The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [79]
He gave her a curious look, but turned at once to questioning about what specific invitations were available. It wasn’t until they were heading to bed that he thought to ask her, “You do want to do this, don’t you? Because if you don’t want to—”
She laid a finger across his lips and then, unexpectedly, followed with a kiss. “It’s just that I think if we’re going to do long-distance traveling, it might be better to do it soon. Might be a little more difficult later on. I wasn’t going to tell you until the doctor confirmed it, but I won’t see her until Friday. The thing is, I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”
21
HONEYMOON, PART TWO
While Myra and Ranjit were making their way to London, a trip as long and wearing as Gamini had described it years before, the world was going on its own way. Which was, of course, the way of death and destruction. They had booked their flight the long way around, by way of Mumbai, so Ranjit could get a quick look at the city. But their plane was forty minutes late because of circling before being allowed to land. Artillery fighting had broken out again in the Vale of Kashmir. No one knew what underground Pakistani agents might be planning to do to targets in India’s heartland, so the couple spent their whole time in the old city in their hotel room, watching television. That didn’t have much good news, either. Units of the Adorable Leader’s North Korean army, no longer limiting themselves to creating incidents along the border with South Korea, had plucked up the courage to have a few incidents with the country that fed it, the one that was pretty nearly its only real friend in the world, the People’s Republic of China. What they were up to no one seemed able to guess, but four separate incursions, no more than a dozen or so troops each, crossed into PRC territory, where there was nothing but hills and rocks, and set up camp.
Myra and Ranjit were three hours later boarding their London plane, too, but by the time they were airborne, skirting Pakistan’s shoreline en route to Heathrow in England, the Kashmir fighting had died down and the North Korean army had turned around and gone back to its barracks, and no one could figure out what they had been up to in the first place.
And then there they were, in London.
It did not disappoint, exactly. The great sights of the city were as fascinating to Ranjit as they had been to millions of visitors for hundreds of years. All of them—huge old St. Paul’s, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey—all the famous ones that every tourist had to see and a fair number of sights that were not really famous at all but were of particular interest to Ranjit—like the London School of Economics and a certain superb maisonette a few squares away on Arundel Street, because both had once been inhabited by Gamini Bandara at a time when Ranjit himself had had no hope of ever visiting them. When Myra persuaded him to take an excursion to Kew Gardens, he really loved the vast greenhouses. He loved all the great and famous structures of the city, almost without exception. What he did not love in the least, however, was all the open and unroofed spaces that lay between them, the spaces that he had to traverse in order to get from one to another.
And which were, without exception in this month of November, terribly, unbearably cold.
This soul-searing experience was one that Ranjit had never before encountered in all of his life. Oh, perhaps sometimes he had suffered a brief chill, maybe at the tip of Swami Rock when the winds were strong, or when he was just coming out of a plunge in the surf in the early, early morning. Not like this! Not when it was so cold that the sparse snows of the week before, and even the ones of the week before that, still left their blackened remains on the margins of parking lots and the edges of lawns because it had never warmed up enough since to finish melting them away.
Still, London’s shops were full of garments designed to keep the coldest visitor toasty, or