Frederik Pohl - The Last Theorem

Whichever star’s system they had inhabited, the astronomers among those creatures (they didn’t call themselves astronomers; their term for what they did was something like “inventoriers of externalities”) paid close attention to that first weak pulse. It troubled them.

These people did not look in the least like humans, but they had certain nearly human “emotions,” and among them was something quite like fear. The microwave emanations from Earth were the first things to worry them. Then came those far brighter fire bursts that arrived a little later—the ones from the first nuclear test from White Sands Proving Ground, and then from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then from everywhere. Those flashes set those alien skywatchers to clattering and squealing at one another. Such flashes represented trouble, and potentially very big trouble.

It wasn’t that those first observers felt fear at what humanity was doing on its remote little planet. They didn’t care in the least what happened to planet Earth. What worried them was that that same expanding hemisphere of radiation would not die out once it passed their star. It would keep going on, farther and deeper into the galaxy. And sooner or later it would reach certain other individuals who were likely to take it very seriously indeed.

1

And so now, at last, we meet this Ranjit Subramanian, the one whose long and remarkable life this book is all about.

At this time Ranjit was sixteen years old, a freshman at Sri Lanka’s principal university, in the city of Colombo, and more full of himself than even your average sixteen-year-old. It was the end of the semester and, at his father’s bidding he had made the long trip from Colombo slantwise across the island of Sri Lanka to the district of Trincomalee, where his father had the distinction of being chief priest at the Hindu temple called Tiru Koneswaram. Ranjit actually loved his father very much. He was almost always glad to see him. This time, however, he was a bit less so, because this time Ranjit had a pretty good idea of what the revered Ganesh Subramanian wanted to talk to him about.

Ranjit was an intelligent boy, in fact one who was quite close to being as smart as he thought he was. He was a good-looking one, too. He wasn’t terribly tall, but most Sri Lankans aren’t. Ethnically he was a Tamil, and his skin color was the rich dark brown of a spoonful of cocoa powder, just before it went into the hot milk. The skin color wasn’t because he was a Tamil, though. Sri Lankans have a rich palette of complexions from near-Scandinavian white to a black so dark it seems almost purple. Ranjit’s best friend, Gamini Bandara, was pure Sinhalese for as many generations back as anyone had bothered to count, but the boys were the same in skin hue.

The boys had been friends for a long time—since that scary night when Gamini’s school had burned to the ground, probably put to the torch by a couple of upperclassmen smoking forbidden cigarettes in a storage room.

Like every other nearby human being capable of picking up a splintered piece of plywood and throwing it on the back of a truck, Ranjit had been drafted for emergency relief work. So had all the rest of the student body of his own school. It had been a dirty job, a lot harder than a youngster’s developing muscles were used to, not to mention the splinters and the scrapes and the endless cuts from the broken glass that was everywhere.

Those were the bad parts, and there were plenty of them. But there were good parts, too. Like the time when Ranjit and some other boy around his own age finally got down to the source of some plaintive sounds that were coming from a debris pile, and released the headmaster’s terrified, but intact, elderly Siamese cat.

When a teacher had carried the cat off to its owner, the two boys had stood grinning at each other. Ranjit had stuck his hand out, English fashion. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian,” he’d said.

“And I’m Gamini Bandara,” the other boy had said, pumping his hand gleefully, “and, hey, we did a pretty good job here, didn’t we?”

They agreed that they had. When at last they had been allowed to quit work for the day, they had lined up together for the sort of porridge that was their evening meal, and plopped their sleeping bags next to each other that night, and they had been best friends ever since. Helped out, to be sure, by the fact that Gamini’s school had been made uninhabitable by the fire and so its students had to double up at Ranjit’s. Gamini turned out to be pretty much everything a best friend could be, including the fact that the one great obsession in Ranjit’s life, the one for which there was no room for another person to share, didn’t interest Gamini at all.

And, of course, there was one other thing that Gamini was. That was the part of Ranjit’s impending talk with his father that Ranjit least wanted to have.

Ranjit grimaced to himself. As instructed, Ranjit went straight to one of the temple’s side doors, but it wasn’t his father who met him there. It was an elderly monk named Surash who told Ranjit—rather officiously, Ranjit thought—only that he would have to wait a bit. So Ranjit waited, for what he considered quite a long time, with nothing to do but listen to the bustle that came from within his father’s temple, about which Ranjit had mixed emotions.

The temple had given his father purpose, position, and a rewarding career, all of which was good. However, it had also encouraged the old man in the vain hope that his son would follow in his footsteps. That was not going to happen. Even as a boy, Ranjit had not been able to believe in the complex Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses, some with their various animal heads and unusual number of arms, whose sculptured figures adorned the temple walls. Ranjit had been able to name every one of them, and to list its special powers and principal fast days as well, by the time he was six. It hadn’t been out of religious fervor. It had been simply because he had wanted to please the father he loved.

Ranjit remembered waking early in the morning when he was a small child, still living at home, and his father getting up at sunrise to bathe in the temple pool. He would see his father, naked to the waist as he faced the rising sun, and hear his long, reverberating Om. When he was a little older, Ranjit himself learned to say the mantra, and the location of the six parts of the body that he touched, and to offer water to the statues in the puja room. But then he went away to school. His religious observances were not required, and therefore ended. By the time he was ten, he knew he would never follow in his father’s faith.

Not that his father’s was not a fine profession. True, Ganesh Subramanian’s temple was neither as ancient nor as vast as the one it had attempted to replace. Although it had been bravely given the same name as the original—Tiru Koneswaram—even its chief priest rarely called it anything but “the new temple.” It hadn’t been completed until 1983, and in size it was not a patch on the original Tiru Koneswaram, the famous “temple with a thousand columns,” whose beginnings had been shrouded by two thousand years of history.

And then, when at last Ranjit was met, it was not by his father but by old Surash. He was apologetic. “It is these pilgrims,” he said. “So many of them! More than one hundred, and your father, the chief priest, is determined to greet each one. Go, Ranjit. Sit on Swami Rock and watch the sea. In an hour, perhaps, your father will join you there, but just now—” He sighed, and shook his head, and turned away to the task of helping his boss cope with the flood of pilgrims. Leaving Ranjit to his own resources.

Which, as a matter of fact, was just fine, because for Ranjit an hour or so to himself on Swami Rock was a welcome gift.