The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “Scarcely matters to us,” muttered Sophie, “we have no blackamoors hereabouts, and no fleet with which to go and get them. But it seems a bit, I don’t know, quixotic.”

  Leibniz said nothing.

  “Quixotic is fine!” Sophie allowed, “we enjoy a dash of quixotic, as long as it is not boring. She is never boring about it, is she?”

  “If you take her aside and really press her on it, she can go on at some length about the evils of slavery,” Leibniz conceded, “but otherwise she is the very soul of discretion, and never heard to utter more than a few words on the topic in polite company.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She spends most of her time in London lately, looking after an unfathomably lengthy and tedious Judicial Proceeding involving one Abigail Frome, a white slave, but maintains residences in St. Malo, Versailles, Leipzig, Paris, and of course the Castle on Outer Qwghlm.”

  “We would meet her. We are grateful that she took Princess Caroline under her wing when the poor child was forgotten and alone. We share her passion for Natural Philosophy. We may require someone of her talents to assist us in the management of our ship Minerva and to ensure that the profits are not illicitly diverted to the coffers of our partner, Kottakkal, the Pirate-Queen of Malabar.”

  “I am afraid you quite lost me there, your Electoral Highness!”

  “Do try harder to keep up, Doctor Leibniz, I hired you because people said you were clever.”

  “It shan’t happen again, your Electoral Highness…er…you were on to something about a ship?”

  “Never mind the ship! The most important thing is that this Eliza shall bring us the most excellent gossip from London; gossip that it is our duty to hear, as we or our heirs are likely one day to be crowned monarchs of England. And so if Eliza comes to this part of the world to pay a call on her bastard…”

  “I’ll see to it that she puts in an appearance here, your Electoral Highness.”

  “Done! What is next on the list?”

  “Whitehall Palace burnt down.”

  “The whole thing? I was led to believe it was quite…rambling.”

  “According to the few people remaining in London who will still write to me, it is all smoking ruins.”

  “Ve must speak Englisch ven ve speak of Englant!” the Electress decreed. “I never get to practice othervise.”

  “Right. In English, then: As soon as the war ended, the Whigs were cast out—”

  “The Yuncto?”

  “Very good, your majesty, you have it right, the Yuncto is cast into the outer darkness, the Tories are ascendant.”

  “How fortunate for William,” Sophie said drily. “Just when he needs a new palace built, the king-loving party gets its hands on the treasury.”

  “Which happens to be completely empty at the moment, but that problem is being worked on by clever fellows, fear not.”

  “Now the conversation really is about to become very boring indeed,” Sophie reflected, “as we are on to revenue and taxes. The bat will go to sleep up there, snuggled up next to a naiad or a dryad, and not come awake until the middle of dinner.”

  “Everything said of the Tsar would suggest he’ll not be troubled by a bat. You could have wolves and bears in here and he would not look twice.”

  “I am not trying to make Peter feel at home,” Sophie said frostily, “but to show him that, somewhere between Berlin and here, he at last crossed the frontier of civilization. And one lovely thing about civilization is philosophers capable of making interesting conversation.”

  “Right. So we are finished with gossip, then, and—”

  “—and on to the latest developments in philosophy—Natural, or Unnatural, as you prefer. Stand and deliver, Doctor Leibniz! Whatever’s the matter? Bat got your tongue?”

  “The English savants are all busy toiling at practical matters—Mints, Banks, Cathedrals, Annuities. The French are all under the shadow, if not the actual boot, of the Inquisition. Nothing of interest has been heard out of Spain since they kicked out the Jews and the Moors two hundred years ago. So when you inquire after Philosophy, Majesty, you inquire—and I do not wish to seem self-important when I say this—after me.”

  “Am I not allowed to inquire after my friend in my house?”

  “Of course, I just…well…never mind. I have been corresponding with those Bernoulli brothers rather a lot. Nothing important. You know I have always been fascinated with symbols and characters. The calculus has brought us new ideas for which we want new symbols. For differentiation, I like a small letter d, and for integration, a sort of elongated S. That’s how the Bernoullis have been doing it, and it suits them well. But there is another Swiss mathematician, a fellow who was once viewed as quite a promising young savant-in-the-making, by the name of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.”

  “That one who saved William of Orange from a kidnap-plot?” asked Sophie, planting the tip of Leibniz’s rapier in the tabletop and flexing it absent-mindedly.

  “The same. He and the Bernoullis have been corresponding.”

  “But you said, very meaningfully, that this fellow was once viewed as promising.”

  “His work the last few years has been laughable. He is not right in his head, or so it would seem.”

  “I thought it was Newton who had gone out of his mind.”

  “I am coming to Newton. He—Fatio, that is—and the Bernoullis have, ’twould seem, been carrying on one of these slow-smoldering disputes. They send him a letter using the little d and the stretched-out S, and, tit-for-tat, he sends them one back using a little dot for differentiation and some sort of abominable “Q”-notation for integration. This is how Newton writes calculus. It is a sort of shin-kicking contest that has been going on for years. Well, a few months ago it blew up. Fatio published an article saying some very uncomplimentary things about your humble and obedient servant right here, and attributing the calculus to Newton. Then the Bernoullis cooked up a mathematicks problem and began sending it round to the Continental mathematicians to see if any of them could solve it. None of them could—”

  “Not even you!?”

  “Of course I could solve it, it was just a calculus problem and it had only one purpose, which was to separate the men—which is to say, those who understood the calculus—from the boys. They then sent the damned thing to Newton, who worked it out in a few hours.”

  “Oh! So he is not out of his mind!”

  “For all I know, Majesty, he may be entirely out of his mind—the point is, he is still without rival, when it comes to mathematicks. And now, thanks to those mischievous Bernoullis, he believes that I and all the other Continental mathematicians do conspire against him.”

  “I thought you were going to talk philosophy now, not gossip.”

  Leibniz inhaled to say something, stopped, and sighed it all out. Then he did it again. Then a third time. Fortuitously, the bat chose this moment to come out of hiding. Sophie was not slow to jerk the rapier free from the tabletop and return to the hunt. After a bit of random flitting here and there—for the bat seemed to phant’sy that the keening tip of the rapier was some sort of blindingly fast insect—it settled into a hunting pattern, swinging around the long perimeter of the dining room, but judiciously avoiding the corners, plotting therefore a roughly elliptical orbit. The table was planted across one end of the room and so the bat flew across it twice on each revolution. Sophie’s strategy, then, was to plant herself on the table just where she predicted the bat would over-fly it as it came in from its long patrol of the room. Missing it there, she could then rush down to the other end to take another hack at it when it rebounded from the near wall and passed over again, outward-bound.

  “Your majesty’s situation vis-à-vis the bat is very like that of a terrestrial astronomer when the earth’s orbit—a segment of which is here represented by the table—is intersected by that of a comet, crossing over twice, once inbound towards Sol, and once outbound.” Leibniz nodded significantly at the dazzling blaze of the
candelabra, which had been set down on the floor between the table and the wall.

  “Less sarcasm, more philosophy.”

  “As you know, the library is being moved here—”

  “I just thought, what’s the use of having a library if I must journey to Wolfenbüttel to use it? My husband never cared much for books, but now that he spends all his time in bed—”

  “I do not criticize, Majesty. On the contrary, it has been good to withdraw from day-to-day management of the collection, and turn my attention to the library’s true purpose.”

  “Now you really have got me confused.”

  “The mind cannot work with things themselves. I see the bat over yonder, my mind is aware of it, but my mind does not manipulate the bat directly. Instead my mind is (I suppose) working with a symbolic representation of the bat that exists inside my head. I can do things to that symbol—such as imagining the bat dead—without affecting the real bat itself.”

  “All right, so thinking is manipulation of symbols in the head, I have heard this from you before.”

  “A library is a sort of catalog or warehouse of all that men think about—so by cataloging a library I can make a more or less orderly and comprehensive list of all the symbols that sapient beings carry around in their heads. But rather than trying to dissect brains and ransack the actual gray matter for those symbols—rather than use the same sorts of symbolic representations that the brain manipulates—I simply assign a prime number to each. Numbers have the advantage that they may be manipulated and processed with the aid of machines—”

  “Oh, it’s that project again. Why don’t you stick to monads? Monads are a perfectly lovely subject and you don’t need machines to process them.”

  “I am sticking to monads, Majesty, I work on the monadology every day. But I am also working on this other thing—”

  “You used to call it something else, didn’t you? This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money’ project,” said Sophie distractedly, and made a rush down the table.

  Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. “The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money,” he said with great dignity, “is that it requires some money every year, and I hope it shall go on forever. Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn’t work because of sabotage, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises. They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines.”

  “Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England. First William, and then Princess Anne (who would be Queen Anne by that point) and then that little Duke of Gloucester, and any other children she might have in the meantime. I am sixty-seven years old. You need to seek support elsewhere—eeeYAHH! There you are! Invade my dining room, will you! Doctor Leibniz, how do you like my cooking?”

  The sword was no longer moving. Leibniz ventured closer, keeping his eyes fixed on Sophie’s powdered face, then traced a line from her soft, plump white shoulder, down the sleeve of her dress, across a rubble of jewelry encrusting her wrist and fingers, down the rusty rapier-blade, to a Dresden china plate where a deceased bat lay, wings arranged artfully as if it had been put there as a garnish by a French chef. “The comet has come to earth!” she proclaimed.

  “Oh, how very poetickal you are, Mummy!” exclaimed a voice from behind Leibniz.

  Leibniz turned around to face the door and discovered a large bloke, nearing forty, but with the face and manner of a somewhat younger man. George Louis, or Georg Ludwig as he was called in the vernacular, seemed to have only just realized that his mother was standing on a table. He blinked slowly a few times, froglike.

  “The comet is approaching, er, the tree,” he said uncomfortably.

  “The tree!? Comets don’t approach trees!”

  “He has been ensnared, as it were, by the net cast by the falcon.”

  “Falcons don’t cast nets,” Leibniz blurted, unable to stop himself. The look he got in return from George Louis made him wish that he hadn’t handed his only means of self-defense to Sophie.

  “What does it matter, since it’s all nonsense to begin with!? Once you’ve made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all consistent?”

  “George, my firstborn, my pride, my love. What are you trying to say to us?” Sophie asked indulgently.

  “That the Tsar is approaching the Herrenhausen!”

  “So the Tsar is the comet?”

  “Of course!”

  “We were using ‘comet’ to mean this bat.”

  The corners of George’s mouth now drew back and downwards so far that his lips ceased to exist and the slit between them took on the appearance of a garrotte. He threw a dark look at Leibniz, blaming him for something.

  “Who is the falcon, your royal highness?” Leibniz asked him.

  “Your fawning disciple—and my little sister—Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, Dr. Leibniz.”

  “Splendid! So the metaphor of the net was to say that she had ensnared Peter by her charm and wiles.”

  “He passed through Berlin like a cannonball—didn’t even slow down—she had to hunt him down like a fox at Koppenbrügge—”

  “Do you mean, Sophie Charlotte was like a fox, in that she was so clever to hunt down the cannonball? Or that the Tsar was foxlike in his evasions?” Sophie asked patiently.

  “I mean they are coming right now.”

  “Go to your father’s bedchamber. Send the embalmers away,” Sophie commanded, meaning the physicians. “Get your father to understand that someone very tall, and frightfully important, may swim into his vision, and that he should try to mumble a pleasantry or two if he is feeling up to it.”

  “Yes, Mummy,” said the obedient son. With a parting bow for his mother, and a momentary eye-narrowing at Leibniz, George Louis took his leave.

  It felt now as if Sophie and the Doctor ought to say something concerning George Louis, but Sophie very deliberately didn’t and Leibniz easily decided to follow her lead. There was a brief upwelling of chaos and hilarity as Sophie was brought down to floor level again (she threatened to jump, and probably could have), but word had reached them that the Tsar of All the Russias had entered the building, preceded by Sophie Charlotte, who was essentially dragging him in by the ear. If this had been an official state visit they’d have had plenty of time to get ready. As matters stood, Peter was traveling incognito and so they were going to behave more or less as if he were a country cousin who had decided to drop by for dinner.

  Clanking noises and guttural accents approached, and the avian trilling of Sophie Charlotte’s laughter! A couple of ladies-in-waiting darted in on Sophie to tuck in loose hair-strands and yank down on her bodice; she counted to ten and slapped them away. Behind her one servant, moving in a posture of awful dignity, bore the bat-plate out of the room while another replaced it with a clean one. Still others made frenetic repairs to the candelabra and the centerpiece. “Doctor! Your sword!” Sophie exclaimed. She snatched the moist weapon up off the table and, in an absent-minded way, made for Leibniz as if to impale him. Leibniz side-stepped politely, took the weapon by its hilt, and then embarked upon the project of trying to get it back into its scabbard. The tip had to be introduced into an opening that was too small for Leibniz to even see, inasmuch as he had pocketed his spectacles, and he was loath to touch the bat-smeared metal with the fingers of his other hand. So when the Tsar’s advance-guard rounded the corner into the room, he was still standing directly be
fore the entrance holding it up in a posture that was ambiguous. The guards, who were not paid to be meditative, could not really discern, at a moment’s glance, whether he was yanking the blade out, or shoving it in.

  Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades—quite a bit shinier than his—triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant—possibly because he had gone slack with terror—the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz’s arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going wuv, wuv, wuv. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face—clean-shaven except for a dark moustache—still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte’s arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. “I would borrow three large wheels!”