The Last Theorem

24 CALIFORNIA

The American East Coast might consider itself the center of power, of government, or of culture. (Of course, that would depend on which East Coast city you were talking about, New York, Washington, or Boston.) But in one very important way it was definitely inferior to the other edge of the North American continent. Oh, it wasn’t the palm trees and the flowers blooming everywhere that thrilled the Subramanians. After all, Myra and Ranjit were Lankans, and a riot of exotic vegetation was their natural ambience. No, the best thing about California was that it was warm! It never got painfully cold, especially around the Los Angeles area, where it wasn’t ever really cold at all.

So Pasadena, where Ranjit discovered he was based, was a great place to live. Well, it was if you didn’t count the possibility of earthquakes. Or wildfires that could flatten a whole subdivision of homes in a dry year. Or floods that could pull down some other subdivision, one that had been built on precipitous lots because all the flat lots had been built on already, floods that were always ready to do this in a year when some relatively minor fire had killed off enough of the brush to weaken the ground’s hold on the substrate.

Never mind. Those things might not happen. At least they might not before the Subramanian family had packed up and gone somewhere else. Meanwhile it was a splendid place to raise a child. Myra happily pushed Natasha’s carriage through the local supermarket, along with all the other mothers doing the same, and thought she had never been so lucky in her life.

Ranjit, on the other hand, had some doubts.

Oh, he loved the good parts of their life in Southern California as much as Myra did. Took pleasure in their excursions to the points of interest that were so unlike anything in Sri Lanka, the La Brea tar pits in the heart of the city, where millennia of ancient beasts had been trapped and preserved for humans to wonder over well into this twenty-first century. The movie studios, with their brilliantly engineered rides and exhibits. (Myra had been a little doubtful about taking Tashy to such a chancy place, but in the event, Natasha chortled and loved it.) Griffith Observatory with its seismographs and telescopes and its grand picnic area overlooking the city.

What he didn’t like was his job.

It gave him everything T. Orion Bledsoe had promised, that was true, and even a fair number of things Ranjit hadn’t expected at all. He had his own private office, which was spacious (three meters by more than five) if windowless (because, like all the rest of this installation, it was nearly twenty meters underground) and furnished with a large desk and a large leather armchair for his own use and several less pricey other chairs, at a clear oak table, for guests and meetings. And no fewer than three separate computer terminals, with unlimited access to almost everything. Now all it took was pushing a few keys for Ranjit to get his personal copies of just about every mathematical journal there was in the world. Not only did he get the journals themselves—hard copies when there were hard copies to begin with, electronic copies when that was all the original “publishers” had produced. He also received translations—horribly expensive, but paid for by the agency, out of their apparently limitless bank account—of at least the abstracts from those journals that happened to be in languages Ranjit had no hope of ever comprehending.

What was wrong was that he had nothing to do.

The first few days were busy enough, because Ranjit had to be walked through the places where red tape was generated so that they could generate Ranjit’s own contribution to the supply—identity badge to prepare, documents to sign, all the unavoidable flotsam of any large enterprise in the twenty-first century. Then nothing.

By the end of the first month, Ranjit, who was never grumpy, was waking up grumpy almost every workday morning. There was a cure. A prescribed dose of Natasha, along with one of Myra, usually cleared the symptoms up before he finished breakfast, but then by the time he came home for dinner, he was morose again. Apologetic about it, of course: “I don’t mean to take it out on Tashy and you, Myra, but I’m just wasting time here. No one will tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. When I find someone to ask, he just gets all mock-deferential and says, Well, that would be up to me, wouldn’t it?” But then, by the time he had finished dinner, and given Tashy her bath or changed her diaper or just dandled her on his knee, who could stay morose? Not Ranjit, and he was then his usual cheery self until the next time he had to get up to go to his nonwork.

By the end of the second month the depression was deeper. It took longer to lift, because, as Ranjit told his wife—over and over!—“It’s worse than ever! I cornered Bledsoe today—not easy to do, because he’s hardly ever in his office—and asked him point-blank what kind of work I was supposed to be doing. He gave me a dirty look, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘If you ever find out, please tell me.’ It seems he had orders from high up to hire me, but nobody ever told him what my job was to be.”

“They wanted you because you’re famous and you add class to the operation,” his wife informed him.

“Good guess. I sort of had the same idea myself, but it can’t be right. That whole operation’s so secret nobody knows who’s working in the next office.”

“So do you want to quit?” Myra asked.

“Huh. Well, I don’t think so. Don’t know if I can, really, because I’m not sure what all I signed, but anyway I promised Gamini.”

“Then,” she said, “let’s just learn to love it. Why don’t you solve that P equals NP problem you talk about? And anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday, so why don’t we take Tashy to the zoo?”

The zoo, of course, was a delight, although in the rest of the world things were going as badly as ever. Recent developments? Well, Argentina’s vast herds of cattle were keeling over by the thousands with a new variety of the old disease called bluetongue. It had just been confirmed that the plague was a biowarfare strain. What wasn’t clear was who had spread it. Maybe Venezuela or Colombia, some people around the agency thought, because Argentina had contributed heavily to the international force that was trying to keep the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies apart. (They weren’t very successful at it, but the Venezuelans and the Colombians hated them for trying.) The rest of the world was as unquiet as ever. In Iraq nightly outbreaks of car-bombings and beheadings showed that the two kinds of Iraqi Muslims were again trying to ensure that there was only one true Islamic faith by exterminating each other. In Africa the number of officially recognized wars had grown to fourteen, not counting several dozen tribal skirmishes. In Asia the Adorable Leader’s North Koreans were issuing communiqué after communiqué charging most of the world’s other states with spreading lies about them.

But in Pasadena nobody was fighting anybody, and little Tashy Subramanian was delighting her parents. What other infant so precociously tried to turn herself over in her crib at such an early age? Or even more precociously, at that same early age, slept nearly halfway through the night, on many nights, sometimes? Natasha Subramanian was bound to be a person of high intelligence, Myra and Ranjit agreed, no matter that Jingting Jian, the baby doctor the office’s advisory service had helped them find, swore that you could tell nothing about a child’s intelligence until it was at least four or five months old.

Though weak in that area, Dr. Jian was a very comforting pediatrician to have, full of tips on the diagnosis of infant crying. Some crying meant you had to do something right away; some could be ignored until the baby had cried itself out. Dr. Jian even had recordings of many of the possible crying styles to help them figure which was which. In fact, the advisers had done nearly everything that had had to be done for Myra and Ranjit. They had located for them the pretty little apartment in a gated development—four rooms, washer-dryer installed, access to the community swimming pool, its own plant-bedecked balcony that looked down on the city of Los Angeles from above, and, maybe most important of all in these times, its twenty-four-hour guard service to check every last person going in or out. The advisers had done more than that, too, helping them choose the best dry cleaners, pizza deliverers, banks, and car rental services (until the time when they might choose to buy a couple of cars for themselves, which time had not yet arrived).

They had even provided Myra with the names of three separate maid services, but Myra chose to decline them all. “The apartment’s not that big,” she told Ranjit. “What kind of housework is there to do? Vacuuming, cooking, laundry, dishes—just for the two of us there’s not that much work involved.”

Ranjit strongly agreed. “I’m sure you can handle it,” he said, which got him a slightly frosty look.

“I’m sure we can,” she corrected him. “Let’s see. I’d better be the cook, because I’m better at it than you are, so you can clean up afterward? That would be good. Laundry—you can operate a washer and dryer, can’t you? They’ve got all the instructions written out in their manuals, anyway. Changing the baby, feeding the baby—when you’re home we can take turns. When you’re not, I can do it myself.”

Item by item they ran through the list of domestic jobs, from replacing used lightbulbs and toilet paper rolls to paying the bills. It wasn’t a problem. Neither one of them wanted the other stuck at some chore that would keep him or her away from the other for a minute longer than necessary, because neither wanted to be so deprived of the other’s talk and company.

At this point the armada of One Point Fives was cruising at its maximum speed of .94c. By the time scale of most non-Earth beings, it would reach its destination in a mere blink of time. Of course, no human being knew this, so all nine billion went right on with their usual daily concerns.

Then one evening, as the Subramanians were finishing the dinner cleanup, the voice from their intercom spoke up. “Dr. Subramanian? This is Henry, down at the gate. There’s a man here who’d like to see you. He says he doesn’t want to give his name but you’ll know him because he’s Maggie’s ex-boyfriend. All right to let him in?”

Ranjit jumped to his feet. “Gamini!” he shouted. “Sure, let the bastard come in, and ask him what he’d like to drink!”

But when the man arrived, he wasn’t Gamini Bandara at all. He was a much older man, carrying a locked case that was chained to his right arm. When he opened it, he took out a chip and handed it to Ranjit. “Please play this,” he said. “I’m not authorized to see it, so I’ll have to wait outside, but Mrs. Subramanian is specifically permitted, and”—he offered them a polite smile—“I’m sure the baby won’t tell any secrets.”

When the courier was safely stowed in the hallway, Myra fed the chip into their player, and a grinning Gamini appeared on the screen. “Sorry to put you through all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, but we’re walking a tightrope here. We’re answering to five different national governments, plus the UN’s own security staff, and—well, I’ll tell you all about that another time. The thing is, that other job we’ve been talking about for you is all cleared now, if you want it. You will. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. However, before I answer all those questions, there is one little thing—No, to tell the truth, there’s one extremely big thing that has to happen first. I can’t say what it is, but you’ll know it when you see it on the news, and then you can say good-bye to Pasadena. So stay loose, Ranj. That’s all those intelligence agencies will let me say now—except love to you all!”

The chip ended and the screen went blank.

Ten minutes later, when the courier had retrieved his chip and departed, Myra pulled down from the top of the cupboard the bottle of wine they saved for special occasions. She filled two glasses, cocked an ear to where Natasha was sleeping, and, when satisfied about that, said, “Do you know what’s going on?”

Ranjit clinked her glass and took a sip from his own before he said, “No.” He sat silently for a moment, and then grinned. “All the same, if I can’t trust Gamini, who can I trust? So we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Myra nodded, finished her glass, got up to check on Natasha, and said, “At least it doesn’t sound like the waiting will be much longer.”

It wasn’t. It was only three days before Ranjit—doing his best to find a few more really large prime numbers for the cryptographers to play with, because his conscience wouldn’t let him do nothing at all—heard a huge commotion in the hallway and discovered that half the staff was trying to get into the lounge at the end of the corridor. Everybody was clustered before the news channels. What the channels were displaying was a procession of military vehicles, scores of them, pouring through a gap in an unfamiliar fence. “Korea,” a man near the screen called to quiet the questions. “They’re going into North Korea! Now shut up so we can hear what they’re saying.”

And North Korea was indeed where they were heading, and none of the Adorable Leader’s huge army seemed interested in trying to stop them!

“But that’s crazy!” the man next to Ranjit was saying. “Something must’ve happened!”

He hadn’t been looking to Ranjit for an answer, but Ranjit gave him one anyway. “I’m sure something did happen,” he told the man, grinning. “Something big.”