The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [140]
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.
Ranjit’s response was typically Ranjit. He stared into space for a long moment. Then he said, “Huh,” and rolled over, presumably to go back to sleep.
Myra thought of trying to do the same, but a brief trial established that that was impossible. Laboriously she went through her morning rituals and wound up in the kitchen to accept a cup of tea, but not a conversation, with the cook. To avoid that she took her tea out on the patio to think.
Thinking was something that Dr. Myra de Soyza Subramanian did quite well. This morning, though, it wasn’t going properly. Perhaps that was because the cook had left the news on in the kitchen, and even from outside Myra could hear the muffled voices—saying nothing that was of interest, really, because the news services didn’t know anything of interest that they hadn’t said in their first announcement. Perhaps it was because what she really wanted to think about was the puzzle of the inexplicable appearance of what looked so much like her daughter but wasn’t. Perhaps it was just the warmth of the morning sun, taken together with her near exhaustion.
Myra fell asleep.
How long she slept, lying on their all-weather recliner in the bright sun, she could not say. When something woke her, she noticed at once that the sun was markedly higher in the sky, and the cook and the maid were making a ridiculous amount of noise in the kitchen.
Then she heard the faint voice from the news screen that they were making the noise about. It was a broadcast, by chance caught by one of the monitors in low earth orbit, and it came from that orbiting collection of space yachts that once had been the contestants in the first-ever solar-sail race. And the voice was one both Myra and Ranjit knew well.
“Help,” the familiar voice said. “I need someone to get me out of this capsule before the emergency air runs out.” The voice finished with another bit of information quite unnecessary for either Myra or Ranjit: “This is Natasha de Soyza Subramanian, formerly the skipper of the solar yacht Diana, and I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
40
THE PORTRAIT GALLERY
Twenty-four hours earlier Myra Subramanian would have taken an oath that there was only one thing that she desired in the world, and that was to learn that, against all the odds, her daughter was alive and well. That was then. Now she had that word. She even had the word of the emergency crews who had instantly responded to Natasha’s SOS. They radioed to the waiting world that the missing young woman was not only alive and as far as they could determine quite well, but she was now even safe, because they had her in their rockets, already heading for the LEO juncture point of the Skyhook.
That wasn’t enough for Myra. What she wanted now was for her daughter to be in her arms. Not thousands of kilometers away, and with no chance of physically getting there for all the weeks it would take Skyhook to get her home.
But then, that evening, Myra was studying the news screens in the hopes of finding one item that wasn’t either frightening or incomprehensible, when her scream brought Ranjit running. “Look!” she cried, waving at the image on the screen. That nearly got a yell out of Ranjit, too, because what she was looking at was their daughter, Natasha—and