Читать книгу The Last Theorem - Frederik Pohl - Страница 10

That year’s first few months of university classes had been the best kind of holiday for Ranjit Subramanian. Not because of the classes themselves, of course. They were totally boring. But they took up only a few hours a day, and then he and Gamini Bandara had all the time that the university hadn’t already claimed, with a whole exciting city to explore and each other to explore it with. They did it all, from the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage and the Dehiwala Zoo to the cricket club and a dozen less reputable places. Gamini, of course, had lived in Colombo much of his life. He had long since explored all of those places and many more, but introducing Ranjit to them made them all fresh. The boys even managed to take in a few museums and one or two theaters—cheaply done, because Gamini’s parents had memberships or season tickets to everything in Colombo. Or at least to everything respectable; and the attractions that weren’t respectable the boys found for themselves. There were of course plenty of the bars, toddy joints, and casinos that gave Colombo its nickname as “the Las Vegas of the Indian Ocean.” The boys naturally sampled them, but didn’t care much for gambling and certainly didn’t need a whole lot of alcohol to feel good. Feeling good was their natural state.

They usually met for lunch in the students’ dining hall as soon as their morning classes were over. Unfortunately none of their classes were shared. Given Gamini’s father-inspired emphasis on government and law, that had been pretty much inevitable.

When they didn’t have time to go into the city proper, there was nearly as much fun to be had exploring the campus of the university itself. Early on they found a penetrable service entrance to the school of medicine’s faculty lounge. That was a promising target, with platters of goodies always laid out, along with endless supplies of (nonalcoholic) drinks. Unfortunately, it was—permanently, it seemed—out of the boys’ reach; the faculty lounge was almost always full of faculty. It was Gamini who found the ventilation louvers for the girls’ changing room in the school of education’s gym—and Gamini who made the most use of them, leaving Ranjit somewhat puzzled. And at a not quite finished, apparently abandoned structure attached to the Queens Road building they found a treasure. According to the decaying signage it had been intended to be the school of indigenous law, set up during one of the periods when the government had been extending olive branches not only to Tamils but to Muslims, Christians, and Jews as well.

The structure itself had been nearly completed, with a row of unfurnished faculty offices and classrooms that had barely been begun. The library was much further along. It even had books. According to Gamini, whose father had insisted on his learning simple Arabic at an early age, the authors were such as Hanafi, Maliki, and Hanbali on the side of the room meant for Sunnis, and mostly devoted to Jaafari on the side for the Shia. And in a little alcove between the two sides sat a pair of silent but fully operational computer terminals.

This whole unoccupied structure called out for the boys to take advantage of it. They did. In short time they had discovered a reception room, furnished but not lavishly; the receptionist’s desk was plywood and the chairs ranked against the wall were the foldaway kind usually found in funeral parlors. That wasn’t their most interesting discovery, though. On top of that plywood desk was an American picture magazine, one of the kind devoted to the lives of Hollywood stars, next to an electric kettle bubbling away and a foil-wrapped container of somebody’s lunch.

The boys’ private little den had not been as private as they had thought. But they hadn’t been caught, and they had chuckled to themselves as they hastened to leave.

Exploring this new territory was a delight for Ranjit. Studying at the university, however, wasn’t. By the time he neared the end of his first year, he had learned a good many things, few of which he considered worth the trouble of knowing. Not in the worth-knowing category, in his opinion, was his newfound ability to conjugate most regular French verbs and even to do the same for a few of the most important irregular ones, such as être. On the positive side, though, was the fact that he had somehow eked out a passing grade in his French class anyway, thus helping to preserve his status as a student for another year.

Even the much-disliked biology course became almost interesting when the (equally disliked) instructor ran out of frogs to dissect and then turned from the theoretical discussion of disease vectors to some actual news stories from the Colombo media. The stories were about a fast-spreading new pestilence called chikungunya. The name was a Swahili word meaning “what bends up,” thus describing the stooped-over posture of patients suffering from its ruinous joint pain. The chikungunya virus, it seemed, had been around for some time, but in relatively trivial amounts. Now it was suddenly reemerging, and infecting the region’s always available swarms of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Thousands of people in the Seychelles and other Indian Ocean islands were coming down with rash, fever, and incapacitating joint pain… and, the instructor reminded them, Sri Lanka still possessed countless swamps and stagnant ponds that were ideal breeding spots for A. aegypti. He did not endorse, but did not deny, either, the rumor that the chikungunya organism might have been “weaponized”—that is, tailor-made to be used in biological warfare (by what country, and intended to be used against what other country, no one would say)—and had somehow escaped to the lands of the Indian Ocean.

It was the most interesting thing Ranjit had found in the wasteland of Biology 101. Rogue nations? Weaponized disease? Those were things he wanted to talk about with Gamini, but that wasn’t possible. Gamini had one of those poli-sci classes just before lunch and thus would not be available for sharing for at least another hour.

Bored, Ranjit did what he had avoided doing for most of the term. There was an open-attendance seminar for do-gooders, something about the world’s water problems. All students were encouraged to attend, and, of course, most students resolutely stayed away. That made it a place where he could maybe drowse with nobody talking to him.

But the lecturer began talking about the Dead Sea.

Ranjit had given very little thought to the Dead Sea, but to the lecturer it was a hidden treasure. What you could do, he said, was dig aqueducts from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, four hundred meters below sea level, and use the height difference to generate electricity.

Ranjit found his mind racing at the idea. It was problem solving on a huge scale, and it was something worth doing! Ranjit couldn’t wait to tell Gamini about it.

But when Gamini finally showed up for lunch, he wasn’t impressed. “Old stuff,” Gamini informed him. “My father’s friend Dr. Al-Zasr—he’s an Egyptian; they went to school together in England—told us about it once at dinner. Only it’s never going to happen. It was an Israeli idea, and the other nations around there don’t like Israeli ideas.”

“Huh,” Ranjit said. The lecturer hadn’t mentioned that it was an Israeli idea. Or that it was twenty years old, and that if it hadn’t been built in twenty years, it wasn’t likely to be built now.

Gamini wasn’t all that interested in chikungunya, either, and then it was his turn to educate Ranjit. “Your problem,” he informed his friend, “is what they call the GSSM syndrome. Know what that is? No, you don’t, but it’s what you’re doing. It’s your multitasking, Ranj. You’re cutting yourself into too many pieces. My psych teacher says there’s a good chance it makes you stupid, because, you know, every time you switch from one thing to another, you’re interrupting yourself, and you can do that just so much before there’s a permanent effect on your prefrontal cortex and you’ve got ADD.”

Ranjit frowned. He was fiddling around on Gamini’s laptop. Recently, Ranjit had begun learning everything he could about computers. “What’s ADD? And while we’re at it, what’s the GSSM syndrome?”

Gamini gave him a reproving look. “You really should try to keep up, Ranj. ADD is attention deficit disorder, and GSSM is the initials of the four people who led the research into the multitasking syndrome. There was somebody named Grafman, plus people named Stone, Schwartz, and Meyer. There was a woman named Yuhong Jiang, too, but I guess they didn’t have room for any more initials. Anyway, it sounds to me like you’re too concerned with events beyond your control.”

It was a fair cop. Nevertheless, that night, before turning in, Ranjit made a point of watching the news, just to show that he wasn’t ruled by his friend’s notions. Not much of it was good. At least a score of countries were still truculently declaring that they had every right to whatever nuclear programs they chose to implement, and most of them were in fact implementing them. North Korea was, as usual, displaying itself as the very model of a rogue state. In endlessly troubled Iraq a Shiite incursion into oil-rich Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized that troubled country.

And so it went.

There was a personal item about to come up on the bad-news list at the next day’s lunch, too.

Ranjit was not immediately aware of that. When he caught his first sight of Gamini, there ahead of him and skeptically investigating what the cafeteria rather charitably called their special of the day, all he felt was the pleasure of seeing his friend again. But as he was seating himself, he became aware of the expression on Gamini’s face. “Is something wrong?” Ranjit demanded.

“Wrong? No, of course not,” Gamini said at once, and then sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Ranjit, there is something I need to tell you about. It’s a promise I made my father years ago.”

Ranjit was instantly suspicious. Nothing good could be coming of that sort of promise, told in that tone of voice. “What promise?”

“I promised the old man that I would apply to transfer to the London School of Economics after my first year here. He visited there years ago and he thought it was the best school in the world to learn about government.”

Indignation fought with surprise in Ranjit’s voice. “About government? In a school of economics?”

“That’s not its whole name, Ranjit. It’s really called the London School of Economics and Political Science.”

To that Ranjit could only respond with his all-purpose “Huh.” But then he added morosely, “So you’re going to apply to this foreign school, just so you can keep some promise you made to your father?”

Gamini coughed. “Not exactly. I mean, it’s not what I’m going to do. It’s what I already did. I actually applied years ago. It was my father’s idea. He said that the earlier I put my name in, the better my chances would be, and it looks like he was right. The thing is, Ranjit, they accepted me. We got the letter last week. I start at London as soon as the school year is finished here.”

And that was the second of the bad things that happened to the friendship of Ranjit Subramanian and Gamini Bandara, and by a long way the worse of the two.

Things did not get better for Ranjit. The biology teacher’s shipment of embalmed white mice finally arrived, and so the grisly business of dissection started again, and interesting subjects like chikungunya didn’t come up again. Even his math course, the one he had counted on to make the others worth enduring, was letting him down.

By the end of his first week at university, Ranjit had been pretty sure he already knew all the algebra he would ever require. Solving Fermat’s great puzzle would not depend on conic sections or summation notation. Still, he had breezed through the first few months; such things as finding the factoring of polynomials and the use of logarithmic functions were at least moderately entertaining. But by the third month it became clear that Dr. Christopher Dabare, the mathematics instructor, not only was not planning to teach anything relating to number theory, but didn’t really know a lot about it himself. And, worse, didn’t want either to learn or to help Ranjit to learn.

For a time Ranjit made do with the resources of the university library, but the books in the stacks were finite in number. When they ran out, Ranjit’s last recourse would have been some or all of the number theory journals, such as the Journal of Number Theory itself, from Ohio State University in the United States, or the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux, for which that hard-won sketchy knowledge of French might have been useful after all. But the university library did not subscribe to any of those journals, and Ranjit could not access them himself. Oh, Dr. Dabare could, just by permitting the use of his private faculty member password. But he wouldn’t do that.

As the end of the year approached, Ranjit needed a friend to unload his disappointments on. But he didn’t have that, either.

It was bad enough that Gamini was going nine thousand kilometers away. But to make it worse for Ranjit even those last few weeks were not going to be reserved for the two boys to share. Gamini’s family obligations, as it turned out, had to come first. First there was a weekend in Kandy, the “great city” that had once been the island’s capital. One branch of Gamini’s family had doggedly stayed on in what had been the family home before the mighty “Great Attractor” that was the bustling city of Colombo had drawn the intellectual, the powerful, and even the merely ambitious to where power now resided. Then another weekend to Ratnapura, where a cousin supervised the family’s interests in the precious stone mines; still another to where Gamini’s ancient grandmother ruled their cinnamon plantations. And even when he was still in the city, Gamini had duty calls to make, and no realistic chance of bringing Ranjit along with him when he made them.

While Ranjit himself had nothing at all to do… except to attend his boring classes in the uninteresting subjects that he didn’t care about in the first place. And then nearer worries appeared.

It happened at the end of the sociology class Ranjit had never liked. The teacher, whom Ranjit had liked even less, was a Dr. Mendis, and as Ranjit was about to leave, Mendis was standing in the doorway, holding the black-covered notebook he entered grades into. “I’ve just been going over the grades from last week’s exam,” he told Ranjit. “Yours were unsatisfactory.”

That wasn’t surprising to Ranjit. “Sorry, sir,” he said absently, peering after his rapidly disappearing classmates. “I’ll try to do better,” he added, poised to follow them.

But Dr. Mendis wasn’t through with him. “If you remember,” he said, “at the beginning of term I explained to the class how your final grade would be calculated. It is made up of the midterm examination, the spot quizzes given out from time to time, your classroom attendance and participation, and the final exam, in the proportion of 25 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent, and 30 percent. I must now inform you that, although you did do reasonably well on the midterm, your performance in the classroom and the spot quizzes is so far below an acceptable standard that you would have to get at least 80 percent on the final examination to get a low C for the course. I truthfully don’t think you are capable of that.” He studied the entries in his book for a moment, and then nodded and snapped it shut. “So what I suggest is that you consider taking an Incomplete for the course.” He raised a hand as though to ward off objections from Ranjit, although Ranjit had not been planning any. “I am aware, of course, that that will naturally cause a problem with your hopes for a continuing scholarship. But it would be better than an outright failure, would it not?”

It would, Ranjit was forced to agree—but not out loud, because he didn’t want to give Dr. Mendis the satisfaction. By the time he got out of the classroom, the one fellow student left in the hall was a Burgher girl, nice enough looking, some years older than himself. Ranjit was aware that she had been in the sociology class with him, but to him she had been simply another item in the lecture hall’s furnishings. He hadn’t had much to do in his life with Burghers, the name given to that small fraction of the Sri Lankan population who traced a significant part of their ancestry to one or another of the old European colonizers. Particularly with the female ones.

This particular female Burgher was talking on a cell phone, but closed it up as he approached. “Mr. Subramanian?” she said.

Ranjit stopped, in no mood for casual conversation. “Yes?” he barked.

She did not seem to take offense at his tone. “My name is Myra de Soyza. I heard what Dr. Mendis was saying to you. Are you going to do what he said and take an Incomplete?”

She was really annoying him. He said, “I hope not. Why should I?”

“Oh, you shouldn’t. All you need is a little study help. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but I’ve been getting straight A’s. I could tutor you, if you liked.”

That wasn’t anything Ranjit had expected to hear, and it immediately triggered his most suspicious reactions. He demanded, “Why do you want to do that?”

Whatever answer might have been true—perhaps simply that he was a good-looking young man—the one she gave was, “Because I don’t think Dr. Mendis is fair to you.” But she looked disappointed at his response, perhaps even offended. As she went on, her tone grew sharp. “If you don’t want help, just say it. But, you know, what Dr. Mendis calls sociology is just memorizing what it says in the books, and almost always only the parts that are about Sri Lanka. I could walk you through it in plenty of time for the final.”

For a moment Ranjit actually considered her offer. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ll be all right.” He gave her a nod to express enough gratitude to be polite, then turned and walked away.

But, although he left the woman behind him, he carried away with him what she had said.

There was wisdom in it. Who was this professor to tell him that he could not do well on the final exam? There were others besides a Sinhalese schoolteacher and a Burgher woman who knew Sri Lankan history. And there was one particular place, Ranjit was quite sure, where such knowledge was stored, and those in charge would be glad to share it with him.

Pass he did. Not with the “impossible” 80 percent on the final that Dr. Mendis had found so amusing, but with a 91 percent—one of the five highest marks for those taking the test that year. And what would Dr. Mendis say now?

Ranjit had been confident that the fact that his father wasn’t speaking to him did not mean he would refuse his son help. He’d been right. When he’d explained his need to Surash, the old monk who had taken his call, he’d got the response he had expected. “I must consult with the high priest about this,” Surash had said cautiously. “Please call me back in one hour.” But Ranjit had had no doubt of the answer, and had already filled his backpack with toothbrush, clean underwear, and everything else he would need for a stay in Trincomalee before he’d called back. “Yes, Ranjit,” the old monk had said. “Come as soon as you can. We will give you what you need.”

The only way for Ranjit to get to Trincomalee had been to hitchhike in a truck that smelled of the driver’s curry and its cargo of fragrant cinnamon bark. That had meant arriving at the temple well after midnight. His father had of course been long asleep, and the assistant priest on duty did not offer to disturb him. What the assistant priest was willing to do, however, was everything Ranjit asked for: give him a cell and a bed and three plain (but adequate) meals a day—and access to the temple’s archives.

The archives weren’t written on ancient parchment or animal skins, as Ranjit had feared; this was his father’s temple, right up to speed with all the modern necessities. When Ranjit woke that morning, there was a laptop on the table by his cot, and through it he had access to all the history of Sri Lanka, from the days of the tribal Veddas who were the island’s first inhabitants, to the present. There was much that his teacher had not touched on, but Ranjit had brought his textbook along—not to study, but to give him a guide to the parts of the nation’s past he could safely ignore. He had only five days before he had to go back to the university. But five days of total dedication to one subject was quite enough for a young man as bright and motivated as Ranjit Subramanian. (Nor was he interrupting himself by multitasking. Score one for the theory of the GSSM syndrome.) And he had learned a number of things that would not appear on the final exam, too. He had learned about the vast treasure of pearls and gold and ivory that the Portuguese had looted from his father’s temple, just before they tore it down. He learned that once, for fifty years, the Tamils had ruled all of the island—and that the general who had finally defeated the Tamil forces and “freed” his own people evidently was still held in respect by the modern Sinhalese—even by Gamini’s own family, because his own father, Dhatusena Bandara, was named after him.

Ranjit headed straight for Gamini’s room when the temple van dropped him at the university. He was grinning to himself as he knocked on Gamini’s door, thinking of how amusing it would be to tell him that.

That didn’t happen. Gamini wasn’t there.

When Ranjit roused the night porter, the man said sleepily that Mr. Bandara had left two days earlier. For his family’s house in Fort? No, not at all. For London, England, where Mr. Bandara was going to complete his studies.

When at last Ranjit got back to his own room, there was a waiting letter that Gamini had left for him, but all it said was what Ranjit already knew. Gamini’s flight to England had been moved up a few days. He would be on it. And he would miss Ranjit.

That was not Ranjit’s only disappointment. It was natural enough that the temple staff hadn’t disturbed his father when Ranjit had arrived so late. It was not quite as natural, perhaps, that his father had not chosen to disturb himself even enough to look in on his son once in any other of the five days he was living in the temple.

It was almost funny, Ranjit told himself as he turned out the light by his bed. His father had not forgiven him for his closeness to Gamini Bandara. But now Gamini was not close to him at all, not by nine thousand kilometers.

So he had lost the two dearest people in his life, and what was he to do with that life now?

There was one other significant event at that time. Neither Ranjit nor any other human being alive knew of it, however. It took place many light-years away, in the vicinity of a star that human astronomers knew only by its right ascension and declination numbers. One of those great expanding hemispheres of photons, perhaps the one from Eniwetok, perhaps from one of the Soviet monster bombs, finally reached the place where the photon pulses caused a major decision that meant bad news for the people of Earth. The pulses had alerted certain high-performance sapients (or one such sapient, their nature making it difficult to say which it should properly be called) who (or at least some fraction of whom) inhabited a vortex of dark-matter rivulets in that part of the galaxy.

These sentients were known as the Grand Galactics. Once alerted they constructed a fan of probability projections. The display that resulted matched some of their worst speculations.

These Grand Galactics had many plans and objectives, few of which would then have been comprehensible to an Earth human. One of their principal concerns was observing the working out of the galaxy’s natural physical laws. Humans did that, too, but humans’ reason for doing so was an effort to understand them. The Grand Galactics’ primary concern was to make sure those laws did not require changing. Other interests were more arcane still.

However, at least one of their concerns would have been quite clear. It could have been translated somewhat like, “Protect the harmless. Quarantine the dangerous. Destroy the malevolent—after storing a backup in a secure location.”

That was what troubled the Grand Galactics here. Species that developed weaponry were all too likely to try it out on some other species, and that could not be tolerated.

Accordingly the Grand Galactics by unanimous agreement (that being the only kind of agreement they ever had) sent a directive to one of their newest, but also most useful, client races, the Nine-Limbeds. The directive came in two parts. The first was to prepare a radio message for Earth, in as many of Earth’s several thousand dialects and languages as were broadcast in electronic form so that Nine-Limbed experts could pick them up and learn to communicate in them. The message was to say, basically, “Cease and desist.” (Languages were what the Nine-Limbeds were especially good at. This was quite unusual among the client races of the Grand Galactics. They did not encourage their clients to speak to one another.)

The second part required the Nine-Limbeds to continue, and indeed to increase, their intensive close-range surveillance of Earth.

It was a curious thing (an outside observer might have thought) for the Grand Galactics to give so much responsibility to a species that was, after all, relatively new to their employ. However, the Grand Galactics had employed them on other matters in the handful of millennia since they had been added to the roster of client races, and the Grand Galactics had observed that the Nine-Limbeds displayed persistence, curiosity, and thoroughness in carrying out their assignments. These were qualities the Grand Galactics prized. It did not occur to them that the Nine-Limbeds might also have other qualities, such as a sense of humor.