The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [104]
It turned out that Joris Vorhulst had heard a great deal about the adventures of his former pupil and wanted to hear a lot more. That took them right up to dinner. Ranjit was hesitant about asking for help in front of the whole household, and anyway Aunt Beatrix had been watching news programs and had a lot of questions. “They’re sending barges full of old tanks and self-propelled guns and things like that out into the China Sea and dumping them into the water,” she informed the group. “To make false reefs where fish will breed, they say. And they showed clips of a kind of guillotine they have, like the ones from the French Revolution only they’re five stories high, and they’re using those to chop up their ICBMs. I imagine they drain the fuel and the warheads first.”
“They strip them of recyclable metals first, too,” Joris informed his mother. “I saw trainloads of the stuff going west through Siberia; the Russians called it part of Korea’s reparations bill. And have you heard about the elections they’ve got scheduled?”
“Heard about them, certainly,” Myra responded. “Understand them, not a chance.”
Joris gave her a rueful grin. “Me, too. But in China I ran into a woman who’d been there, and she tried to explain it to me. The first thing is that the basic unit for voting isn’t the town or precinct the voter lives in. It’s an arbitrary group of ten thousand people, all over the country, who were born on the same day. And from those ten thousand there’s a group of thirty-five, randomly computer-selected, who will run the group. Those thirty-five do meet; they spend one week a month in session somewhere in Korea, and they elect from their own membership a presider—sort of like a mayor—and a legislature to take care of things like issuing permits and planning construction projects. And they name judges and elect representatives to the national legislature and so on.”
“Sounds complicated,” his mother commented. “Also, that part about selecting them at random by computer? That was suggested thirty years or so ago by a science-fiction writer.”
Joris nodded. “They have all the best ideas, don’t they? Anyway, the system can’t work until they get their communications back—at least another month or two, I think. Maybe by then we’ll understand it.”
After dinner the proud parents had to show Joris how well their infant could swim, and Mevrouw insisted that Joris go to bed when Tashy did. Since the last time he’d been in a bed, he had flown halfway around the world, and it was time he got some rest!
So there wasn’t any chance to ask for Joris’s help then, either. When both Natasha and his wife were sound asleep, Ranjit fretfully flipped on the news, sitting in their dressing room, volume too low to disturb the sleepers. The Security Council had issued a whole new bundle of stern warnings to countries that were engaging in, or seemed to be on the brink of, one of those brushfire wars; Silent Thunder was not mentioned but, Ranjit had no doubt, was present in the calculations of all the belligerents. It was possible, Ranjit told himself, that he had made a mistake in turning Gamini’s offer down. Pax per Fidem had every appearance of being where the action was, while Colombo did not.
Irritated, he turned off the news. He thought he might as well get some sleep and perhaps get a word with Joris first thing in the morning, before Joris was off again on his way to the terminal’s construction site.
But there was a faint sound of music coming from somewhere.
Ranjit pulled on a robe and investigated. There, on the balcony overlooking the gardens, Joris sat, sipping a tall drink and gazing at the moon while a radio softly played. When he saw Ranjit peering at him, he gave him a faintly embarrassed grin. “You caught me. I was just thinking where I’d like to land up there, oh, maybe five or six years from now, when the Skyhook’s operational and I can get there. Mare Tranquillitatis, or Crisium, or maybe something on the far side, just to show off.