Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

“Well,” Myra said comfortably, “sure it does. Why wouldn’t it?”

Ranjit gave her a hot look. “We mathematicians don’t deal in the intuitively obvious. We want proof! And back in 1937 old Collatz made his conjecture, which is that that will happen to any number at all, all the way up to infinity. But it has never been proved.”

Myra nodded absently. “Sounds like a good possibility.” Then, shading her eyes as she looked toward the pool and raising her voice, she said, “Better take a break, Tashy! You don’t want to get overtired.”

Ranjit was quick to meet his daughter with a towel, but he was looking at his wife. Finally he said, “Myra? You sound a little bit distracted. Is anything wrong?”

She gave him a fond look, and then a real laugh. “Wrong? Not at all, Ranj. It’s just that—Well, I haven’t seen the doctor yet, but I’m pretty sure. I think I’m pregnant again.”

For Myra de Soyza Subramanian, caring for her second infant was even more of a breeze than caring for her first. Her husband, for example, did not now come home depressed from a job he thought irrelevant; his students liked him, he liked his students, and Dr. Davoodbhoy was unfailingly pleased. The outside world was easier to take now, too. Oh, a few nations could not seem to break the habit of making threatening noises at their neighbors. Hardly anyone was actually getting killed, though.

And, over Beatrix Vorhulst’s protest, they had finally moved into their own little house—“little” only by comparison with the Vorhulst mansion—just steps from one of the island’s beautiful broad beaches, where the water was as warm and welcoming as ever. By the time they were settled in their new house, the world outside no longer seemed as threatening. Little Robert splashed in the shallowest part of the pool, while Natasha found deeper water to demonstrate her considerable (and, Ranjit maintained, clearly inherited) skill at swimming—or any other way—when she wasn’t taking sailing lessons from a neighbor who owned a little Sunfish. What made being in their own home particularly pleasant was that Mevrouw Vorhulst had parted with her favorite cook and Natasha’s favorite maid to save Myra the trouble of housework.

Another way in which Myra’s second pregnancy was unlike the first went by the name of Natasha—well, more often it was Tashy. Tashy wasn’t a problem. When she wasn’t winning ribbons for swimming—only in children’s events so far, but she was seen to watch adult races with narrowed eyes and obvious intentions—she was busy at being her mother’s assistant, deputy, and sous-chef. Thus aided, Myra had a gratifying number of hours each day to spend catching up on what was going on in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous prostheses.

That was quite a lot. By the time Myra had begun to evaluate each muscle twinge in the hope that it might be the beginnings of labor, she was pretty nearly up to speed again.

Of course, that wouldn’t last. By the time the new baby was birthed, weaned, toilet trained, and off to school, Myra would have slipped behind her cohort again. That was inevitable.

Was Myra angry at this tyrannical law of childbearing? It was clearly unjust. It dictated that any woman who wanted a baby had to accept Mother Nature’s inflexible decree that, for a period of time, the cognitive functions of her mind would have to take second place to mothering. It would have to be a fairly significant period, too. Ten years was the accepted minimum before a female AI nerd (or medical doctor or politician or, for that matter, pastry chef) could get back to her career.

Obviously that was unfair. But the world was chronically unfair in so many ways that Myra de Soyza Subramanian had no patience for wasting time in resentment. That was the unchangeable way the world was. What was the point in complaining? There would be a time when both her children were in college. Then she would be as free as any human could ever get, and then she would have twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years of productive life in which to unravel the riddles of her chosen profession.

Deferred gratification was the name of that game. You didn’t have to like its rules to play by them. And, one way or another, you might even win.

Both Myra and Ranjit considered themselves big winners when Robert Ganesh Subramanian was born. His parents thought they had hit the jackpot with two fine offspring. Robert was a vociferously healthy newborn who gained weight and strength as rapidly as Ranjit and Myra could have hoped for. He tried to turn himself over in his crib even earlier than Natasha had, and was toilet trained almost as early. All of their friends declared that he was the handsomest child they had ever seen, and they weren’t really lying, either. Robert was the kind of infant for whose picture baby-food manufacturers would have paid handsomely to put on their labels.

Interestingly, if there was anyone who loved Baby Robert more than his parents did, that person was little Natasha, who wasn’t all that little anymore and was already beginning to demonstrate a considerable aptitude for athletics, education, and getting her parents to do just about everything she might require of them.

Which, in this case, was to let her take care of Baby Robert.

Well, not quite all of his care. Not the part that involved situations that smelled really bad. But dressing Robert, pushing Robert around in his stroller, playing with Robert—Natasha demanded the privilege of taking care of those things, and after some early worried hesitation, Myra gave her daughter what she asked.

Actually, Natasha was good at the job. When Robert screamed or roared, it was Natasha who could usually fit words to his outcries. And when his mother took him away, Natasha had her own life to live, school or her daily swim sessions or just spending time with her friends…or most likely combining her interests, with her friends joining her at the pool, or Robert slumbering beside her as she studied English verbs or the history of India and its satellite nations.

All this, of course, was a good thing for Myra. With Natasha relieving her of so much of the work of raising Robert, Myra was not falling behind as rapidly as she might have feared in AI nerding. And what was good for Myra was certainly good for Ranjit, for whom his wife was as dear—and as unpredictably exciting—as she had been on the day they were wed.

All in all, things were going well for Ranjit Subramanian. One seminar per semester was all he needed to do, Dr. Davoodbhoy had decreed, but as long as he was going to do the one, they might as well make it a big one. So Ranjit’s classroom had become the exact supersize theater in which he had thrilled to Joris Vorhulst’s stories of the worlds of the solar system. Ranjit didn’t have twenty students at a time anymore, either. Now he had a hundred. Which, Dr. Davoodbhoy assured him, entitled him to the luxury of a teaching assistant—that eager young woman, Ramya Salgado, now possessed of a master’s degree of her own, who had so enriched his second seminar—and freedom to do his own “research” for the rest of each semester. Davoodbhoy intimated that that was so he could get a head start on whatever proof he was going to assign his next class.

Or, Ranjit realized, it was a good time to do some of that exploration of his native country that he had been intending to get around to ever since Myra had first chided him as overparochial.

That was a more attractive idea than it might have been some years earlier, for even tourist travel was looking more attractive in this post–Silent Thunder world. They could, for example, cruise the Nile River, as Myra had longed to do since she was ten; both Egypt and Kenya had furloughed large fractions of their militaries while the ecologists for all the countries involved worked out water-saving ways of containing their thirsts for Nile water. The Subramanians could have taken the children to London—or to Paris, or New York, or Rome—to get an idea of what a great city was like. They could have settled for Norwegian fjords or Swiss mountains or the jungles of Amazonia; they could indeed have gone almost anywhere, but what in fact happened was that, while they were still studying travel brochures, they got a text from Joris Vorhulst. It said: