planck unit is 1.616 × 10^-35 meters. The easiest way to understand how little that is is to remember that it’s so small it is impossible to measure anything smaller.

(Why impossible? Because you can’t measure anything you can’t see, and nothing can be seen without employing those light-carrying particles called photons. And any photon that was powerful enough to illuminate a Planck-scale distance would be so extremely powerful—and thus so extremely massive—that it would immediately transform itself into a black hole. The word “impossible” is sometimes taken as a challenge. In this case, though, it’s just a fact.)

So to measure anything in any of the three dimensions, whether it’s the circumference of an electron or the diameter of the universe itself, Grand Galactics simply count the number of Planck distances along a line from point A to point B.

That is invariably a large number, but that’s all right with the Grand Galactics. Looked at in one way, they are pretty large numbers themselves.

So, having found ways of at least identifying the un-understandable, let’s get back to that much simpler being, Ranjit Subramanian.

When Ranjit was quite young, his highly ecumenical father encouraged him to read some rather strange books, one of which, by a writer named James Branch Cabell, was about the nature of writing and writers. (For a time Ganesh Subramanian thought that might be a career choice for his son.) What some would-be writers were trying to say to the world, Cabell wrote, was, “I am pregnant with words, and I must have lexicological parturition or I die.”

And, curiously, that is almost exactly the condition Ranjit now felt himself to be in.

For days now Ranjit had been pleading for help, shouting into the empty hallways, explaining, though no one seemed to be listening, that he had something that absolutely had to be communicated to a journal at once. There were no answers. Even the limping old man was now just putting Ranjit’s meals inside the door and limping away as fast as he could.

So when Ranjit heard the old man’s step-slide coming along the empty corridors, he felt little interest, except that this time there was, along with it, the rap-tap-tap of the footsteps of someone who wasn’t limping at all. A moment later Ranjit’s cell door opened. The old man was there, but deferentially a step or two behind another man—a man who wore an expression of shock and dismay on a face whose lineaments Ranjit knew as well as he knew his own. “Sweet God Almighty, Ranj,” Gamini Bandara said wonderingly, “is that really you?”

Of all the questions Ranjit might have asked this unexpected visitor from his past, he chose the simplest. “What are you doing here, Gamini?”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m going to get you out of here, and if you think that was easy, you’re crazier than you look. Then we’ll get you to a dentist—what happened to your front teeth? Or, no, I suppose first you need to see a doctor—What?”

Ranjit was standing now, almost quivering with excitement. “Not a doctor! If you can get me out of here, get me to a computer!”

Gamini looked puzzled. “A computer? Well, sure, that can be arranged, but first we need to make sure you’re all right—”

“Damn it, Gamini!” Ranjit cried. “Can’t you understand what I’m saying? I think I’ve got the proof! I need a computer, and I need it right now! Do you have any idea how terrified I am that I’ll forget some part of the proof before I can get it refereed?”

Ranjit got the doctor. He got the computer, too—in fact got both of them at the same time, but not until Gamini had walked him out of his prison to where a helicopter waited, its vane turning over. As Ranjit climbed into the chopper, he saw a couple of men standing nearby. Squinty was one of them; Squinty looked astonished and worried but didn’t even gesture a good-bye. Then a twenty-minute downhill flight, among great mountains that wore brilliant caps of ice. In the helicopter Ranjit could not help turning to Gamini with questions, but this time it was Gamini who didn’t want to talk. “Later,” he said, nodding at the chopper pilot, who wore a uniform Ranjit had never seen before.

They landed at a real airport, a scant dozen meters from a plane—and not just any plane, Ranjit saw, but a BAB-2200, the fastest and, in some configurations, the most luxurious aircraft Boeing-Airbus had ever built, and it wore the blue globe-and-wreath United Nations insignia. Inside, it was even more so. Its seating was in leather armchairs. And its crew consisted of a pilot (wearing the uniform of a colonel in the American air force) and two very pretty flight attendants (wearing the same uniforms but with captain’s bars, and over the uniform fluffy white aprons). “Heading for home now, sir?” the pilot asked Gamini. He got a nod for an answer and immediately disappeared into the cockpit. One of the attendants led Ranjit to a chair (which, he discovered, swiveled) and belted him in. “That’s Jeannie,” Gamini informed him, while himself being belted into another chair. “She’s a doctor, too, so you better let her check you out—”

“The computer—” Ranjit started to object.

“Oh, you’ll get your damn computer, Ranj, but first we have to get airborne. It’ll just be a minute.”

By then the two women had already retreated to their fold-down seats against a bulkhead and, sure enough, the plane had begun to move. And as soon as the seat belt sign went off, the second of the attendants—“I’m Amy. Hi!”—was magicking a laptop out of the table next to Ranjit’s chair, while the one named Jeannie was approaching with stethoscope, blood pressure machine, and several other instruments at the ready.

Ranjit didn’t protest. He let the doctor poke and prod and listen as much as she liked while he himself slowly and clumsily typed out pages of a nearly six-page manuscript, pausing every couple of lines to ask Gamini if he could find the address of the magazine called Nature for him. “Their offices are in England somewhere.” Or just to scowl at the keyboard until memory at last told him what the next line should be. It was a slow process, but when Gamini ventured to ask him if he wanted anything to eat, Ranjit ferociously and unarguably told him to shut up. “Just give me ten minutes,” he demanded. “Oh, maybe half an hour at the most. I can’t stop now.”

It wasn’t ten minutes, of course. Wasn’t half an hour, either. It was well over an hour before Ranjit looked up, sighed, and said to Gamini, “I need to check everything, so I’d better send a copy to your house. Tell me your e-mail address.”

And when he had typed that in, he at last pushed the icon marked send and then sat back.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry to have been such a pest, but it was pretty important to me. Ever since I figured it out, five or six months ago, I’ve been terrified that I might forget some part of it before I could get it refereed.” He paused, suddenly licking his lips. “And one other thing. For a long time I’ve been thinking about real food. Do you have, say, any fresh fruit juice on this plane, any kind? And maybe something like a ham sandwich, or maybe a couple of scrambled eggs?”