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

by Neal Stephenson

  But then finally a cart-train came down out of the north laden with charcoal and with firewood, and Vrej Esphahnian unveiled a wooden crate containing a gross of glass bottles (smoky brown, striated, and bubbly, but more or less transparent), and they were ready to go. Jack had mentioned to them, and Padraig had demonstrated beyond all question, that the apparatus would destroy itself in a spitting storm of white fire shortly after they were finished using it; they had, in other words, one and only one chance.

  At last one morning Jack and van Hoek and some local representatives of the chamber-pot-handling caste wrapped cloths around their mouths and noses and set about lugging the vast motley collection of kegs, urns, and pots of fœtid urine up to the great kettle and dumping them in. At the same time, the largest and hottest possible bonfire was kindled beneath. It took some time for the fire to take hold, for the piss had grown chilly sitting out overnight. But when it did, all fled the compound, and many fled the neighborhood. They would have fled screaming, if they’d had the power to draw breath. Not that they were any strangers to the stench of old piss, by this point; but what the kettle exhaled was of an altogether different order. The broad rim of that kettle might as well have been the maw of Jupiter-Ammon himself, striking mortals dead, not with thunderbolts from on high, but with burning exhalations drawn up from Hell. It made the air shiver as it came on, and made birds fold their wings and smack their little heads into the ground. Men could do nothing but hide their eyes in the crooks of their arms, plug their noses, and bump into one another until they found a way out. When they had escaped to a radius where it was possible to draw breath, they turned inwards and watched the kettle through sheets of burning tears. From time to time someone would draw in a deep breath and hold it while he sprinted back to the hell-mouth to shove a few more pieces of cord-wood into the fire.

  After a while the stench dissipated, and not long after that, steam began to rise. Presently the kettle came to a galloping boil, and they found that they could approach. The Breath of Ammon had all been expelled. But this was not the last time they smelled it, for the kettle had not been capacious enough to hold all the urine they had collected, and much remained strewn about the compound in diverse small containers. As the level of the boiling brew fell, they dumped in more urine to top it off again, and each time they did, it let off another scream of Ammon-breath. This went on for much of the day; but finally the last chamber-pot had been emptied and tossed into the street. A few minutes later the stench of sal ammoniac abated for good. There followed an interlude of some hours during which the kettle merely boiled, and threw off a column of steam that rose high over Diu and drifted away into the blue sky over the sea. Jack, peering in over the kettle’s rim, saw it boiled down to a small fraction of its former volume, and glimpsed just beneath the foaming surface a churning mass of solid yellow-brown stuff. From time to time he reached into it with a paddle, checking its consistency as he had seen Enoch Root do. When it became difficult to stir, he called for charcoal. The mass was stained with black as sacks of the stuff, ground up to the consistency of meal, were dumped in. Jack stirred until the mix was gray, and so dry and thick that the paddle nearly became lodged in it. Moisture was still condensing on his brow, but he knew all the water was nearly gone now, and they must work quickly. The others knew as much as Jack did, having been in on the trial batch that had taken Padraig’s eye. So when Jack jumped back from the kettle’s rim they did not need to be told what to do: pulling on lines and pushing with sticks, they maneuvered over the kettle’s rim an upside-down funnel of the same diameter, and set it down so that the two were joined in an open-mouth kiss, and packed oakum and dribbled tar around the junction so that no fume could escape. All of the vapors emanating from the hot gray mass in the bottom of the kettle were now channeled up into the copper dunce-cap, which had but one outlet: a copper chimney that bent round to the side and developed into a snergly tube, terminated by a U-bend that led into the bottom of the smaller vessel—the bubbler—with the glass port-hole in its side. This was filled with water, as anyone who looked at the window could see. It was two fathoms above the ground, and they had erected a scaffold and a platform of bamboo so that they could work there.

  When Jack was satisfied with the progress of the caulking and sealing of the great dunce-cap, he ascended the platform—a tinker’s shop and an apothecary-store of ladles, funnels, bottles, and terra-cotta vessels of clove-oil—and was pleased to observe a slight rise in the water-level, followed by a blurp and a collapse as some residual steam forced its way through the water-trap in the U-bend. This happened several more times in the next few minutes as the very last of the moisture was exhaled from the humid cake in the kettle, but then it stopped. There was then an interlude, which grew awkward the longer it went on; but Jack bid them keep stoking the fire and have faith. He was viewing the water level with respect to a wee bubble trapped in the glass pane, and for a while it did not move at all. But then it rose up distinctly, and a moment later a little belch of vapor shimmered up through the water and broke out the top. “It begins!” he announced.

  Contrary to claims lately issued by Mr. Foot to the good people of Diu, Jack did not have the power to command the wheeling of the heavens. It was wholly fortuitous that the sun went down a few minutes later. The window in the side of the bubbler gleamed in the light of the sunset, as shiny objects were wont to do. But after the sun had gone down it continued to glow for a length of time that was odd, then remarkable, and, finally, unnatural. For it only got brighter as the night grew darker. Had it not been square, it might have been mistaken for a full moon. It grew so bright that if Jack stared at it full-on he became dazzled, and then could see nothing else. He assigned to Monsieur Arlanc the duty of monitoring the level of the water and adding more as needed to keep it from boiling dry; which had been the error that had led to Padraig’s injury. Jack then turned his back on the window and let his eyes adjust. From the platform, he saw, as if he were an actor on a stage, a lake of faces, all turned his way, many with mouths open in wonder, all lit up by the blue-green radiance of the kaltes Feuer, the cold fire, of Phosphorus: light-bearer. They were all out of doors, of course, and the cold fire confined to a small vessel of beaten copper; but that was not how it seemed. It seemed that these people were all walled up inside some black dungeon, which had only a single square window, high up in the wall, through which light shone in from another world.

  “This will all be smoking ruins by break of day,” he announced, “let us gather what we may of the kaltes Feuer and preserve it from the air, and ourselves from fiery death!”

  They went about that in two ways. First, someone would from time to time dip a ladle into the top of the bubbler and scoop out portions of the water, and along with it, flecks and flakes of cold fire that swirled through it like sparks above a campfire. This they decanted through funnels into the bottles that Vrej had procured. The glowing bottles were handed down to others on the ground, who stopped them with rags to prevent air from getting in. These were then placed into a tray of simmering water that was going over a bed of coals. Gradually, over a period of hours, the level of water within these bottles declined as it escaped through the rag stoppers. But the amount of light escaping from them did not diminish, for the waxy phosphorus was trapped inside, and tended to cling to the walls, so that each bottle over time acquired a blotchy lining of weird light. When these bottles were nearly dry, they were plucked out and plunged neck-first into a tar-pot, to seal them against infiltration of air.

  Second, they dumped ladles of the stuff into clay pots each of which contained a small amount of clove oil. The water fell through the oil and found the bottom of the pot, shedding some of its burden of phosphorus along the way. These pots were then subjected to a similar process of gentle heating, so that the water trapped beneath the oil was driven out as steam. When these pots stopped blurping and steaming, it meant that all the water was gone, and nothing was left but phosphorus suspended in oil. The oil coa
ted the tiny particules of phosphorus and prevented air from touching them, which rendered the stuff safe.

  This anyway was the general plan of action. For the most part it actually went this way; but what made it interesting were the mishaps. Every splash and spill remained visible as a pool, burst, or dribbling trail of cold fire. Jack got some splashed on a forearm and did not notice it until he went and stood by the bottle-simmering place for a few minutes; the warmth shining from the bed of coals dried the damp place on his arm, leaving a fine layer of phosphorus that burst into unquenchable flame. Many had similar stories. Presently most of them were naked, having frantically stripped off clothing when it was pointed out to them by excited spectators that they were glowing. Ladles were spilled on the scaffolding by burnt and nervous hands, obliging Monsieur Arlanc to stand his ground with more than human courage as he implored someone to come up and wash away the spill with buckets of fresh water before it dried out. The caulking around the windowpane weeped, then seeped, then began to dribble a steady stream of cold fire. They made shift to catch what they could of this, and confine it to bottles or oil-pots; but matters deteriorated as more and more of the scaffold, the ground beneath it, and the men working on it became tinged with the fire, which could have only one consequence when it dried. Finally Jack ordered Monsieur Arlanc to abandon ship. The Huguenot vaulted down with spryness odd in a man of his age, rending his garments even as he hit the ground; men converged on him with buckets of sea-water and sluiced him off until he was dark. Then all ran away, for the leak around the windowpane had opened wide, and the fire was raining down in a blinding cataract. The water all came out. Air found its way in through the empty bubbler to the chimney, which had become thickly lined with condensed phosphorus. White fire shrieked out of it. The sun rose. What a moment ago had been glowing pools of spilled fire on the black velvet ground, were revealed as damp patches on khaki dirt. The bubbler ripped loose, hurtled away, and impacted on the roof of a monastery half a mile downrange. The chimney and dunce-cap shot into the air, spiraling and pin-wheeling through the night sky as if the Big Dipper had scooped up a load of the sun’s own fire. It landed somewhere out to sea. Left in the vicinity of the scaffold was a metropolis of small sputtering conflagrations that erupted here and there without warning over the next several hours. Fortunately they had had the wisdom to establish the double-boilers for the bottles and the clove-oil pots at a respectful distance. So they abandoned the center and toiled at the periphery until daybreak. This was not without some dangers of its own; sometimes a bottle would crack from the heat, and then some intrepid person would have to pluck it out with tongs and fling it away, lest in burning and exploding it would detonate the others. This led to the burning-down of the house where they had all been dwelling. In other circumstances, the loss of their domicile would have been rated a grave setback; as it was, they knew they were going to be kicked out of town anyway. A formation of Portuguese pikemen came for them at daybreak. Working amid the smoldering ruins of what had, a month earlier, been a perfectly respectable brewery, Jack and the others had already loaded the bottles (packed very carefully in straw) and the pots of oil into crates, and the crates onto those wagons that remained unburnt, and harnessed these to the few domesticated beasts that had not run away or simply dropped dead of terror during the night-time. They were escorted, not to say pursued, by the pikemen down to the quay where they boarded their hired boat with the phosphorus and what few possessions they still had. Winds favored them; pirates, who had witnessed strange apparitions in the night sky above Diu, avoided them; and a day and half a later they were in Surat, taking up their position near the head of a great armed trade-caravan, and beginning the long march north and east to Shahjahanabad.

  “YOU WILL BE AMUSED to know that where I come from, swords are straight,” Jack said. “Some are broader, and indeed, being a plain-spoken people, we call those broadswords. Some are of intermediate size, as rapiers, others whisker-thin, as the small-swords that are lately in vogue. Oh, admittedly one sees a few blades with a bit of a curve to them, as in your cutlass or saber. But compared to these, they’re all straight as a line, as are the style and tactics of their usage. Compared to which…” Jack extended a hand towards a Mobb of warriors that they had picked up in Surat. There were Yavanas—which was to say, Muslims—who had come across the water from the lands to the west, or down out of Afghanistan, Balochistan, or this or that Khanate. And there were Hindoos of diverse martial castes who for whatever reason had elected to throw in their lot with the Moguls. But even within the smallest discernible sub-sub-subtribe each warrior had a weapon—or at least, a dangerous-looking object—completely different from the next bloke’s.

  Among the personal effects of the Doctor, Jack had once seen books, filled not with letters but with depictions of curves. These he had leafed through in times of boredom; for though he could not read, he could stare at a strange curve as well as any other man. Eliza had sat next to him and pronounced their names: the Limaçon of Pascal, the Kampyle of Eudoxus, the Conchoid of de Sluze, the Quadratrix of Hippias, the Epitrochoid, Tractrix, and the Cassinian Ovals. At the onset of the recitation Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry. There was not a straight blade in all of Hindoostan. Some weapons had grips at one end and were sharpened elsewhere; these might be classed as swords. Others consisted mostly of handle, with a dangerous bit at one end; these Jack conceived of as axes or spears, depending on whether they looked like they were meant to be swung, or shoved. Still others had strings, and seemed capable of projecting arrows. Jack put these down as bows. But of the sword-like ones, some were bent all the way round to form hooks; some curved first one way, then thought better of it and veered back the other; some had a different curve on either edge, so that they became broad as shovels in parts; some quivered back and forth like wriggling snakes; some forked, or spun off hooks, beaks, barbs, lobes, prongs, or even spirals. There were swords shaped like feathers, horseshoes, goat-horns, estuaries, penises, fish-hooks, eyebrows, hair-combs, Signs of the Zodiac, half-moons, elm-leaves, dinner-forks, Persian slippers, baker’s paddles, pelican’s beaks, dog’s legs, and Corinthian columns. This did not take into account the truly outlandish contraptions that seemed to have been made by piling two or more such weapons atop each other, heating, and beating. Of long-handled swinging-weapons (axes, maces, hammers, halberds, and weaponized farm-implements, viz. war-sickles, combat-flails, assault-shovels, and tactical adzes) there was a similar variety. Most troublesome to Jack’s mind, for some reason, were the bows which instead of the good old crescent of English yew, here seemed to’ve been made from the legs of giant spiders; they were black, sinewy, glossy, spindly things that curved this way and that, and were sometimes longer on one end than the other, so that Jack could not even make out which end was up; which part was the handle; or which side was supposed to face the enemy. For each of these weapon-styles, he knew, there must be a six-thousand-year-old martial art with its own set of unfathomable rites, lingo, exercises, and secrets that could only be mastered through a lifetime of miserable study.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me it is all quite mundane compared to the weaponry of our adversaries,” Jack muttered.

  “In truth you have waxed so peevish that I have avoided that, and all other topics of conversation, these last few hours,” said Surendranath.

  The Banyan was in his palanquin. Jack rode a horse. This helped explain the peevishness, for the former reclined in the shade of a roof while the latter was protected onl
y by a turban.

  “Verily this must be the kingdom of Gordy himself,” said Jack.

  “Who or what is Gordy?”

  “Some bloke who had a Knot once, so tangled that the only way to get it undone was to chop it in twain. The story is proverbial among ferangs. It is what we are about to do at the crossing of the Narmada. Rather than see all of these blokes cross scimitars, kitars, khandas, jamdhars, tranchangs, et cetera with the Marathas, we are going to cut the Gordian Knot.”

  “To you it may be a proverb of great significance but to me it is meaningless,” said Surendranath, “and I would fain have something like an actual plan of battle before we meet the foe, which will probably occur this very night.”

  Here Surendranath was only pointing out something that had been weighing on Jack’s mind anyway, which was that they had been so preoccupied with making the phosphorus, and recovering from having made it, that they’d not thought much about what to do with it. So Padraig, Vrej, Monsieur Arlanc, and Mr. Foot were sent for, and presently rode up to join Jack and Surendranath. Van Hoek had chopped off the tips of his fingers the night before and, still woozy from shock and opium, was being carried behind on another palanquin.

  “This country that we have been traveling through,” said the Banyan, “is hardly the type of scene to make any of you write awe-struck letters home, but it is the most dangerous and unsettled part of Hindoostan.”

  They had made landfall at the port of Surat, which was at the mouth of the river Tapti, and since then had been heading north, following a caravan-road that ran parallel to the sea-coast, a few miles inland. From time to time they would cross some smaller stream that, like the Tapti, meandered down out of the country to their right on its way to the Gulf of Cambaye, to their left. All knew that the biggest such river was called the Narmada and that they would come to it today, but so flat was the landscape that it afforded no hints as to how near or far the great river might be. This coastal plain reminded Jack a little bit of the Nile Delta, which was to say that it was well-watered, populated with many villages, and presented to the traveler a mixed prospect of marshes, farms, and groves of diverse kinds of trees that were cultivated (or at least allowed to stay alive) because they provided fruit or oil or fiber. “We shall see wilder and stranger landscapes farther north,” Surendranath promised them, “but by then we shall be out of danger.