Julia turned on a fluorescent that flickered a half-dozen times before it came on fully.
She strode through the small cramped room, around the desk, and said, "I'm glad you're all right, Ruth."
"Julie—" Ruth began.
"No thanks to the bastards you work for," Gideon blurted. He was saying it before he even realized the anger that he was holding back.
Ruth reached for his arm, "Gideon, wait a m—"
Gideon shook off her arm and took a limping step forward. "You do work for them, don't you? Or is it the other way around?"
"You don't know what's going on here, Detective Malcolm," Julia said. Her voice was much colder than the one she had used to address Ruth.
"I don't?" Gideon said. He took another step and leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the desk. He gripped the edge until the healing muscles in his arm vibrated. "You and Emmit D'Arcy came to some sort of agreement to continue your 'work' outside of the NSA's control. Both of you staged your defection to a phantom terrorist group, and even went so far as to contract the theft of a Daedalus supercomputer. Have I got the gist?"
"Please," Ruth said. "Let her explain what's happening." If anything, it was Ruth who seemed to be hurt by Gideon's tirade. Julia simply watched him, unmoved.
"If I have that much right—" Gideon glared at the woman. React, damn you. "Those thieves killed a highway patrolman, you realize that, don't you? In fact, they botched the whole job—bad enough that the CIA managed to set a trap with the Daedalus. But D'Arcy tipped you off, didn't he?"
"I'm sorry that you and your brother—" Julia began.
"You are? Are you sorry about Mr. Jones and Mr. Williams? They might have been criminal scum, but the fact that you involved them meant they had to die. Your pet terrorist, Volynskji, put a bullet into Morris Kendal because he was just a little too close to figuring out D'Arcy was behind this. Are you sorry about him? Then there're a half-dozen dead Israelis in New Jersey-----"
Julia nodded and said quietly, "Much of this has been unfortunate."
"Good Lord, do you understand that these bastards almost killed your sister—"
"They panicked," Julia said. "After the travesty with the Israelis, I made them understand that they had to bring the two of you here, in one piece."
"Do you know how many people have died because of this?"
Julia sat down, behind the desk. "I am not in control of these people, Detective Malcolm."
"Bullshit!"
"Gideon, please." Ruth sounded shocked. She pulled at his arm trying to get him back into a seat.
"You have these people wrapped around your finger. You dictated that we be brought into audience with you, and here we damn well are—snatched from out of the NSA's own hands."
"You have no idea what that required," Julia said.
"They can't have their little project without you, can they? You seem to have a powerful negotiating position."
Julia shook her head. "D'Arcy won't allow a threat to himself or the IUF—"
"So the blood is on his hands, not yours?"
"You don't know what Aleph means, do you?" Julia looked at Ruth and the coolness leaked out of her face. "I couldn't not take the opportunity D'Arcy offered me."
"Whatever the cost?"
"I brought you here to explain." She was still talking to Ruth.
"Explain why my brother died." The words hung in the air as silence claimed them again. Julia still looked at Ruth as if she was searching for something, support, justification, rationalization. Gideon turned around and looked at Ruth himself. Ruth's eyes were shiny, and she was wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Gideon felt spent, as if venting his anger had withdrawn all solid support from inside him. He pushed away from Julia's desk and half-collapsed into a chair next to Ruth.
"Julie," Ruth said. "What's going on here? Why's this happening?"
Julia Zimmerman glanced at Gideon and paused, as if waiting for a continuation of his tirade. "You didn't need to involve yourself so deeply. Eventually you would have known. Everyone would have known, soon enough."
"What is Aleph?" Gideon asked.
Julia smiled slightly. "You already know." She looked up, toward the louvered window, and at first Gideon thought she might be looking at the Daedalus. But her eyes were unfocused and blank, as if she was looking beyond the Daedalus, at something only she could see. "'Why,' is a good question. 'Why' is exactly what we're searching for here."
"Why what?" Gideon asked.
"Why is this world, on its face, filled with such illogic, such randomness, such pain. The human mind is such a faulty mechanism, capable of intolerance, brutality, stupidity, evil. . . And yet, and yet. . ." She closed her eyes. "I cannot believe that we, a race of beings of brutal stupidity, a race of Pol Pots, Charlie Mansons, and," she paused a moment, "Emmit D'Arcys—a race of evil high and low—could have 'invented' the beauty of the mathematical world."
To Gideon, it appeared as if she had fallen into that world. The hardness was gone from her expression, replaced with something distant and serene. "How can we say that Newton invented the calculus when it was his study of the physical world that led him to discover it? How can we say that some ancient invented '1 + 1 =2'? Those in my discipline keep going further and further afield, trying to 'invent' new, esoteric forms of mathematics, and they always find to their chagrin that eventually their math describes some aspect of the world, be it the quantum spaces inside an atom, or the growth of a species, or the deformation of a polymer under stress."
"You see it as a form of higher reality—" Gideon said. But Julia opened her eyes and shook her head slowly, as if trying to be kind in contradicting a child's view of the world.
"It is reality," she said. "The closest that we can come to seeing how things really are."
Gideon opened his mouth, but he couldn't say anything.
"It's obvious," Julia said. "Once you start to see. The way that every form of the discipline, from number theory to topology, will find its manifestation in the world we experience. The way the world we see informs the discipline, from chaos theory to the evolutionary algorithm—" Julia tapped on the desk. "If you believe in physics, you believe that this desk is simply a physical form of energy left over from the creation of the universe.
"So can't you see that this universe is an objectified form of a mathematical object?"
"Is that what the New Pythagoreans are about?" Gideon asked.
"They are Mr. Gribaldi's invention. They understand, but only in a rhetorical fashion. Their beliefs are ones of aesthetics . . . There are very few who even claim that the evolutionary algorithm is the same as evolution, or that a computer program that shows all the functions of biology is, by definition, biological."
"That's what you were doing at MIT, wasn't it? Applying the evolutionary algorithm to computer viruses."
"An oversimplification. We were working on a new biology. At MIT, working within a closed environment of our private computer network, we generated programs that were more complex than any mere virus . . ."
Ruth spoke up. "All sorts of people work on Artificial Life. There're conventions for it. Why was this a secret? Why destroy all the research you left at MIT."
Gideon felt as if he finally understood. He could feel some of the anger return. "A private, isolated environment wasn't big enough, was it?"
"No," Julia said, "it wasn't."
"You let these things out into the world," Gideon said. "Damn the consequences. So what if Wall Street collapses—"
"These were not destructive viruses." Julia frowned.
Ruth sounded appalled. "You were letting these things go?"
"To generate what we wanted required the widest, most diverse, and challenging environment that was available."