The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [122]
“What they know, their secret, it’s not complicated,” she said. “My brother once told me that everything that remains of the tradition, the basics anyway, could be explained in an afternoon to any person who’d taken college calculus. And I believe him. Not all of these people are geniuses.”
“What does it matter if you believe in God?” Cepeda said. “Pythagoras believed in God.”
“Some of the followers today believe the knowledge of Pythagoras was so far ahead of its time, it had to be divinely inspired. Others, while acknowledging the man’s brilliance, do not.”
“Nouns and adjectives,” Cepeda said.
“What?”
“It’s an old debate in my profession. Some mathematicians believe numbers are adjectives. That they were invented by man to describe the world. Others believe numbers are nouns. That they have been here as long as the universe, that they are the universe. That numbers weren’t invented by man, but discovered.”
“I can tell which one you are.”
He nodded. “So you don’t really know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“What they know.”
She shook her head. “I know about it. I know it’s more like ratios than long equations, like secret recipes jealously guarded by chefs. I know the body of what they keep secret gets smaller all the time as science catches up to Pythagoras. I also know they all believe, mathematici and acusmatici alike, that when everyone knows what they know—and that day is inevitable—civilization will cease to exist.”
“Why?”
“This is what my brother told me.” Laura took a long breath. “He said, ‘Imagine there is a button, a big red button, in the middle of a field or a jungle or a desert, and pushing that button will destroy the world and everything in it. The button is completely unprotected. There are no soldiers around it. No guards. No fences. No doors. No locks. Any person can walk right up to it and push this button whenever they like. Can there be any doubt that before long, someone will do just that, even though pressing that button will destroy him and every other life on the planet?’ The tradition believes it is protecting mankind from itself.”
Looking beyond the water, Cepeda could see a pair of old Gothic residence halls next to the ranch-style credit union, and not for the first time, he quietly cursed the lack of planning and logic and especially symmetry in campus architecture.
The face of a building—or a man, for that matter, Cepeda often thought—should articulate its purpose. For instance, El Morro Castle, the fortress that stood guard over his beloved San Juan, with its pointed snout and narrowed brow, must have seemed like a dragon’s head to old-world invaders approaching from the sea. Here be monsters, ye damn right. The Brits took the fort once, but by land, without ever looking the great stone beast in the eyes. What El Morro’s reptilian walls and fire-breathing cannons could not do, however, alien bacteria in the water could, and the English navy retreated weeks later with a brutal case of the shits.
“Man can be creative in his cruelty,” Cepeda said out loud, almost to the water, “but nature has always fashioned the more efficient weapons.”
She laughed. “You should be one of them.”
Cepeda took a regretful breath. “There is a rumor that one of the secrets is a number that doesn’t work. That if you had a circle the diameter of which equaled this number and you multiplied that number by pi, you would not get the circumference of the circle as you should. Allegedly, this number causes trouble in nature—hurricanes, tornadoes. It’s said to have caused the Challenger disaster when the onboard computer stumbled randomly across it. It’s also said that the Thousand know what it is.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Cepeda swallowed his disappointment. “I still don’t understand. What does it matter that you believe in God?”
“The acusmatici and mathematici are almost evenly split at the moment. And