Inexorably Ganesh Subramanian repeated the terrible words. “Gamini is Sinhalese.”
“But Father! What about all the things you taught me? About that poem you made me learn by heart, the one from the Purananuru. ‘To us all towns are one, all men our kin, thus we have seen in the visions of the wise.’”
He was clutching at straws. His father was not to be moved by two-thousand-year-old Tamil verses. He didn’t answer, just shook his head, though Ranjit could see from the expression on his face that he was suffering, too.
“All right,” Ranjit said miserably. “What do you want me to do?”
His father’s voice was heavy. “What you must, Ranjit. You cannot remain so close to a Sinhalese.”
“But why? Why now?”
“I have no choice in this,” his father said. “I must put my duties as high priest of the temple first, and this matter is causing dissension.” He sighed and then said, “You were raised to be loyal, Ranjit. I am not surprised that you want to stand with your friend. I only hoped that you could find a way to be loyal to your father as well, but perhaps that is impossible.” He shook his head and then stood up, looking down at his son. “Ranjit,” he said, “I must tell you that you are not now welcome in my house. One of the monks will find you a place to sleep tonight. If you finally choose to sever your relationship with Bandara, phone or write me to tell me so. Until you do, there is no reason for you to contact me again.”
As his father turned and walked away, Ranjit dropped quite suddenly into a state of misery….
Perhaps that state needs to be examined more closely. Ranjit was certainly miserable with the sudden distance that had opened between himself and his beloved father. Nothing in that fact, however, led him to think that he himself was in any way in the wrong. He was, after all, just sixteen years old.
And some twenty light-years away, on a planet so corrupted and befouled that it was very difficult to believe any organic creature could survive there, an odd-looking race known as the One Point Fives was nevertheless surviving.
The question now on the collective minds of the One Point Fives, as they prepared themselves to meet the inevitable orders from the Grand Galactics who were their masters, was how much longer that survival would go on.
True, the One Point Fives hadn’t received their marching orders yet. But they knew what was coming. They themselves had detected the troublesome emissions from Earth as the successive waves of photons had swept by. They knew as well just when those photons would reach the Grand Galactics.
Most of all, they knew just how the Grand Galactics were likely to respond. The thought of what that response might mean for them made them shudder within their body armor.
The One Point Fives had only one real hope. That was that they would be able to accomplish everything the Grand Galactics would demand of them and, when that task was completed, that they would have enough survivors among their own people to keep the race alive.
2
UNIVERSITY
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 eve
n 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 was 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?”