THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  “Yes! Yes, I did. As there are only two men in this room, I can only have meant, you and I. As we shared a room, and worked together, at the beginning of our lives, so shall we do now, as we near their ends.”

  “What possible use could I be in helping to apprehend Jack the Coiner?”

  “You have come from America on a mysterious errand. You have traveled in the company of a notorious weigher, and I am told that you are up to some occult doings in a hole in the ground in Clerkenwell.”

  “Not true, unless you count real estate development as one of the black arts.”

  “If you were now to announce yourself, to the criminal underworld of London, as a weigher, in possession of gold from America-”

  “I beg your pardon, but I really do not wish to announce myself to the criminal underworld as anything!”

  “But supposing you did, why, you might be able to establish contacts with Jack’s subtile net-work of informants and Black-guards.”

  “That is the second time today I have heard ‘Black-guard’ spoken in those portentous tones. I thought a Black-guard was a boy who polished boots.”

  “Some of those boys have got rather big, and found employment even lower, and even blacker,” Isaac remarked.

  “Then I’ll have nothing to do with any Black-guard.”

  “If you have heard some other man speaking the word to-day, ’twould seem that you already do have something to do with them,” said Isaac, amused, “which would hardly surprise me considering the company you have been keeping.”

  Daniel was silent. But only because he could not divulge to Isaac that his only motive in speaking to the sort of man who spoke of the Black-guard-men such as Peter Hoxton-was to track down whatever remnants Hooke had left behind.

  Isaac read his silence as submission. Given more time, Daniel might have disabused Isaac of any such ideas, and extricated himself. But a servant was knocking at the door. A minute earlier Daniel had heard someone calling briefly at the front door of the house, presumably to deliver a message, and now it had penetrated to the study, and interrupted their discourse at the worst possible moment for Daniel. He wondered whether the servant had been lurking outside the door, waiting to knock at some subtle signal from Isaac: I have sprung the trap, now interrupt us lest he wriggle free!

  “Enter!” Isaac commanded, and in came the servant who’d admitted Daniel earlier, holding a rectangle of good paper with a few lines scrawled over it in a lazy, important hand. As Isaac decyphered the penmanship, and considered the import, and discussed it in a hushed, elliptical manner with his servant, Daniel had his first opportunity to review all that had passed since he had breezed into this room with a riddle concerning guineas.

  What had he expected? He had expected that, at best, Isaac would be cool and distant. At worst, he’d know that Daniel was striving to preserve some memory of Hooke, and corresponding with and running errands for Leibniz, and would tear Daniel’s beating heart out of his chest then and there, like an Aztec priest. Those had seemed the most likely outcomes. If some oracle had let him know in advance that he was to have a long, cordial, even friendly conversation with Isaac, he’d have accounted it a triumph. And maybe it was-but it was Isaac’s triumph and not Daniel’s. Whether or not Isaac knew of Daniel’s concealed loyalty to Hooke and Leibniz, he had clearly got it into his mind that Daniel needed to be kept close, and kept busy.

  “We’ve not even had time to broach the subject of Baron von Leibniz’s pretensions concerning the calculus,” Isaac announced in a chummy voice that was very odd coming from him, “and here it is time for me to be on my way.”

  “I consider myself fortunate indeed to have taken up as much of your time as I have done,” Daniel said, trying not to sound ironic about it.

  “The good fortune is all mine, and I assure you that the meeting I go to now shall never be half so enjoyable as this!” Isaac returned. “If the Mint were strictly a temple of Natural Philosophy-as it ought to be-supervising it would be pure pleasure. As it is, I waste many hours in meetings of a political nature.” He was getting to his feet.

  “Is it Whigs or Tories today, then?” Daniel asked, rising. From here on out it would be all banter: pleasant noises that might as well have been spoken in Iroquois.

  “Germans,” Isaac returned, offering him priority out the door. Catherine Barton, or someone, must have taught him manners.

  “Really! They’ll be running the country soon enough, why are they pestering you now?”

  They paused in a hall so that Isaac could shrug off his scarlet robe and have a vest and coat thrown across his shoulders by a valet. “They don’t pester me, but other men, of higher station-ramifications ensue,” Isaac said. “I would offer to convey you somewhere, but my conveyance only has room for one. May I have a hackney summoned for you?”

  “I’ll walk, thank you,” Daniel said. Isaac followed him into the vestibule, which was crowded. Two large men were in here, smelling of the street. Between them stood a vertical black box, open on one side to reveal a crimson leather seat. Isaac sidled into it, smoothing the skirts of his coat under him. A servant stood at the ready to slam the door to.

  “I shall hear from you concerning the proposal that I made,” Isaac predicted. “And do let’s not forget to have a conversation, some day soon, about the calculus.”

  “Not a day passes without my thinking of it,” Daniel answered. With that the door was latched shut. Isaac had vanished inside the black box. His voice came out of it clearly, “God save the Queen, Daniel,” reminding Daniel that the only thing between them was a sheer black screen through which Isaac could see and hear everything, though he was quite invisible to anyone outside.

  “God save the Queen,” Daniel returned, and then he followed the sedan chair out the door and onto St. Martin’s. Isaac was carried rapidly southwards, toward St. James’s and Westminster and all things great and important. Daniel, not wanting the awkwardness of walking along abreast of Isaac’s chair, went the other way.

  Passing immediately through a gate at the head of the lane, he came out into an open plaza, squarish, about a bow-shot on a side. This was called Leicester Fields, and on three sides-including the one where Daniel had entered-it was now hemmed in by the sort of new town-houses that had started going up all round here after the Fire. But on the north edge-which Daniel was facing directly across a few hundred feet of open turf-it was walled off by one of the few remaining old-fashioned Tudor compounds: a congeries of red brick and half-timbered buildings called Leicester House. It had formerly been one of the few houses around London deemed suitable for royalty to dwell in, and had been used by diverse Tudor and Stuart princes as a palace. Elizabeth Stuart had dwelt there before she’d gone off to Europe to become the Winter Queen and to spawn Sophie and many others. Changes in the royal line had weakened the sentimental ties to this house, and the re-building of London in a new style had quite over-shadowed it and made it seem a mere English farm-house.

  As Daniel came into Leicester Fields, he gazed in that direction curiously, trying to get his bearings, like a mariner looking for the old familiar stars. He saw a lot of horses and vehicles in front of the place, and felt a pang, supposing that the wreckers had arrived to tear it down. But as he strolled across the Fields, creating localized panics among sheep and chickens, he perceived that these were not rubbish-wagons but baggage-carts, and rather well-maintained ones at that. Among them was a carriage, a coach-and-four drawn by a matched set of black horses. A woman was alighting from that carriage, walking away from Daniel toward the house, and servants were drawn up in two lines to greet her. Daniel could not see anything of the woman, other than that she was petite, and trim. Her head was shrouded in a voluminous silk scarf covering a big hat or wig. And he was too far away, and his eyes were too far gone, to resolve lips, eyes, and noses on the faces of those servants. But something in their posture, and in the way they turned their faces and bodies toward the woman as she progressed across the court, told Dani
el that they were smiling. They loved her.

  At the apex of this formation, where the two lines of servants came together in front of the house’s main entrance, stood a man who was not a servant: he was dressed in the clothes of a gentleman. But there was something odd about him, which Daniel could not make sense of until he went into movement, extending a leg to make a low bow, and accepting the woman’s hand to kiss it. The man’s skin was entirely black. The woman took his arm and the black man escorted her into Leicester House; the lines of servants broke up and everyone made him- or herself busy unloading the baggage carts, amp;c.

  As there was nothing more to see, Daniel turned on his heel and ambled toward the edge of Leicester Fields; and as he did, he became aware that he was only one part of a general slow evacuation. Diverse tinkers, vagabonds, strolling gentlemen, and boot-blacks were also making their way towards the exits, and in the fronts of the new town-houses around the square, curtains were being drawn.

  Leicester House

  TEN SECONDS LATER

  HE WAS OBLIGED TO PURSUE her to the upper storey, for she talked as she went. She stormed a long dangerous wooden staircase and then faltered, only for an instant, as a great splintery-looking wooden door had presented itself in her way. By the time Dappa could get the words “Allow me-” past his lips, she’d clobbered it with her shoulder, got it open, and vanished into a big-sounding space yonder. The door remained ajar, shuddering from end to end.

  He took the last few steps with some care. His legs, anyway, were unused to pushing off against things that did not pitch and roll. After all he’d been through, he didn’t want to die falling down a nasty old stairway in a strange English house.

  They were now in an isosceles triangle made by the converging planes of the roof and a somewhat dodgy floor of loose deals. In any house made to normal scale it would have been pigeon-nesting space, but here it was large enough to throw a country dance.

  Dappa wished he had some sailors with him, so that they could all share a good laugh at this room. Persons who fell into the habit of dwelling on dry land soon acquired queer and comical ways. They forgot that everything in God’s creation moved, and they fell into the phant’sy that an object, such as a wardrobe, could be dragged to a certain position in a room such as this one, covered with a sail, and let go of, without in any way being lashed down, and that twenty years later one might come back and find it just where it had been left.

  Certain of these people then let themselves go altogether. Rooms such as this one were the monuments that they built to themselves. The draped furniture, crated paintings, and heaps of books were as chock-a-block as ice-floes driven into a blind cove by a boreal breeze. Spiders had been at work: a Navy of diligent riggers working day and night to tie it all down and lash it smartly together. Eliza was undoing their work, moving down the length of the room in carefully considered lunges and clever sideways darts. Her gown was growing a diaphanous train of cobwebs, and her wake in the air was visible as a serrated line of dust-explosions and plunging vortices. She was thinking hard about which way to go next, and had forgotten to talk.

  Wee dormers were cut into the pitch of the roof every few yards, shedding plentiful light, and giving Dappa an excellent prospect of the many ways he could soil his dark suit if he attempted to follow her. Forgetting that this house could be trusted not to move under his feet, he reached up with one hand and braced it absent-mindedly on a tie-beam running between rafters above his head. A small avalanche of pale gray bat-shit tumbled down his sleeve and made itself one with the expensive black wool. “ ’Tis well my head’s grizzled to begin with,” he muttered, and then was struck by how well his voice carried down the utterly silent room.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Never mind, only grumbling and muttering.”

  “It is all right,” she called back in her alert way. “Do keep in mind, though, that when we are in the presence of others-especially, Persons of Quality-”

  “Then you are my noble patroness,” Dappa said, “and I the ink-stained wretch. So very ink-stained, as to’ve become black from head to toe, save the soles of my feet, where I walk about collecting slave-narratives-”

  “And the palm of your hand, where you grip your quill. I recognize these phrases from the Apology of your new manuscript,” she said, favoring him with a trace of a smile.

  “Ah, you’ve read it!”

  “Of course I have,” she answered, affronted. “Why ever not?”

  “I was afraid you might have grown weary of slave-tales. I fear they are repetitious. ‘I was seized by raiders from the next village…traded to the tribe across the river…marched to the edge of the great water, marked with a hot iron, put aboard ship, dragged off of it half dead, now I chop sugar cane.’ ”

  “All human stories are in some sense repetitious, if you boil them down so far. Yet people fall in love.”

  “What?”

  “They fall in love, Dappa. With a particular man or woman, and no one else. Or a woman will have a baby, and love that baby forever…no matter how similar its tale might seem to those of other babies.”

  “You are saying,” Dappa said, “that we make connections with other souls, despite the sameness-”

  “There is no sameness. If you looked down upon the world from above, like an albatross, you might phant’sy there was some sameness among the people crowding the land below you. But we are not albatrosses, we see the world from ground level, from within our own bodies, through our own eyes, each with our own frame of reference, which changes as we move about, and as others move about us. This sameness is a conceit of yours, an author’s hobgoblin, something you fret about in your hammock late at night.”

  “In truth, I have my own cabin, and do my fretting in a bed nowadays.”

  Eliza did not answer. Quite some time ago she had reached the far end of the room, which Dappa guessed was the front of the house, and during this exchange she had been peering out across Leicester Fields through a tiny round window. If this were a ship, she’d be keeping her eye on the weather. But it wasn’t; so what could she be looking at?

  “All that is wanted,” she continued distractedly, “is for a reader to recognize a kindred soul in a single one of your narratives, and that will suffice to prove, for that reader, that Slavery is an abomination.”

  “Perhaps we should be printing them up separately, as pamphlets.”

  “Broadsheets are cheaper, and may be posted on walls, et cetera.”

  “Ah, you are far ahead of me.”

  “Distribution is my concern-Collection is yours.”

  “What are you looking out the window for? Afraid you were followed?”

  “When a Duchess comes off a foreign ship in the Pool and travels through London in a train of a dozen coaches and waggons, she is followed,” Eliza said levelly. “I am taking a census of my followers.”

  “See anyone you know?”

  “There is an aged Puritan I think I recognize…and some nasty Tories…and too many curtain-twitching neighbors to count.” She turned away from the window and demanded, in a wholly new tone of voice, “Anything good from Boston?”

  “They are mostly Angolans there, and my command of that language is not what it used to be. The Barkers have become so aggressive in Massachusetts-handing out pamphlets on street-corners…”

  This, which he’d thought she’d find interesting intelligence, bored her right back to gazing out the window. Of course she would know precisely what the Barkers were up to in Massachusetts. “The result,” he continued, “is that the slave-owners there are more watchful than the ones in, say, Brazil, and when they see their slave having a lengthy conversation with a strange well-dressed Blackamoor-”

  “You did not collect anything useful in Boston,” she said shortly.

  “Am I too discursive in my responses, your grace?”

  “Am I too much the Editor?” She was done peering, and was returning to him.

  “This room is the reverse of a B
ilge,” Dappa realized. “That is, if you took Minerva and capsized her, so that her masts were pointed straight down towards the center of the earth, then her keel would be high and dry, like this ridge-beam above our heads, and the hull-planks would form a pitched roof.”

  “And it would still be crowded with stored objects, like this garret.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Starving writers live in them.”

  “Is that an offer of lodgings, or a threat of starvation?”

  “It depends on whether you bring back some apt Narrations from your next sea-voyage,” she said with a smile. She’d come abreast of him now, and took his arm. “Where to next?”

  “Boston again.”

  They could see down those stairs now. Servants were standing anxiously below, coming in earshot. “And your grace?” Dappa added, distinctly.

  “Oh-do you mean, where am I off to next?”

  “Yes, my lady. You’ve just returned from Hanover, I gad?”

  “Antwerp,” she whispered. “I am here now, Dappa, for-what do you call it-the long haul.”

  They descended the stairs-a simple procedure made longer and more complicated than it ought to have been by the helpful strivings of the servants, and of some members of the Duchess’s household. Dappa’s ear, ever tuned to languages, picked out an exchange in German between two young women. They were dressed as if they were merely Gentle. But Dappa thought they carried themselves Nobly.

  DAPPA HAD FIRST SEEN ELIZA some twenty years earlier. He’d been eager to hate her. He, Jack, van Hoek, and Vrej Esphahnian had sailed from Vera Cruz on a ship full of gold, bound for London or Amsterdam, and had diverted to Qwghlm only because of Jack’s infatuation with this woman. The letter that had lured them there had turned out to be a trick, a forgery from the hand of the Jesuit father Edouard de Gex, and Minerva had fallen into a trap laid for them there by the French. A kind of justice had been served on Jack. Dappa, van Hoek, and the crew of Minerva had been allowed to sail away, but only after the gold in Minerva’s hold had been seized by the French. They’d been left with nothing more than the thin plates of gold that had been put on the hull, below the water-line, when the ship had been built on a Hindoostan beach. That, and the ship itself. Minerva was a home and an income, but only as long as they continued sailing her to and fro. They had, in other words, been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in dangerous toils and wanderings. This suited van Hoek perfectly. Not so much Dappa.