THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  Kikin was still in difficulties. “Do you mean to say that each of us pursues a separate Prosecution, or-”

  “We might,” Daniel said, “but I suppose it would be more efficient”-this word chosen to delight the ears of Mr. Orney, who indeed looked keen on it-“for you and you, and I, and the Hand-in-Hand Fire-Office if they are so inclined, and Mr. Threader and Mr. Arlanc, to pursue it jointly.”

  “Who are Threader and Arlanc?” Kikin asked. For Daniel had left them out of his Crane Court narration.

  “Why,” said Daniel, “you might say that they are the other members of our Clubb.”

  A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell

  EARLY APRIL 1714

  “THE RIVER FLEET is a parable-I would venture to say, a very mockery-of humane degradation!” announced Mr. Orney, by way of a greeting, as he stomped down stairs into the crypt.

  Here, if he had evinced dismay, turned on his heel, and run back up the steps, no man would have thought less of him.

  Mr. Threader-who’d arrived a quarter of an hour previously-had been quite aghast. “It is consecrated ground, sir,” Daniel had told Mr. Threader, “not some pagan Barrow. These souls are Members in Good Standing of the Community of the Dead.” And he had shoved his hand into a tangle of pallid roots and ripped them out of the way to reveal an ancient brass plate, bejeweled with condensed moisture, and gouged with a dog’s breakfast of rude letters, no two the same size, evidently copied out by some medieval artisan who knew not what they signified.

  Re-forming them into Latin words and sentences was a job for patient clerks, or clerics. But this was Clerkenwell, where such had been coming to draw water for at least five hundred years. Decyphered, the letters said that behind this plate lay the earthly remains of one Theobald, a Knight Templar who had gone to Jerusalem whole, and come back in pieces. Next to it was another plate telling a similar tale about a different bloke.

  Unlike Mr. Threader, Mr. Orney seemed not in the least put out by the surroundings. Daniel had been at pains to set up candles and lanthorns wherever he could, which generally meant the lids of the half-dozen blocky sarcophagi that claimed most of the floor. By the light of these, it was possible to make out a vaulted roof. This was not a soaring, lost-in-dimness type of vaulted roof. It was barely high enough for a bishop to walk up the middle without getting slime on his mitre. But the stones had been well joined, and the room had survived, a pocket of air in the dirt, oblivious to what might be happening above.

  Mr. Orney paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs to let his eyes adjust, which was very prudent, then advanced on Daniel and Mr. Threader, dodging round nearly invisible puddles with sailorly grace as he made his way between the sarcophagi. He was showing a lack of curiosity, and a refusal to be awed, that in another man would have been infallible proof of stupidity. Since Daniel knew him not to be stupid, he reckoned that it was a sort of religious assertion; to a Quaker, these Papist crusader-knights were as primitive, and as beside the point, as a clan of Pictish barrow-diggers.

  “Why, Brother Norman? Because the Fleet, like life, is brief and stinky?” inquired Daniel politely.

  “The stench at its end is only remarkable because the Fleet runs so pure and fresh at the beginning; issuing as it does from diverse wells, holes, rills, and spaws hereabouts. Thus does a babe, fresh from the womb, soon fall prey to all manner of gross worldly-”

  “We get the point,” Mr. Threader said.

  “And yet the interval between the two is so brief,” Mr. Orney continued, “that a robust man” (meaning himself) “may walk it in half an hour.” He pretended to check his watch, as proof that this was no exaggeration. But it was too gloomy in here to make out the dial.

  “Do not let our host see your time-piece, sir, he’ll have it apart before you can say, ’avast, that is expensive!” ’ said Mr. Threader, sounding as if he knew whereof he spoke.

  “Never mind,” said Daniel, “I recognize it as the work of Mr. Kirby, probably undertaken when he was journeyman to Mr. Tompion, nine years ago.”

  This produced a brief but profound-one might say, sepulchral-silence. “Well discerned, Brother Daniel,” Mr. Orney finally said.

  “After the mysterious explosion,” remarked Mr. Threader, “Dr. Waterhouse secreted himself in an attic no less gloomy than this tomb, and would not return my letters for many weeks. I feared he had no stomach for Prosecution. But when he returned to polite society, behold! He knew more of clocks, and the men who make ’em, than any man alive-”

  “That is rank flattery, sir,” Daniel protested. “But I will grant you this much, that if our Clubb is to achieve its Goal, we must learn all we can of the Infernal Devices in question. They were driven by clock-work, you may be sure on’t. Now, thirty years ago, I knew Huygens and Hooke, the most illustrious horologists of the ?ra. But when I returned to London I found that I was no longer privy to the secrets, nor acquainted with the practitioners, of that Technology. In my eagerness to redress this, I did from time to time forget my manners, prising open clocks and watches to examine their workings and decypher their makers’ marks, as Mr. Threader has waspishly reminded me. The result: we are met here in Clerkenwell!”

  “Vy the khell are ve meetink khere?” demanded a new voice.

  “God save you, Mr. Kikin!” answered Mr. Orney, not very informatively.

  “If you had arrived on time,” said the irritable Mr. Threader, “you’d have had an answer just now from Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “My carriage is axle-deep in a bog,” was the answer of Mr. Kikin.

  “That bog is a valuable discovery,” said Mr. Orney, who waxed jovial when Mr. Threader was in a bad mood. “Put a fence round it, call it a Spaw, charge a shilling for admission, and you’ll soon be able to buy a phaethon.”

  The Russian was ill-advisedly descending a slimy twelfth-century staircase into his own shadow. A flickering orange trapezoid was projected onto the floor from above, skating back and forth like a leaf coming down from a tree. It could be inferred that Mr. Kikin’s associate, who was too tall to enter the crypt, was standing in the antechamber at the top of the stairs waving a torch around, trying to get the light around his master’s shoulders.

  “This damp will kill us,” Mr. Kikin predicted in a stolid way, as if he got killed every morning before breakfast.

  “As long as the candles don’t go out, we have nothing to fear from this atmosphere,” said Daniel, who was deeply sick and tired of hearing semi-learned people ascribe all their problems to damps. “Yes, water seeps in here from the moist earth. But Mr. Orney was only just now remarking upon the marvellous purity of these waters. Why do you think the Knights Templar built their Temple here? It is because the nuns of St. Mary and the Knights Hospitallers both drew their water from the same well here, and didn’t die of it. Why, just up the road, wealthy gentle-folk pay money to soak in these same moistures.”

  “Why not meet there?” Mr. Kikin suggested.

  “I second the motion!” exclaimed Mr. Threader.

  “Because-” Daniel began. But then he heard a snatch of conversation from the top of the stairs. The torch-light trapezoid grew wider and moved sideways. A new shadow appeared in its center. The fifth and last member of the Clubb was making his way down stairs. Daniel gave him a few moments to get within earshot, then continued, loudly: “because we do not wish to draw attention to ourselves! If our Nemesis has employed a clock-maker, or indeed a maker of any sort of fine instrument, why, the knave’s workshop is likely within a musket shot of this Temple.”

  “Some would call it a temple, some a mound of rubble in the middle of a swine-yard,” said Mr. Kikin, catching the eye of Mr. Threader and getting a warm look in return.

  “Mound is too grand a word, sir. In English we say ‘bulge.’ ”

  “Those who did, would thereby show a grievous want of Real Estate Acumen!” Daniel returned, “for of the Three Desiderata: location, location, and location, this ruin has all! The tide of London’s expansion is lappin
g at its foundations!”

  “Are you the land-lord, Dr. Waterhouse?” inquired Mr. Threader, suddenly interested.

  “I am looking after the property on behalf of a High Net Worth Individual,” returned Daniel, “who is keen to make this vale into a world-renowned center of Technologickal Arts.”

  “How did this individual become aware of the ruin’s existence?”

  “I told him, sir,” Daniel said, “and to anticipate your next question, I learnt of it from a fellow of my acquaintance, a very, very old chap, who had knowledge from a Knight Templar.”

  “Then he must indeed be very old, as the Templars were wiped out four hundred years ago,” said Mr. Threader, sounding a bit irritated.

  “A new building is contemplated?” asked Mr. Orney, as one man of commerce to another.

  “Is already underway,” Daniel confided, “to include an arcade of shops and ateliers for makers of watches, and of instruments-not only musickal, but philosophickal.”

  He was getting expectant stares, as if he had broken off in mid-sentence.

  “Planispheres, heliostats, theodolites, and circumferentors, e.g.,” he tried. Nothing.

  “If Longitude is found, I daresay, ’twill be found on this property!” he concluded.

  All of this had been taken in by Henry Arlanc, the last to arrive. He was standing silently, and somewhat apart from the others.

  “Right!” said Mr. Threader. “The second meeting of the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney’s Ship-yard, amp;c., is called to order.”

  TO DANIEL, IN HIS YOUTH, a club had always been a stick for hitting things with.

  In 1664, a Mr. Power, discoursing of barometers, had written, “The Difference of the Mercurial Cylinder may arise from the club and combination of all these causes joined together.”

  This extended meaning of “club” had been taken clearly by Daniel and everyone else at the Royal Society, because many of them had lately been at universities where starvelings pooled pennies to buy food or, more often, drink. The slang for this was “to make a club.” Around this time, one often heard Mr. Pepys proposing to John Wilkins and others that they make a club for dinner, meaning exactly the same procedure, save with more money and better results.

  During Daniel’s absence from London, Pepys’s merry improvisations had spread out across Time to become perpetual, while losing their freedom in Space by confining themselves to fixed quarters. The notion had struck Daniel as questionable, until Roger had finally lured him to the Kit-Cat Clubb. On entering that place Daniel had said, “Oh, why didn’t you say so!” for he had understood it immediately as a Routine Upgrade of the coffee-houses where everyone had used to pass the time of day twenty years ago-the chief difference being that only certain people were let in. This all but ruled out ear-biting, stab-wounds, and duels.

  This Clubb was nothing at all like the Kit-Cat. Its purpose was altogether different, its members (except for Daniel) very unlike Roger’s crowd, its meeting-place even darker and more low-ceilinged.

  But certain things about Clubbs were universal. “First order of business: the collection of Dues!” Mr. Threader proclaimed. He had a coin pre-positioned in a tiny pocket of his waistcoat, and now flipped it casually onto the stone lid of a twenty-ton coffin. Everyone did a double-take: it was a pound sterling, which was to say a silver coin, and very crisp-looking, too. Using it to pay Clubb dues was a bit like nonchalantly riding around Hyde Park on the back of a Unicorn.

  Daniel threw in a Piece of Eight. Mr. Kikin paid with Dutch silver money. Mr. Orney tossed out a golden guinea. Henry Arlanc upended a purse and poured out half a pint of copper tokens. Nearly all of these had been given him beforehand by Daniel. The other members of the Clubb probably suspected as much.

  Daniel had insisted that the Huguenot porter be admitted, because it was theoretically possible that he was an intended victim of the first Infernal Device. Mr. Threader had proposed that the dues be set high, as a way of keeping rabble such as Arlanc out. Orney had agreed for reasons strictly practical: it was expensive to hunt down and prosecute criminals. Kikin had gone along with any and all expenditures because it might help keep his head attached to his neck if he could show the Tsar he was sparing no expense to catch the men who’d burned his ship. So Daniel had ended up paying high dues, not only for himself but for Arlanc.

  Mr. Threader opened a small wooden case lined with red velvet, took out a hand-scale, and began to weigh the Spanish and Dutch money against a calibrated brass weight, which, according to tiny but furious assertions graved on its face, was the Platonic ideal of what a pound sterling ought to weigh, as laid down some 150 years ago by Gresham. Mr. Orney took this as a signal to begin reading the minutes of the previous meeting, which had been held at Mr. Kikin’s town-house in Black Boy Alley a fortnight ago.

  “With the Membership’s indulgence, I shall elide all that was to no purpose, and summarize all that was merely pedantic…” Orney began.

  “Hear, hear!” said Daniel before Mr. Threader could object. He needn’t have worried. Mr. Threader had stuck his tongue out, and his eyes were nearly projecting from his head on stalks as he gauged the weight of Daniel’s Spanish silver.

  “This leaves only two items worth mentioning: the interview with the unfortunate Watchman, and Dr. Waterhouse’s discourse on the mechanism. Taking these in order, we interrogated Mr. Pinewood, a Watchman who witnessed the explosion in Crane Court, and was hired, or in some way induced, by verbal representations from Mr. Threader, of a highly ambiguous and still hotly disputed nature…”

  “Is all of that really in the minutes!?” said Mr. Threader, glancing up from his scale with a look of mock amazement.

  “Believing that he would be compensated, Mr. Pinewood lit out after a sedan chair that had been seen following Mr. Threader and Dr. Waterhouse immediately prior to the explosion,” said Mr. Orney, looking satisfied that he had been able to get a rise out of Mr. Threader. “Mr. Pinewood informed us that he followed the chair eastwards on Fleet Street as far as the Fleet Bridge, where the two men bearing it stopped, set it down, turned on Mr. Pinewood, picked him up…”

  “Avast, we know the story,” muttered Mr. Threader.

  “…and flung him bodily into Fleet Ditch.”

  Everyone swallowed.

  “A collection was taken up for Mr. Pinewood’s boils, and prayers said for his other symptoms, some of which medical science has not even devised names for yet. Some contributed more, and prayed more reverently, than others.

  “The subsequent movements of the sedan chair may only be guessed at. Dr. Waterhouse lost no time guessing that it had returned to the side-alley whence he himself had seen it issue only a few minutes earlier. ‘I am convinced,’ Dr. Waterhouse informed us, ‘that they had some foreknowledge of our arrival in London, and were positioned to follow Mr. Threader’s carriage through Newgate to the City, and that we foxed them by diverting down the bank of Fleet Ditch to Crane Court.’ There followed some discussion as to whether the occupant of the sedan chair had any connection whatever to the Infernal Device; I opined that ’twere imprudent to follow so closely a vehicle known to be moments away from exploding, and that the sedan chair probably contained nothing more than a venturesome Courtesan. Mr. Threader was quick to take offense at any suggestion that a Whore (to use his term) would look on the arrival of his entourage in London as an Opportunity; the faces of the other members of the Clubb recorded amusement at his pious…”

  “I move we choose a new secretary to take the Minutes,” Mr. Threader said. “Monsieur Arlanc, never mind what I’ve said about him in the past, is quiet, dutiful, and literate; I’ll pay his dues if he takes the job.”

  The end of Mr. Threader’s sentence was garbled, because while talking he had reached up and inserted a large gold coin between his own molars.

  “Mr. Threader,” said Mr. Orney, “if you
are feeling peckish, there are Inns up the road at Black Mary’s Hole, and taverns down at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to which we might adjourn; but you’ll get no satisfaction by eating my guinea.”

  “It is not yours any longer, but the Clubb’s,” said Mr. Threader, now examining the coin for bite-marks, “and it is not a guinea until I say it is.”

  “You’ve already weighed it, so what’s the use of biting it?” asked Mr. Orney, sounding at least as curious as he was peeved.

  “ ’Tis a proper guinea,” Mr. Threader admitted. “Pray continue your whimsical Narration, Mr. Orney.”

  “In short, I put forth the hypothesis that the sedan chair was a red herring,” said Mr. Orney. “This led to a murky disquisition on clock-work, or so it appears in my notes…”

  “For once your notes are accurate,” said Mr. Threader.

  “Not in the least!” said Daniel. “All I meant was this. Mr. Orney avers that to place an Infernal Device in a carriage, made to explode at a certain time, and then to follow the same carriage closely down the street, only moments in advance of the explosion, were madness. To which I answer, this depends on how knowledgeable, and how confident, one is of the correct running of the clock-work. A competent horologist would set the Device up properly, and moreover would have some idea how fast or slow ’twould run in a rocking and jouncing carriage on a cold day.”

  “So the person in the sedan chair was no horologist!” said Mr. Kikin.

  Mr. Threader chuckled, believing that it was a witticism, but Daniel could see that the Russian had taken Daniel’s point, and was wholly serious.

  “Indeed, sir. I submit that the Infernal Devices might have been planted by people who had but a very imperfect understanding of how they worked. If that is true, the Device might have been expected to explode hours or even days later than it did-the person in the sedan chair might have been nearly as astonished as were Mr. Threader and I, when it went off in Crane Court.”