The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  At any rate Daniel could not now tear his eyes away from those of Jeffreys. In a sense Jeffreys had planned this spectacle poorly. The drug must have been slipped into Daniel’s drink at the coffeehouse and Jeffreys’s minions must have abducted him after he’d fallen asleep in a water-taxi. But the elixir had made him so groggy that he had failed to be afraid until this moment.

  Now, Drake wouldn’t have been afraid, even fully awake; he’d sat in this room and defied Archbishop Laud to his face, knowing what they would do to him. Daniel had been brave, until now, only insofar as the drug had made him stupid. But now, looking up into the eyes of Jeffreys, he recalled all of the horror-stories that had emanated from the Tower as this man’s career had flourished: Dissidents who “committed suicide” by cutting their own throats to the vertebrae; great trees in Taunton decorated with hanged men, dying slowly; the Duke of Monmouth having his head gradually hacked off by Jack Ketch, five or six strokes of the axe, as Jeffreys looked on with those eyes.

  The colors were draining out of the world. Something white and fluffy came into view near Jeffreys’s face: a hand surrounded by a lace cuff. Jeffreys had grasped one of the hooks projecting up from Daniel’s collar. “You say that your revolution does not have to involve any violence,” he said. “I say you must think harder about the nature of revolution. For as you can see, this hook is on top now. A different one is on the bottom. True, we can raise the low one up by a simple revolution—” Jeffreys wrenched the collar around, its entire weight bearing on Daniel’s adam’s apple—giving Daniel every reason to scream. But he made no sound other than a pitiable attempt to suck in some air. “Ah, but observe! The one that was high is now low! Let us raise it up then, for it does not love to be low.” Jeffreys wrenched it back up. “Alas, we are back to where we started; the high is high, the low is low, and what’s the point of having a revolution at all?” Jeffreys now repeated the demonstration, laughing at Daniel’s struggle for air. “Who could ask for a better career!” he exclaimed. “Slowly decapitating the men I went to college with! We made Monmouth last as long as ‘twas possible, but the axe is imprecise, Jack Ketch is a butcher, and it ended all too soon. But this collar is an excellent device for a gradual sawing-off, I could make him last for days!” Jeffreys sighed with delight. Daniel could not see any more, other than a few pale violet blotches swimming in turbulent gray. But Jeffreys must have signalled the bailiffs to right the chair, for suddenly the weight of the collar was on his collarbones and his efforts to breathe were working. “I trust I have disabused you of any ludicrous ideas concerning the true nature of revolutions. If the low are to be made high, Daniel, then the high must be made low—but the high like to be high—and they have an army and a navy. ‘Twill never occur without violence. And ‘twill fail given enough time, as your father’s failed. Have you quite learnt the lesson? Or shall I repeat the demonstration?”

  Daniel tried to say something: namely to beg that the demonstration not be repeated. He had to because it hurt too much and might kill him. To beg for mercy was utterly reasonable—and the act of a coward. The only thing that prevented him from doing it was that his voice-box was not working.

  “It is customary for a judge to give a bit of a scolding to a guilty man, to help him mend his ways,” Jeffreys reflected. “That part of the proceedings is now finished—we move on to Sentencing. Concerning this, I have Bad News, and Good News. ‘Tis an ancient custom to give the recipient of Bad and Good News, the choice of which to hear first. But as Good News for me is Bad for you, and vice versa, allowing you to make the choice will only lead to confusion. So: the Bad News, for me, is that you are correct, the Star Chamber has not been formally re-constituted. ‘Tis just a pastime for a few of us Senior Jurists and has no legal authority to carry out sentences. The Good News, for me, is that I can pronounce a most severe sentence upon you even without legal authority: I sentence you, Daniel Waterhouse, to be Daniel Waterhouse for the remainder of your days, and to live, for that time, every day with the knowledge of your own disgusting cravenness. Go! You disgrace this Chamber! Your father was a vile man who deserved what he got here. But you are a disfigurement of his memory! Yes, that’s right, on your feet, about face, march! Get out! Just because you must live with yourself does not mean we must be subjected to the same degradation! Out, out! Bailiffs, throw this quivering mound of shite out into the gutter, and pray that the piss running down his legs will wash him down into the Thames!”

  THEY DUMPED HIM like a corpse in the open fields upriver from Westminster, between the Abbey and the town of Chelsea. When they rolled him out the back of the cart, he came very close to losing his head, as one of the collar-hooks caught in a slat on the wagon’s edge and gave him a jerk at the neck so mighty it was like to rip his soul out of his living body. But the wood gave way before his bones did, and he fell down into the dirt, or at least that was what he inferred from evidence near to hand when he came to his senses.

  His desire at this point was to lie full-length on the ground and weep until he died of dehydration. But the collar did not permit lying down. Having it round his neck was a bit like having Drake stand over him and berate him for not getting up. So up he got, and stumbled round and wept for a while. He reckoned he must be in Hogs-den, or Pimlico as men in the real estate trade liked to name it: not the country and not the city, but a blend of the most vile features of both. Stray dogs chased feral chickens across a landscape that had been churned up by rooting swine and scraped bald by scavenging goats. Nocturnal fires of bakeries and breweries shot rays of ghastly red light through gaps in their jumble-built walls, spearing whores and drunks in their gleam.

  It could have been worse: they could have dumped him in a place with vegetation. The collar was designed to prevent slaves from running away by turning every twig, reed, vine, and stalk into a constable that would grab the escapee by the nape as he ran by. As Daniel roamed about, he explored the hasp with his fingers and found it had been wedged shut with a carven peg of soft wood which had been hammered through the loops. By worrying this back and forth he was able to draw it out. Then the collar came loose on his neck and he got it off easily. He had a dramatical impulse to carry it over to the river-bank and fling it into the Thames, but then coming to his senses he recollected that there was a mile of dodgy ground to be traversed before he reached the edge of Westminster, and any number of dogs and Vagabonds who might need to be beaten back in that interval. So he kept a grip on it, swinging it back and forth in the darkness occasionally, to make himself feel better. But no assailant came for him. His foes were not of the sort that could be struck down with a rod of iron.

  ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE of the settled and civilized part of Westminster, a soon-to-be-fashionable street was under construction. It was the latest project of Sterling Waterhouse, who was now Earl of Willesden, and spent most of his days on his modest country estate just to the northwest of London, trying to elevate the self-esteem of his investors.

  One of the people who’d put money into this Westminster street was the woman Eliza, who was now Countess of Zeur. Eliza occupied something like fifty percent of all Daniel’s waking thoughts now. Obviously this was a disproportionate figure. If it’d been the case that Daniel continually come up with new and original thoughts on the subject of Eliza, then he might have been able to justify thinking about her ten or even twenty percent of the time. But all he did was think the same things over and over again. During the hour or so he’d spent in the Star Chamber, he’d scarcely thought of her at all, and so now he had to make up for that by thinking about nothing else for an hour or so.

  Eliza had come to London in February, and on the strength of personal recommendations from Leibniz and Huygens, she had talked her way into a Royal Society meeting—one of the few women ever to attend one, unless you counted Freaks of Nature brought in to display their multiple vaginas or nurse their two-headed babies. Daniel had escorted the Countess of Zeur into Gresham’s College a bit nervously, fearing that she’d mak
e a spectacle of herself, or that the Fellows would get the wrong idea and use her as a subject for vivisection. But she had dressed and behaved modestly and all had gone well. Later Daniel had taken her out to Willesden to meet Sterling, with whom she gotten along famously. Daniel had known they would; six months earlier both had been commoners, and now they strolled in what was to become Sterling’s French garden, deciding where the urns and statues ought to go, and compared notes as to which shops were the best places to buy old family heirlooms.

  At any rate, both of them now had money invested in this attempt to bring civilization to Hogs-den. Even Daniel had put a few pounds into it (not that he considered himself much of an investor; but British coinage had only gotten worse in the last twenty years, if that was imaginable, and there was no point in keeping your money that way). To prevent the site from being ravaged every night by the former inhabitants (human and non-), a porter was stationed there, in a makeshift lodge, with a large number of more or less demented dogs. Daniel managed to wake all of them up by stumbling over the fence at 3:00 A.M. with his neck half sawn through. Of course the porter woke up last, and didn’t call the dogs off until half of Daniel’s remaining clothes had been torn away. But by that point in the evening, those clothes could not be accounted any great loss.

  Daniel was happy just to be recognized by someone, and made up the customary story about having been set upon by blackguards. To this, the porter responded with the obligatory wink. He gave Daniel ale, an act of pure kindness that brought fresh tears to Daniel’s eyes, and sent his boy a-running into Westminster to summon a hackney-chair. This was a sort of vertical coffin suspended on a couple of staves whose ends were held up by great big taciturn men. Daniel climbed into it and fell asleep.

  When he woke up it was dawn, and he was in front of Gresham’s College, on the other end of London. A letter was waiting for him from France.

  THE LETTER BEGAN,

  Is the weather in London still quite dismal? From the vantage point of Versailles, I can assure you that spring approaches London. Soon, I will be approaching, too.

  Daniel (who was reading this in the College’s entrance hall) stopped there, stuffed the letter into his belt, and stumbled into the penetralia of the Pile. Not even Sir Thomas Gresham his own self would be able to find his way around the place now, if he should come back to haunt it. The R.S. had been having its way with the building for almost three decades and it was just about spent. Daniel scoffed at all talk of building a new Wren-designed structure and moving the Society into it. The Royal Society was not reducible to an inventory of strange objects, and could not be re-located by transporting that inventory to a new building, any more than a man could travel to France by having his internal organs cut out and packed in barrels and shipped across the Channel. As a geometric proof contained, in its terms and its references, the whole history of geometry, so the piles of stuff in the larger Pile that was Gresham’s College encoded the development of Natural Philosophy from the first meetings of Boyle, Wren, Hooke, and Wilkins up until to-day. Their arrangement, the order of stratifications, reflected what was going on in the minds of the Fellows (predominantly Hooke) in any given epoch, and to move it, or to tidy it up, would have been akin to burning a library. Anyone who could not find what he needed there, didn’t deserve to be let in. Daniel felt about the place as a Frenchman felt about the French language, which was to say that it all made perfect sense once you understood it, and if you didn’t understand it, then to hell with you.

  He found a copy of the I Ching in about a minute, in the dark, and carrying it over to where rosy-fingered Dawn was clawing desperately at a grime-caked window, found the hexagram 19, Lin, Approach. The book went on at length concerning the bottomless significance of this symbol, but the only meaning that mattered to Daniel was 000011, which was how the pattern of broken and unbroken lines translated to binary notation. In decimal notation this was 3.

  It would have been perfectly all right for Daniel to have crawled up to his garret atop the College and fallen asleep, but he felt that having been stupefied with opium for a night and a day ought to have enabled him to catch up on his sleep, and events in the Star Chamber and later in Hogs-den had got him rather keyed up. Any one of these three things sufficed to prevent sleep: the raw wounds around his neck, the commotion of the City coming awake, and his beastly, uncontrollable lust for Eliza. He went up-stairs to a room that was optimistically called the Library, not because it had books (every room did) but because it had windows. Here he spread out Eliza’s letter on a table all streaked and splotched with disturbing stains. Next to it he set down a rectangle of scrap paper (actually a proof of a woodcut intended for Volume III of Newton’s Principia Mathematica). Examining the characters in Eliza’s letter one by one, he assigned each to either the 0 alphabet or the 1 alphabet and wrote a corresponding digit on the scrap paper, arranging them in groups of five. Thus

  DOCTO RWATE RHOUS E

  01100 00100 10000 0

  The first group of binary digits made the number 12, the second 4, the next 16, and the one after that 6. So writing these out on a new line, and subtracting a 3 from each, he got

  Which made the letters I A M C

  The light got better as he worked.

  Leibniz was building a splendid library in Wolfenbüttel, with a high rotunda that would shed light down onto the table below…

  His forehead was on the table. Not a good way to work. Not a good way to sleep either, unless your neck was so torn up as to make lying down impossible, in which case it was the only way to sleep. And Daniel had been sleeping. The pages under his face were a sea of awful light, the unfair light of noon.

  “Truly you are an inspiration to all Natural Philosophers, Daniel Waterhouse.”

  Daniel sat up. He was stiff as a grotesque. He could feel and hear the scab-work on his neck cracking. Seated two tables away, quill in hand, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.

  “Sir!”

  Fatio held up a hand. “I do not mean to disturb you, there is no need for—”

  “Ah, but there is a need for me to express my gratitude. I have not seen you since you saved the life of the Prince of Orange.”

  Fatio closed his eyes for a moment. “‘Twas like a conjunction of planets, purely fortuitous, reflecting no distinction on me, and let us say no more of it.”

  “I learned only recently that you were in town—that your life was in danger so long as you remained on the Continent. Had I known as much earlier, I’d have offered you whatever hospitality I could—”

  “And if I were worthy of the title of gentleman, I’d have waited for that offer before making myself at home here,” Fatio returned.

  “Isaac of course has given you the run of the place and that is splendid.”

  Daniel now noticed Fatio gazing at him with a penetrating, analytical look that reminded him of Hooke peering through a lens. From Hooke it was not objectionable, somehow. From Fatio it was mildly offensive. Of course Fatio was wondering how Daniel knew that he’d been hobnobbing with Isaac. Daniel could have told him the story about Jeffreys and the Star Chamber, but it would only have confused matters more.

  Fatio now appeared to notice, for the first time, the damage to Daniel’s neck. His eyes saw all, but they were so big and luminous that it was impossible for him to conceal what he was gazing at; unlike the eyes of Jeffreys, which could secretly peer this way and that in the shadow of their deep embrasures, Fatio’s eyes could never be used discreetly.

  “Don’t ask,” Daniel said. “You, sir, suffered an honorable wound on the beach. I’ve suffered one, not so honorable, but in the same cause, in London.”

  “Are you quite all right, Doctor Waterhouse?”

  “Splendid of you to inquire. I am fine. A cup of coffee and I’ll be as good as new.”

  Whereupon Daniel snatched up his papers and repaired to the coffee-house, which was full of people and yet where he felt more privacy than under the eyes of Fatio.

  The bi
nary digits hidden in the subtleties of Eliza’s handwriting became, in decimal notation,

  4 16 6 18 16 12 17 10

  which when he subtracted 3 from each (that being the key hidden in the I Ching reference) became

  9 1 13 3 15 13 9 14 7… which said,

  I AM COMING…

  THE FULL DECIPHERMENT took a while, because Eliza provided details concerning her travel plans, and wrote of all she wanted to do while she was in London. When he was finished writing out the message he came alive to the fact that he had sat for a long time, and consumed much coffee, and needed to urinate in the worst way. He could not recall the last time he had made water. And so he went back to a sort of piss-hole in the corner of the tiny court in back of the coffeehouse.

  Nothing happened, and so after about half a minute he bent forward as if bowing, and braced his forehead against the stone wall. He had learned that this helped to relax some of the muscles in his lower abdomen and make the urine come out more freely. That stratagem, combined with some artful shifting of the hips and deep breathing, elicited a few spurts of rust-colored urine. When it ceased to work, he turned round, pulled his garments up around his waist, and squatted to piss in the Arab style. By shifting his center of gravity just so, he was able to start up a kind of gradual warm seepage that would provide relief if he kept it up for a while.