The Last Theorem

  This time Gamini laughed out loud. “Me? No. They didn’t do it for me. They did it because my dad requested it. He’s got this high-up UN job, you see.”

  “And what job is that?”

  “Can’t tell you that, either, so don’t ask. And don’t ask what country you’ve just got out of, either. Finding where you were wasn’t hard, after we got hold of Tiffany Kanakaratnam—Oh,” he said, taking note of Ranjit’s response to the child’s name, “that’s something I can tell you about, anyway, at least up to a point. I, uh, used my father’s position to run my own computer search for you. Sort of the way you got your math teacher’s password; I fed in every name I could think of that might possibly know anything about where you were—Myra de Soyza, and Maggie and Pru, and all your teachers, and all the monks that worked for your father, and the Kanakaratnams. No,” he said, again answering the look that had appeared on Ranjit’s face, “there wasn’t anything to embarrass you. We were just looking for meetings or conversations you’d had, after the day you disappeared. We got nothing. Didn’t get any data on the adult Kanakaratnams at all, which I think means they were shot out of hand along with the rest of the pirates by the first court that tried them. But I kept adding names as I thought of them, and when I put the names of the four children in, we found them. They’d been arrested, of course, but they were too young to be tried even on a piracy charge, so they were taken to some relatives near Killinochchi, and Tiffany gave us a description of the people who took you away. She described the helicopters and where you washed ashore; it took a lot of searching after that, to be sure, but at last I located you. You might have sat there for years more.”

  “And the people who took me were?”

  “Oh, Ranj,” Gamini said, “there you go again. I can’t exactly tell you that, except, I guess, in sort of general terms, without mentioning any specifics. Have you ever heard of extraordinary rendition? Or the Law Lords’ findings on torture?”

  Ranjit hadn’t, but Gamini filled him in after his friend had woken from a deep sleep that had lasted hours. Back in the bad old days some great powers, such as the United States, were on record as opposed to using torture to extract information. However, they kept finding themselves in possession of some captives who surely knew things that were important but that they would never voluntarily say. Torture was an unreliable way of making people give truthful answers—at a certain stage almost anyone would say whatever their interrogators wanted to hear, true or not, just to make it stop—but these great powers had no better way available. So they worked out a little plan. Captives of that sort were handed over to the intelligence services of some other country, one that had never promised to abjure the infliction of pain as a technique in questioning, and then the information would be passed back to the United States or whatever other great power had requested it. “And that,” Gamini finished, “was extraordinary rendition. ‘Extraordinary’ because that’s what it was. ‘Rendition’ in the sense of rendering—meaning, ‘turning over’—like rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, as the Christians say.”

  “Huh,” Ranjit said thoughtfully. “And that’s still going on?”

  “Well, sort of. The superpowers don’t commission it anymore. There’s been too much publicity. Anyway, they don’t have to because there are plenty of uncommitted countries that automatically pick up and question people with inexplicable criminal records. Like pirates, who are beyond the pale for them anyway, and especially like pirates who seem to be hiding their identities. Like you, they thought, because of the name business. And then they trade off information to the sanctimonious countries, because that’s where the Law Lords’ decision comes in. The Lords did a commission on information derived from torture way back when, and concluded that, for moral reasons, such information could never be used in any legal proceedings. On the other hand, it would be perfectly proper, they said, to turn it over to, say, the police.” He looked up as the two women were advancing on them. “And now we have to buckle up because I guess we’re coming in to Bandaranaike. Only, listen. You wouldn’t believe what deals we had to make and what promises we had to give to spring you loose from where you were. So help me keep those promises. No matter what, you don’t ever tell anybody anything that can identify any of the people who held you. Or I’ll be in deep trouble, and so will my dad.”

  “I promise,” Ranjit said, meaning it. And then he added mischievously, “You said you checked on the girls. How’s good old Maggie doing?”

  Gamini gave him a pained look. “Oh, good old Maggie’s fine,” he said. “She married a U.S. senator a couple of months ago. Sent me an invitation to the reception, as a matter of fact. So I went to Harrods and picked out a nice fish slice to send her, but I didn’t go myself.”

  17

  HEAVEN

  As the BAB-2200 rapidly taxied toward a gate, Captain-Doctor Jeannie delivered her verdict: What Ranjit really needed was rest, kindly care, and food, enough food to put back the eight or ten kilos of body mass that his extraordinary-rendition diet had taken from him, although (she added) it wouldn’t hurt for him to spend the next couple days in a hospital, either. The party waiting to greet him at the gate, however, vetoed that. That party was only one person, but that person was Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, and she was not in a mood to be contradicted. The place for Ranjit to recuperate, Mevrouw Vorhulst declared, was not some impersonal factory that generated quantities of medical care but very little love. No. The right place for Ranjit to regain his strength was a comfortable, caring home. Hers, for instance.

  So it was. Beatrix Vorhulst was certainly right about her promise of great care, too, because at the moment Ranjit arrived, every resource of their quite resourceful household was devoted to him. He had a room as vast and cool as his hottest and sweatiest prison night could have imagined. He had three wonderful meals a day—no, more like a dozen of them, because every time he closed his eyes for a moment, he woke to find a perfect apple or banana or icy-cold pineapple spear waiting beside his bed. Better still, in the long run he won his argument with the doctors that Gamini had ordered to double-check him. True, he first had to convince them that for all the time of his captivity he had been up and about every day without harm, or at least every day when he wasn’t so bruised and beat-up that walking hurt more than it was worth. But then he had the freedom of that grand house and its grander gardens. Including the swimming pool, and what a delight it was to backstroke dreamily across that gently cool water, with the hot sun blessing him from the sky and the palms swaying overhead. And he had access to the news.

  That was not altogether a good thing. His time without access to print or television had not prepared him for the details of all the things that had been going on around the planet Earth—the murders, the riots, the car bombings, the wars.

  None of those were the worst of the bad news, though. That came when Gamini looked in for a minute before leaving Sri Lanka for some more urgent (but, of course, unspecified) errand. As he was actually at the door to leave, he paused. “There’s one thing I didn’t tell you, Ranj. It’s about your father.”

  “Oh, right,” Ranjit said remorsefully. “I’d better call him right away.”

  But Gamini was shaking his head. “Wish you could,” he said. “The thing is, he had a stroke. He’s dead.”

  There was only one person in the world Ranjit wanted to speak to at that moment, and he had him on the phone before Gamini was out of the Vorhulst house. That was the old monk Surash, and he was overjoyed to hear Ranjit’s voice. Less so, of course, to discuss the death of Ganesh Subramanian, but curiously not particularly sad about it, either. “Yes, Ranjit,” he said, “your father was moving heaven and earth to find you, and I think he just wore out. Anyway, he came back from another visit to the police complaining he felt tired, and the next morning he was dead in his bed. He had not been in really good health for some time, you know.”

  “Actually, I didn’t know,” Ranjit said sorrowfully. “He never said.?
??

  “He did not wish to worry you—and, Ranjit, you must not be worried. His jiva will be greeted with honor, and his funeral was good. Since you had been taken from us, I was the one who said the prayers, and made sure there were flowers and rice balls in his coffin, and when he had been burned, I myself carried his ashes to the sea. Death is not the end, you know.”

  “I know,” Ranjit said, more for the monk’s sake than his own.

  “He may never even need to be born again. And if he is, I am sure it will be as someone or some creature near you. And, oh, Ranjit, when you can travel, please come and see us. And do you have a lawyer? There is a little bit in your father’s estate. Of course it all goes to you, but there are documents to file.”

  That troubled Ranjit. He had no lawyer. But when he mentioned it to Mevrouw Vorhulst, she said that wasn’t a problem, and from then on he did have a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, either, but a partner in Gamini’s father’s firm, whose name was Nigel De Saram. What troubled Ranjit a good deal more was the stabbing guilt he felt. He hadn’t known of his father’s death, and the reason for that was that he had not bothered to ask.

  Oh, sure, he told himself, he had been full of a thousand other concerns.

  But if it had been the other way around, would Ranjit have slipped his father’s mind?

  Not counting servants, Mevrouw Vorhulst was his only visitor for the first few days, but then he argued (and the doctors had to agree) that no stress any visitor might cause him would come anywhere near the stress caused by strong young jailers hitting him with clubs. The barriers were reduced. The next morning, while Ranjit was experimenting with some of the Vorhulsts’ exercise machines, the Vorhulsts’ butler came into the gym, cleared his throat, and said, “You have a visitor, sir.”

  Ranjit’s mind had been far away. “Have there been any messages for me?” he asked.

  The butler sighed. “No, sir. If any messages come, they will be brought to you at once, as you requested. Now Dr. De Saram would like to see you. Shall I show him in?”

  Ranjit quickly put on one of the Vorhulsts’ infinite supply of dressing gowns. Lawyer De Saram quickly took charge. He didn’t seem very junior to Ranjit—he was maybe fifty or sixty, maybe more—and he was clearly good at what he did. He didn’t have to be told about the bequest from Ranjit’s father. Although he had been asked to handle Ranjit’s affairs barely forty-eight hours before, he had already established Ranjit’s existence with the appropriate Trincomalee court and had a pretty good idea of the value of the bequest. “Not quite twenty million rupees, Mr. Subramanian,” he said, “but not far under it, either—or, at the current rate of exchange, about ten thousand U.S. dollars. The bulk of it is two pieces of property, your father’s home and a smaller house that is currently unoccupied.”

  “I know the house,” Ranjit told him. “Is there anything I have to do?”

  “Not just now,” De Saram told him, “although there is one possibility that you may wish to give some thought to. Dr. Bandara himself would have wished to do this for you, but, as you know, he is involved in some highly classified matters with the United Nations.”

  “I do know, but I don’t know much,” Ranjit said.

  “Of course. The thing is that you might normally have a claim for damages against the people who, ah, prevented you from coming home for so long, but—”

  Ranjit said, “I know. We aren’t to talk about those people.”

  “Exactly so,” De Saram declared, sounding relieved. “However, there is another avenue you may wish to take. It would be possible for you to bring an action against the cruise line company on the grounds that they should not have allowed their ship to be taken over by pirates. That would not be for as large a sum as the other, of course, both because their responsibility is a little harder to establish and also because their solvency is not very strong—”

  “No, wait a minute,” Ranjit said. “They had their ship stolen, which I was on because of my own stupidity, and now I should sue them for letting it happen? That doesn’t sound fair.”

  For the first time De Saram gave him a friendly grin. “Dr. Bandara said you would say that,” he announced. “Now I think my car should be about ready….”

  And indeed just then there was a knock on the door. It was Vass, the butler, to announce that that was the case. And then, before Ranjit could say anything, the butler addressed him directly: “There are no messages for you, sir,” he added. “And, if I may—I didn’t want to trouble you before—we were all deeply saddened to learn of the loss of your father.”

  It wasn’t that what the butler said reminded Ranjit of his father’s death. He didn’t need reminding. The loss was part of him, day and night, a wound that did not heal.

  The worst thing about death was that it irrevocably ended communication. Ranjit was left with a long list of things he should have said to his father and never had. Now that the opportunity was lost, all those unsaid expressions of love and respect were silting up inside Ranjit’s heart.

  And, of course, there was no more cheer to be found in the news. Fighting had flared up between Ecuador and Colombia, new squabbles were arising over the division of Nile water, and North Korea had filed a complaint before the Security Council accusing China of diverting rain clouds from Korean rice paddies to their own.

  Nothing had changed. It was just that the world population was now irretrievably one person short.

  But there was one thing he could do—should have done long since—and by his sixth day as a guest in the Vorhulst home, Ranjit finally demanded, and got, a copy of that frantic communication he had rushed off from the plane. He studied it as critically, as demandingly and as judgingly, as any freshman composition teacher had ever looked over a student’s final term paper. If the kind of mistakes that might disqualify him were there, he was going to find them. He was crushed to discover that there indeed were some—two of them on his first look, then four, then one or two additional passages that weren’t entirely wrong but did seem to be not entirely clear, either.

  Ranjit had excuses. It was all due to that last stretch of seven or eight weeks, when he had at last completed the proof in his mind—all that he could manage to complete, since he was lacking paper, ink, or computer—and only kept rehearsing it, step by step, terrified that he might forget some crucial step.

  The question was, what to do about those mistaken bits?

  Ranjit worried over that question for all of one day and much of that night. Should he send the magazine a list of corrections? That would seem the sensible thing to do…but then Ranjit’s pride got in the way, because the “mistakes” were really rather trivial, things that any decent mathematician would spot at once and almost as quickly see how to repair. And he had a horror of seeming to beg.

  He did not send another communication to Nature, though most nights after that, while trying to go to sleep, he all over again worried the question of whether he should have.

  Ranjit wished he had a better idea of what a publication such as Nature did with submissions like the one he had sent them. He was pretty sure that if they had any idea of publishing it, their first step would be to send copies of it to three or four—or more—experts in that particular area to see that there weren’t any glaring mistakes in it.

  How long could that take?

  Ranjit didn’t know. What he did know was that it had already taken a lot longer than he would have liked.

  So every time the butler knocked on the door to announce a visitor, Ranjit’s hopes soared, and every time the butler announced that visitor’s trivial errand, his hopes crashed again.

  18

  COMPANY

  On the seventh day of Ranjit’s stay with the Vorhulsts the butler announced another visitor, and it was Myra de Soyza. “Am I intruding, Ranjit?” she asked at once. “Aunt Bea said I could look in on you as long as I didn’t keep you from resting.”

  Actually he had in fact been resting, and Myra de Soyza was certainly keeping him from it
. He didn’t want to say that and did his best to manufacture conversation. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “I mean, are you still at the university?”

  She wasn’t. Hadn’t been since that sociology class they had shared; had in fact just come back from a postdoc session (postdoc! He had had no idea how far up the academic ladder she had climbed) at MIT in America, and naturally he asked, “Studying what?”

  “Well…artificial intelligence, more or less.”

  He decided to ignore the cryptic “more or less.” “So how’s artificial intelligence doing?”

  She grinned at last. “If you mean how close are we to getting a computer to have a reasonable chat with us, terrible. If you go back to the kinds of artificial intelligence projects that the people who started the field were trying to solve, not bad at all. Did you ever hear of a man named Marvin Minsky?”

  Ranjit consulted his memory and came up empty. “I don’t think so.”

  “Pity. He was one of the best minds ever to try to define what thought was, and to find ways of getting a computer to actually do something you could call thinking. He used to tell a story that cheers me up sometimes.” She paused there, as though unsure of her audience’s interest. Ranjit, who would have taken pleasure in hearing her announce train delays or closing stock prices, made the right sounds, and she went on. “Well, the thing is that in the beginning of AI studies, he, and all the other pioneers, too, considered pattern recognition as one of the hallmarks of AI. Then pattern recognition got solved in a rather everyday way. Checkout counters in every supermarket in the world began reading the prices of every item from bar codes. So what happened? AI simply got redefined. Pattern recognition got left out of the recipe because they’d solved that one, even if the computers still couldn’t make up a joke or figure out from the way you looked that you had a hangover.”