The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [38]
“Of course I can follow it,” she told him sweetly. “He was very clear. I just had to read his explanation—well,” she admitted, “five times, actually. And had to look up quite a lot in the reference books. And I don’t doubt that I missed a lot, but I do think I got a sort of approximate understanding.” She looked at him silently for a moment before she asked, “Do you know what I might do if I were you?”
With total truth Ranjit said, “I have no idea.”
“Well, I wouldn’t bother with any part of Wiles. I’d take a look at what other mathematicians had done in, say, the first thirty or forty years after Fermat died. You know. I’m talking about work that Fermat might have heard some anticipations of, or perhaps even worked on himself. And—Ah,” she said, with an abrupt change of subject, looking past Ranjit’s right shoulder, “and here is my long-lost Brian Harrigan, with my long delayed champagne.”
The long-lost Brian Harrigan was another of those outsize Americans, and he came trailing a pretty girl of about twenty. He gave Ranjit a one-microsecond glance. Then, “Sorry, hon,” he said to Myra de Soyza, talking through the space occupied by Ranjit Subramanian as though it were empty, “but I got to talking to, uh, Devika? She more or less grew up in this house and she promised to show me around. It’s got some great design features—have you noticed the cement floors? So if you don’t mind…”
“Go,” Myra said. “Just give me the champagne if it isn’t warm by now, and then go.” And he went, arm in arm with the girl, who hadn’t said a word to either Ranjit or Myra de Soyza.
The best part of Brian Harrigan’s departure was that it left Ranjit in exclusive possession of the company of this surprising, perplexing, altogether quite unusual young woman. (Although Ranjit was pretty sure she wasn’t all that young. At least two or three years older than himself, he conjectured. Maybe even more than that.) He did not regard their tête-à-tête as a romantic event. He was too ill-informed on boy-girl dating to take that leap, and anyway there was the matter of this Brian Harrigan, who routinely addressed her as “hon.” Given a hint or two, de Soyza filled in part of the Brian Harrigan portrait for him. Turned out he wasn’t American after all. He was Canadian. Worked for one of those world-girdling hotel chains, currently doing some sort of planning for another luxury hotel on one of Trincomalee’s beaches. She did not, however, supply the one datum about which Ranjit was most curious. Still, he told himself, it really was none of his business whether they were sleeping together.
When Ranjit picked up on the name Trincomalee, de Soyza looked embarrassed. “Oh, of course. I didn’t think. That’s your home. Do you know the hotel Brian was talking about?”
Ranjit admitted that about all he knew about Trinco’s tourist hotels was that they were really expensive. But then she asked him about his father’s temple, about which she, again astonishingly, seemed to know a great deal. She knew that it was built on what was called Shiva’s holy hill, knew that it had—or at least the big temple that the Portuguese had sacked in 1624 had—been one of the richest houses of worship in all of Southeast Asia, with the vast stores of gold, silk, jewels, and every other sort of thing that the monks had amassed over its thousand-year history. Knew even about that terrible 1624 day when the Portuguese commander, Constantine de Sa de Menzes, ordered the temple’s head priest to strip the temple of everything of value and deliver the treasures to the Portuguese ships in the harbor, because if he didn’t, de Sa would turn his ship’s cannon on the temple. The head priest had had no choice. He did as ordered…and then de Sa cannonaded the temple into rubble anyway.
“Huh,” Ranjit said when she had stopped. “You really know a lot about that time, don’t you?”
She looked embarrassed. “I suppose, but I imagine what I know isn’t quite the same as you do. Actually,