The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [50]
Cepeda looked up, apparently waiting for Kloska and Traden to appear impressed, and when he saw no reaction, he said, “Pythagoras didn’t allow his students to write down any of his teachings, so most of what he taught was lost to us. We can only guess from the work of his disciples what he must have said. But what if his ideas really had been passed down secretly from generation to generation on through the millennia?”
“What would be the point?”
“We can assume the most practical teachings of Pythagoras were taught and applied immediately by his students and became common knowledge. But what if Pythagoras had made abstract mathematical discoveries so far ahead of his time that for centuries, even millennia, they remained just esoteric musings—in the ignorance of the past, they must have seemed more like astrology than math. The Pythagoreans never put them to work or revealed them to others because they had no practical use.
“But then comes the twenty-first century. Our cars have computers. So do our blenders and our shoes and our timepieces and our ice cream makers, as well as our thermostats and our smoke detectors, our pacemakers and our baby monitors. Numbers play a far more critical role in our lives than they did in the time of Pythagoras.
“Suppose, then, that this once esoteric and useless mathematical knowledge, passed from the ancients down to a small group of modern minds, is suddenly very useful. Powerful even. Perhaps this knowledge is now being used in secret, to build better washing machines and laptop computers and vacuum cleaners. Perhaps they’re using it to design better weapons and surveillance devices and tracking software, to develop methods of cryptography and financial instruments. Machines that think like people. People who think like machines. Perhaps the modern-day descendants of the disciples of Pythagoras—‘the Thousand’ is what they allegedly call themselves—have become wealthy and powerful because they possess information no one else does.”
“That sounds like urban-legend bullshit to me, Professor,” Kloska said.
“You’re the one who insisted on hearing it.” Cepeda bit his lip. “But just imagine if you lived in the time of Christ and you knew something as elementary as Newton’s laws of motion.”
“I’m not sure I know what those are now,” Kloska said. Traden laughed.
“Okay, but what if even today the Thousand knows mathematical principles that might not be generally accepted for five hundred years?”
Kloska said, “So, what, you think Marlena Falcone was getting close to one of their secrets?”
Cepeda was suddenly very still. A pearl of sweat rolled along his chin. “I’m suggesting she must have been one of them.”
“Oh Christ,” Kloska said out loud.
Cepeda told them, “From almost the very beginning the Thousand have been rumored to be at war with themselves. A secret civil war that has been raging for millennia and is still going on right under our noses, right across our front pages. After what you’ve told me, I think Dr. Falcone might have been one of the casualties.” He walked to his desk and looked in vain for a piece of paper among hundreds. “Shortly after Pythagoras died, there was a schism among his closest followers. One group called themselves ‘acusmatici.’ They were basically Pythagorean fundamentalists. They believed that Pythagoras had been a prophet or a god and that his teachings were divine truth. But they also believed the truth ended with his word and that trying to expand upon his teaching was heresy. Think