Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

The figure’s putative father shook his head. “Not at all. There are some countries with as few as some hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and some—China, for instance—with nearly two billion. But they’re both sovereign states—nations, that is,” he corrected himself.

The figure was silent for a moment. Then, “How was the decision made to annihilate the electronic capabilities of the nations, countries, or sovereign states of North Korea, Colombia, Venezuela, and others?”

Ranjit sighed. “By the council of Pax per Fidem, I suppose. You’d probably have to ask one of them for a more reliable answer—Gamini Bandara, say, or his father.” When the figure was silent again, he added nervously, “Of course, I can speculate. Would you like me to do that?”

The eyes that were not Natasha’s eyes regarded him for a long moment. Then the figure said, “No.” There was an ear-piercing electronic squeal, and a quick stir in the air, and the figure was gone.

Myra could move again, and did. She ran to her husband’s side and threw her arms around him. They sat silent, hugging each other, until a banging at the front door startled everyone. When the maid answered it, at least a dozen police came racing in, looking for something to arrest. The captain, out of breath, panted, “Sorry. The duty constable saw what was happening through a window and alerted us, but when we got here, we just couldn’t get close to the house. Couldn’t even touch the wall—Excuse me.” He lifted his own screen to his ear, while Myra was assuring the police, diligently searching every part of the house, that none of them had been harmed.

Then the police captain replaced his pocket screen on his belt. “Dr. Subramanian? Did you mention Gamini Bandara, the president-elect’s son, in your conversation with that—” He stopped, searching for the right noun to complete the sentence and not finding it. “With that,” he finished.

Ranjit nodded. “Yes, I think I did.”

“I thought so,” the cop said heavily. “Now he’s getting the same kind of questioning you were, from the same person.”

All of that news went out to every human being who owned or had access to a screen. It did not give much understanding to anyone, though. Not to what was left of the Subramanian family, nor to the rest of the human race. Not even to the horde of One Point Fives who hung trapped in their troop transports, drifting through the Oort cloud.

Those beings had concerns much more immediate than those of the human race. To the One Point Fives it was all very well to be ordered to postpone their annihilation of the human race, but the orders the Grand Galactics had handed down did not seem to take full cognizance of what obeying those orders entailed.

It was a question of numbers. Some 140,000 One Point Fives had originally boarded the transports. That number had not changed for more than a dozen years. But then, unwilling to die without descendants to carry on their genetic line, the One Point Fives had given themselves the luxury of that brief and violent flurry of sexuality.

The results of that orgy had already been born. Indeed, they now were nearly fully adult….

But the armada had not been equipped to keep so large a number alive for a prolonged period.

The mechanical replenishers that had been built to supply air, water, and food for 140,000 One Point Fives had been forced to cope with nearly twice that number. Now they were beginning to crumble under that stress. Soon there would be shortages. Soon after that, deaths.

And what were the Grand Galactics going to do about that?

There wasn’t much sleep that night for the Subramanian family—for anybody, really, whatever their time zone, because most of the world sat enthralled before their screens regardless of the hour. What they saw at first was Gamini Bandara, wearing only a huge bath towel, sitting on the edge of a tub and being questioned by that same close copy of Natasha Subramanian who had interrogated her father. There was no immediate explanation of how this event came to be.

The subject matter of these particular questions had mostly to do with the founding of Pax per Fidem, the development of the Silent Thunder weapon, and the command structure of the groups that planned and executed its missions. Gamini answered every question as best he could. For the technical details of Silent Thunder he shook his head and named one of the team of engineers who had built it. For the inside story of who said what to whom to get the project started, he referred the questioning to the UN secretary-general. When the questioning turned to the human race’s eternal propensity for fighting wars with neighboring bodies, Gamini apologized. That went back as far as human history did, he said, but he had failed the one ancient history course he had ever taken. The professor who taught it, however, was still at the London School of Economics.

So she was, though at the moment on sabbatical in the tiny country of Belize. The inquisitor tracked her down at a local collection of ruins called Altun Ha. There, in broad and sweaty daylight, with a hundred anthropologists, tourists, guides, and (finally) Belizean police watching and hearing every word that was spoken but unable to approach the participants, the pseudo-Natasha demanded and got a summary of the military history of the human race. The professor gave her everything she wanted. She started with the first nations on record—Sumerians, Akkadians, Old Babylonians, and Hittites—in those earliest years before what was called “civilization” exploded out of the Fertile Crescent that lay between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates to conquer Egypt, China, Europe, and ultimately the whole world. Wherever human beings went, whatever their neighbors, however rich their lives, yes, they still fought their regular ration of bloody and murderous wars.

Taken all in all the simulacrum of Natasha Subramanian interviewed nearly twenty people. Whatever she asked, they answered—not necessarily on first being asked. The slowest to answer her was a nuclear bomb designer from Amarillo, Texas, who flatly refused to give any details about the design of the nuclear weapon in Silent Thunder. Wouldn’t answer even when he was denied food, water, or the use of a bathroom…until he finally admitted that if the president of the United States gave him permission to talk, he would obey. The interview with the president that followed took less than twenty minutes before the president, grasping the situation and its likely impact on his own life and comfort, said, “Oh, hell, tell her whatever she wants.”

The simulacrum’s nonstop interrogations altogether took some fifty-one hours. Then she simply disappeared. And when Ranjit and Myra compared tapes of the last questioning and the first, they were astonished to see that her curls were still in place. There was no fatigue in her face or in the sound of her voice. Her sketchy garments weren’t stained with the inevitable drop of food (what food? she hadn’t been seen to eat any) or involuntary brushing against a powdery wall. “She just isn’t real,” Ranjit marveled.

His wife said, “No, she isn’t. But where is the real one?”

Because Myra and Ranjit were, after all, merely human, they needed rest. They weren’t getting it. So Myra left strict orders with the servants that they were not to be disturbed before ten A.M. unless the end of the world was at hand.

Then, when Myra opened one eye to see the cook’s worried face bent over hers and discovered it was only a little past seven, she gave her unmoving husband a quick elbow to the ribs. That was just in case the world really was ending, since she didn’t want him to miss that.

And really, who was to say it was not? The news the cook had for them was that the “supernova” in the Oort had come to life again, though at only a tiny fraction of the energy displayed before. As more and more of Earth’s biggest light buckets swung themselves to get a better look, it turned out that there wasn’t a single source for this new radiation, either. There were more than a hundred and fifty sources, and (so the news reader said, sounding both worried and very confused) Doppler analysis showed one more fact about them. They were all moving. And they were moving in the general direction of the inner solar system, indeed in the direction of Earth itself.