Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

The servant left Ranjit blinking after him until, from another direction, a female voice said, “You were breaking his rice bowl, you know. If the guests opened their own Coke bottles, the beverage wallah would be out of a job. So, Ranjit, how are you?”

When he turned, he recognized the young Burgher woman from his unhappy first year’s sociology class, Mary—Martha—no, “Myra de Soyza,” she supplied. “We met in sociology last year, and it’s nice to see you again. I heard you were working with Fermat’s theorem. How is it going?”

It was not a question Ranjit had expected to be asked, especially by a young woman as good-looking as this one was. He gave her a noncommittal answer. “Pretty slowly, I’m afraid. I didn’t know you were interested in Fermat.”

She looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I’d have to say that you were the one who got me interested. After we heard that you’d stolen the math professor’s password—oh, are you surprised? But of course all of his classes heard about it. I think if the semester hadn’t been over, there would have been a movement to elect you class president.” She gave him a friendly smile. “At any rate, I couldn’t help wondering what would so obsess a person like you—is ‘obsession’ too strong a word?” Ranjit, who had long since come to terms with the technical description of his so-far-failed quest, shrugged. “Well,” she went on, “let’s just say I couldn’t help wondering what would account for your strong interest in trying to find a proof for Fermat’s claim. Wiles’s work was certainly not what Fermat had had in mind, was it? If only because nearly every step in Wiles comes from work somebody else did long after Fermat was dead and gone, and there was no way Fermat could have known—Oh, Ranjit, please be careful of your drink!”

Ranjit blinked and saw what she was talking about. He had been so taken aback by the turn the conversation had taken that he had allowed his Coke glass a dangerous tilt. He straightened it and took a quick swallow to clear his head. “What do you know about the Wiles proof?” he demanded, past the point of caring if he was being polite.

Myra de Soyza didn’t seem to mind. “Not a great deal, really. Just enough to get an idea of what it was all about. Certainly not as much as a real mathematician might. Do you know who Dr. Wilkinson is? From the Drexel Math Forum? I think his was the best and simplest explanation of what Wiles really accomplished.”

The thing that was now paralyzing Ranjit’s vocal cords was that he himself, in the days when he had just begun to try to comprehend the Wiles proof, had been really grateful for that same Dr. Wilkinson’s analysis.

He realized that he must have made some sort of vocal sound, because the de Soyza woman was looking at him inquiringly. “I mean,” he clarified, “are you telling me that you can follow Wilkinson’s gloss?”

“Of course I can follow it,” she told him sweetly. “He was very clear. I just had to read his explanation—well,” she admitted, “five times, actually. And had to look up quite a lot in the reference books. And I don’t doubt that I missed a lot, but I do think I got a sort of approximate understanding.” She looked at him silently for a moment before she asked, “Do you know what I might do if I were you?”

With total truth Ranjit said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, I wouldn’t bother with any part of Wiles. I’d take a look at what other mathematicians had done in, say, the first thirty or forty years after Fermat died. You know. I’m talking about work that Fermat might have heard some anticipations of, or perhaps even worked on himself. And—Ah,” she said, with an abrupt change of subject, looking past Ranjit’s right shoulder, “and here is my long-lost Brian Harrigan, with my long delayed champagne.”

The long-lost Brian Harrigan was another of those outsize Americans, and he came trailing a pretty girl of about twenty. He gave Ranjit a one-microsecond glance. Then, “Sorry, hon,” he said to Myra de Soyza, talking through the space occupied by Ranjit Subramanian as though it were empty, “but I got to talking to, uh, Devika? She more or less grew up in this house and she promised to show me around. It’s got some great design features—have you noticed the cement floors? So if you don’t mind…”

“Go,” Myra said. “Just give me the champagne if it isn’t warm by now, and then go.” And he went, arm in arm with the girl, who hadn’t said a word to either Ranjit or Myra de Soyza.

The best part of Brian Harrigan’s departure was that it left Ranjit in exclusive possession of the company of this surprising, perplexing, altogether quite unusual young woman. (Although Ranjit was pretty sure she wasn’t all that young. At least two or three years older than himself, he conjectured. Maybe even more than that.) He did not regard their tête-à-tête as a romantic event. He was too ill-informed on boy-girl dating to take that leap, and anyway there was the matter of this Brian Harrigan, who routinely addressed her as “hon.” Given a hint or two, de Soyza filled in part of the Brian Harrigan portrait for him. Turned out he wasn’t American after all. He was Canadian. Worked for one of those world-girdling hotel chains, currently doing some sort of planning for another luxury hotel on one of Trincomalee’s beaches. She did not, however, supply the one datum about which Ranjit was most curious. Still, he told himself, it really was none of his business whether they were sleeping together.

When Ranjit picked up on the name Trincomalee, de Soyza looked embarrassed. “Oh, of course. I didn’t think. That’s your home. Do you know the hotel Brian was talking about?”

Ranjit admitted that about all he knew about Trinco’s tourist hotels was that they were really expensive. But then she asked him about his father’s temple, about which she, again astonishingly, seemed to know a great deal. She knew that it was built on what was called Shiva’s holy hill, knew that it had—or at least the big temple that the Portuguese had sacked in 1624 had—been one of the richest houses of worship in all of Southeast Asia, with the vast stores of gold, silk, jewels, and every other sort of thing that the monks had amassed over its thousand-year history. Knew even about that terrible 1624 day when the Portuguese commander, Constantine de Sa de Menzes, ordered the temple’s head priest to strip the temple of everything of value and deliver the treasures to the Portuguese ships in the harbor, because if he didn’t, de Sa would turn his ship’s cannon on the temple. The head priest had had no choice. He did as ordered…and then de Sa cannonaded the temple into rubble anyway.

“Huh,” Ranjit said when she had stopped. “You really know a lot about that time, don’t you?”

She looked embarrassed. “I suppose, but I imagine what I know isn’t quite the same as you do. Actually, my ancestors were generally some of the looters.”

For that Ranjit had no better response than another “Huh.” They had strolled out into the garden with its frangipani and flowering ginger, and were sitting companionably side by side in a cluster of palms. They were within sight of the Vorhulsts’ vast swimming pool, where a few of Ranjit’s classmates, somehow having obtained the right swimsuits, were playing aquatic volleyball. One of the Vorhulst servants had brought refills of Myra’s champagne and Ranjit’s Coke. Other guests had greeted Myra as they’d strolled past, and one or two had said hello to Ranjit as well. Still, de Soyza showed no interest in ending their tête-à-tête. Ranjit had no interest, either. Which was, he reflected, a bit curious, since he had seldom been willing to protract any other chat with a young woman.