THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  Peter Hoxton now extended his arms. His left hand held the chain of the Hooke-watch, swinging it like a pendulum, and his right offered a handshake. Daniel accepted the watch greedily, and the handshake with reluctance.

  “I have a question for you, Doctor,” said Saturn, as he was shaking Daniel’s hand.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve made a study of you, and know you are a bit of a Natural Philosopher. Been meaning to invite you into my ken.”

  “Did you-sir, did you cause my watch to be stolen!?” Daniel demanded, trying to draw back; but Saturn’s hand had engulfed his, like a python swallowing a gerbil.

  “Did you-Doctor, did you fling yourself against my shop-window on purpose!?” Saturn answered, perfectly mocking Daniel’s tone.

  Daniel was too indignant to speak, which the other took as permission to go on: “Now philosophy is the study of wisdom-truths ?ternal. Yet, long ago you went over the sea, didn’t you, to set up an Institute of Technologickal Arts. And here you are back in London, aren’t you, on some similar errand. Why, Doctor? You had the life I dream of: to sit on your arse and read of truths ?ternal. And yet I cannot make my way through a chapter of Plato without glancing up to see you sprawled against my shop-window like an enormous spate of bird-shite. Why turn away from the study of truths ?ternal, to traffick in transitory knowledge?”

  Somewhat to his own surprise, Daniel had a ready answer, which came out of his mouth before he had had time to consider it. “Why does the minister tell mundane stories during his homily? Why not simply quote direct from sublime works of theology?”

  “Anecdotes serve to illustrate the ideas he’s getting at,” Saturn surmised, “and anyway, if those ideas have no relation to mundane things, why, they’re probably rubbish.”

  “Then if Newton and Leibniz are sublime theologians, sir, I am an humble vicar. Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the ?ternal by way of the mundane. Does that answer your question, and may I have my hand back?”

  “Yes,” said Saturn. “You have your watch, sir; you have your hand; and you have a parishioner.”

  “But I do not want a parishioner,” said Daniel, turning on his heel and walking west into Liquor-pond Street.

  “Then you ought to give up preaching, and those religious observances you just spoke of,” said Peter Hoxton, falling into step beside Daniel. “You are a Cambridge man?”

  “I am.”

  “And is not the ancient purpose of Cambridge to turn out clerics, and send them out into England to minister to the unwashed?”

  “You know that perfectly well! But I’ll not minister to you or any other man, Peter Hoxton, for if ever I was a vicar, I am a fallen one now, and not fit to minister to a dog. I went astray early, and have strayed far. The only way I can think of to find my way closer to God is through the strange ministry I spoke of earlier, whereof Hooke and Spinoza were prophets. It is not a way I recommend to any man, for I am as ’stranged from the main line of religion as a stylite monk, sitting on a pillar in a waste.”

  “I have strayed further and grown more ’stranged than you, Doc. I have been wandering in that same waste without any pillar to sit upon-therefore, you, perched on your post, are like a Pharos to me.”

  “I say to you one more time-”

  “There’s that word again! Time. Let me speak of time, Doc, and say to you this: if you continue to walk through Hockley-in-the-Hole unaccompanied, and to wander about the city as you’ve been doing, your time may be measured in days, or hours. You are not leery enough. This fact has been made note of by certain coves who make unleery gagers their prey. Every foot-scamperer and bridle-cull on the upper Fleet pricks up his ears when you trudge out to your swine-yard and disappear into your hole in the ground. Your time will be up very soon, and you will wind up as a scragg’d, naked corpse, floating down Fleet Ditch to Bridewell, if you do not make some large friends soon.”

  “Are you nominating yourself my bodyguard, Saturn?”

  “I am nominating myself your parishioner, Doc. As you lack a church, we shall have to worship peripatetically, ambling about the streets, as now, and making Hockley-in-the-Hole our Agora. As I am half as old, and twice as big, as you, why, many an idle cove, who does not wot the true nature of our relationship, may ignorantly assume that I am your bodyguard, and, on account of that foolish misapprehension, refrain from stabbing you or bludgeoning you to death.”

  They had reached Gray’s Inn Lane. The lawyer-infested gardens and walks behind Gray’s Inn lay to either side of the road here, and beyond them were the settled confines of various Squares: Red Lyon, Waterhouse, Bloomsbury. Roger’s estate was on the far corner of Bloomsbury, where London gave way again to open countryside. Daniel did not want to lead Saturn directly to it. He stopped.

  “I am dafter e’en than you guess, Saturn.”

  “Why, impossible!”

  “Have you heard of a pirate in America, called Edward Teach?”

  “Blackbeard? Of course, sir, he is legendary.”

  “I say that not so long ago, I heard Blackbeard standing on the poop of Queen Anne’s Revenge, calling for me by name.”

  For the first time, Peter Hoxton was taken a-back.

  “As you see, I am insane-best leave me alone,” Daniel said, and turned his back on Saturn yet again, looking for an opening in traffic on Gray’s Inn Lane.

  “Concerning Mr. Teach, I shall make inquiries among the Black-guard,” said Peter Hoxton.

  The next time Daniel dared to look over his shoulder, Saturn had vanished.

  Bloomsbury

  HALF AN HOUR LATER

  “A ROMAN TEMPLE, on the edge of the city. Modest. Nothing gaudy,” had been Roger’s instructions to him, some twenty-five years earlier.

  “I suppose that rules out having it be a Temple of Jupiter or Apollo,” Daniel had returned.

  Roger had looked out the window of the coffee-house, feigning deafness, which was what he always did when he guessed Daniel was making fun of him.

  Daniel had sipped his coffee and considered it. “Among your modest and humble Roman Gods would be…let me think…Vesta. Whose temples, like your house, stood outside the old boundaries of the city.”

  “Well enough. Splendid god, Vesta,” Roger had said, a bit distantly.

  “Goddess, actually.”

  “All right, who the hell was she!?”

  “Goddess of the hearth, chaste above all others…”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Worshipped around the clock-or the sundial, I should say-by the Vestal virgins…”

  “Wouldn’t mind having a few of those around, provided they were not pedantic about the virginity.”

  “Not at all. Vesta herself was almost seduced by Priapus, the ithyphallic God…”

  Roger shivered. “I can’t wait to find out what that means. Perhaps we should make my house a Temple of Priapus.”

  “Every shack you walk into becomes a Temple of Priapus. No need to spend money on an architect.”

  “Who said I was going to pay you?”

  “I did, Roger.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “I will not make you a Temple of Priapus. I do not think that the Queen of England would ever come to call on you, Roger, if you lived in such a place.”

  “Give me another humble, unassuming God then!” Roger had demanded, snapping his fingers. “Come on, I’m not paying you to drink coffee!”

  “There’s always Vulcan.”

  “Lame!”

  “Indeed, he was a bit gouty, like many a gentleman,” Daniel had said patiently, “but he got all the most beautiful goddesses-including Venus herself!”

  “Haw! The rogue!”

  “He was master of metals-though humble, and scorned, he fettered Titans and Gods with his ingenuity-”

  “Metals-including-?”

  “Gold and silver.”

  “Capital!”

  “And of course he was God of Fire, and Lord of Volcanoes.�
��

  “Volcanoes! An ancient symbol of fertility-sending their gouts of molten stone spurting high into the air,” Roger had said meditatively, prompting Daniel to shove his chair away several inches. “Right! That’s it, then-make me a Temple of Vulcan-tasteful and inexpensive, mind you-just off Bloomsbury there. And put a volcano in it!”

  This-put a volcano in it-had been Roger’s first and last instructions to Daniel concerning interior decoration. Daniel had fobbed that part of it off on a silversmith-not a money one, but an old-school silversmith who still literally smote silver for a living. This had left Daniel free to design the Temple of Vulcan itself, which had presented no difficulties at all. A lot of Greeks had figured out how to make buildings of that general type two thousand years ago, and then Romans had worked out tricks for banging them out in a hurry, tricks that were now second nature to every tradesman in London.

  Not really believing that Roger would ever actually build it, Daniel had sat down in front of a large clean sheet of paper and proceeded to pile element on element: and quite a few Plinths, Pilasters, Architraves, Urns, Archivolts, and Finials later, he had ended up with something that probably would have caused Julius C?sar to clap his hands over his laureled and anointed head in dismay, and order the designer crucified. But after a brief sell job from Daniel in the back room of a coffee-house (“Note the Lesbian leaf pattern at the tops of the columns… Ancient symbols of fertility are worked into the groins… I have taken the liberty of depicting this Amazon with two breasts, rather than the historically attested one”), Roger was convinced that it looked exactly like a Temple of Vulcan ought to. And when he actually went and built the thing-telling everyone it was an exact reproduction of a real one on Mount Vesuvius-nine out of ten Londoners were content to believe it. Daniel’s only consolation was that because of the bald lie about Vesuvius, hardly anyone knew he-or indeed any living person-had been responsible for it. Only the Gods knew. As long as he avoided parts of the world with a lot of volcanoes, he would go unscathed.

  During his most melancholy times, he was kept awake at night by the phant’sy that, of everything he’d ever done, this house would last the longest, and be seen by the most people. But with the one exception of being cut for the stone, every fear that had ever tormented Daniel in his bed had turned out, in the light of day, to be not all that bad really. As he plodded westwards on Great Russell Street toward its cross with Tottenham Court Road, passing by Bloomsbury Square, he sensed a massy white Presence in the corner of his eye, and forced himself not to look at it. But at some point this became absurd, and he had to square his shoulders, perform a soldierly right-face, and look his shame in the eye. And, mirabile dictu, it was not so very bad! When it had first gone up, twenty years ago, in the middle of a hog-lot, cater-corner from a timber depot, it had been screamingly bizarre. But now it was in the middle of a city, which helped a little, and Hooke had added on to it, which helped a great deal. It was no longer an alienated Temple but the buckle in a belt of Corinthian-columned arcades that surrounded Roger’s parcel. The wings gave it proportion and made it seem much less likely to topple over sideways. The friezes had been added to the pediment and to the tablatures while Daniel had been in Boston, a tangle of togas and tridents that diverted the viewer’s eye from the underlying dreadfulness (or so Daniel thought) of the architecture. Here Hooke had done him more favors by extending the horizontal features of the Temple into the wings, giving Daniel’s phant’sies and improvisations more authority than they probably deserved. All in all, Daniel was able to stare at the place for a solid five or ten minutes without dissolving in embarrassment; London’s boundaries enclosed much worse.

  For the thirtieth time since crossing Gray’s Inn Road, he looked to see if Saturn was following him. The answer was again no. He crossed Great Russell and walked up the steps, feeling like a wee figure sketched into a rendering to show the scale. Passing between two fluted columns he swept across the Portico and raised his walking-stick to beat upon one of the massive front doors (gold leaf, with details in silver and copper, all part of the metallurgical theme). But the doors were drawn open so swiftly that they seemed to leap away from him. It gave him a turn-his eye was foxed into thinking that the doors were stationary, and he falling backwards away from them. He took a step forward to compensate; and, entering the cleavage between the doors, nearly fell into the one between a pair of breasts. It required some effort to stop himself, straighten his carriage, and look the owner in the eye. She was giving him a knowing look, but the dimples in her cheeks said, All in good fun, go on, have a good long stare then!

  “Doctor Waterhouse! You have kept me waiting far too long! How can I ever forgive you?”

  This sounded like an opportunity for Daniel to say something witty, but it whooshed past him like grapeshot.

  “Er…I have?”

  Ah, but the lady was accustomed to dealing with numb-tongued Natural Philosophers. “I should have heeded Uncle Isaac, who has spoken so highly of your strength of character.”

  “I…beg your pardon?” He was beginning to feel as if he should perhaps hit himself with his stick. Perhaps it would restore circulation to his brain.

  “A weaker man would have planted himself right there, where you were just now standing, on his first day in London, and said to all who passed by, ‘Look! D’you see that House? I built it! It’s mine!’ But, you!” and here she actually planted her hands on her hips in mock exasperation. But it seemed funny, not in the least affected. “You, Doctor Waterhouse, with your Puritan ways-just like Uncle Isaac-withstood that temptation for, what, a little more than two months! It is a mystery to me, how you and Uncle Isaac can delay your pleasures with such stony patience, when someone such as I would become frantic.” Then, because this perhaps sounded a bit risque, she added, “Thank you so kindly for answering my letters, by the way.”

  “You are most welcome, it was my privilege,” Daniel answered without thinking. But it took a moment to remember what she was even talking about.

  Catherine Barton had come to London round the turn of the century. She’d have been about twenty. Her father-Isaac’s brother-in-law-had died a few years earlier, and Isaac had shouldered the load of keeping the poor survivors fed, clothed, and housed. After a short time staying in the city with Isaac, she’d come down with smallpox and fled to the countryside to recover or die. It was during that time that she’d sent a letter to Daniel in Boston, a letter no less sweet and charming for being cleverly written.

  Which reminded Daniel that he ought to say something. “It is fortunate for me that, through your letters, I was able to meet your mind before I was put in any danger of being swept off my feet by…er…the rest of you.”

  She’d been trying to figure out why her uncle was the way he was. And not in a conniving way, but, it seemed, out of a sincere desire to be a good and understanding help-meet to this weird old man who had become, in effect, her new father. Daniel had written eight drafts of his letter back to her, for he knew perfectly well that one day Isaac would find it among her effects, and read it. He would read it every bit as shrewdly as a challenge from Leibniz.

  Everyone knows Isaac as a brilliant man, and treats him as such, which is a mistake; for he is as pious as he is brilliant, and his piety taketh precedence. Mind you, I speak not of outward, conspicuous piety but of an inner fire, a light under the bushel as ’twere, a yearning to draw nearer to God through exercise of God-given faculties.

  “Your advice was of inestimable value to me, after I recovered-thanks be to God-and returned to London. And insofar as I have been of any help whatever to Uncle Isaac, I daresay what you wrote was a boon to him as well.”

  “I shall not hold my breath waiting for an expression of gratitude from him,” Daniel said, hoping it sounded like a wry thing to say. She had the good grace to laugh out loud. Daniel got the impression she was accustomed to having men blurt indiscreet things to her, and regarded it as excellent sport.

  “Oh, nonsense! You u
nderstand him better than any man alive, Dr. Waterhouse, and he is keenly aware of it.”

  This-though she said it with dimples engaged-was really more of a threat than a compliment. What was more, Daniel knew that Catherine Barton had said it quite carefully and deliberately.

  He decided to stop waiting for the formal introduction of Miss Catherine Barton to Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. It would never happen. She had vaulted over that hurdle with ribbons and skirts a-flying, and obliged him to follow. “You might enjoy a look round,” she suggested, arching her eyebrows spectacularly. She did not need to speak aloud the second half of the sentence: if you could only manage to pry your eyes off me. In truth, she was more presentable than beautiful. But she had some beautiful features. And she was very well-dressed. Not in the sense of showing off how much money she could spend, or how a la mode she could be, but rather in the sense that her attire presented to the world a full, frank, and exhaustive account of all that was admirable about her body. When she spun around to lead him across the vestibule, her skirts swirled around her buttocks and thighs in a way that made their contours fully known to Daniel. Or he phant’sied as much, which amounted to the same thing. He’d been wondering, for as long as he’d been in London, what it was about this woman that caused great and powerful men to recite appalling poetry about her in the Kit-Cat Clubb, and to go all glassy-eyed when her name came up in conversation. He should have known. Faces could beguile, enchant, and flirt. But clearly this woman was inflicting major spinal injuries on men wherever she went, and only a body had the power to do that. Hence the need for a lot of Classical allusions in Catherine Barton love-poetry. Her idolaters were reaching back to something pre-Christian, trying to express a bit of what they felt when they gazed upon Greek statues of nude goddesses.

  There were plenty around. The vestibule was an oval room lined with niches that had stood vacant the last time Daniel had seen the place. The decades since had afforded Roger all the time he’d needed to bankroll raiding-parties on Classical ruins, or to commission original works. As he followed Miss Catherine Barton out of the room, Daniel spun round a full three hundred sixty degrees to scan the vestibule. The two servants who had pulled the doors open on Catherine’s command-both young men-were caught staring at their mistress’s backside. Both of them snapped their heads away and blushed. Daniel gave them a wink, turned, and followed her out.