THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  After a brief conversation with William Ham, the night porter suffered them to enter, and even offered to relieve Saturn of the burden in his arms: a strangely heavy locked chest. Saturn politely declined. William Ham dismissed the porter and sent him back to his bed. Lanthorns were distributed. Monsieurs Kohan, Waterhouse, Hoxton, and Ham moved through the Bank in their own pool of light, quickly leaving behind the parts of the establishment that looked like a bank (finished rooms with windows and furniture) and descending into its cellar.

  By no stretch of the imagination could this be understood as a proper and rational basement. The ground under the Bank was a foam of cavities, some recent, some ancient, but mostly ancient. Most were connected to at least one other. This made it possible to navigate through the foam without resorting to shovels and blasting-powder, provided only that one understood the graph of their connexions. This was a job for a banker if ever there was one. Mr. Ham changed direction incessantly, but gave them all some reassurance by only rarely stopping to think, and only once backtracking. Anyone who had even a layman’s knowledge of structures could see at a glance that, over the ages, more than one building had been erected on this site, and many a builder had stayed up late at night worrying about whether the foam could support it. The diverse vaults, arches, timbers, pilings, footings, and rubble-walls that threw back the light of their lanthorns, and forced William Ham into catastrophic reversals, were what those builders had effected when they had gotten worried enough. The timbered tunnels, linteled doorways, and arched passageways through which William conducted them were evidence that other builders had gambled that the inter-locking foundation-works were strong enough, and would not give way if judiciously undermined.

  “It is just the sort of hidden mare’s nest about which one has bad dreams when putting one’s money in a Bank,” Saturn reflected, at a moment when he and Daniel were several convolutions behind Mr. Ham and Monsieur Kohan. But a moment later they caught up to find William Ham looking a bit huffy. He was directing their attention to a Gothik arch sealed off by a new portcullis of iron bars. Pyramidal beams of lanthorn-light, shining through the interstices, careered around the space on the other side. Slivers of gold and silver winked between the planks of crates. “The inherited complexities of the property,” said Mr. Ham, “are, as you can see, giving way to a steady programme of rationalization. Where weaknesses are found, they are made strong. Several entire chambers have been infilled. Where sound vaults are discovered, they are fortified, as here.” Mr. Ham then took them on a lengthy detour intended to bolster these and other assertions with evidence visual and anecdotal. By this point Daniel could no more have made his way out to the street than he could have balanced the Bank’s accounts on his fingers. But he did feel that they were on average descending, for the air got damper and colder as they went, and the architecture changed. There was less wood, and what there was of it was rotten, and being replaced by masonry. They passed through a Gothik stratum into a Romanesque, or perhaps Roman-boundaries were ambiguous, as the site might have gone unchanged for half a millennium after the Romans had pulled out. Evidence of dampness was all round, though actual standing water was rare. It looked, in other words, as though they had found a way to channel groundwater and drain it out of the place-probably to Walbrook, a local creek that was famous because, at some point after the Fall of Rome, it had gone missing.

  They came at some length to a chamber, sealed by a massive ironbound door, which William unlocked with a key big enough to double as a bludgeon should the Bank come under attack. It was large for a subterranean vault, small for a parish church. Like a church, it had an aisle up the center, which had been made useful as a gutter. A trickle of groundwater two fingers wide meandered through crevices between close-set paving-stones. To either side of the aisle was a raised platform, also paved. Crates, lock-boxes, and money-bags had been piled up on these. William Ham led them up to the far end of the room, where the platforms gave way to a clear open space, and the trickle of aisle-water disappeared into a hole in the floor. He identified an open space at the end of a platform, and by a gesture indicated that Saturn should set the chest down there. Saturn did; but Solomon did not witness it, as he was inspecting the room.

  Solomon shoved a sack of money aside to make a clear space on the platform, into which he spat, and then rubbed the saliva with a thumb until he had smeared away the patina of dust and congealed slime to reveal, in the light of Daniel’s lanthorn, a few chips of colored stone set into the surface. A glimpse of a Mosaic.

  “Roman?” Daniel guessed. Solomon nodded.

  “As I think I have now demonstrated, the plates will be perfectly safe in this sealed vault until the time has come to ship them to St. Petersburg,” William said to Solomon, as the ancient Jew came up to join them at the head of the chamber. But Solomon was staring at the floor. “Pray lend me your key,” he said, holding out a hand.

  William Ham did not like this proposition at all. But he could come up with no reason to refuse. He placed it in Solomon’s hand. Solomon squatted down, felt the floor with his fingertips for some moments, then inserted the key’s handle-which looked a bit like a very ornate trowel-into the drain-hole. A bit of exploratory wiggling and prying led to the sudden appearance of a large crescent-moon-shaped crevice. Saturn stepped forward. “Careful!” Solomon continued, “it will be a well.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This is a Temple of Mithras, constructed by Roman soldiers,” Solomon said, “and every such temple contained a well.”

  Saturn got his fingers into the crevice and pulled. A disk perhaps two feet in diameter came up out of the floor. It had been fashioned recently out of heavy planks. A lanthorn, let down into the cavity, revealed a well-shaft, lined with stones all the way down to the level of the water, which was perhaps three fathoms below.

  “Your workmen found the well, and covered it,” said Solomon. “But more for their own safety, than the Bank’s security. I would wager the contents of this Bank that I could now leave the premises and meet you out in the street in half an hour’s time without passing out through the building’s front door.”

  “That is a bet I could not accept, even if the money were mine to wager,” said William Ham, “for I can smell and feel the current of air rising up from the shaft as well as you.”

  “Indeed, the well has a side-channel!” exclaimed Saturn, who was on his stomach with head and shoulders thrust down into the shaft. “About halfway down. I have a mind to fetch one of the workmen’s ladders and investigate!”

  This was daft. But once Saturn had proposed, none could resist, it. Ladders were all over the place. They stabbed one down the well and planted it on the floor of the side-channel that Saturn had noticed. He went down first, and reported that the masons of the Temple of Mithras had carried out their duties well.

  “As how could they not,” Solomon returned, “for Mithras was the god of contracts.”

  “The god of contracts!?” exclaimed William Ham.

  “Indeed,” said Solomon, “and so it is a good thing for you that you have founded your Bank on his Temple.”

  “This Mithras does not appear in any Pantheon I have ever heard of.”

  “He was not a god of Olympus but one that the Greeks borrowed from the Persians, who had in their turn borrowed him from Hindoostan. From the Greeks his cult spread to the Romans, and became popular around the hundredth year of what you call Anno Domini. Or, as I would put it, some years after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. Especially among soldiers, such as garrisoned Londinium, along the banks of the Walbrook.”

  Solomon had been clambering onto the ladder as he spoke.

  “You aren’t going down there?”

  “Mr. Ham, I was sent here by the Tsar to investigate the Bank’s security,” said Solomon, “and inspect it I shall!”

  Daniel followed Solomon down the ladder. Three of them now squatted together in a vaulted tunnel that ran off into the earth, sloping gently
down toward the well so that it, too, acted as a drain. William Ham was left to sit sentry in the Temple of Mithras, and to run for help if they never emerged. But after a very brief shuffle down the tunnel they sensed space above their heads, and found stone steps, which turned to the right and led them down to the level of the groundwater. A creek, perhaps eight feet in breadth, ran sluggishly off into the dark, wending round pilings, moles, and foundations one could only assume supported buildings up on the street. In rainy weather they might have had to stop and turn back. But it was the first day of August and the level did not rise above their ankles as long as they stayed along the side of the channel. So they ventured downstream, shining their lights on walls and foundations as they went, and speculating as to which belonged to which building.

  “During the Plague,” Daniel said, “my uncle Thomas Ham-William’s father-enlarged the cellar of his goldsmith’s shop, which cannot be more than a stone’s throw from us. He discovered a Roman mosaic, and diverse pagan coins and artifacts. My wife in Boston is wearing one of them in her hair.”

  “What did the mosaic depict?” Solomon asked.

  “Some figures that called to mind Mercury. Mr. Ham styled it a Temple of Mercury and made of it a good omen. But it contained other images that would call his opinion into question-”

  “Ravens?”

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  “Carox, the raven, was, to Persians, a messenger of the Gods-”

  “As Mercury was to the Romans.”

  “Indeed. The worshippers of Mithras believed that as the soul descended from the sphere of the fixed stars to be incarnated on Earth, it passed through all of the planetary spheres along the way, and was influenced by each in turn. In passing through the sphere of Venus the soul became amorous, and so on. The innermost sphere, and the last to wreak its influence on the soul, was that of Mercury or Corax. The practitioners of this cult believed that as the soul prepared for death, and a return to the sphere of the fixed stars, it must reverse that transmigration, shedding first the trappings of Mercury-Corax, then those of Venus, et cetera, and finally-”

  “Saturn?” guessed Saturn.

  “Indeed.”

  “I am honored to be closest to the fixed stars, and least worldly of vices.”

  “Accordingly, there were seven ranks. For each rank was a chamber-always subterranean. Your uncle’s cellar was that of Mercury-Corax, where new initiates were taken in. Later they would move through a gate or passage to the next chamber, which would have been decorated with images of Venus, and so on.”

  “What was the big chamber under the Bank?”

  “You shall be pleased to know it was the chamber of Saturn, for the highest-ranking members,” Solomon said.

  “I did feel wondrously at home in the place!”

  “If it is true that we are passing the foundations of the Ham goldsmith shop,” said Solomon, “then we are traversing the hierarchy in reverse order, following the same course as souls coming down from the C?lestial Sphere to be incarnated in the World.”

  “Funny that,” Daniel said, “for I have just recognized the name of an old friend of mine, who’d be pleased to know where his work stood in the hierarchy.”

  They had stopped before a pile of relatively new stone-work, where heavy blocks had been laid to repair some ancient foundation, and to make it ready to support a new building. For the most part it was an uninterrupted bulwark of massive stones; but in one place a long slab had been laid like a lintel across a gap between two others, creating a low squarish opening through which the cellar on the other side could drain if need be. Carved on that lintel in spidery Roman letters was:

  CHRISTOPHER WREN A.D. 1672

  “This is the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” said Daniel.

  “No better place for souls to enter the world,” Saturn mused.

  They crawled up the drain-a tight fit-and emerged in the church’s tombs. The bell was tolling above. “A grim birth,” Daniel said. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, but then he led Saturn and Solomon up a stair to a room at the back of the church. They were surprised to see daylight coming in through windows-but not half so surprised as the vicar’s wife was to see them. Her eyes were swollen half-shut from weeping, her cries of terror were relatively subdued, and her efforts to chase the muddy interlopers out of the building were desultory. No service was in progress, yet, strangely, many of the pews were occupied by persons who had come to do nothing but sit and pray in silence. Daniel, Saturn and Solomon stumbled out into the half light of early morning. A man was shuffling down Walbrook Street, headed for the Thames, bonging a hand-bell and shouting: “The Queen is dead, long live the King!”

  Book 8

  The System of

  the World

  It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

  –NEWTON, Principia Mathematica

  Marlborough House

  MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, 4 AUGUST 1714

  ’Tis a notion in the pamphlet shops that Whiggish libels sell best, so industrious are they to propagate scandal and falsehood.

  - FROM A LETTER TO R OBERT H ARLEY, 1ST E ARL OF O XFORD, QUOTED IN S IR W INSTON C HURCHILL, Marlborough: His Life and Times, VOL. VI

  THE LEVEE, OR RITUALIZED, semi-public getting-

  out-of-bed-in-the-morning, was an invention of Louis XIV, and like many of the Sun King’s works was frowned upon by all right-minded Englishmen, who knew of it only from lurid yarns told of Versailles court-fops’ prostituting their daughters to wangle an invitation to hold a candlestick or carry a shirt at a levee of the Sun King. This was all Daniel knew of the subject as of nine of the clock on the morning of August 4th, when a messenger knocked him up at Crane Court to inform him that he, Daniel, was one of half a dozen who had been summoned to take part in the Duke of Marlborough’s first levee in London, which was going to commence in an hour’s time.

  “But my own levee is not yet finished,” Daniel might have answered, wiping porridge from an unshaven chin. Instead he told the messenger to wait downstairs and that he would be along presently.

  Marlborough House was invested by a crowd of several hundred Englishmen, the giddy-tired residue of an ecstatic Mobb that had sung the Duke through the streets of London yesterday: a Roman triumph thrown together on the spur of the moment by disorderly plebeians.

  The Duke and his Duchess had reached Dover late on the 2nd. Yesterday had been devoted to an all-but-Royal progress through Rochester and other burgs lining the road to Londinium. So many of the Whig Quality had turned out to ride in the procession, and so many commoners had lined Watling Street, as to rouse suspicions in Daniel’s mind that the rumors spread for so long by the Tories were true: Marlborough was the second coming of Cromwell. Now, to his very first levee, he had invited Daniel, who could still remember sitting on Cromwell’s knee when he was a little boy.

  Next to St. James’s Palace, which was getting to look like a heap of architectural elements flung into a bin, Marlborough House shaped up as a proper building. The fence around its forecourt was a giant iron strainer, stopping everyone except for Daniel. The excluded had formed drifts of flesh on the other side, and watched eagerly, faces wedged between bars. As Daniel was helped down out of the carriage, and walked to the front door, he wondered how many of the crowd knew who he was, and of his ancient connexion to the terrible Puritan warlord. Some of them had to be Tory spies, who would mark Daniel, and note the connexion instantly. Daniel guessed that he had been summoned here to send a message of a vaguely threatening nature to all Torydom.

  Vanbrugh had been remodeling the place in the expectation that the Duke would settle in for a long stay. Much of this work was still in its most brute stages and so Daniel had to be conducted under scaffolding and between piles of bricks and of timbers by a member of Marlborough’s household. But as they got deeper into the building, it became more finished. The Duke’s bedchamber had been done firs
t, and the renovations propagated outwards from there. Before the Grinling Gibbons custom-carved double doors, a maid handed Daniel a large silver bowl full of steaming water, swathed in towels so it would not burn his hands. “Set it down beside my lord,” he was instructed, and the doors were pulled open.

  Like a beetle on a glacier the Duke of Marlborough sat in a chair in the white immensity of his bedchamber. Next to him was a table. The stubble on his scalp was dense: obviously it was Shaving-Day, and high time for it; as everyone had now heard, the Duke and Duchess had been held back in Ostend by contrary winds for a whole fortnight. Daniel, knowing no more of levees than any other Englishman, feared for a moment that he was about to be asked to lather the Duke’s skull and scrape off two weeks’ growth. But then he noted a valet standing by, stropping a razor, and understood, with immeasurable relief, that the blade-work would be left to a trained artisan.

  Of the half-dozen who had been summoned to the levee, Daniel was the last to arrive-this much he could see even though his eyes were dazzled by August sunshine glancing off many tons of new plasterwork. So lofty was the ceiling that a Natural Philosopher could be forgiven for thinking that the festoons and friezes up along the ceiling had been carved from natural accumulations of snow and ice.