The Last Theorem

36 PREPARING FOR THE RACE

Some people might have expected that the bon voyage party for the solar-sail contestants would have been held in some giant auditorium in a city like New York, or Beijing, or Moscow. It wasn’t. True, the cameras were there, and everything that happened within their sight went out to the whole world’s screens. But the place where the cameras were was only the terminal’s little auditorium, and—counting everybody, the seven racers themselves, their handlers, their immediate families, and a very few VIP guests—there weren’t more than two hundred people in the room.

Myra had her suspicions about why. No doubt no two of the big three were willing to let the other one have the event. She said nothing, however. Then she caught a glimpse of her daughter, standing serious and tall with the other six contestants as a judge gave them a last-minute review of the rules of the race. “Doesn’t she look good?” she whispered to her husband, knowing the answer.

She got it. Ranjit had no more doubt than she that Natasha wasn’t only the smartest and best of the solar-sail pilots, but that she looked astonishingly, even a little worrisomely, mature for her sixteen years. He focused on the most worrisome part of the scene. “There’s that Brazilian, Olsos, standing right next to her,” he pointed out to his wife.

She squeezed his hand. “Ron’s all right,” she told him, with the wisdom that came with once having been a sixteen-year-old girl herself. And then, “Oh, hello, Joris.”

Vorhulst got a hug from her, and the two men shook hands. “They’re going to start in a minute,” Vorhulst told them. “I just wanted to say hello—and to tell you that we’ve got a little pool going among the Skyhook engineers. My money’s on Natasha.”

Myra said, “Is that what you engineers were getting excited about a little while ago?”

Vorhulst blinked at her. “Oh, that. No. It was an all-points message from the Sky Events center in Massachusetts. There’s been a hell of a bright supernova just observed in Centaurus, but it’s got some funny features.” He grinned. “Almost makes me wish I’d stayed with astronomy.” And then, as the chairman of the event mounted the podium and all the members of the audience began the move toward their chairs, he said, “See you later!”

There was only one speaker at the ceremony, and that was the newly elected president of the Republic of Sri Lanka, Dhatusena Bandara. He looked presidential, all right, with a strong old face and the slim figure of a man who had never let himself go soft. But what he said was informal, almost jocular. “There were several nations,” he told the select few who were his audience, “who wanted this event to be held in some great city, but you are here. That isn’t because my country is more deserving than any other. It’s simply because, through the good fortune of geography, Sri Lanka is the site for the Skyhook. Without the Skyhook this race could never be. It is the Skyhook that you seven wonderful young men and women will board to take you to low earth orbit. It was the Skyhook that carried each one of your spacecraft up to that point, piece by piece, and now those pieces are nearly completely assembled into the craft that you will fly in this greatest of all races. May God bless you all, and see you safely home when the race is over.”

And that was the end of it, except for the good-bye hugs and kisses before the pilots and their handlers moved toward the Skyhook loading platform. Ranjit observed, not with displeasure, that this Ronaldinho Olsos from Brazil was boarding the first capsule, while Natasha was among those going in the third.

When they had kissed Natasha good-bye for the fourth or fifth time, and had at last successfully untangled Robert from her arms, the remainder of the Subramanian family, like everyone else, began to head for the buses.

There, squarely in their way, was Joris Vorhulst, standing by himself and talking agitatedly into his pocket screen. “So, Joris,” Myra said as they came up to him, “what are you worrying about now? Did they find another supernova?”

Her tone was jocular. Vorhulst’s expression was not. He folded his screen shut and shook his head. “Not exactly. What they saw may not be a supernova at all, now that the space telescopes are lining up to get a good look at it. And it’s a lot closer than any supernova should be. It may even be right in the Oort cloud.”

Myra stopped, her hand to her breast. “It isn’t going to bother the racers—?”

Vorhulst shook his head. “Oh, there’s no danger of that. No. The solar sailers will be in low earth orbit. This thing, whatever it is, is a long, long way from there. But I wish I knew what it was.”

Up where the solar sailers were nearly completely assembled, their riggers were not alone.

No one saw the tiny spacecraft of the Nine-Limbeds, because they had restored their photon-shifters long since. But their Nine-Limbed crews were nearly as puzzled as Joris Vorhulst, though about an entirely different matter. These seven nearly completed sail ships—what were they for? They bore no sign of any kind of weaponry. That relieved the Nine-Limbeds of one sort of worry, but another kind remained. None among the Nine-Limbeds had any idea of what these spacecraft were up to. And that was not a fact that the Nine-Limbeds wanted to report to their Grand Galactic masters.