Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

The plan was not working. With less than a week before the new school year began, Ranjit faced the fact that he was trying to work too many angles at once. It was something like the very GSSM syndrome Gamini had warned him against.

So he determined to simplify his attack. Being Ranjit Subramanian, his idea of simplifying was to make a head-on attack on that hated and endlessly long Wiles proof, the one that only a handful of the world’s leading mathematicians dared claim they understood.

He gritted his teeth and began.

The first steps were easy. But then he worked further into Wiles’s ugly chain of reasoning and it began to get—well, not hard, exactly, not for the likes of Ranjit Subramanian, but at least it began to require concentrated attention for every line. Because that was when Wiles began considering the equations for curves in the x-y plane, and for elliptical curves, and for the many solutions to the equation for modularity. Which was when Wiles, for the first time ever, was able to demonstrate that what was called the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture—namely, that any infinite class of elliptical curves was modular—was valid. And then, while Gerhard Frey and Kenneth Ribet had demonstrated that a certain elliptical curve could not be modular, Wiles himself was able to demonstrate that that same curve necessarily had to be modular….

And, aha! There it was! A veritable contradiction!

A contradiction was the mathematical pot of gold that—sometimes!—lay at the end of some interminable mathematical trail. A contradiction was the thing that mathematicians gladly devoted their lives to finding, because if logical deductions from your starting equation wind up with two conclusions that contradict each other, then your starting equation itself must be wrong!

And so it was proved—sort of proved—that Fermat had spoken truth. The square was the limit. The sum of no two cubes would ever be another cube, and so on for every other exponent this side of infinity. But Ranjit was no nearer to finding his own less daunting proof of what Fermat had so casually mentioned so long ago.

And—oh, yes—he was not aware that his picture was being taken.

The beings that were doing the picture taking were another of those client races of the Grand Galactics. These were called the Machine-Stored, and of course Ranjit never saw them. They didn’t intend to be seen. They generally weren’t ever seen, either, although under certain rare combinations of starlight, moonlight, and gegenschein, a few of them had occasionally been detected by an occasional human being. When reported, these sightings were generally referred to as sightings of flying saucers, thus adding to the vast catalog of fakes, mistakes, and downright lies that made it nearly certain no respectable scientist would ever pay any attention to them.

What the Machine-Stored were doing on Earth at that time was anticipating a need of the Grand Galactics, whose needs and wishes the Machine-Stored always catered to. The Grand Galactics hadn’t ordered this activity, but the Machine-Stored were permitted to use their own discretion in certain limited circumstances. The special quality of the Machine-Stored lay in the fact that they had trashed their planet even more diligently than the One Point Fives, to the point where organic life on its surface was now completely impossible. The One Point Fives had dealt with the problem by adding infinite prostheses to their vulnerable organic bodies. The Machine-Stored took a different tack. They abandoned their physical planet, and indeed abandoned everything physical at all. They reconstituted themselves as something like computer programs and allowed their now quite frail and sickly bodies the privilege of death, while the individuals lived on in cyberspace. (Since which their despoiled planet had begun to show the beginning signs of regeneration. Not all of its liquid water was now toxic, for instance—though it still would have been pretty much a hellhole for anything organic.)

And the Machine-Stored themselves?

Why, they made themselves useful. Sometimes, when the Grand Galactics chose to move a certain quantity of objects or beings from one star system to another, the Machine-Stored were instructed to do the moving. And when they had detected those first microwave and then nuclear pulses from Earth, they’d known the Grand Galactics would take an interest. They didn’t wait for orders. They at once began to survey the planet and everything on it, and to pass those findings at once to the corner of the galaxy where the Grand Galactics swam in their dark energy streams.

Of course, the Machine-Stored had no good idea of just what the human race was up to in its various activities. For that, they would have needed to understand human languages. That didn’t happen. The Grand Galactics preferred that their client races be ignorant of any languages but their own, because if the races could freely talk to one another, who knew what they might be saying?

Ranjit would have been astonished to know that his own picture had been flashed across interstellar space in that manner. It had, though. So had the pictures of everyone, and almost everything, on Earth, because the Machine-Stored—if not omnipotent—were diligent.

And hoped that the Grand Galactics would appreciate, or at least tolerate, that diligence.

When Ranjit’s bedside radio woke him for the first day of his new term, he leaped out of bed in order to turn it off. His first class, Astronomy 101: The Geography of the Solar System, was also pretty close to his last hope that the university would provide him with anything interesting over the next three years. That was mildly cheering in itself. And then, as he was leaving the building, the porter handed him a letter—from London, and therefore from Gamini—and Ranjit actually did feel a little bit cheerful.

Hunched over his breakfast, he read the letter. It didn’t take very much time. The letter was even shorter than its predecessor and almost entirely devoted to describing Gamini’s “superb maisonette”:

You enter from the street and go up a flight of stairs. Then you’re in the living room (the Brits call it the “reception”). Next to that room is a doll-size kitchen, and that’s all there is on that floor. There’s a separate flight of stairs going down from the reception to the back, where there’s a spare room that looks out on a few square meters of mud that might be supposed to be a garden. I guess I’ll call that the guest room, but I don’t plan to be putting up any overnight guests in it. (Unless, my man, you want to drop by for a weekend sometime!) Going back to the reception floor, there’s another flight of stairs that takes you up to the bedroom and bath. Not very convenient for anybody sleeping in the guest room if he needs to have a pee in the middle of the night. And let’s go back to the kitchen. It’s got everything you’d want in a modern kitchen, but in dollhouse sizes: tiny fridge, tiny stove, tiny sink, and the tiniest washer-dryer you’ve ever seen. I said it was about big enough to handle a pair of socks, but Madge said it could only if you did just one sock at a time.

Anyway, such as it is, it’s mine! Even if all the furnishing is Early Cheap. Only now I’ve got to run, because a bunch of us are going to see the new Stoppard revival and we want to have dinner first.

Ranjit managed a smile at the thought of Gamini doing laundry—the Gamini for whom laundry had always been what you took home and gave to the servants, who the next morning would return it to you, cleaned, ironed, and folded.

That did not keep him from wondering just who this Madge was.

So he showed up for his first class prepared for disappointment….

But then, wonderfully, miraculously, that was not at all what happened!