Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

But that was only the good part of drug decriminalization. There was a bad part as well.

The bad part, or the worst of the bad parts, was that the drug cartels, deprived of the profits from their coca plantations, began to look longingly at the equally addictive stuff that was being exported by their neighbors in Venezuela. Why, there was even more money in oil than there ever had been in drugs! And so armed parties from the Colombian drug citadels were infiltrating the oil fields of their neighbor. The relatively small (and often quite purchasable) Venezuelan army was putting up a show of resistance, sometimes, but the powerful motivation was all on the Colombian side, and so were almost all the victories.

All this, of course, in addition to the latest list of vicious little escapades from the Adorable Leader’s North Korea, and in addition to the renewal of violence in the irreconcilable fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, and more and more heavy fighting in parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, and the Middle East….

It was all bad. What made up for it, a little, was the city of New York itself, not in the least like Trincomalee, or even Colombo, and in fact not all that much like London. “It’s so vertical,” Ranjit told his wife, as they stood at the sixty-sixth-floor picture window of their hotel suite. “Whoever heard of sleeping this high up?” And yet in the panorama of the city that lay before them there were a dozen or more buildings much taller, and when they walked in the city streets, there were times when the sun seldom appeared because steep concrete walls shut it out except when it was directly overhead.

“But it does have that beautiful park,” Myra pointed out, gazing at the lake, the giant apartments that lined the far side of the park, and the distant roofs of the Central Park Zoo.

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Ranjit told her, and indeed he had little to complain about. Though Dr. Dhatusena Bandara’s office in the UN building was just across town, the doctor himself was somewhere else, on some errand that no one chose to discuss. His office had, though, provided them with a young lady who had taken them to the top of the Empire State Building and introduced them to the Lucullan joys of oyster stew in the old Grand Central railroad station, and who stood ready to get tickets for them for any show on Broadway. Which wasn’t a great thrill to Ranjit, whose entire lifetime experience of performances had been on a flat screen, but greatly pleased Myra. Which itself much pleased Ranjit, not to mention that he had discovered the American Museum of Natural History, only a few blocks away—wonderful in its own right as an exemplar of that new delight in Ranjit’s life, its museumness, but thrilling in the great planetarium that filled its northern space. “Planetarium” was hardly the right word, in fact; the structure on Central Park West was so much more than that. “I wish Joris could be with us!” Ranjit said, more than once, as he strolled its thrilling exhibits.

And then, following a long enough interval that Ranjit had stopped thinking he might actually show up, appeared the one person, totally unexpected, who could make a pleasant visit unforgettable. When Ranjit opened the door of their suite to a knock, supposing there would be no more than a chambermaid with an armload of fresh towels on the other side of it, there in fact, grinning, stood Gamini Bandara, with a spray of fresh roses in one hand for Myra and in the other a bottle of good old Sri Lanka arrack for the two of them. It was the first time they had been together since the wedding, and the questions came thick and fast. How had they liked England? What did they think of America? What was it like back in Lanka these days? It wasn’t until the men had poured their third round of arrack that Myra noticed that all the conversation went in the same direction, questions coming from Gamini, answers from her husband and herself. “So,” she said at last, “tell us, then, Gamini, what are you doing in New York?”

He grinned and spread his hands. “One damn meeting after another. It’s what I do.”

“But I thought you were based in California,” Ranjit put in.

“I am, right. But there’s all sorts of international stuff going on, and this is where the UN is, isn’t it?” Then he swallowed his third shot and looked serious. “Actually, the reason I’m here, Ranjit, is that I want to ask you to do me a favor.”

Ranjit said promptly, “Name it.”

“Don’t say yes so fast,” Gamini chided. “It means making a commitment for some time. But it’s not a bad commitment, either. So let me get right down to it. When you’re in Washington, you will be contacted by a man named Orion Bledsoe. He’s a cloak-and-dagger guy, and he’s high up in the part of the government most people never hear about. For that matter, he has quite a record of his own. He’s a veteran of the first Gulf War, and of the troubles in what used to be Yugoslavia, and then of the second, and much worse, war in the Gulf, the one in Iraq. That’s where he got, in that order, the wound that cost him his right arm, the Purple Heart, the Navy Cross, and, finally, the job he’s got now.”

“Which is what?” Ranjit asked, as Gamini seemed to pause for a moment.

Gamini shook his head. “Come on, Ranj. I’ll have to let Bledsoe tell you that—there are rules I have to follow, you know.”

Ranjit tried again. “Is it going to be about a real job?”

That made Gamini pause for thought again. “Well, yes, but I can’t tell you what that is right now, either,” he said at last. “The important thing about that job is that you’ll be doing something useful for the world. All we need Bledsoe for is to see that you get the security clearance you need.”

“Need for what?” Ranjit asked.

Gamini, smiling, shook his head. Then, looking faintly embarrassed, he said, “I have to warn you that Bledsoe is a kind of old-fashioned Cold Warrior and a bit of a silly ass, too. But once you’re in the job, you won’t have to see much of him. And,” he added, “since when I’m in America I’m usually based less than half an hour’s drive from his part of the world, you probably will be seeing a lot more of me, if you can stand that.” He winked at Myra. And then reported that he was late for another of those damn meetings way on the other side of town, and he hoped they’d all see one another one day soon in Pasadena, and was gone.

Ranjit and Myra looked at each other. “Where’s Pasadena?” he asked.

“In California, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Do you suppose that’s where you’d be based? If you took this job, I mean.”

He gave her an exasperated grin. “You know what? Maybe we should ask Gamini’s father about all this.”

Which they did, or at least left a query at his office. They didn’t get an answer right away, though. They didn’t get an answer at all until they had made the short hop from New York (LaGuardia) to Washington National (Reagan) and were already welcomed by the people from the Triple-A-S and booked into their new hotel, in sight of the Capitol and walking distance from the Mall. And all Dr. Bandara’s communication said was “Gamini assures me this person he wants you to see can be of great help to you.” But it didn’t say great help in doing what, or why Gamini cared in the first place, and so Ranjit sighed and gave up. Which actually was not a great disappointment, because Washington turned out to be full of things that interested him more than some unspecified job to be offered by some still unmet person named Orion Bledsoe.

The first thing—with Ranjit and Myra escorted there by enthusiastic volunteers from the AAAS—was the famous (which, actually, Ranjit had never heard of before coming to Washington) cluster of museums collectively known as the Smithsonian Institution. London’s British Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History had delighted him; this Smithsonian, not just one fabulous structure but a whole row of the things, staggered his imagination. All he could make time for was the Air and Space Museum and a quick peek into one or two of the others, but the space collection had, among countless other things, an actual working model (though not to scale) of the Artsutanov space elevator, which was even now beginning to be spun out in the skies above Sri Lanka. And then he had his own keynote speech to give the Triple-A-S convention, and (that having been done, and once again declared a triumph) he had their whole damn convention to pick and choose among. Bear in mind that this celebrated genius among Earth’s most honored scientific minds, world famous and already possessed of three actual doctoral degrees given by three of the world’s most prestigious schools (although in fact he had never quite achieved even a bachelor’s degree for himself)—this modern Fermat or even Newton had never in his not very long life been lucky enough to sit in on a single scientific convention of any kind, except ones for which he was the principal speaker. He had no idea so much could be learned on so many subjects. His own chores attended to, he had the freedom of the convention, and he used it, attending sessions on cosmology and Martian (and Venusian and Europan) tectonics and something called “Machine Intelligence: Awareness of Self” (that primarily for Myra, but it fascinated Ranjit almost as much when he listened), and heaven only knew what arcane aspects of what previously unexplored (by Ranjit) other areas of human investigation turned up somewhere on the vast and challenging menu of events.