The Last Theorem

40 THE PORTRAIT GALLERY

Twenty-four hours earlier Myra Subramanian would have taken an oath that there was only one thing that she desired in the world, and that was to learn that, against all the odds, her daughter was alive and well. That was then. Now she had that word. She even had the word of the emergency crews who had instantly responded to Natasha’s SOS. They radioed to the waiting world that the missing young woman was not only alive and as far as they could determine quite well, but she was now even safe, because they had her in their rockets, already heading for the LEO juncture point of the Skyhook.

That wasn’t enough for Myra. What she wanted now was for her daughter to be in her arms. Not thousands of kilometers away, and with no chance of physically getting there for all the weeks it would take Skyhook to get her home.

But then, that evening, Myra was studying the news screens in the hopes of finding one item that wasn’t either frightening or incomprehensible, when her scream brought Ranjit running. “Look!” she cried, waving at the image on the screen. That nearly got a yell out of Ranjit, too, because what she was looking at was their daughter, Natasha—and not, she was sure, that unreal copy of her Natasha that had spent fifty-odd hours questioning all those members of the human race.

What she was saying Ranjit didn’t know and didn’t at that moment care about. He headed for his study, Myra by his side, leaving the image on the news screen behind. He didn’t waste time trying to get a regular phone call through to the Skyhook car that contained his real returning daughter, either. Rank had its privileges. He called on the executive channels that were open to him as a member of the Skyhook board, and it was less than a minute before he had his own actual daughter looking out at him from her tiny bunk in the car’s radiation-shielded capsule. It took longer than that for the actual Natasha to reassure her mother that this Natasha—hair mussed, bra stained, nothing like the immaculacy of the narrator-Natasha—was really the specific Natasha that Myra had wanted.

She was also, she finally succeeded in persuading her parents, alive and unharmed, though totally unable to say how she had come to wind up in the capsule that she had definitely not been in when it was searched.

That was all good, but not quite good enough to satisfy Myra. Having frighteningly, and seemingly irrevocably, lost her daughter once, she was not prepared to give up the present contact. Might indeed not have done so for hours, except that it was actually Natasha who ended their talk. She looked up from the camera first in irritation, then in startlement, and finally in something that was almost fear. “Oh my God,” she cried. “Is that the copy of me they were talking about? On the news channels—go see for yourself!”

They did, and then they dialed back to the beginnings of the thing’s message. It started with a blaze of light. Then the Natasha figure began to speak without introduction. “Hello, members of the Earth human race,” it said. “We have three matters to communicate to you, and they are as follows.

“One, the member of the Grand Galactics formerly nearby has left this astronomical neighborhood, we suppose to rejoin its fellows. It is not known when it will return or what it will then do.

“Two, our principal decision makers have concluded that you will find it easier to converse with us if you know what we look like. Accordingly, we will display images of about fifty-five of the races most active on behalf of the Grand Galactics, beginning with ourselves, who are known as the Nine-Limbeds.

“Three, and final, the One Point Fives cannot return to their home at present because of inadequate supplies. The Machine-Stored prefer not to leave without them. Both species will therefore come to your planet. Those three species just mentioned include all of the species charged with dealing with the problems arising from your kind. Do not be alarmed, though. The Grand Galactics have rescinded their orders to sterilize your planet. In any case, when the One Point Fives arrive, they will be occupying areas that your people do not use. That ends this communication.”

It did. Myra and Ranjit looked at each other in bafflement. “What areas are they going to occupy, do you think?” Myra asked.

Ranjit didn’t try to answer her, because he had a more urgent question of his own. “What do you suppose they meant about sterilizing our planet?” he asked.

The creatures who called themselves the Nine-Limbeds not only showed all the beings they had promised—over and over, on all the world’s screens—they gave a running commentary. “We are called Nine-Limbeds,” the voice said, “because, as you see, we have nine limbs. There are four on each side used mainly for transportation. The one at the rear is used for everything else.”

And on each screen was a picture of the creature the voice was describing. “It looks like a beetle!” the cook exclaimed. Indeed it did, provided a beetle might wear girdles of bright metallic fabric between each of its four pairs of limbs. As the voice promised, there was another limb at the end of its body, a thing like an elephant’s trunk, Myra thought, but skinnier and long enough to reach to the front end, where there seemed to be a mouth and eyes.

And if the Nine-Limbeds looked bizarre—well, face it, they really were quite bizarre enough for any normal purpose—the next contestants down the runway were markedly weirder still. The second species displayed most suggested something like a skinned baby rabbit, though one of an unhealthy pale lavender color instead of the more familiar pink. (The accompanying commentary referred to them as the One Point Fives, though it was some time before any human being knew why.) The third was the nearest to human-looking (though not very) of mankind’s newly discovered galaxy mates. Some of the species displayed later in the broadcast enjoyed up to a dozen limbs or perhaps even more tentacles (it was sometimes hard to be sure). This third species, though, oddly termed the Machine-Stored, had only the familiar two arms, two legs, and single head. There was no way of judging scale. It could have been marmoset-tiny or circus-freak huge, but it was certainly not the kind of thing one would like to meet on a dark night. It was hideous. In fact the kindest adjective any of the world’s news commentators used to describe it was “diabolical.”

Then the displays got weirder still. The creatures that followed were of every imaginable color, and often of many colors clashing against one another in eye-aching camouflage-like patterns. They had scales or sparse and wispy feathers; they were of every imaginable architecture; and those were only the carbon-based forms. The ones that looked, more than anything else, like stubby alligators in old-fashioned divers’ suits were not that comprehensible, until it was revealed that they came from a world with an atmosphere as brutal as an earthly sea bottom, and the working fluid of their biologies was supercritical carbon dioxide.

Actually, the display that Myra couldn’t help calling “the freak show” didn’t stop with displaying all fifty-five of the galaxy’s most advanced races. It was a continuous performance. Once every one of the species had had its moment of fame on Earth’s screens, the procession started over, again with the Nine-Limbeds. The difference was that this time there was a context. The aliens were displayed along with their banana-shaped spacecraft and other parts of their world, and there was a different running commentary.

It was all interesting, of course. By the third time around, the Subramanians had learned that, measured against the approximate size of one of their spacecraft, the average Nine-Limbed couldn’t be much more than eighteen or twenty centimeters long. And, according to the commentary with the second showing of the Machine-Stored, that name described precisely what they were. They were machine-stored. The biological bodies shown were a historical fact, but now every member of that race survived only in electronic storage. So Myra informed Ranjit as he returned from carrying the sleeping Robert off to bed.

“Huh,” he said, returning to his favorite armchair. “That’s convenient. I guess then you can live pretty much forever, wouldn’t you say?”

“Probably so,” she agreed. “I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Want some?”

He did. When she came back with the two cups, the screen was displaying one of the Nine-Limbeds removing the fabric from between two of another’s hip joints and then rubbing the exposed flesh with his own ninth limb. “Hey,” Myra said, setting a cup before her husband. “What’s he doing, giving the other one a bath?”

“Maybe changing his oil,” Ranjit said. “Who knows? Listen, all this is recorded, so why don’t we turn it off for now and we can come back to it when we want to?”

“Good idea,” Myra said, reaching out and doing it for him. “I wanted to ask you something anyway. What is it that we haven’t seen in this parade?”

Ranjit nodded. “I know. The ones they were talking about. The ones they call the Grand Galactics.”

“They’re the ones, and they sound important. And yet they’re not showing them to us.”