The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [9]
He was clutching at straws. His father was not to be moved by two-thousand-year-old Tamil verses. He didn’t answer, just shook his head, though Ranjit could see from the expression on his face that he was suffering, too.
“All right,” Ranjit said miserably. “What do you want me to do?”
His father’s voice was heavy. “What you must, Ranjit. You cannot remain so close to a Sinhalese.”
“But why? Why now?”
“I have no choice in this,” his father said. “I must put my duties as high priest of the temple first, and this matter is causing dissension.” He sighed and then said, “You were raised to be loyal, Ranjit. I am not surprised that you want to stand with your friend. I only hoped that you could find a way to be loyal to your father as well, but perhaps that is impossible.” He shook his head and then stood up, looking down at his son. “Ranjit,” he said, “I must tell you that you are not now welcome in my house. One of the monks will find you a place to sleep tonight. If you finally choose to sever your relationship with Bandara, phone or write me to tell me so. Until you do, there is no reason for you to contact me again.”
As his father turned and walked away, Ranjit dropped quite suddenly into a state of misery….
Perhaps that state needs to be examined more closely. Ranjit was certainly miserable with the sudden distance that had opened between himself and his beloved father. Nothing in that fact, however, led him to think that he himself was in any way in the wrong. He was, after all, just sixteen years old.
And some twenty light-years away, on a planet so corrupted and befouled that it was very difficult to believe any organic creature could survive there, an odd-looking race known as the One Point Fives was nevertheless surviving.
The question now on the collective minds of the One Point Fives, as they prepared themselves to meet the inevitable orders from the Grand Galactics who were their masters, was how much longer that survival would go on.
True, the One Point Fives hadn’t received their marching orders yet. But they knew what was coming. They themselves had detected the troublesome emissions from Earth as the successive waves of photons had swept by. They knew as well just when those photons would reach the Grand Galactics.
Most of all, they knew just how the Grand Galactics were likely to respond. The thought of what that response might mean for them made them shudder within their body armor.
The One Point Fives had only one real hope. That was that they would be able to accomplish everything the Grand Galactics would demand of them and, when that task was completed, that they would have enough survivors among their own people to keep the race alive.
2
UNIVERSITY
That year’s first few months of university classes had been the best kind of holiday for Ranjit Subramanian. Not because of the classes themselves, of course. They were totally boring. But they took up only a few hours a day, and then he and Gamini Bandara had all the time that the university hadn’t already claimed, with a whole exciting city to explore and each other to explore it with. They did it all, from the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage and the Dehiwala Zoo to the cricket club and a dozen less reputable places. Gamini, of course, had lived in Colombo much of his life. He had long since explored all of those places and many more, but introducing Ranjit to them made them all fresh. The boys even managed to take in a few museums and one or two theaters—cheaply done, because Gamini’s parents had memberships or season tickets to everything in Colombo. Or at least to everything respectable; and the attractions that weren’t respectable the boys found for themselves. There were of course plenty of the bars, toddy joints, and casinos that gave Colombo its nickname as “the Las Vegas of the Indian Ocean.” The boys naturally sampled them, but didn’t care much for gambling and certainly didn’t need a whole lot of alcohol to feel good. Feeling good was their natural state.