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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Why, some would say it has proved the opposite!”

  “Perhaps you have read something new in London or Paris that I have not seen yet?”

  “Actually, Doctor, I was thinking of Isaac’s Principia.”

  “I have read it,” Leibniz said drily, “and do not recollect seeing anything about gold.”

  “And yet it is clear enough that two planets of equal size and composition will describe different trajectories through the heavens, depending on their distances from the sun.”

  “Of course—that is necessarily true, by the inverse-square law.”

  “Since the two planets themselves are equal in every way, how can this difference in their trajectories be accounted for, unless you enlarge your scope of observations to include the difference in their situations vis-à-vis the sun?”

  “Monsieur Fatio, a cornerstone of my philosophy is the identity of indiscernibles. Simply put, if A cannot be discerned from B, then A and B are the same object. In the situation you have described, the two planets are indiscernible from each other, which means that they ought to be identical. This includes having identical trajectories. Since they are obviously not identical, in that their trajectories differ, it follows that they must in some way be discernible from each other. Newton discerns them by assigning them differing positions in space, and then presuming that space is somehow pervaded by a mysterious presence that accounts for the inverse-square force. That is, he discerns one from the other by appealing to a sort of mysterious external quality of space…”

  “You sound like Huygens!” Fatio snapped, suddenly annoyed. “I might as well have stayed in the Hague.”

  “I am sorry if the tendency of me and Huygens to agree causes you grief.”

  “You may agree with each other all you like. But why will you not agree with Isaac? Can you not perceive the magnificence of what he has achieved?”

  “Any sentient man can perceive that,” Leibniz returned. “Almost all will be so blinded by its brilliance that they will be unable to perceive its flaws. There are only a few of us who can do that.”

  “It is very easy to carp.”

  “Actually it is rather difficult, in that it leads to discussions such as this one.”

  “Unless you can propose an alternative theory that mends these supposed flaws, I believe you should temper your criticisms of the Principia.”

  “I am still developing my theory, Monsieur Fatio, and it may be a long time before it is capable of making testable predictions.”

  “What conceivable theory could explain the discernibility of those two planets, without making reference to their positions in absolute space?”

  THIS LED TO AN INTERLUDE in the snow outside. Doctor Leibniz packed two handfuls of snow together between his hands, watched warily by Fatio. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Fatio, I’m not going to throw it at you. If you would be so helpful as to make two more, about the size of melons, as like to each other as possible.”

  Fatio was not quick to warm to such a task, but eventually he squatted down and began to roll a pair of balls, stopping every couple of paces to pound away the rough edges.

  “They are as close to indiscernible as I can make them under these conditions—which is to say, in twilight with frozen hands,” shouted Fatio towards Leibniz, who was a stone’s throw off, wrestling with a snowball that weighed more than he did. When no response came back, he muttered, “I shall go in and warm my hands if that is acceptable.”

  But by the time Nicolas Fatio de Duillier had got back to Leibniz’s office, his hands were warm enough to do a few things. He took another look at the papers stuck into the Chinese book. The letter from Eliza was inordinately long, and appeared to consist entirely of gaseous chatter about what everyone was wearing. Yet on top of it was the other document, addressed to the Doctor but written in the Doctor’s hand. A mystery. Perhaps the book was a clue? It was called I Ching. Fatio had seen it once before, in the library of Gresham’s College, where Daniel Waterhouse had fallen asleep over it. The sheaf of papers had been used to mark a particular chapter entitled: 54. Kuei Mei: The Marrying Maiden. The chapter itself was a bucket of claptrap and mystickal gibberish.

  He put it back where he’d found it, and went over to the shed’s single tiny window. Leibniz now had his back pressed against an immense snowball and was trying to topple it over by thrusting with both legs. Fatio strolled once around the room, pausing to riffle through any prominent stacks of papers that presented themselves to his big pale eyes. Of which there were several: letters from Huygens, from Arnauld, from the Bernoullis, the late Spinoza, Daniel Waterhouse, and everyone else in Christendom who had a flicker of sense. But one of the larger stacks consisted of letters from Eliza. Fatio reached into the middle, grabbed half a dozen leaves between his thumb and index finger, and snapped them out. He folded them and stuffed them into his breast pocket. Then he ventured back outside.

  “Are your hands warm, Monsieur Fatio?”

  “Exceeding warm, Doctor Leibniz.”

  The Doctor had arranged the three snowballs—one giant one and the two small indiscernibles—on the field between the stable, the Schloß, and the nearby Arsenal. The triangle defined by these balls was nothing special, being neither equilateral nor isosceles.

  “Isn’t this how Sir Francis Bacon died?”

  “Descartes, too—froze to death in Sweden,” the Doctor returned cheerfully, “and if Leibniz and Fatio can go down in the annals next to Bacon and Descartes our lives will have been well concluded. Now, if you would be so good as to go to that one and tell me of your perceptions.” The Doctor pointed to a small snowball a few paces in front of Fatio.

  “I see the field, the Schloß, Arsenal, and Library-to-be. I see you, Doctor, standing by a great snowball, and over there to the right, not so far away, a lesser one.”

  “Now pray do the same from the other snowball that you made.”

  A few moments later Fatio was able to report: “The same.”

  “Exactly the same?”

  “Well, of course there are slight differences. Now, Doctor, you and the large snowball are to my right, and closer than before, and the small snowball is to my left.”

  Leibniz now deserted his post and began stomping towards Fatio. “Newton would have it that this field possesses a reality of its own, which governs the balls, and makes them discernible. But I say the field is not necessary! Forget about it, and consider only the balls’ perceptions.”

  “Perceptions?”

  “You said yourself that when you stood there you perceived a large snowball on the left, far away, and a small one on the right. Here you perceive a large one on the right, near at hand, and a small one on the left. So even though the balls might be indiscernible, and hence identical, in terms of their external properties such as size, shape, and weight, when we consider their internal properties—such as their perceptions of one another—we see that they are different. So they are discernible! And what is more, they may be discerned without reference to some sort of fixed, absolute space.”

  By now they had, without discussion, begun trudging back towards the Schloß, which looked deceptively warm and inviting as twilight deepened.

  “You seem to be granting every object in the Universe the power to perceive, and to record its perceptions,” Fatio ventured.

  “If you are going to venture down this road of subdividing objects into smaller and smaller bits, you must somewhere stop, and stick your neck out by saying, ‘This is the fundamental unit of reality, and thus are its properties, on which all other phænomena are built,’ ” said the Doctor. “Some think it makes sense that these are like billiard balls, which interact by colliding.”

  “I was just about to say,” said Fatio, “what could be simpler than that? A hard wee bit of indivisible matter. That is the most reasonable hypothesis of what an atom is.”

  “I disagree! Matter is complicated stuff. Collisions between pieces of matter are more complicated yet. Consider: If these a
toms are infinitely small, why, then, is it not true that the likelihood of one atom colliding with another is essentially zero?”

  “You have a point,” said Fatio, “but I hardly think it is somehow simpler to endow these atoms, instead, with the ability to perceive and to think.”

  “Perception and thought are properties of souls. It is no worse to posit that the fundamental building-block of the Universe is souls than to say it is wee bits of hard stuff, moving about in an empty space that is pervaded by mystickal Fields.”

  “Somehow a planet’s perception of the sun and all the other planets, then, causes it to behave exactly as if it were in such a ‘mystickal Field,’ to an uncanny degree of precision.”

  “I know it sounds difficult, Monsieur Fatio, but ’twill work out better in the long run.”

  “Physics, then, becomes a sort of vast record-keeping exercise. Every object in the Universe is distinguished from every other object by the uniqueness of its perceptions of all the other objects.”

  “If you think on it long enough you will see it is the only way to distinguish them.”

  “Why, it is as if every atom or particle—”

  “I call them monads.”

  “Monad, then, is a sort of Knowledge Engine unto itself, a Bücherrad-rad-rad-rad…”

  Leibniz summoned a weak smile.

  “Its gears grind away like the ones in your Arithmetickal Engine, and it decides what to do of its own accord. You knew Spinoza, did you not?”

  Leibniz held up a warning hand. “Yes. But pray do not put me in with him.”

  “If I may just return to the topic that got us started, Doctor, it seems to me that your theory allows for a possibility you scoffed at—namely, that two lumps of gold might be different from each other.”

  “Any two such lumps are different, but it is because, being differently situated, they have different perceptions. I am afraid that you want to assign mystickal properties to some gold and not other.”

  “Afraid why?”

  “Because the next thing you’ll do is melt it down to extract that mystery and put it in a phial.”

  Fatio sighed. “In truth, all these theories have their problems.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Why not admit it, then? Why this stubborn refusal to consider Newton’s system, when yours is just as fraught with difficulties?”

  Leibniz drew to a halt before the front stoop of the Schloß, as if he’d rather freeze than continue the discussion where it might be overheard. “Your question is dressed up in the guise of Reason, to make it appear innocent. Perhaps it is. Perhaps not.”

  “Even if you do not think me innocent, pray believe that my confusion is genuine.”

  “Isaac and I had this conversation long ago, when we were young, and matters stood quite differently.”

  “How odd. You are the only person, other than Daniel Waterhouse, who has ever called him by his Christian name.”

  The look of uncertainty on Leibniz’s face now hardened into open disbelief. “What do you call him, when the two of you are alone together in your London house?”

  “I stand corrected, Doctor. There are three of us who have known him thusly.”

  “That is a very clever sentence you just uttered,” Leibniz exclaimed, sounding genuinely impressed. “Like a silken cord turned in on itself and knotted into a snare. I commend you for it, but I will not put my foot in it. And I will thank you to keep Daniel out of it as well.”

  Fatio had turned red. “The only thing I wish to snare is a clearer understanding of what has passed between you and Isaac.”

  “You want to know if you have a rival.”

  Fatio said nothing.

  “The answer is: you do not.”

  “That is well.”

  “You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.”

  Ireland

  1690–1691

  THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history. Connaught was one, and the others were Ulster, Leinster, and Munster.

  Bob heard about Connaught first, but saw it last. Nevertheless, he felt he knew something of it. He had heard endless discourse of it during the last thirteen years from his Irish “out-laws,” the kin-folk of the late Mary Dolores, most of whom bore the surname of Partry.

  Until of late, the Partry clan and their swine, kine, assorted free-ranging poultry, and one bewildered sheep had teemed in a bit of shed in Rotherhithe, which lay across the Thames from Wapping, about a mile downstream of the Tower of London. Teague Partry—one of three Partrys who had, at one time or another, enlisted in the Black Torrent Guards—had often volunteered to stand watch on Develin Tower, the extreme southeastern vertex of the citadel, in spite of the fact that it was sorely exposed to raw weather coming up the River, and detested by all of the other soldiers. The cold wet winds, he claimed, reminded him of Connaught, and from his Develin vantage point he could see all the way downriver to Rotherhithe and keep an eye on his four-legged assets. Teague rhapsodized about Connaught all the time, and did it so convincingly that half the regiment was ready to move there. Bob had taken it with a grain of salt because he knew that Teague had never in his life ventured more than five miles’ distance from London Bridge, and was merely repeating tales told to him by his folk. From which Bob had collected, very early, something that it would have benefited the Partrys to know, namely that Ireland was a mentality, and not a physical place.

  After the Revolution the Partrys had slaughtered all their livestock, deserted their Regiment, gathered up what money they could, and escaped to Dublin. Several months later, Bob had been shipped to Belfast with the rest of his regiment, and with the Dutch colonel who’d been put in command of it. Now, King William found John Churchill hard enough to trust when he was inside London Wall. He could not possibly bring himself to trust Marlborough (or any other English commander) with an elite regiment on Irish soil, especially when Churchill’s former master, James, was only a few marches south, in Dublin. So it was under a Colonel de Zwolle that the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards voyaged to Belfast, and under him that they tarried on that island over two winters. When Bob next saw Churchill, he would assure his old chief that he had not missed a thing.

  From their point of disembarkation the regiment had marched south for a few days, and then wintered over in a camp at Dundalk, which lay near the border between the part of Ireland called Ulster and the one called Leinster. Out of a full strength of 806 men they suffered casualties of thirty-one dead, thirty-two so disabled that they had to be retired, and many hundreds who were laid low for a time but later got better. Most of these casualties were put down to disease or hunger, a few to accidents and brawls—zero to combat, of which there was none. This was an exceptionally good record.

  They were encamped near a Dutch regiment commanded by one of Colonel de Zwolle’s old drinking-and hunting-buddies. The Dutch soldiers suffered very little from disease, though they were every bit as cold and hungry. They kept their camp so clean that it was mocked as “the Nunnery” by certain men in Bob’s regiment, who espoused a more temperate approach to hygiene. But when English soldiers began dying at a rate of several per day, the Black Torrent Guards finally began to pay some attention to de Zwolle’s nagging and to emulate some of the practices of their Dutch neighbors. Coincidentally or not, the number of men sick in bed began to drop not long afterwards. When spring came and the rolls were called, it was found that they had suffered much lighter casualties than other English regiments.

  In June 1690, then, William of Orange f
inally arrived in Ulster as only a King could, viz. with three hundred ships, fifteen thousand troops, hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, more Princes, Dukes, and Bishops than a boat-load of playing-cards and chess-sets, and a lot of Dutch artillery. He marched south, pausing at Dundalk long enough to collect the regiments that had wintered over there, and then invaded Leinster at the head of thirty-six thousand men. He made straight for Dublin, where James Stuart had established his rebel Parliament. King William had a wooden house, designed by one Christopher Wren—that same bloke who was building the new St. Paul’s in London. It was ingeniously made so that it could be taken down in sections at a few minutes’ notice, transported on wagons, and put back up again wherever William decided to establish his headquarters. Normally he erected it in the midst of his army, which was not at all usual for a campaigning King, and made a good impression on his soldiers.

  James Stuart had been spoiling for a fight for a year and a half. He marched north from Dublin at the head of twenty-five thousand men and, after some preliminary maneuvering, set up a position on the south bank of the river called Boyne.

  The next day, William was reconnoitering the north bank in person, looking for crossing-places, when a Jacobite cannonball hit him on the shoulder and knocked him off his horse. Jacobites on the opposite bank saw it happen, and saw a vaguely king-shaped object being carried away in haste by agitated Protestants.

  What they could not see, from that side of the Boyne, was that the cannonball was a spent ricochet that had glanced off William’s shoulder and dealt him no serious harm. They made the wholly reasonable assumption that William the Usurper was dead and reported as much up the chain of command.

  The next day William launched a diversionary attack across the Boyne not far from where he had been hit. He waited for James to move his main force that way, then crossed the river in force elsewhere. The first to mount this main attack were William’s best and favorite soldiers, the Dutch Blue Guards. But they were followed closely by several companies of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, a plum job that never would have been afforded them if they’d been under the command of Marlborough. De Zwolle had spent the winter plying his superiors with brandy and sending letters to London; that probably explained how Bob and his men were given such a splendid opportunity to have their heads hacked off in a bog. They crossed the Boyne, at any rate, and formed up on the south bank, and withstood several Jacobite cavalry charges. This was not an easy thing to do. They did it in direct view of King William, who had found a vantage point on the north bank from which to observe his beloved Blues.