The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [15]
When Ranjit roused the night porter, the man said sleepily that Mr. Bandara had left two days earlier. For his family’s house in Fort? No, not at all. For London, England, where Mr. Bandara was going to complete his studies.
When at last Ranjit got back to his own room, there was a waiting letter that Gamini had left for him, but all it said was what Ranjit already knew. Gamini’s flight to England had been moved up a few days. He would be on it. And he would miss Ranjit.
That was not Ranjit’s only disappointment. It was natural enough that the temple staff hadn’t disturbed his father when Ranjit had arrived so late. It was not quite as natural, perhaps, that his father had not chosen to disturb himself even enough to look in on his son once in any other of the five days he was living in the temple.
It was almost funny, Ranjit told himself as he turned out the light by his bed. His father had not forgiven him for his closeness to Gamini Bandara. But now Gamini was not close to him at all, not by nine thousand kilometers.
So he had lost the two dearest people in his life, and what was he to do with that life now?
There was one other significant event at that time. Neither Ranjit nor any other human being alive knew of it, however. It took place many light-years away, in the vicinity of a star that human astronomers knew only by its right ascension and declination numbers. One of those great expanding hemispheres of photons, perhaps the one from Eniwetok, perhaps from one of the Soviet monster bombs, finally reached the place where the photon pulses caused a major decision that meant bad news for the people of Earth. The pulses had alerted certain high-performance sapients (or one such sapient, their nature making it difficult to say which it should properly be called) who (or at least some fraction of whom) inhabited a vortex of dark-matter rivulets in that part of the galaxy.
These sentients were known as the Grand Galactics. Once alerted they constructed a fan of probability projections. The display that resulted matched some of their worst speculations.
These Grand Galactics had many plans and objectives, few of which would then have been comprehensible to an Earth human. One of their principal concerns was observing the working out of the galaxy’s natural physical laws. Humans did that, too, but humans’ reason for doing so was an effort to understand them. The Grand Galactics’ primary concern was to make sure those laws did not require changing. Other interests were more arcane still.
However, at least one of their concerns would have been quite clear. It could have been translated somewhat like, “Protect the harmless. Quarantine the dangerous. Destroy the malevolent—after storing a backup in a secure location.”
That was what troubled the Grand Galactics here. Species that developed weaponry were all too likely to try it out on some other species, and that could not be tolerated.
Accordingly the Grand Galactics by unanimous agreement (that being the only kind of agreement they ever had) sent a directive to one of their newest, but also most useful, client races, the Nine-Limbeds. The directive came in two parts. The first was to prepare a radio message for Earth, in as many of Earth’s several thousand dialects and languages as were broadcast in electronic form so that Nine-Limbed experts could pick them up and learn to communicate in them. The message was to say, basically, “Cease and desist.” (Languages were what the Nine-Limbeds were especially good at. This was quite unusual among the client races of the Grand Galactics. They did not encourage their clients to speak to one another.)
The second part required the Nine-Limbeds to continue, and indeed to increase, their intensive close-range surveillance of Earth.
It was a curious thing (an outside observer might have thought) for the Grand Galactics to give so much responsibility to a species that was, after all, relatively new to their employ. However, the Grand Galactics had employed them on other matters in the handful of millennia since