The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [21]
Ranjit would have been astonished to know that his own picture had been flashed across interstellar space in that manner. It had, though. So had the pictures of everyone, and almost everything, on Earth, because the Machine-Stored—if not omnipotent—were diligent.
And hoped that the Grand Galactics would appreciate, or at least tolerate, that diligence.
When Ranjit’s bedside radio woke him for the first day of his new term, he leaped out of bed in order to turn it off. His first class, Astronomy 101: The Geography of the Solar System, was also pretty close to his last hope that the university would provide him with anything interesting over the next three years. That was mildly cheering in itself. And then, as he was leaving the building, the porter handed him a letter—from London, and therefore from Gamini—and Ranjit actually did feel a little bit cheerful.
Hunched over his breakfast, he read the letter. It didn’t take very much time. The letter was even shorter than its predecessor and almost entirely devoted to describing Gamini’s “superb maisonette”:
You enter from the street and go up a flight of stairs. Then you’re in the living room (the Brits call it the “reception”). Next to that room is a doll-size kitchen, and that’s all there is on that floor. There’s a separate flight of stairs going down from the reception to the back, where there’s a spare room that looks out on a few square meters of mud that might be supposed to be a garden. I guess I’ll call that the guest room, but I don’t plan to be putting up any overnight guests in it. (Unless, my man, you want to drop by for a weekend sometime!) Going back to the reception floor, there’s another flight of stairs that takes you up to the bedroom and bath. Not very convenient for anybody sleeping in the guest room if he needs to have a pee in the middle of the night. And let’s go back to the kitchen. It’s got everything you’d want in a modern kitchen, but in dollhouse sizes: tiny fridge, tiny stove, tiny sink, and the tiniest washer-dryer you’ve ever seen. I said it was about big enough to handle a pair of socks, but Madge said it could only if you did just one sock at a time.
Anyway, such as it is, it’s mine! Even if all the furnishing is Early Cheap. Only now I’ve got to run, because a bunch of us are going to see the new Stoppard revival and we want to have dinner first.
Ranjit managed a smile at the thought of Gamini doing laundry—the Gamini for whom laundry had always been what you took home and gave to the servants, who the next morning would return it to you, cleaned, ironed, and folded.
That did not keep him from wondering just who this Madge was.
So he showed up for his first class prepared for disappointment….
But then, wonderfully, miraculously, that was not at all what happened!
5
FROM MERCURY TO THE OORT
The place where Astronomy 101 was given wasn’t a regular classroom. It was one of the rooms that were designed like miniature theaters, with curved rows of seats enough for a hundred students. Almost every seat was occupied, too, right down to the level that held a desk, a chair, and a lecturer who didn’t look to be much older than Ranjit himself. His name was Joris Vorhulst. He was obviously a Burgher, and it was almost as obvious that he had chosen to leave the island for his graduate schooling.
The schools he had gone to impressed Ranjit, too. They were hallowed names for astronomers. Dr. Vorhulst had got his master’s at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where he had interned on the vast old Keck telescopes, and he’d gone on to his doctorate at Caltech, with a side order of working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. At JPL he had been part of the team that ran Faraway, the spacecraft that