THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  “You will have ample time to rest from your travails, and lovely places in which to do it,” says Leroy.

  Jack, suddenly alert, pulls one of the blind doors to, and crouches behind it. A trio of French courtiers, drawn by the sound of the fowling-pieces, are approaching. “Lovely places indeed,” says Jack, “as long as I stay out of sight, and out of gossip.”

  “Ah, but in such places as La Zeur and St.-Malo, this is not so terribly difficult, eh?”

  “That is where I shall live out my retirement,” Jack allows, “as long as she’ll have me.”

  The King looks mock-astonished. “And if she throws you out?”

  “Back to England, and back to work,” says Jack.

  “As a coiner?”

  “As a gardener.”

  “I do not believe such a thing!”

  “Believe it, Leroy, for ’tis a notorious weakness of Englishmen who are too old to do anything useful. My brother has found a position on a rich man’s estate. If Eliza ever grows weary of supporting a broken-down old Vagabond, I may go thither and live out my days killing the Duke’s weeds and poaching his game.”

  Blenheim Palace

  “FINE! SO BE IT, then! I’ll get along unshod!” bellows a man of similar age and proportions to Jack. He seizes one of his knees with both hands and yanks up. A bare foot emerges from a boot, which is sunk almost to its top in the mud. He plants the foot, grabs the other knee, and repeats. Bob Shaftoe now stands, a free man, in mud almost up to his knees. His boots are stranded nearby, rapidly filling with rain. He salutes them. “Good riddance!”

  “Hear, hear!” calls a voice from a tent, pitched nearby on slightly higher and firmer ground. A man rises from a table and turns toward him. The table is lit by several candles even though it is two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Bob’s wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, which supports approximately a gallon of rainwater, distributed among several discrete pools. He cocks his head in a most deliberate and calculating manner, and the pools slide, merge, slalom round the hat’s contours, and spring off its back brim, splatting into the mud behind him. This enables him to get a clear sight-line into the tent.

  The man who has just spoken stands in its entrance, gazing down on him; at the table, a peg-legged fellow sits on a folding chair and graciously accepts a cup of chocolate from a woman who has been at work over a little cook-fire in the rear. “Bob,” calls the standing gentleman, “you are now barefoot in the rain, which calls to mind how I first saw you nigh on fifty years ago, and I say it becomes you, and may you leave those boots there to rot, and never again wear such odious contraptions. Now, do come back to us before you catch your death. Abigail has made chocolate.”

  Bob wrenches a foot clear of the mud, plants it on a rock, and uses this as a foundation on which to pull the opposite one free. He risks a glance back at the abandoned boots. “Do the bloody plans call for a pair o’boots there?”

  “They call for a shrubbery!” announces the peg-leg, peering at Bob through a transit, and consulting a garden-plan spread out on the table. “But never you mind, those boots will be eaten by vermin long before planting-season.”

  “What would the Vicar of Blenheim know about planting-season?”

  “As much as I know about being a vicar.”

  “And that is as much as I know about being a country gentleman,” says the Duke of Marlborough, gazing fretfully across a half-mile of mud and stumps at the still-building pile of Blenheim. “But we must all adapt-we must all learn. Except for Abigail, who is already perfect.” Abigail gives him a skeptical look and a cup of chocolate. Bob squelches another step closer. The gaze of (formerly) Colonel, (and now) the Reverend Barnes strays back to the great map, which looks ever so fanciful when contrasted against the gloomy reality outside. His eye wanders across the orderly geometry of the plan until it fixes upon a wee Chapel and a nearby Vicarage.

  Marlborough says, “We shall mount a last Campaign from this tent, and pick off the vermin who are drawn hither by the intoxicating fragrance of Bob’s boots. Bob shall study how to look after plants, Barnes shall learn how to look after souls, I shall learn how to be idle, and Abigail shall look after all of us.”

  “It sounds as if it ought to work,” says Bob, “so long as my brother does not show up.”

  “He is dead,” Marlborough avers. “But if he shows up, we’ll shoot him. And if he recovers, we’ll pack him off to Carolina, where he may work alongside his offspring. For I am told that you are not the only Shaftoe, Bob, to have turned over a new leaf, and become a tiller of the soil.”

  Bob has finally reached the tent’s threshold. “It is a strange fate indeed,” he mutters, “but only fitting.”

  “Why fitting?”

  “Jack, Jimmy, and Danny ought by rights to become tillers of the soil,” says Bob, “because they have made so much trouble in the past, as soilers of the till.”

  “If you are going to make such jests,” says Barnes, “you are welcome to stay out in the rain.”

  Carolina

  “I SPIED ’EM AGAIN this morning, Tomba! The weather cleared, just after sunup, and I looked to the West and saw ’em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”

  Tomba is lying face down on the sack of desiccated pine-branches that answers to the name of bed here, in the indentured servants’ quarters of Mr. Ickham’s Plantation. Not for the first time in his life, his back is striped with long whip-cuts. Jimmy Shaftoe hauls a sopping mass of rags out of a bucket, wrings it out, and lays it on Tomba’s raw flesh. Tomba opens his mouth to scream, but makes no sound. Danny keeps talking, trying to get Tomba to think about something else. “A week’s hard traveling,” he says, “less than that if we steal some horses. We can manage without food for that long. When we make it to those hills, there’ll be game a-plenty.”

  “Game,” says Tomba, “and Indians.”

  “Tomba, look at the state you’re in, and tell me Indians are worse than the Overseer.”

  “Nothing’s worse than him,” Tomba admits. “But I’m in no condition to run cross-country for seven days.”

  “Then we wait until those stripes are healed. Then we do it-”

  “Boys, you do not understand. There will always be something. The Overseer knows how to keep men downtrodden. Especially black men. I didn’t understand that, when I came here. It’s different, the way he treats me. Look at my back, and tell me it isn’t so.”

  Lines of fire run in parallel courses across the walls of the shack where the sun glares between unchinked wall-planks. A pig roots outside, undermining the corner of their dwelling, but they can’t shoo it away or eat it because it is the Overseer’s pride and joy. They can hear him now, bellowing in the distance. “Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Where the hell have you got to?”

  “Lookin’ after our mate you just beat half to death, you bastard,” mutters Jimmy.

  “I want to see red necks on the lot of you,” says Tomba, repeating the Overseer’s favorite aphorism. “Tomorrow, red necks all around, save for this Blackamoor-there’s only one way to give him a red neck and that’s with the lash.” Tomba gets his hands underneath him, and pushes himself up on to all fours, then hangs his head low and lets his dreadlocks sweep the floor, he’s so woozy.

  “Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Are you feedin’ your pet Blackamoor?” By process of elimination, the Overseer has figured out where they are, and is drawing nigh.

  “You’re right,” says Tomba, “he means to kill me today. It is time to unpack.”

  “Then unpack we shall,” says Danny.

  He bends down and seizes the hay-bag that served him for a bed, and rips it open from one end to the other. Out tumbles an elongated bundle. Jimmy snatches it and tears away several rope ties. The two Shaftoes work together to unroll the bundle, Danny holding his arms out like a pair of shelf-brackets while Jimmy unwinds the bolt of canvas. Tomba paws one
hand up the shack’s wall until he finds a hand-hold on one of the hewn logs that make up its frame, and pulls himself to his feet. “They’re not in here, Master!” he calls, “no one in here but poor Tomba!”

  “You’re a damned liar!” bellows the Overseer, and hammers the door open with the butt of his whip-handle. He stops, framed in the entrance, unable to see into the darkness of the shed. He can hear, though, the unexpected sounds of two gently curved blades-a longer one and a shorter one-being whisked from their scabbards. Perhaps he even glimpses the unaccustomed sight of Carolina sunlight gleaming from watered steel.

  “Don’t tell us,” says Danny, “you want to see some red necks around this place. Is that what you were about to say?”

  “What-get back to work, you lazy bastards! Or I’ll give you more of what Tomba got!” The Overseer steps into the shed, and raises his whip; but before he can bring it down, steel skirls past his ear, and the amputated lash drops to the dirt floor at his feet. Tomba staggers outside and closes the shed door behind himself. He squints about at several acres of mud, which he knows to be red in color, though it looks gray to him because his vision has gone black and white. A big white house stands at one end. Indentured servants toil with mattocks and shovels. Behind him, the Overseer has become uncharacteristically silent. Perhaps his eyes have adjusted to the point where he can see he’s locked in a confined space with a pair of enraged Samurai.

  “There’s more’n one way to make a red neck,” Danny points out, “and here’s how they do it in Nagasaki!” There follows a rapid sequence of noises that Tomba has not heard in quite a while, though he recognizes them well enough. Blood rushes out from under the shed wall and puddles in the wallow rooted out by the Overseer’s pig. Drawn by its fragrance, the pig waddles over, snuffles, then begins to lap it up.

  Jimmy and Danny burst out of the shed. Danny wipes his blade on his pant-leg and re-sheathes it. Jimmy hollers to the other indentured servants: “You all can take the rest of the day off! And when Mr. Ickham comes back from Charleston, and wants to know what happened, why, you just tell him that it was done by the Red-Neck Ronin, and that we went that-away!” And he thrusts his wakizashi into the un-tamed West. Then he sheathes it and turns to his companions.

  “Let’s head for the hills, boys.”

  Cornwall

  WILL COMSTOCK, the Earl of Lostwithiel, has been worrying that they’ll become trapped in one of the sudden mists that wander about the moors like ghosts through a haunted house, and lose their way. And indeed such mists wash up round them on two occasions. He insists, then, that they stop right where they are, and bide their time until the air clears. Daniel frets that Minerva shall lose patience, and sail without him. But around midday the mists blow off on a stiff north wind that presses and pursues them down-valley toward the sea, now visible far off, pea-green, and pied with cloud-shadows and sun-shafts.

  The land is chopped by stone walls into parcels so irregular it’s almost as if this country had to be pieced together from shreds of other worlds. In the high open country that tumbles down from the moors, the walls are lacy and irregular. Later, as the company of travelers traverse down into the valley, they pass through forests of stunted oaks, no taller than Daniel’s head, that cling to the slopes like wool to a sheep’s back and refuse to give up their leaves even at this time of year. There the walls run straight and solid, drenched with moss and saturated with life.

  From such a wood, the company emerges into a smoky bottom-land, where shaggy anthracite-colored cattle engage in desultory shoving-matches. They fall in along the course of a rushing river that has vaulted down off the moor. Not far below them, it slows, flattens, and broadens to an estuary. There is the longboat waiting to take Daniel out to Minerva, which is anchored somewhere hereabouts, making ready for the run to Oporto and thence, eventually, to Boston.

  But the travelers from London have not followed the Earl of Lostwithiel and Thomas Newcomen all this way to look at cows or boats. As they come out from under the dripping eaves of the last little oak-coppice, Daniel Waterhouse, Norman Orney, and Peter Hoxton begin to note certain oddments and novelties round the foot of the valley. Above the high tide mark, the ground runs gently up-hill for no more than a bow-shot before leaping up to make a rocky bluff that looms over the estuary. It’s obvious enough, even to visitors who are not aficionadoes of the Technologickal Arts, that men have been digging coal out of the roots of that bluff for many generations. The flat ground along the shore is strewn with dunnage and gouged with marks where they have trundled and dragged the coal down to meet the boats. To that point, it is typical of a certain type of small mine that might prosper until the miners delved to the waterline, and then be abandoned.

  There is a flattish out-cropping not far above the foot of the bluff. On it stands a thing that might have been cobbled together from pieces of drawbridges and siege engines. Two free-standing stone walls are held apart by an unroofed void perhaps four yards in breadth. That void has been congested with a dark web of timbers that reminds Daniel of a gallows. This supports some arrangement of platforms, stairs, ladders, and Machinery that is quite difficult to sort out, even as they draw closer to it. From its complexities emerges a sucking and hissing and booming, like the beating of a giant’s heart, one might think, in the last moments before it dies. This does not die, however, but keeps going in a steady cadence. With each beat comes a sudden rushing noise, which their ears can follow as it meanders down a crooked wooden aqueduct and finally leaps out and spatters on the tidal flat below, where it has carved a little water-course-a man-made streambed-down into the surf.

  “Ground-water, pumped from the depths of the mine, by Mr. Newcomen’s Engine,” announces Lostwithiel. This is unnecessary, since the three visitors have come all the way out from London expressly to see it. And yet it’s important for Lostwithiel to come out and say it, as when the pastor at a wedding intones, I now pronounce you man and wife.

  Orney and Saturn are keen to clamber down into the bowels of the Engine and know the particulars. Daniel goes with them as far as a plank platform from which he can get a good prospect of the valley. There he stops for a look round. It is the closest thing to solitude he’ll have until he reaches Massachusetts. He can now see Minerva anchored beyond the bar, some miles down where the estuary joins the sea. The crew of the longboat have already marked him through their prospective-glasses and are rowing directly for him, building speed to ground their keel in the soft sand where the Engine spits out the mine-water.

  Slowly shaking its fist above Daniel’s head is an arm made of giant, knot-ridden timbers joined by iron hasps that must have been sledge-hammered out in a forge somewhere nearby. Depending from its end is a gargantuan chain, its links about the size of a grown man’s femur, joined together by hand-forged cotter pins as big as bears’ claws. In Newcomen’s mind, Daniel knows, these links are meant to be of uniform size. In practice each is a little different, the differences averaging out as the chain disappears over the horizon of the curving arch-head that terminates the great arm. From it depends the piston, which fills a vertical cylinder the size of a mine-shaft. Packed round the piston’s edge to form a seal is a matted O of old rope yarn, called junk, clamped down by a junk ring, secured with rustic nuts. Plenty of steam leaks out around it, but most stays where it belongs. The opposite end of the arm is linked to a pump rod consisting of several tree-trunks squared off and bound together with iron bands, plunging into the earth and pulling on giant sucking and splurging equipment too deep down for Daniel to see. Compared to all of this, the brains of the thing are tiny, and easy to miss: a man, on a platform a storey or two below where Daniel is standing, surrounded by pushrods, bell-cranks, and levers and supplying information to the machine when needed, which is not very frequently. At the moment, he is supplying information to Orney and Saturn, who have joined him down there.

  This platform is dripping wet, and yet it’s warm, for the used steam exhaled by the Engine drifts round it and c
ondenses on the planks. Daniel lets the Engine breathe down his neck while he surveys the other works of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. He means to dash off a note to Eliza, letting her know just what has been done here with the capital that she and the other investors have entrusted to Lostwithiel and Newcomen. Mr. Orney will then take the letter back to London and see that she receives it. Orney will have a lot more to say, of course. Being a man of commerce, he’ll mark things to which Daniel would be blind, and he’ll know, without having to think about it, just which details Eliza shall and shan’t find interesting. For Orney himself has put a bit of money in this thing now, and if he likes what he sees here, he’ll go back to London and talk it up among his brethren.

  So there’s no need for Daniel to make some foolish pretense of seeing this venture through the shrewd eyes of a businessman. He tries, rather, to see it as what he is: a Natural Philosopher. As such it is the experimental aspects of it-its failures-that draw his notice. The level ground below the Engine is pocked, all around, with wreckage of Newcomen’s boilers. The natural and correct form for such a thing is a sphere. Knowing as much, Newcomen has been learning how to fabricate large spherical shells out of iron. And just as a schoolboy’s waste-book is littered, page after page, with smeared and scratched-out failures, so the deep soil of the river-bottom is strewn with ineradicable records of every idea that Newcomen has ever had on the subject, and striking visual proof of why and how certain of those ideas were bad. He can’t possibly beat out a single billet of iron into a vast seamless bubble and so he has to piece the things together of many smaller curved plates, lapped and riveted.

  Fifty years ago Hooke had caught sparks struck off of a steel, and put them under the microscope, and shown Daniel what they really were: pocked spheres of shiny metal, like iron planets. Daniel had supposed they were solid, until he saw some that had been blown open by internal pressure. For the sparks weren’t globules, but hollow bubbles, of molten steel that flailed, then froze, when they burst, leaving wild out-flung extremities that looked a little bit like clawing hands and a little bit like ancient tree-roots cast up on a beach. Some of Mr. Newcomen’s failed boilers look like those exploded sparks. Others have failed in ways not so obvious, and lie half-embedded in the earth, like meteors fallen out of the sky.