“Yes, but now we no longer think that al-Asiri made a mistake. We think that he made a very precise set of deliberately flawed computations. Thousands of them. And somewhere in those flawed numbers is the key to the ciphertext.”

“How’s the Voynich book play into it?” asked Church.

“There are celestial charts and drawings all through that book. We know that algebra and trigonometry are used in celestial charting and navigation. The connection seemed obvious, or so I thought. Anyway, I had Bug use MindReader to plot the positions of the celestial charts in the Voynich manuscript, but we got error after error because the diagrams are wrong. The astrological star patterns in the Voynich book aren’t exactly in the right place. Scholars had dismissed this as the errors often found in old sky maps made before the invention of ultraprecise telescopes.

“Then Bug had the idea of trying those same calculations based on algebra and trigonometry as it appears in the Codex. Al-Asiri’s calculations have long been decried as bad math. They aren’t. They’re brilliant math, but they’re deliberately flawed math. When we charted the same astrological star patterns using al-Asiri’s skewed mathematics, they matched exactly with the star patterns in the Voynich manuscript.”

Church and Lilith looked stunned. So did many of the Mothers.

“Um,” I said, “speaking on behalf of C students in math everywhere, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Joe,” said Circe, “math is an exact science. However if you build a flaw into it, then the flaw becomes an exact flaw and every computation is exactly wrong in the same way.”

“So what? How does that help us?”