Year’s Best SF 15 Read Online Free PDF Page A

much. He pores over the proof of Gödel’s theorem, seeking to understand it, to get around it. Gangadhar encourages him:
    â€œYou know, in the old tales, every great treasure is guarded by a proportionally great monster. Perhaps Gödel’s theorem is the djinn that guards the truth you seek. Maybe instead of slaying it, you have to, you know, befriend it…”
    Through his own studies, through discussions with Gangadhar, Abdul Karim begins to feel again that his true companions are Archimedes, Al-Khwarizmi. Khayyam, Aryabhata, Bhaskar. Riemann, Cantor, Gauss, Ramanujan, Hardy.
    They are the masters, before whom he is as a humble student, an apprentice following their footprints up the mountainside. The going is rough. He is getting old, after all. He gives himself up to dreams of mathematics, rousing himself only to look after the needs of his mother, who is growing more and more frail.
    After a while, even Gangadhar admonishes him.
    â€œA man cannot live like this, so obsessed. Will you let yourself go the way of Cantor and Gödel? Guard your sanity, my friend. You have a duty to your mother, to society.”
    Abdul Karim cannot make Gangadhar understand. His mind sings with mathematics.
    The limit of a function f(N) as N goes to infinity….
    So many questions he asks himself begin like this. The function f(N) may be the prime counting function, or the number of nested dolls of matter, or the extent of the universe. It may be abstract, like a parameter in a mathematical space, or earthy, like the branching of wrinkles in the face of his mother, growing older and older in the paved courtyard of his house, under the litchi trees. Older and older, without quite dying, as though she were determined to live Zeno’s paradox.
    He loves his mother the way he loves the litchi tree; for being there, for making him what he is, for giving him shelter and succor.
    The limit…as N goes to infinity…
    So begin many theorems of calculus. Abdul Karim wonders what kind of calculus governs his mother’s slow arc into dying. What if life did not require a minimum threshold of conditions—what if death were merely a limit of some function f(N) as N goes to infinity?
    A world in which human life is but a pawn
    A world filled with death-worshipers,
    Where death is cheaper than life…
    That world is not my world…
    â€”Sahir Ludhianvi, Indian poet (1921–1980)
    While Abdul Karim dabbles in the mathematics of the infinite, as so many deluded fools and geniuses have done, the world changes.
    He is vaguely aware that there are things going on in the world—that people live and die, that there are political upheavals, that this is the hottest summer yet and already a thousand people have died of the heat wave in Northern India. He knows that Death also stands at his mother’s shoulder, waiting, and he does what he can for her. Although he has not always observed the five daily prayers, he does the namaz now, with her. She has already started becoming the citizen of another country—she lives in little leaps and bends of time long gone, calling for Ayesha one moment, andfor her long-dead husband the next. Conversations from her lost girlhood emerge from her trembling mouth. In her few moments of clarity she calls upon Allah to take her away.
    Dutiful as he is to his mother, Abdul Karim is relieved to be able to get away once a week for a chess game and conversation with Gangadhar. He has a neighbor’s aunt look in on his mother during that time. Heaving a sigh or two, he makes his way through the familiar lanes of his childhood, his shoes scuffing up dust under the ancient jamun trees that he once climbed as a child. He greets his neighbors: old Ameen Khan Sahib sitting on his charpai, wheezing over his hookah, the Ali twins, madcap boys chasing a bicycle tire with a stick, Imran at the paan shop. He crosses, with some trepidation, the increasingly congested market road, past