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. Habit won; she was still irrevocably female. “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—from a woman, yes, but still wisdom. 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 be
en 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.
3
AN ADVENTURE IN CODE-CRACKING
There were nearly two months of summer vacation between the end of Ranjit’s first school year and the beginning of his second. This tinkering with the calendar was still regarded as a rather radical new experiment by much of the university’s faculty. Until recently they had never allowed a summer vacation on the grounds that, Sri Lanka being as close to the equator as it was, it never had seasons. But a few years of student unrest, followed by the realization that college-age young men and women need a break from discipline now and then, led to the experiment of following Western university practices.
For Ranjit, the experiment was not so successful. Gamini was away, so he had no one to enjoy it with, and world news remained bad.
What made it worse was that for a time things had looked good. There had been a promise of a superpower meeting to stamp out some of the world’s deadly little wars. That had sounded like a promising development, but the selection of a site for the meeting went badly. Russia proposed Kiev, in Ukraine, but when it came to a vote, Kiev lost by two votes to one. China offered Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, but it, too, was defeated, by the same margin. As was the American proposal, Vancouver, in Canada. After which the Chinese representatives stormed out of the UN building, declaring that the Western powers had no real interest in world peace after all.
But the American and Russian delegates had expected that, and had made a plan in readiness. In joint statements they deplored the Chinese failure to subordinate national vanity to the needs of peace and announced their intention to set aside their often-expressed and irreconcilable differences to go ahead with the meeting without China’s presence.
For a locale they chose that beautiful Venice of the north, the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Their effort almost succeeded. They agreed on the urgent need to put an immediate stop to the ongoing fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, between the Muslim and the Christian fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, between Ecuador and Colombia—well, between every pair of nations that was making war, declared or otherwise, on each other all around the globe. There were plenty of candidates, and there was no doubt that a few rockets in the right place could have made any of them stop fighting. The Americans and the Russians agreed that it was their simple duty, as the biggest bullies on the block, to do the job.
But there was one thing they couldn’t agree on. That was, in each combative pair, which one to aim their rockets at.
Ranjit Subramanian decided to do his best to ignore all that sort of thing. It was spoiling his summer, which was cherished, unprogrammed time for Ranjit, meaning he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and he knew exactly what that would be. But when he trapped Dr. Christopher Dabare in his office, the math teacher took offense. “If I would not allow you to use my password during the school year, what gives you the lunatic notion that I will let you have it while I’m in Kuwait?”
Ranjit blinked at him. “Kuwait?”
“Where I have a contract to teach summer sessions each year for the oil sheikhs’ sons, at, I might mention, a rate of payment quite a bit more impressive than I receive trying to beat simple mathematical truths into the heads of you people.”
To which Ranjit, thinking fast, responded only, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be away. I wish you a pleasant trip,” and headed out of the professor’s office for the nearest computer. If bloody Dr. Dabare wouldn’t give up his password voluntarily, there were other possibilities. Specifically there were the kind of possibilities that existed in the case of a teacher who would be making his fortune a couple of thousand kilometers away, and Ranjit had instantly conceived a plan for taking advantage of them.
Step one in the plan was easy. Every faculty member at the university kept a potted biography on file. It took only a moment for Ranjit to pull Dabare’s up. Ten minutes later he was walking away, folding into his pocket the printout that held a healthy beginning for all the preliminary data he wanted—Dabare’s birth date, his personal phone extension number, his e-mail address, his passport number, his wife’s name—and the names of her parents, too—his own parents’ names, and even the name of his paternal grandfather, included because he had once been mayor of a small town somewhere in the south. Plus the name of his Jack Russell terrier, Millie, and the address of his beach house down the shore in Uppuveli. It wasn’t everything. It almost certainly would not even be enough. But it was certainly a good chunk of data to be starting with.
The question was, where could he find a place to run the necessary programs?
Certainly none of the terminals he was in the habit of using for his schoolwork would do. They were far too public. Ranjit had no doubt that when he finished programming the computer to do what he wanted, it would need to chug along for a significant period of time as it worked all the required combinations and permutations. He did not want some casual passerby wondering what that computer was up to.
But there was an ideal place! The one he and Gamini had discovered in the unfinished school of indigenous law!
When he got there, though, he got a shock. He came in the usual way for Gamini and himself—the back way—and was pleased to see the two computers still sitting there and lighting up at once when he hit the power key. But he could hear a distant sound of music, the kind of tuneless this-year’s trash that he and Gamini had agreed they hated, and when he peered in at the reception room, the actual receptionist was there. An elderly woman, rather fat. Making herself a cup of tea to go with the supermarket special “newspaper” in her hand.
She seemed to have the ears of a bat. She looked up at once to where Ranjit lurked. “Hello?” she called. “Is someone there?”
For a time it seemed to Ranjit that he was going to have to find another perfect spot for his computing, but it turned out that the receptionist did not consider her duties to include security checks. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Wanniarachchi. (To which Ranjit inventively responded that his was Sumil Bandaranaga.) She was glad to have company in the stacks, because sometimes it got lonesome. Mr. Bandaranaga did of course have at least a minor in comparative religions? Ranjit assured her that he did, and that was all it took. Mrs. Wanniarachchi gave him a friendly wave and went back to her scandal sheet, and Ranjit had the freedom of the library.
Nothing had changed. The pair of computer terminals still sat ready, and it didn’t take Ranjit long to set up his program and feed in the bits and pieces he had collected. As he left, the woman at the desk, already standing up and putting on her raincoat, said idly, “You’ve turned everything off, haven’t you?”
“Oh, of course,” Ranjit reassured her. Actually, he hadn’t; but the computer would turn itself off when it had found the password Ranjit was looking for, or when it concluded that the password could not be generated from any of the data he had supplied. And in the morning he could get the results.
Which were, as he had more or less expected, nonexistent.
There had not been enough data for the program to do its job. By then he already had more data to feed it, though, having spent one hour of the night wearing the rough clothes of a garbageman and collecting all the refuse Dr. Dabare’s household had set out for the real collectors of everything unwanted. Most of what Ranjit acquired was not only worthless but offensive to the nose, but there had been several dozen sheets of paper—statements of account from various shops and service providers; offers for tours, car rentals, and e-bank lending facilities; and, best of all, a dozen or so personal letters. Tragically most of them were in German, the language of the country where the professor had taken some graduate courses, a language as opaque to Ranjit as Inuit or Choctaw, but from the letters in English or Sinhalese he extracted Dabare’s driver’s license number, his exact height in centimeters, and the PIN for his cash machine card. (And wouldn’t it be only fair if Ranjit took a thousand rupees or so for the trouble the math professor was causing him? No, he concluded, it wouldn’t. Such a thing was feloniously illegal. But it was amusing to think about.)