The Last Theorem

  Take the situation in North Korea, for instance. First off, there seemed to have been a regime change. Blustery luxury-loving Kim Jong Il was gone.

  In some ways that was almost a pity. Kim might have been a nut, but he had been the kind of nut that had always stopped just short of an actual large-scale attack on his neighbors. Now there was this new guy. He was always referred to as “the Adorable Leader.” If he had a proper name, it seemed to be too precious to share with the decadent West.

  But if the Adorable Leader’s identity was secret, what he did was all too public. Their latest generation of nuclear rockets, the Adorable Leader’s generals claimed, could easily cross the northern stretches of the Pacific Ocean. This meant that they could strike actual United States of America soil—at least Alaska, perhaps even the northern corner of Washington State. What’s more, the generals boasted, the new rockets were definitely reliable. This talk made all of their neighbors increasingly nervous. Those that didn’t already have their own nuclear stocks were under increasing pressure to acquire them.

  Nor was the rest of the world much better off. In Africa the continent had backslid to some of the worst days of the twentieth century. Once again they were seeing the armies of boy soldiers, some of them barely into their teens, drafted when their families were murdered, and fighting for stocks of illicit diamonds and even less licit ivory….

  It was discouraging.

  There was, though, one thing that did trouble Ranjit when he let himself think of it, and it came up when Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst looked in on a conversation with lawyer De Saram to ask, “What would anyone like for dinner?”

  It was the same question that someone had to ask every morning, but this time it got a different reception. Myra turned to look inquiringly at Ranjit, who cocked an eyebrow at her, sighed, and spoke to their hostess. “That’s something we’ve been talking about, Aunt Bea. We think you’d probably like to have your house back.”

  It was the first time Ranjit had ever seen Beatrix Vorhulst look indignant. “Dear boy, not at all! We’re glad to have you stay here as long as you like. You’re family, you know. We like having you here, and we’re honored, besides, and—”

  But De Saram, having studied Myra’s face, was shaking his head. “Perhaps we’ve missed the point, Mevrouw,” he said. “They’re married. They want their own home, not a piece of yours, and they’re absolutely right about it. Let’s all have another cup of tea and consider the options. And as to a place for the two of you to live, you already have one, Ranjit. What used to be your father’s home in Trincomalee is now yours, you know.”

  Ranjit turned to examine Myra’s face. The expression on it was very much what he had been expecting. “I don’t think Myra wants to live in Trinco,” he reported sorrowfully to the group, but she was already shaking her head.

  “Trinco’s beautiful,” she said. “I’d love to have a place there, but—”

  She didn’t finish. “What then?” De Saram asked, puzzled.

  Ranjit answered for her. “It was a very nice house for one elderly man,” he said. “But for us—that is, for a couple who are probably going to want washing machines, dishwashers, all sorts of appliances that my father had no reason to bother with—well, what do you say, Myra? Do you want to start making changes in my father’s house?”

  She took a deep breath, but managed to compress her reply to one word: “Yes.”

  “Of course you do,” he said. “You wouldn’t rather tear it down and start over from scratch? No? All right. Then the first thing we do is get Surash to find us an architect who can make floor plans of what we’ve got to work with—he knows every Tamil in Trinco—and we invite him here with the plans and you and he start creating. With,” he added, “me available for creative inputs any time I’m asked. Meanwhile, Myra, you and I move our bodies into a hotel. How does that sound?”

  Mevrouw was frowning more deeply than Ranjit had ever seen her. “There’s no reason for that,” she declared. “We’re perfectly comfortable with you here until the place in Trincomalee is ready for you.”

  Ranjit looked at his wife, then spread his hands. “All right, but I do have another suggestion. Myra, love? Didn’t I once hear you say something about a honeymoon?”

  Myra looked surprised. “No. You haven’t. I admit I think a honeymoon would be grand, but I haven’t said a single word about it—”

  “Not since we were married,” Ranjit agreed, “but I remember exactly what you said to me, right in this room, a few years ago. You told me about all the wonderful parts of Lanka that I’d never visited. So let’s go visit them, Myra. While everybody’s getting the rest of our lives ready for us.”

  The best place to start was the easiest, Myra declared, so the first place they tried was the turtle hatchery in Kosgoda, because Myra had loved it as a child and, mostly, because it was close enough for practice, then Kandy, the island’s grand old city. But a week later, when they had done them both and were back in the Vorhulst house and the staff wanted to know how they’d liked it, their responses were tepid. They had been recognized in Kosgoda, and small crowds had followed them about all day. Kandy had been worse. The local police had taken them around the town in a police car. They had seen everything, but hadn’t once been allowed to wander at will.

  Over the dinner table Beatrix Vorhulst listened sympathetically as Ranjit explained that it was nice to be driven around, but they really would have liked to mingle with the crowds. She sighed. “I don’t know if that can happen,” she said. “You’re the best sight the people have for sightseeing purposes. You see, the trouble is that we’re a bit short on world-famous celebrities here in Lanka. You’re about all we’ve got.”

  Myra disagreed. “Not really. There’s the writer—”

  “Well, yes, but he hardly ever comes out of his house. Anyway, it’s not the same. If we were somewhere thick with movie stars and all kinds of famous people—Los Angeles, for instance, or London—you two could just put on some dark glasses and you’d hardly be noticed.” And then her expression changed. She said, “Well, come to think of it, why not?”

  And when everyone was looking at her, she explained: “You’ve got all these invitations from all over the world, Ranjit. Why not accept a few?”

  Ranjit blinked at her, then turned to Myra. “What do you think? Should we try to have a real honeymoon—Europe, America, whatever you like?”

  She glanced at him, then around the table thoughtfully. She finally said, “I think that would be wonderful, Ranjit. If we’re going to do it, let’s do it soon.”

  He gave her a curious look, but turned at once to questioning about what specific invitations were available. It wasn’t until they were heading to bed that he thought to ask her, “You do want to do this, don’t you? Because if you don’t want to—”

  She laid a finger across his lips and then, unexpectedly, followed with a kiss. “It’s just that I think if we’re going to do long-distance traveling, it might be better to do it soon. Might be a little more difficult later on. I wasn’t going to tell you until the doctor confirmed it, but I won’t see her until Friday. The thing is, I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”

  21

  HONEYMOON, PART TWO

  While Myra and Ranjit were making their way to London, a trip as long and wearing as Gamini had described it years before, the world was going on its own way. Which was, of course, the way of death and destruction. They had booked their flight the long way around, by way of Mumbai, so Ranjit could get a quick look at the city. But their plane was forty minutes late because of circling before being allowed to land. Artillery fighting had broken out again in the Vale of Kashmir. No one knew what underground Pakistani agents might be planning to do to targets in India’s heartland, so the couple spent their whole time in the old city in their hotel room, watching television. That didn’t have much good news, either. Units of the Adorable Leader’s North Korean army, no longer limiting themselves to creating incidents along the border with Sout
h Korea, had plucked up the courage to have a few incidents with the country that fed it, the one that was pretty nearly its only real friend in the world, the People’s Republic of China. What they were up to no one seemed able to guess, but four separate incursions, no more than a dozen or so troops each, crossed into PRC territory, where there was nothing but hills and rocks, and set up camp.

  Myra and Ranjit were three hours later boarding their London plane, too, but by the time they were airborne, skirting Pakistan’s shoreline en route to Heathrow in England, the Kashmir fighting had died down and the North Korean army had turned around and gone back to its barracks, and no one could figure out what they had been up to in the first place.

  And then there they were, in London.

  It did not disappoint, exactly. The great sights of the city were as fascinating to Ranjit as they had been to millions of visitors for hundreds of years. All of them—huge old St. Paul’s, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey—all the famous ones that every tourist had to see and a fair number of sights that were not really famous at all but were of particular interest to Ranjit—like the London School of Economics and a certain superb maisonette a few squares away on Arundel Street, because both had once been inhabited by Gamini Bandara at a time when Ranjit himself had had no hope of ever visiting them. When Myra persuaded him to take an excursion to Kew Gardens, he really loved the vast greenhouses. He loved all the great and famous structures of the city, almost without exception. What he did not love in the least, however, was all the open and unroofed spaces that lay between them, the spaces that he had to traverse in order to get from one to another.

  And which were, without exception in this month of November, terribly, unbearably cold.

  This soul-searing experience was one that Ranjit had never before encountered in all of his life. Oh, perhaps sometimes he had suffered a brief chill, maybe at the tip of Swami Rock when the winds were strong, or when he was just coming out of a plunge in the surf in the early, early morning. Not like this! Not when it was so cold that the sparse snows of the week before, and even the ones of the week before that, still left their blackened remains on the margins of parking lots and the edges of lawns because it had never warmed up enough since to finish melting them away.

  Still, London’s shops were full of garments designed to keep the coldest visitor toasty, or anyway somewhat warm. Thermal underwear, gloves, and a fur-collared topcoat made the London streets bearable to Ranjit, while the first mink coat of her life improved things for Myra.

  Then they met Sir Tariq. It was he, on behalf of the Royal Mathematical Society, who had invited Ranjit to become a member, and to come to London to tell them about his feat. (And had produced a foundation that paid their expenses.) Sir Tariq al Diwani turned out to be a plump elderly man with unruly Albert Einstein hair, a kindly heart, and no trace of any accent but the purest OxCam. (“Well,” he explained when pressed, “I’m fourth generation London, after all.”) And when he found that Ranjit was freezing most of the time, he struck his forehead. “Oh, blast,” he said. “I let them give you posh instead of comfort. I’ll have you moved.”

  What they were moved to was a brand-shiny-new but not particularly fashionable hotel in South Kensington. Which puzzled Myra a bit until she had a talk with the concierge and, grinning, reported to Ranjit that Sir Tariq had chosen this particular hotel because, a, it was convenient to some of the city’s best museums, if that should interest them while they were there, and, b, it was frequently occupied by Arab oil sheikhs and their large retinues, an entire floor or two at a time. The importance of that was that what the oil sheikhs hated most, even more than Ranjit did, was being cold, not just in their private rooms but in a hotel’s lobbies, fire stairs, and even elevators as well. And what the owners of the hotel hated even more than that was to fail to give those free-spending Arabs every last thing they might desire.

  Though not himself a free-spending oil sheikh, Ranjit was happy to receive the fallout from their spending. Over the next couple of months, his mood improved visibly—improved enough, indeed, for him to take a shot at that other reason for the particular hotel they were in, its proximity to Museum Row. The Natural History Museum (though drafty) was a delight, inspiring Ranjit to agree to the crosstown odyssey to the great British Museum itself, back in Gamini’s part of town—even grander (if even draftier) and making him agree that yes, cold countries might after all have some advantages over the hot ones.

  It wasn’t all tourism. The lecture for the Royal Mathematical Society took some thought, though actually what Ranjit said in London was pretty much what he had said at the press conference in Colombo. Two magazines had urgently requested a visit, Nature because they were the ones who had published his paper and New Scientist because (they promised) they would take him to the best pub on their side of the Thames. And there were a couple of press conferences, too, set up at long range by De Saram in Colombo. And even so, with their pictures in print on every newsstand and occasionally on the telly as well, Myra persuaded Ranjit to put his thermal underwear to the test by standing outside Buckingham Palace one evening to observe the changing of the guard. When they were back in their hotel, and Ranjit had to admit none of his parts seemed to be at all frostbitten from the ordeal, he also pointed out that, of all the cameras held by their fellow tourists, every last one had been pointed at the guards, and not one at them. “So it’s true,” he said. “We can move around London all we like, and no one pays any attention to us at all. I’d really like this place if they’d just move it a thousand kilometers or so south.”

  Well, they wouldn’t do that, so after a few hours of bundling up to get from the hotel lobby to a taxi, and from the taxi to some other lobby somewhere else, Ranjit gave up. He took Sir Tariq aside. Then he got on the phone with De Saram in Colombo, and then, grinning, reported to Myra, “We’re going to America. It’s what they call the Triple-A-S—the American Association for the Advancement of Science?—and next month they’re having their annual convention and De Saram has it all worked out. Oh, we’re not through here, Myra. Not permanently. We’ll do everything there is to do here, but not until the weather’s a little warmer.” So they were booked first class—another of those generous foundations—to leave on the American-Delta flight to New York City (Kennedy) at two P.M. that afternoon.

  Which they did, though with many sincere protestations of thanks to Sir Tariq, and by two-twenty they were leaving England behind and approaching the eastern coast of Ireland.

  Ranjit was all solicitude. “I haven’t rushed you too much, have I? You’re not—?” The whoopsing gesture he made at his mouth elucidated the question for Myra, who laughed. She held up her glass for an orange juice refill from the attendant, who was quick to oblige.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “And yes, you and I can come back to England when it’s nice and warm—say June. But are you sure you’re doing the right thing now, going to America?”

  Ranjit finished spreading the clotted cream and strawberry preserves on his scone and popped the product into his mouth. “Of course I am,” he told her, chewing. “I checked the New York weather reports for myself. Right now they’ve got a low of nine, looking to a high for the day of eighteen. I’ve been colder than that in Trinco.”

  Uncertain whether to laugh or cry, Myra set down her glass. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “You’ve never been in America, have you?”

  Suddenly worried, Ranjit turned to face her. “What do you mean?”

  She reached out to stroke his hand. “Just that you haven’t noticed that they’re pretty old-fashioned there in some ways. The way they still use miles instead of kilometers, for instance. And—I hope this won’t upset you—the way they cling to the Fahrenheit thermometer scale instead of going to Celsius along with the rest of the world?”

  22

  THE NEW WORLD

  Apart from the great thermal disappointment that the climate of New York represented for Ranjit, the news that
kept coming over their hotel suite’s large supply of TV sets was even more disheartening than usual. For example, South America had been relatively quiet, war-wise, for some time. No longer. Now (as one of their American hosts explained it to Myra and Ranjit) what had changed was the fact that the United States had revised most drug crimes down from felonies to, at most, misdemeanors. That had decriminalized nearly all the stock in trade of the Colombian drug merchants. That change in the laws made it possible for any American addict to get what he needed for his habit, cheap and without gangster intervention, at any local pharmacy, thus effectively putting the gangsters out of business. (It also made it pointless for any neighborhood pusher to hand out free samples to twelve-year-olds. That would no longer ensure him a supply of addicted customers for the future, since none of those future customers, if there were any, would be buying from him anyway. And so each year the census of American addicts slowly dwindled as the oldest ones died or went dry, and few new ones came along as replacements.)

  But that was only the good part of drug decriminalization. There was a bad part as well.

  The bad part, or the worst of the bad parts, was that the drug cartels, deprived of the profits from their coca plantations, began to look longingly at the equally addictive stuff that was being exported by their neighbors in Venezuela. Why, there was even more money in oil than there ever had been in drugs! And so armed parties from the Colombian drug citadels were infiltrating the oil fields of their neighbor. The relatively small (and often quite purchasable) Venezuelan army was putting up a show of resistance, sometimes, but the powerful motivation was all on the Colombian side, and so were almost all the victories.