Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

“Gamini said something about going to work with him,” Ranjit said.

Dhatusena Bandara said, “And I hope that will happen, but I’m afraid not right away. Meanwhile, I understand the university is prepared to offer you a faculty position, teaching a few advanced classes and doing your own research, if you wish.”

“But I’m not a professor! I haven’t even graduated!”

Dr. Bandara said patiently, “A professor is just a person the university has hired in that grade. And don’t worry about degrees you may lack. I expect people will be offering you all the degrees you could wish for.”

All of this, naturally, Ranjit passed on to Myra. But Beatrix Vorhulst, sitting on the other side of her, was looking dubious. “You know,” she said, “I’m not sure you even need a job. Look at these.” She held up a sheaf of printouts, vetted by her personal secretary, who was now supplemented by an assistant just to handle the traffic Ranjit was generating. “People want you to come and speak to them, or to be interviewed, or just to say that you drink their beer or wear their shirts. And they’re willing to pay for it! If you’ll wear their track shoes, these people will give you a good many American dollars. And if you’ll let them interview you, 60 Minutes will pay, too. Harvard University will pay you to come and talk to them—they don’t say how much, but I understand they’re rich.”

“Whoa,” said Myra, laughing. “Let the poor man catch his breath.”

But the secretary-screener was waving another piece of paper just off the printer at Mevrouw, who glanced at it, bit her lip, and said, “Well, this one isn’t about money, but I think you’ll want to see it, Ranjit. And you, too, Myra.”

“Me?” asked Myra. “Why me?”

But when it had been passed to Ranjit, who looked thunderstruck but handed it over to her, Myra quickly understood why. The note was from the old monk at his father’s former temple, and what it said was:

Your father would be even more proud of you, and as delighted as we all are, that you are going to marry. Please don’t delay too long! You don’t want to wait until the unlucky months of Aashad, Bhadrapad, or Shunya. And of course, please, not on a Tuesday or a Saturday.

Myra looked up at Ranjit, who was staring in confusion at her. “Did I say anything about getting married?” he asked.

This brought about a faint blush. “Well, you did say some nice things about me,” she admitted.

“I have no recollection of saying anything like that,” he said. “Must have been my subconscious.” And, taking a deep breath, he said, “Which proves that my subconscious is smarter than I am. So what about it, Myra? Will you?”

“Of course I will,” she said, as though that had been the dumbest question she had ever heard. And that was that.

Later, when the two of them played news clips of the speech out of curiosity, they found that what he had said was simply the obvious truism that he could not imagine spending the rest of his life without her… but that was enough, and anyway, by then they were already thoroughly married.

Was everything perfect for the loving pair?

Well, pretty close. The one big question that had to be settled was not about whether they should get married, because there wasn’t the slightest doubt about that, or even when, because the answer to that was as soon as could be. The real questions were where, and by whom. For a time it looked like that was easily answered, too, because the Vorhulsts and the Bandaras and the de Soyzas among them had access to every church in the city of Colombo, not to mention every registrar’s office, and were well along the process of eliminating the less attractive of them when Myra noticed the faraway look in Ranjit’s eyes.

When she asked, he shrugged it off. “Nothing, really,” he said. “No. Nothing at all.”

But, since Myra did not give up easily, at last he relented and showed her yet another text from the old monk: “Your father would have been so happy to see you marry in his temple.”

Myra read it twice and then smiled. “What the hell,” she said. “I don’t think the presbytery of Ceylon is going to care. I’ll tell everybody.”

And, of course, “everybody” understood at once that what Ranjit wanted was what Myra would enforce, and so it was. If there was a little disappointment in some circles in Colombo, there was wild delight among others in Trincomalee. The old monk quickly understood that it would have to be a stripped-down ceremony. He wistfully considered what a wonderful Paalikali Thalippu they could have had for the bride—if they could have had them at all—and how the groom’s Janavasanam arrival at the temple would have been decorated with the finest fruits and flowers. Well, that would have pretty nearly amounted to a full-scale parade, wouldn’t it? And anything like that would have attracted vast attention just when the couple wanted to be ignored. So no Paalikali Thalippu and no Janavasanam, though the monk did make sure that the bride’s party carried the requisite supply of parupputenga and other sweetmeats to give to the groom.

The good part of the stripped-downness of the wedding was that it could all be done quite quickly, for which reason it was less than a week before the bride and the groom were in Trincomalee—well, in hiding in Trincomalee, to be exact, because they tried to avoid showing their instantly recognizable faces in public.

For that reason there were few people at the ceremony, as Ranjit spoke the words the old monk had written out for him and Myra allowed the monk to tie around her wrist the holy thread that would ward off evil, with the endless flowers all over the room and the unending blare of the Naathaswaram horns and the melam drums. Then it was all over and the two of them, now indissolubly wed, got back into their police car for the long ride back to the Vorhulst estate. “Long life!” called the monks as they left, and indeed Ranjit and Myra felt confident that that was what lay ahead of them.

However, other persons, farther away, had quite different expectations.

Those persons included the One Point Fives, the designated assassins for the Grand Galactics. They were executing their order to clean up the mess on Planet 3 of that trivial yellow star, and their armada was progressing on its flight. Since their vessels were material, they could not go faster than light speed. There would be many years of transit time, followed by a few days of actual extermination, after which the newlyweds, and every other human being anywhere, would be dead.

It might not be a very long life after all.

Now that he was everything that he had dared to dream of being, namely, free, famous, and married to Myra de Soyza, it seemed to Ranjit that his personal world just kept getting better and better. There was, however, a larger perspective that kept intruding itself on his private musings, and in many ways that wasn’t good at all.

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.