The Last Theorem

17 HEAVEN

As the BAB-2200 rapidly taxied toward a gate, Captain-Doctor Jeannie delivered her verdict: What Ranjit really needed was rest, kindly care, and food, enough food to put back the eight or ten kilos of body mass that his extraordinary-rendition diet had taken from him, although (she added) it wouldn’t hurt for him to spend the next couple days in a hospital, either. The party waiting to greet him at the gate, however, vetoed that. That party was only one person, but that person was Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, and she was not in a mood to be contradicted. The place for Ranjit to recuperate, Mevrouw Vorhulst declared, was not some impersonal factory that generated quantities of medical care but very little love. No. The right place for Ranjit to regain his strength was a comfortable, caring home. Hers, for instance.

So it was. Beatrix Vorhulst was certainly right about her promise of great care, too, because at the moment Ranjit arrived, every resource of their quite resourceful household was devoted to him. He had a room as vast and cool as his hottest and sweatiest prison night could have imagined. He had three wonderful meals a day—no, more like a dozen of them, because every time he closed his eyes for a moment, he woke to find a perfect apple or banana or icy-cold pineapple spear waiting beside his bed. Better still, in the long run he won his argument with the doctors that Gamini had ordered to double-check him. True, he first had to convince them that for all the time of his captivity he had been up and about every day without harm, or at least every day when he wasn’t so bruised and beat-up that walking hurt more than it was worth. But then he had the freedom of that grand house and its grander gardens. Including the swimming pool, and what a delight it was to backstroke dreamily across that gently cool water, with the hot sun blessing him from the sky and the palms swaying overhead. And he had access to the news.

That was not altogether a good thing. His time without access to print or television had not prepared him for the details of all the things that had been going on around the planet Earth—the murders, the riots, the car bombings, the wars.

None of those were the worst of the bad news, though. That came when Gamini looked in for a minute before leaving Sri Lanka for some more urgent (but, of course, unspecified) errand. As he was actually at the door to leave, he paused. “There’s one thing I didn’t tell you, Ranj. It’s about your father.”

“Oh, right,” Ranjit said remorsefully. “I’d better call him right away.”

But Gamini was shaking his head. “Wish you could,” he said. “The thing is, he had a stroke. He’s dead.”

There was only one person in the world Ranjit wanted to speak to at that moment, and he had him on the phone before Gamini was out of the Vorhulst house. That was the old monk Surash, and he was overjoyed to hear Ranjit’s voice. Less so, of course, to discuss the death of Ganesh Subramanian, but curiously not particularly sad about it, either. “Yes, Ranjit,” he said, “your father was moving heaven and earth to find you, and I think he just wore out. Anyway, he came back from another visit to the police complaining he felt tired, and the next morning he was dead in his bed. He had not been in really good health for some time, you know.”

“Actually, I didn’t know,” Ranjit said sorrowfully. “He never said.”

“He did not wish to worry you—and, Ranjit, you must not be worried. His jiva will be greeted with honor, and his funeral was good. Since you had been taken from us, I was the one who said the prayers, and made sure there were flowers and rice balls in his coffin, and when he had been burned, I myself carried his ashes to the sea. Death is not the end, you know.”

“I know,” Ranjit said, more for the monk’s sake than his own.

“He may never even need to be born again. And if he is, I am sure it will be as someone or some creature near you. And, oh, Ranjit, when you can travel, please come and see us. And do you have a lawyer? There is a little bit in your father’s estate. Of course it all goes to you, but there are documents to file.”

That troubled Ranjit. He had no lawyer. But when he mentioned it to Mevrouw Vorhulst, she said that wasn’t a problem, and from then on he did have a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, either, but a partner in Gamini’s father’s firm, whose name was Nigel De Saram. What troubled Ranjit a good deal more was the stabbing guilt he felt. He hadn’t known of his father’s death, and the reason for that was that he had not bothered to ask.

Oh, sure, he told himself, he had been full of a thousand other concerns.

But if it had been the other way around, would Ranjit have slipped his father’s mind?

Not counting servants, Mevrouw Vorhulst was his only visitor for the first few days, but then he argued (and the doctors had to agree) that no stress any visitor might cause him would come anywhere near the stress caused by strong young jailers hitting him with clubs. The barriers were reduced. The next morning, while Ranjit was experimenting with some of the Vorhulsts’ exercise machines, the Vorhulsts’ butler came into the gym, cleared his throat, and said, “You have a visitor, sir.”

Ranjit’s mind had been far away. “Have there been any messages for me?” he asked.

The butler sighed. “No, sir. If any messages come, they will be brought to you at once, as you requested. Now Dr. De Saram would like to see you. Shall I show him in?”

Ranjit quickly put on one of the Vorhulsts’ infinite supply of dressing gowns. Lawyer De Saram quickly took charge. He didn’t seem very junior to Ranjit—he was maybe fifty or sixty, maybe more—and he was clearly good at what he did. He didn’t have to be told about the bequest from Ranjit’s father. Although he had been asked to handle Ranjit’s affairs barely forty-eight hours before, he had already established Ranjit’s existence with the appropriate Trincomalee court and had a pretty good idea of the value of the bequest. “Not quite twenty million rupees, Mr. Subramanian,” he said, “but not far under it, either—or, at the current rate of exchange, about ten thousand U.S. dollars. The bulk of it is two pieces of property, your father’s home and a smaller house that is currently unoccupied.”

“I know the house,” Ranjit told him. “Is there anything I have to do?”

“Not just now,” De Saram told him, “although there is one possibility that you may wish to give some thought to. Dr. Bandara himself would have wished to do this for you, but, as you know, he is involved in some highly classified matters with the United Nations.”

“I do know, but I don’t know much,” Ranjit said.

“Of course. The thing is that you might normally have a claim for damages against the people who, ah, prevented you from coming home for so long, but—”

Ranjit said, “I know. We aren’t to talk about those people.”

“Exactly so,” De Saram declared, sounding relieved. “However, there is another avenue you may wish to take. It would be possible for you to bring an action against the cruise line company on the grounds that they should not have allowed their ship to be taken over by pirates. That would not be for as large a sum as the other, of course, both because their responsibility is a little harder to establish and also because their solvency is not very strong—”

“No, wait a minute,” Ranjit said. “They had their ship stolen, which I was on because of my own stupidity, and now I should sue them for letting it happen? That doesn’t sound fair.”

For the first time De Saram gave him a friendly grin. “Dr. Bandara said you would say that,” he announced. “Now I think my car should be about ready….”

And indeed just then there was a knock on the door. It was Vass, the butler, to announce that that was the case. And then, before Ranjit could say anything, the butler addressed him directly: “There are no messages for you, sir,” he added. “And, if I may—I didn’t want to trouble you before—we were all deeply saddened to learn of the loss of your father.”

It wasn’t that what the butler said reminded Ranjit of his father’s death. He didn’t need reminding. The loss was part of him, day and night, a wound that did not heal.

The worst thing about death was that it irrevocably ended communication. Ranjit was left with a long list of things he should have said to his father and never had. Now that the opportunity was lost, all those unsaid expressions of love and respect were silting up inside Ranjit’s heart.

And, of course, there was no more cheer to be found in the news. Fighting had flared up between Ecuador and Colombia, new squabbles were arising over the division of Nile water, and North Korea had filed a complaint before the Security Council accusing China of diverting rain clouds from Korean rice paddies to their own.

Nothing had changed. It was just that the world population was now irretrievably one person short.

But there was one thing he could do—should have done long since—and by his sixth day as a guest in the Vorhulst home, Ranjit finally demanded, and got, a copy of that frantic communication he had rushed off from the plane. He studied it as critically, as demandingly and as judgingly, as any freshman composition teacher had ever looked over a student’s final term paper. If the kind of mistakes that might disqualify him were there, he was going to find them. He was crushed to discover that there indeed were some—two of them on his first look, then four, then one or two additional passages that weren’t entirely wrong but did seem to be not entirely clear, either.

Ranjit had excuses. It was all due to that last stretch of seven or eight weeks, when he had at last completed the proof in his mind—all that he could manage to complete, since he was lacking paper, ink, or computer—and only kept rehearsing it, step by step, terrified that he might forget some crucial step.

The question was, what to do about those mistaken bits?

Ranjit worried over that question for all of one day and much of that night. Should he send the magazine a list of corrections? That would seem the sensible thing to do…but then Ranjit’s pride got in the way, because the “mistakes” were really rather trivial, things that any decent mathematician would spot at once and almost as quickly see how to repair. And he had a horror of seeming to beg.

He did not send another communication to Nature, though most nights after that, while trying to go to sleep, he all over again worried the question of whether he should have.

Ranjit wished he had a better idea of what a publication such as Nature did with submissions like the one he had sent them. He was pretty sure that if they had any idea of publishing it, their first step would be to send copies of it to three or four—or more—experts in that particular area to see that there weren’t any glaring mistakes in it.

How long could that take?

Ranjit didn’t know. What he did know was that it had already taken a lot longer than he would have liked.

So every time the butler knocked on the door to announce a visitor, Ranjit’s hopes soared, and every time the butler announced that visitor’s trivial errand, his hopes crashed again.