LITMIR.BIZ

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course, was that the astronomy course was over as well. But there was at least a postscript in the form of the party at Professor Vorhulst’s home.

      Still, as he walked from the bus to the address that had been on his invitation, Ranjit was beginning to have second thoughts. In the first place, the neighborhood was refined and therefore unfamiliar to him because he and Gamini had avoided it in their browsings in the city. (Gamini’s family lived in this neighborhood, too.) Then, the Vorhulst home was not only bigger than any single-family home needed to be, it was surrounded by totally unnecessary columned verandas and set in an exquisitely maintained garden.

      Ranjit took a deep breath before he pushed the gate open and climbed the couple of steps to the veranda. The first thing he noticed once inside the door was the cooling breeze from overhead fans. That was welcome in Colombo’s heat. More welcome still was catching sight of Joris Vorhulst himself, standing next to a woman almost as ostentatiously oversize as the house they lived in. The professor greeted Ranjit with a wink and a nod. “Ranjit,” he said, steering him down to where the woman stood, “we’re so glad you could come. I’d like you to meet Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, my mother.”

      Unsure of what action to take in greeting a woman—and an exceedingly fair-skinned one—who towered over him by at least three or four centimeters and outmassed him by more kilos than that, Ranjit experimentally offered a small bow. Mevrouw Vorhulst was having none of that. She took his hand and held it. “My dear Ranjit, I am delighted to meet you. My son doesn’t have favorites in his classes, but if he did—please don’t let him know I said this—I’m sure you would be one of them. And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting your father. A wonderful man. We worked together on one of the truce commissions, back when we needed truce commissions.”

      Ranjit sent a quick glance to Dr. Vorhulst in the hope of getting some clue as to what he should be saying to this good-looking perfumed force of nature. He got no help there. The professor was already bantering with three or four new arrivals, but Mevrouw Vorhulst, well aware of Ranjit’s difficulty, helped him out. “Don’t waste your time with an old widow lady,” she advised. “There are quite a few nice-looking girls inside, not to mention things to eat and drink. There are even some of those horrid American sports drinks that Joris came back from California addicted to, but I would not myself recommend them.” She relinquished his hand with a final pat. “But you must join us for dinner one of these days, after Joris gets back from New York. He’ll be depressed. He always is after he’s tried one more time to get the UN to act on the Artsutanov lift. But of course,” she added, already turning toward the next guests, “you can’t entirely blame them, can you? People just haven’t learned how to play nicely together.”

      Entering the house’s wide salon, Ranjit observed that there were indeed some nice-looking girls present, though most of them seemed to be already taken by one or more young men. He exchanged nods with three or four classmates, but what most interested him at that moment was the house itself. It was very little like his father’s modest home in Trincomalee. The floor was made of polished white cement, and the walls were punctuated with open doors leading out to the vast garden with its palms and frangipani and an inviting pool. As a precaution Ranjit had already eaten lunch, so the great spread of food the Vorhulsts had set out was superfluous. The American sports drink Mevrouw Vorhulst had spoken of he passed with a shudder, but was glad to find a supply of good old-fashioned Cokes. When he looked for an opener, a servant appeared from nowhere, whisked the bottle out of his hand, snapped the cap off, and emptied the soda into a tall glass, already iced, that also came from nowhere.

      The servant left Ranjit blinking after him until, from another direction, a female voice said, “You were breaking his rice bowl, you know. If the guests opened their own Coke bottles, the beverage wallah would be out of a job. So, Ranjit, how are you?”

      When he turned, he recognized the young Burgher woman from his unhappy first year’s sociology class, Mary—Martha—no, “Myra de Soyza,” she supplied. “We met in sociology last year, and it’s nice to see you again. I heard you were working with Fermat’s theorem. How is it going?”

      It was not a question Ranjit had expected to be asked, especially by a young woman as good-looking as this one was. He gave her a noncommittal answer. “Pretty slowly, I’m afraid. I didn’t know you were interested in Fermat.”

      She looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I’d have to say that you were the one who got me interested. After we heard that you’d stolen the math professor’s password—oh, are you surprised? But of course all of his classes heard about it. I think if the semester hadn’t been over, there would have been a movement to elect you class president.” She gave him a friendly smile. “At any rate, I couldn’t help wondering what would so obsess a person like you—is ‘obsession’ too strong a word?” Ranjit, who had long since come to terms with the technical description of his so-far-failed quest, shrugged. “Well,” she went on, “let’s just say I couldn’t help wondering what would account for your strong interest in trying to find a proof for Fermat’s claim. Wiles’s work was certainly not what Fermat had had in mind, was it? If only because nearly every step in Wiles comes from work somebody else did long after Fermat was dead and gone, and there was no way Fermat could have known— Oh, Ranjit, please be careful of your drink!”

      Ranjit blinked and saw what she was talking about. He had been so taken aback by the turn the conversation had taken that he had allowed his Coke glass a dangerous tilt. He straightened it and took a quick swallow to clear his head. “What do you know about the Wiles proof?” he demanded, past the point of caring if he was being polite.

      Myra de Soyza didn’t seem to mind. “Not a great deal, really. Just enough to get an idea of what it was all about. Certainly not as much as a real mathematician might. Do you know who Dr. Wilkinson is? From the Drexel Math Forum? I think his was the best and simplest explanation of what Wiles really accomplished.”

      The thing that was now paralyzing Ranjit’s vocal cords was that he himself, in the days when he had just begun to try to comprehend the Wiles proof, had been really grateful for that same Dr. Wilkinson’s analysis.

      He realized that he must have made some sort of vocal sound, because the de Soyza woman was looking at him inquiringly. “I mean,” he clarified, “are you telling me that you can follow Wilkinson’s gloss?”

      “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

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