The Last Theorem

47 PARTING

When Ranjit and Myra went back to see Surash, it was quite a bit after their previous meeting—two surgeries later, by the way the old monk had come to count time. By then their world—the world of everyone alive on Earth—was new twice over, and still changing.

“It’s not just the technology, either,” Ranjit told his wife. “It’s, well, friendlier than that. All the Egyptians hoped for was a share of the Qattara power. The One Point Fives didn’t have to give them all of it.”

Myra didn’t immediately respond, so Ranjit gave her a quick look. She was gazing out at the waters of the Bay of Bengal, with what might have been a slight smile on her face. When she felt her husband’s eye on her, the smile broadened. “Huh,” she said.

Ranjit, laughing, turned his attention back to the road. “My darling,” he said, “you are full of surprises. Have you run out of things to be suspicious of?”

Myra considered. “Probably not. Right now I can’t think of any big ones, though.”

“Not even the Americans?”

She pursed her lips. “Now that that horrid Bledsoe man is a fugitive from justice, no. I think the president isn’t going to make any more waves for a while. Bledsoe is what deniability was invented for.”

Ranjit listened quietly, but what he was thinking was not really about what she was saying. More than anything else he was thinking about Myra herself, and in particular what incredibly good fortune he had to have her. He almost didn’t hear the next thing she said to him. “What?”

“I said, do you think he can get reelected?”

Before he answered, Ranjit made the turn onto the uphill road where Surash waited. “No. But I don’t think it matters. He’s played the hard-as-nails role about as long as he can. Now he’s going to want to show himself caring.”

Myra didn’t respond to that until Ranjit had parked the car. Then she put an affectionate hand on his arm. “Ranj, do you know what? I’m feeling really relaxed.”

The old monk’s days of freedom were over. He lay on a narrow cot, his left arm immobilized so that a forest of tubing could stream unimpeded, from a wildflower bed of multicolored bags of medications at the head of the bed to the veins in his wrist. “Hello, my dears,” he said as they came in, his voice fuzzed and metallic because of the throat mike taped to his larynx. “I am grateful that you came. I have a decision to make, Ranjit, and I don’t know what to do. If your father were still alive, I could ask him, but he is gone and I turn to you. Shall I let them store me in a machine?”

Myra caught her breath. “Ada has been here,” she said.

The old monk couldn’t nod his head, but he managed a movement of the chin. “Indeed she has,” he agreed. “I invited Dr. Labrooy. There is nothing more that medicine can do for me except let the machines continue to breathe for me and continue me in this great pain. In the news it said that Ada Labrooy had another possibility. She says she can do as these people from space have taught her. I can leave my body but live on as a computer program. I wouldn’t hurt anymore.” He was silent for a moment before he found the strength to go on. “However,” he said, “there would be costs. The way to salvation through doing good works in karma yoga would no longer be possible for me, I think, but jnana yoga and bhakti yoga—the way of knowledge and the way of devotion—are still there. But do you know what that sounds like to me?”

Ranjit shook his head.

“Nirvana,” said the old monk. “My soul would be released from the cycle of eternities.”

Ranjit cleared his throat. “But that is what everyone seeks, my father used to say. Don’t you want it?”

“With all my heart, yes! But what if this is a deception? I can’t trick Brahman!”

He lay back in the bed, the ancient eyes fixed on Ranjit and Myra imploringly.

Ranjit frowned. It was Myra, however, who spoke. She laid one hand on his shrunken wrist and said, “Dear Surash, we know you would never do anything for a base motive. You must simply do what you think is right. It will be.”

And that was the end of their talk.

When they were outside again, Ranjit took a deep breath. “I didn’t know Ada was ready to try recording a human being.”

“Neither did I,” Myra said. “Last time we spoke, she told me they were getting ready to record a white rat.”

Ranjit winced. “And if Surash is wrong, that’s what he’ll be reborn as.”

“Well,” Myra said practically, “if he is going to be reborn at all—which is his belief, not mine—I am sure it would not be as a bad thing.”

She was silent for a moment, then smiled. “Let’s see how they’re coming with our house.”

The house that had been Ranjit’s father’s had now begun to show the effects of Myra’s reshaping—one big bedroom for Ranjit and Myra to share where there had been two smaller ones, three baths (and a half bath on the ground floor for visitors as well) where there had been only one. None of it, however, was finished, and sidestepping all the piles of tiling and plumbing and general refurbishing was thirsty work. And Myra said, “What would you think about a quick swim?”

It was a great idea, and Ranjit admitted as much at once. Within twenty minutes they were in their suits and on their bikes on the way to the raft anchored nearest to Swami Rock.

Since the waters nearby quickly fell off to a depth of a hundred meters and more, they took along their diving gear. That included the latest carbon-fiber tanks, capable of holding air at a pressure of a thousand atmospheres. They had no particular plans for going that deep, but there was always the brutal history of the area to view underwater. It was here that—nearly four centuries back, when Trinco was dominated by the Portuguese invaders—their sea captain had destroyed the original temple in a fit of religious fury. (The fact that some of her own ancestors had been among the vandals didn’t diminish Myra’s interest at all.) The seabed around the rock was still littered with recognizable carved columns.

Once underwater, Ranjit and Myra paused to inspect an elaborate doorway. Ranjit was giving his wife a mock-reproachful shake of the head as he traced a crack that defaced the lotus carvings, when the light above them suddenly dimmed.

Looking up through the brilliantly clear water, Ranjit saw an enormous shape passing just above them.

“It’s a whale shark!” he shouted through his aquaphone, so loudly that his voice was distorted into something resembling the old monk’s as reshaped by his throat mike. “Let’s go and make friends with it!”

Myra grinned and nodded. It was not the first time she and Ranjit had encountered these huge and entirely harmless plankton eaters in the waters around Trincomalee. As much as ten meters long, they were capital ships attended by a retinue of remoras, some attached to them by their suction pads, others swimming hopefully near the enormous mouths in the expectation of table scraps to feast on.

Ranjit started to inflate his buoyancy compensator, rising slowly up the shot line. He expected that Myra would follow at the same pace and was startled when he heard her voice, tightly controlled but clearly under a strain. “Something’s wrong with my inflator,” she gasped. “Be with you in a moment.” Then there was a violent hiss of air as her flotation bag suddenly filled. Ranjit was thrust aside as she was dragged violently upward.

It was in moments such as that when even the most experienced divers could panic. Myra made the fatal mistake of trying to hold her breath.

When Ranjit caught up with her on the raft, it was already too late. Blood was trickling from her mouth and he was not sure if he had caught her last whispered words.

He replayed them in his mind until he was standing on the pontoon of the air-medic helicopter that had arrived just in time to confirm what he already knew.

What she had said was, “See you in the next world.” He bent to kiss her chilled forehead.

Then to the helicopter pilot he said, “Let me use your phone. I need to talk to Dr. Ada Labrooy right away.”