THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  “Don’t you wish to-?”

  “You’ve done splendidly to this point, Tom, and that lot in the corner seem trustworthy. Go and see what you can find in Jewel Tower and I’ll meet you back here-”

  Yevgeny cleared his throat.

  “Strike that, I’ll meet you at, oh, Black Jack’s Boozing-Ken at Hockley-in-the-Hole tomorrow evening, after the bear-baiting.”

  Jack had accompanied these improvised remarks with any amount of nods, gesticulations, nudgings, and shovings, all directed toward the a-mazed Tom and all meant to impel him toward the fabulous Jewel-trove in question. Finally Tom began to move that direction, but he walked backwards, keeping a sharp eye on Jack. “D’you really think Black Jack’s Boozing-Ken is a good place to be cutting up the Sovereign’s Orb?”

  “Cut it up where you will, bring me some bits in a sack. Whatever you think is fair. Off you go, then!”

  Tom-who was about halfway to the claque of piratish-looking blokes-scanned the roofs of the storehouses while Jack spoke these words, expecting that this was all a sort of test of Tom’s loyalty, and that if he made the wrong move he’d get a crossbow-bolt through the heart. But there was nothing to be noted save a few furious Highlanders starting to boil from the door of the White Tower. Which anyway forced him to make up his mind. “Right!” he exclaimed, then turned, and sprinted for the Jewels. Jack did not even see this, for he’d already bolted, along with de Gex, into the portal where Yevgeny had been awaiting them. Yevgeny barred the heavy storehouse door behind them.

  “Your name?” Jack said to the Yeoman Warder.

  “Clooney! And whatever it is you want-”

  “Why, Yeoman Clooney, you make it sound as if I am some sort of nefarious villain. All I want is for you to be my boon companion these next several minutes, and to survive the night in good health.”

  “I should not love to be your companion for any length of time.”

  “Then I shall remind you that I am, in truth, a nefarious villain. You may follow me on your own two feet, or I shall have the Rus put a leash around your neck and drag you up and down stairs on your beef-stuffed belly.”

  “I shall walk,” announced Clooney, eyeing Yevgeny. By this time he had probably watched the Muscovite do any number of appalling things and was more afraid of him than of Jack.

  A brief, dark, tortuous walk through the bowels of the Tower followed. After the third change of direction Jack became utterly lost. He guessed that they’d broken the plane of the curtain-wall and entered the bastion of Brick Tower.

  Then a stone stair was before them, descending into a gloom that was beyond the power of their lanthorns. A man more superstitious than Jack might have recoiled, seeing it as a prefigurement of prison, death, and descent into the world below. But in the catalog of gloomy and hair-raising locations into which Jack had ventured during his lifetime, this scarcely rated notice. Down the stairs he traipsed, turning left at a landing, and then jogging left again at the foot of another flight. They must now be down in some oubliette of the Normans. But passing through a door, he found himself under the sky on, of all things, a street: Mint Street. Directly across that street was a house, a wreck of a thing, nearly black with soot. The door of this house stood open, and a single light burned within. Door and street were guarded by three men-men well known to Jack-each of whom carried the ne plus ultra of Mobb control weapons, a blunderbuss. And not without effect, for what crowd there was-a few grubby Mint workers-remained far away down the street, ready to duck for cover behind the elbow of Bowyer Tower if there was need.

  There was no need. Jack checked his stride in the middle of the street, set his black satchel down as if to rest a weary hand, and turned around to see what was keeping the others. This movement caused his gold-lined cloak to swirl around him in a flourish that could not be missed by the cowed Mint-men. As it turned out, the black-robe was right on his heels. So Jack turned again, snatched up his satchel, and carried it into the house of the Warden of the Mint.

  It was abandoned. Warden of the Mint was a profitable sinecure, usually granted to some man who knew little and cared less about coining but who had places in high friends. Such a man would not dream of living in this house, even though it was provided by the government for his use. He would as like live by a knacker’s yard on the outskirts of Dublin than dwell on this smoky street in the midst of soldiers. And so most of the place went unused. But not all. Following the glimmer of lamp-light, Jack descended a stair to a vault-door, which hung open.

  The vault itself was barely an arm-span in width, and the apex of the arched ceiling was scarcely high enough for Jack to stand upright. It was dank and dripping, for it was down close to the level of the moat. But it was soundly made. At the far end stood a table. On the table was a black chest with three hasps. Two of these were going unused at the moment, and opened padlocks dangled from their loops like freshly killed game from the butcher’s hook. The third hasp was still closed by a padlock the size of a man’s fist. Sitting before it on an overturned basket was a bulky man whose face was obscured by black hair hanging down. He was peering at the lock from a few inches away, gripping it in one great hand while the other manipulated its inner works with a steel toothpick. None of which was in the least remarkable to Jack, for he had expected all of these things, except for one.

  “That’s it?” he exclaimed.

  “This is the Pyx,” answered the man who was sitting on the basket. He spoke as if he had entered the serene trance of a Hindoostani mystic.

  “You know, in any other country, they’d go to a bit of trouble, wouldn’t they, to make it be dazzling. But this is just a bloody box.”

  “All objects that perform the essential functions of a box, are unavoidably boxy,” said the other. “If it makes you feel any better, the locks are excellent.”

  “Those two don’t appear to have been excellent enough,” Jack remarked.

  “Ah, but this one. I am guessing that the other two were those of the Comptroller and the Warden. But this is the lock of the Master.”

  “Newton.”

  “Yes. Some admirer-some royal sycophant from the Continent-must have given it to him.”

  Jack was conscious now of de Gex breathing behind him. He said, “You of all people ought to be more alive to the passage of time.”

  “But Saturn was Time’s lord, not its servant.”

  “Which are you?”

  “Both. For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops.”

  “The clock stops, you mean.”

  “No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-” now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. “Or an opened lock.” Saturn could not stand in this confined space, but he sat up straight, heaved a vast sigh, then drew the padlock out of the loop of the third hasp with great care, not wanting to bang it up on the way out.

  “I thought you said that Newton’s lock was something extraordinary,” Jack said.

  Saturn held it up near a candle-flame so that all could admire its Baroqueness. It had been fashioned after the style of the portico of an ancient temple. The style was Classical. But the tiny figures all around were seraphim and cherubim, rather than the gods of Olympus, and the inscription on the frieze was in Hebrew. “It is the Temple of Solomon,” Saturn explained.

  “There is no keyhole!” Jack said.

  The front of the temple, between the pillars, was closed by a small doorway with more Hebrew on it. Saturn flicked this open with a blackened fingernail to reveal, hidden beneath, an impossibly complex keyhole, shaped like a maze. It had been cut into a block of what appeared to be solid gold, which was shaped like a flame burning on the temple’s altar.

  “You were right
,” Jack said, “it’s bloody amazing.”

  “Decorative,” Saturn admitted, “and clever. But still a lock.”

  He flipped open the vacant hasp, then grabbed the handle on the lid of the Pyx, and pulled.

  The Pyx groaned open. Jack stepped forward. De Gex hastened to his side.

  Shive Tor

  TWILIGHT

  ABOVEDECKS, BY THE LIGHT of the flaming Tor, the soldiers toiled with poles, pushing the hooker back from the conflagration one yard at a time. Below, in the gleam of a lanthorn that Colonel Barnes had had the presence of mind to bring over from Atalanta, Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel Waterhouse regarded the big locked chest, and listened to it tick.

  Barnes had worried the point of a bayonet under the edge of the iron-bound chest and tried to lever it up, but they had seen no movement. “It is not that this is heavy, though it is,” Barnes had announced, “it is rather that the whole thing has been bolted to the very keel of the ship. And the bolt-heads are presumably locked up safe inside it.”

  Isaac was saying nothing. Indeed, he had been perfectly silent ever since he had descended into the hooker’s hold with Daniel, and found it empty, save for the ticking chest.

  For once, Daniel had Isaac at a disadvantage. Isaac had boarded this hooker still believing that he had sprung a trap on Jack the Coiner and was about to recover Jack’s hoard of Solomonic Gold. That he’d been trapped by Jack was only just now trespassing on the frontiers of his awareness, and would take a good long time to march in to the core of his brain.

  Daniel’s instinct, of course, was to withdraw to the bow or stern, to get as far away from the device as he could. With luck he might then live through the explosion. But it was now clear that the hooker’s keel would be snapped like a twig, and she’d go down fast in the cold dark water.

  Daniel went abovedecks, carrying the lanthorn so as to literally leave Sir Isaac in the dark. He was afraid that if Isaac had light he might try to tamper with the Device. Barnes followed Daniel.

  Shive Tor had become a red-hot obelisk jutting straight up from the sea.

  The hooker’s rigging had been sabotaged and her rudder cast away, so all she could do was drift where the currents and the winds might take her. This was very much in doubt, for the flows of the Thames and of the Medway here joined to war against the incoming tide in a wild melee of tows and vortices. But they would tend to drift into the center of the estuary, where the united rivers would flush them out to sea. The shore of the Isle of Grain was not so very distant; perhaps there was still time to summon Sergeant Bob, who was rowing about in yonder darkness salvaging the men of the First Company from the inrushing tide. Bob could not have failed to note the burning of the Tor; but he would have no way of guessing that an Infernal Device was bolted to the keel of the hooker.

  Out of the hooker’s butchered rig the dragoons had chopped down two spars, and were using them as push-poles, standing at the gunwales and hugging the spars to their chests (they were heavy) to jab them into the mucky bottom. When Daniel had gone below with Isaac a few minutes ago this had been strictly a matter of keeping the hooker from getting sucked into the flames of the Tor, and it had not been especially difficult, in that the water had been barely deep enough to float the vessel, so that the spar-tips found the bottom easily. Now it was different. They’d put a safe distance between them and the cherry-red pillar. The light was fainter now. It created extreme contrasts between what was lit and what was in shadow, so Daniel’s mind labored to construct a picture of events from a few strewn arcs, points, and patches of light, and dreamlike snatches of men’s faces. But he could see that the dragoons were leaning dangerously over the sides, struggling to maintain control of the spars, most of which were now submerged. The tide had moved in on them, or they had pushed themselves out into a river-channel. At any rate, they were fast losing the power to affect their own movements.

  The Tor-which was really the only thing visible outside of the ship-had until recently remained in a fixed position off their larboard quarter. But now it was executing a swift and dramatic traverse across the horizon, and it was dwindling. They were being pressed out to sea by the force of the rivers.

  “What happens if you fire a musket while the ramrod is in the barrel?” Daniel inquired of the darkness.

  “Sergeant Shaftoe thrashes you within an inch of your life!” answered a dragoon.

  “But what happens to the ramrod?”

  “Flies out like a spear, I suppose,” said the dragoon, “unless it jams in the barrel and the whole thing blows up in your face.”

  “I would like to make a hole in a locked box,” Daniel explained.

  “We’ve an axe,” said the dragoon.

  “This box is bound and sheathed in iron,” said Daniel.

  But he had already discarded the idea of firing a ramrod, or aught else, into the ticking chest. For all he knew, this was as likely to detonate, as disrupt, the Infernal Device.

  A sense of relief now washed over him as he came to a realization: they were altogether doomed.

  He went belowdecks to inform Isaac. Daniel might have expected Isaac to be furious over having been left in the dark. But as the light of the lanthorn invaded the hold, it revealed Isaac curled up on the decking with one ear pressed against the side of the chest, like one of Queen Anne’s physicians trying to make out whether she was still alive.

  “It is a Tompion balance-spring movement,” Isaac proclaimed, “of curiously massive construction-like a watch wrought for a giant. But well-wrought. There is no grinding in the bearings, the gears mesh cleanly.”

  “Shall we try to force it open?”

  “The art of building lethal traps into lock-boxes is far more ancient than that of constructing Infernal Devices,” Isaac returned.

  “I understand,” said Daniel, “but if the alternative is to do nothing, and be blown to bits-” But he stopped there, for Isaac’s eyelids had fluttered shut, his lips had parted, and he shifted to press his skull even harder against the cold iron frame of the chest.

  “Something is happening,” he announced. “A pin was engaged. A cam revolves-” he opened his eyes and drew back as if it had only just entered his mind that he was in danger. Daniel caught one of Isaac’s hands and assisted him to his feet-then caught him in his arms as the boat was heaved beneath their feet by a swell coming in from the sea.

  “Well,” Daniel said, “are you ready to find out what comes next?”

  “As I told you, there is some mechanism-”

  “I meant, after we die,” Daniel said.

  “For that I have long been ready,” said Isaac; and Daniel was put in mind of Whitsunday 1662, when Isaac had repented of all the sins he had ever committed, and begun a ledger of sins committed since then. Did that ledger still exist somewhere? Was it still blank?

  “And you, Daniel?” Isaac inquired.

  “I made myself ready twenty-five years ago, when I was dying of the Stone,” Daniel said, “and have oft wondered when Death would bother to come for me.”

  “Then neither of us has anything to fear,” said Isaac. Which Daniel agreed with on a purely intellectual level; but still he flinched when a hefty mechanical clunk sounded from the chest, and its lid sprang open, driven by a pair of massive springs. Daniel missed what happened next because (as he was ashamed to realize) he had jumped behind Isaac. But now he stepped clear. He let the lanthorn drop to his side. It was no longer of any use. The chest was emitting its own light. Fountains of colored sparks gushed from several metal tubes that splayed from its rim, a bit like the iron pikes that adorned London Bridge’s Great Stone Gate. Their light blinded him for a few moments. But when his eyes adjusted he saw a little carved and painted figure-a poppet-jutting from the top of the box, bobbling up and down atop a coil spring that had thrust it into the air. The poppet was adorned with a motley fool’s cap with wee bells on the ends of its tentacles, and its face had been carven into a foolish grin. Illuminated from beneath by the fizzing sparklers, it wor
e a ghoulish and sinister aspect.

  “Jack in the Box!” Daniel exclaimed.

  Isaac approached the chest. The poppet had sprung up out of a mound of hundreds of coins. These had avalanched over the rim of the chest when the lid had sprung open, and were still tumbling to the deck in ones and twos. One of them rolled to within inches of Isaac’s toe. He stooped and picked it up. Daniel, ever the lab-assistant, held the light near to hand. Isaac stared at it for a quarter of a minute. Daniel’s lanthorn-arm began to ache, but he dared not move.

  Finally it occurrred to Isaac to resume breathing. A tiny smacking noise came from his mouth as he re-animated his parts of speech.

  “We must get back to the Tower of London straightaway.”

  “I am all for it,” Daniel said, “but I’m afraid that the currents of the Thames and the Medway disagree with us.”

  Book 7

  Currency

  There was the usual amount of corruption, intimidation, and rioting.

  –SIR CHARLES PETRIE, DESCRIBING A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION OF THE ERA

  Hanover

  JUNE 18 (CONTINENTAL) / 7 (ENGLISH) 1714

  Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness…

  -S OPHIE C HARLOTTE, Q UEEN OF P RUSSIA, ON HER DEATHBED AT AGE THIRTY-SIX

  “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a penniless orphan girl named Wilhelmina Caroline, or Caroline for short. Father was a brilliant if odd man, who died young of the smallpox, leaving Mother at the mercy of his son by an earlier marriage. But this son had inherited neither his father’s wisdom nor his love for the beautiful mother of Caroline; and, conceiving of her as a wicked stepmother, and of the infant as a future rival, he cast them out. Mother took little Caroline up in her arms and fled to a house deep in the woods. The two lived almost as Vagabonds for some years, making occasional sojourns in the houses of more fortunate relations. But when the compassion of her family was spent, Mother was left with no choice but to marry the first suitor who came along: a brute who had been hit on the head when he was a child. This fellow cared little for Caroline’s mother and less for Caroline. He relegated them to a miserable life on the fringe of his household while he openly made love to his vile, ignorant, and wicked mistress.