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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Chinese smugglers they accept grudgingly. It pleases them not to have a Christian ship drop anchor here. They want rid of us.”

  Van Hoek came by and said, “I had Father Gabriel write, in his last communication, that the transfer of metal would continue until the sun was four fingers above the western horizon—not a moment longer.”

  Every man on the ship who was not manning a cannon gravitated to the rail to watch the Japanese boat approach. As it drew closer, and the sun came clear of the rugged horizon, they were able to see a dozen or so commoners in drab clothing pulling on the oars, and, in the middle of the boat, three men wearing the same hair-do as Gabriel Goto, each armed with a pair of swords, and dressed in kimonos. Packed in around them were half a dozen archers in outlandish helmets and metal-strip armor. The boat was moving almost directly up-wind and so had not bothered raising her one sail, but from the mast she was flying a large banner of blue silk blazoned with a white insignia, a roundish shape that like the art of the Mahometans did not seem to be a literal depiction of anything in particular, but might have been thrown together by a man who had seen a flower once.

  A fresh breeze was rising up out of the Sea of Japan as the day got under way, and no one needed to consult a globe to guess that this air had originated over Siberia. It was the first time Jack had felt cold since he had left Amsterdam—a memory that caused him to rub absent-mindedly at the old harpoon-scar on his arm, which at the moment was all covered with goose-pimples. The crew of Filipinos, Malabaris, and Malays had never felt anything like this, and muttered to one another in astonishment. “Make sure they understand that this is only a taste of what will come when we are crossing the Pacific, or rounding Cape Horn,” van Hoek said to Dappa. “If any of them desires to jump ship, Manila will be his last opportunity.”

  “I am giving thought to it myself,” Dappa said, rubbing and spanking himself. His eyes crossed for a moment as he gazed in alarm at steam rising from his own mouth. “I could be a publican at the new Bomb and Grapnel…and never feel cold, except when I had snow brought down from Eliza Peak, and scooped a handful of it into a rum-drink. Brrr! How can those men stand it?” He nodded across fifty yards of chop to the Japanese boat. The Samurais were kneeling there stolidly, facing into the wind, which made their garments billow and snap.

  “Later they will go boil themselves in vats,” Enoch said learnedly.

  “When I saw Goto-san’s get-up,” Jack said, “I supposed that he’d had it pieced together of scraps collected from Popish Churches and whorehouses, such are the colors. Yet compared to what those sour-pusses in the boat are wearing, Father Gabriel’s togs look like funeral-weeds.”

  “They put French Cavaliers to shame,” Enoch agreed.

  In a few minutes the Japanese boat advanced into the lee of Minerva and drew up alongside her. Lines were thrown back and forth, and a pilot’s ladder unrolled from the upperdeck. The protocol of what followed had been worked out in such detail that van Hoek had to consult a written list: First, the Cabal gathered near the mainmast and said farewell to Gabriel Goto. Jack, for his part, had never felt especially friendly toward the man, but now he remembered the ronin doing battle against the foe at the needle’s eye in Khan el-Khalili, and his nose ran and tears came to his eyes. Gabriel Goto was recalling the same thing, for he bowed low to Jack and said in Sabir: “I have been a ronin all my life, Jack, which means a Samurai without a master—except for that one day in Cairo when I swore allegiance to you, and for a brief time knew what it was to have a Lord and to fight as part of an Army. Now I go to a place where I will have a new Lord and serve in a different Army. But in my heart I will always owe my first allegiance to you.” And then he removed the two swords, the katana and the wakizashi, from the belt of his garment, and presented them to Jack.

  Dappa, van Hoek, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig, and Vrej Esphahnian each stepped forward to exchange bows with the Samurai. Moseh, Surendranath, and the Shaftoe boys had remained behind in Manila and had already said their good-byes on the banks of the Pasig. Finally Gabriel Goto strode over to the top of the ladder and threw one leg over the gunwale and began to descend, rung by rung, vanishing below the teak horizon. For a moment only his head was visible, his face clenched like a fist, a few stray strands of hair whipping around in the wind. Then it was only his top-knot. Then he was gone.

  Jack sighed. “We are a Cabal no longer,” he said. “What began on the roof of the banyolar in Algiers has dissolved in this Japanese smugglers’-cove.”

  “We are all business partners now, and not brothers-in-arms,” said Dappa.

  “There is no difference to me,” said Vrej Esphahnian, moderately annoyed. “Why should the bonds holding a business partnership together be inferior to those joining brothers-in-arms? For me the venture does not end here—it only begins.”

  Jack laughed. “A great adventure to other men is a routine thing for an Armenian, it seems.”

  A different top-knot appeared at the gunwale, and a different Samurai came aboard and exchanged bows with van Hoek. It was obvious from the way he looked around that he had never seen a ship of any size before, to say nothing of sailors with red hair, blue eyes, or black skin. But he kept his composure and carried on with the next phase of the protocol: van Hoek presented him with a single egg of wootz, which had been cleverly boxed and wrapped, with great ceremony, by an ancient Japanese lady in Manila. The Samurai made as great a ceremony of unwrapping it, then handed it off to one of his archers, who had to scamper up the ladder to get it.

  Van Hoek gave the visitor a tour of Minerva’s hold, where many more eggs of wootz, and diverse other goods besides, were waiting for inspection. Meanwhile Enoch Root caused his black chest to be lowered into the boat. Then he descended the ladder. In a few minutes he was followed by the Samurai, who’d finished his inspection belowdecks. The Japanese boat cast off its lines, raised a sail, and quickly made its way into a pier, where it was tied up next to a much larger vessel, a sort of cargo-barge that looked as if it might be used for ferrying goods between shore and ship. Under the watchful spyglasses of various men on Minerva, everyone disembarked onto the pier. Enoch was escorted to a sort of warehouse on the shore.

  Half an hour later the alchemist came out by himself and boarded the boat. Immediately it shoved off and began rowing towards Minerva. At the same time a few score boat-men swarmed over the barge and cast off its mooring-lines, and began laboring with oars and push-poles to move it away from shore.

  Enoch Root ascended the pilot’s ladder like a young man, though when his face appeared above the rail he had a grave look about him. To van Hoek he said, “I performed every test I know of. More tests than the assayers in New Spain will likely do. I submit to you that the stuff is as pure as any from the mines of Europe.” To Jack the only thing he said was, “It is a very strange country.”

  “How strange?” Jack asked.

  Enoch shook his head and answered “Enough to make me understand how strange Christendom is.” Then he retired to his cabin.

  Minerva’s sailors pulled his belongings up on ropes: first his chest of alchemical whatnot, and second a box, still partly covered in gaudy wrapping paper. Dappa caught this as it was hoisted over the rail and set it down on a table that they’d brought up from van Hoek’s wardroom. Nestled in crumpled paper inside the box was an egg of fired clay: a flask, stoppered at one end by a wooden bung. Wax had been dribbled over this to seal it, but Enoch Root had already violated the seal so that he could perform his tests. Dappa thrust his hands down into the nest of paper and cupped the egg in his hands and raised it up into cold blue sunlight. Van Hoek drew out his dagger and used its tip to worry the bung loose. When this had been removed, Dappa tipped the flask. Fluid sloshed inside with momentum so potent that it nearly pulled him off his feet. A bead of liquid silver leapt out into the sun and built speed until it struck the tabletop with the impact of a hammer. Then it exploded in a myriad gleaming balls that glided across the table and cascaded over its e
dge like a waterfall and spattered heavily on Minerva’s deck. The quicksilver probed downhill, seeking gaps between planks, spattering down into the gundeck and making an argent rain among the men who stood tense by their guns. A murmur and then a thrill ran through the ship. It was to every man aboard as if Minerva had received a second christening, with quicksilver instead of Champagne, and that she was now re-consecrated to a new mission and purpose.

  It was high noon before the barge was alongside Minerva and the transfer of cargo could begin. This was an awkward way to do it, but the Japanese officials would on no account suffer Minerva to approach shore. With larger cargo it would have been well nigh impossible. But Minerva was laden with wootz, silk, and pepper, and the barge carried nothing but flasks of quicksilver, and bales of straw for packing it. Any of these items could be passed or thrown from hand to hand, and once they had got it organized the transfer went on at a terrific pace—a hundred men, sweating and breathing hard, could transfer tons of cargo in a minute. Steel, spice, and silk streamed out of Minerva’s holds and were replaced by quicksilver. The outgoing and incoming flows grazed each other at one place on the upperdeck, where Monsieur Arlanc and Vrej Esphahnian sat at the table facing each other, each armed with a stockpile of quills, one tallying the quicksilver and the other tallying other goods. Every so often they would call out figures to each other, just making sure that the flows were balanced, so that Minerva would not rise too high or sink too low in the water.

  Enoch Root emerged, rubbing sleep from his eyes, when the transfer was perhaps two-thirds complete. He flicked his eyes at Jack, and then van Hoek, and then returned to his cabin.

  Twenty seconds later Jack and van Hoek were in there with him.

  “I was trying to sleep but that lanthorn kept me awake,” Enoch said, nodding at an oil lamp that was suspended from the ceiling of his cabin on a chain. It was swinging back and forth dramatically even though the ship was only rocking slightly from side to side.

  “Why don’t you take it down?” Jack asked.

  “Because I think it is trying to tell me something,” Enoch said. He then turned his gaze on van Hoek. “You told me, once, that every harbor, depending on its size, has a characteristic wave. You said that even if you were lying in your cabin with the curtains drawn you could tell the difference between Batavia and Cavite simply by the period of the waves.”

  “It’s true,” van Hoek said. “Any captain can tell you stories of ships that were proven seaworthy, but that were cast away entering an unfamiliar harbor, because the period of that harbor’s waves happened to match the natural frequency of the ship’s hull.”

  “Every ship, depending on how it is ballasted and laden, rocks in a particular rhythm—just as this lantern swings at a fixed rate,” said Enoch, explaining it for Jack. “If waves strike that ship in the same rhythm, then she soon begins moving so violently that she overturns and is cast away.”

  “Just as a lute-string that is plucked makes its partner, which is tuned to the same note, vibrate in natural sympathy,” said van Hoek. “Go on, Enoch.”

  “When we sailed into this harbor early this morning, my lanthorn suddenly began to swing so violently that it was bashing against the ceiling and spilling oil about the cabin,” Enoch said. “And so I took it down and adjusted the chain to a different length, as you see it now.” Enoch now lifted the lanthorn’s chain from its hook in the ceiling-beam, and began to feel his way along, link by link, until he came to one that was worn smooth. “This is how it was when we entered the harbor,” he said, and then re-hung the lanthorn so that it dangled a few inches lower than before. He pulled it away to the side and then let it go, and it began swinging back and forth in the center of the cabin. “So it follows that the frequency we observe now—swing, swing, swing—is tuned to the natural period of this harbor’s waves.”

  “With all due respect to you and your friends of the Royal Society,” van Hoek said, “can this demonstration not wait until we are out in the middle of the Sea of Japan?”

  “It cannot,” Enoch said calmly, “because we will never reach the Sea of Japan. This is a death-trap.”

  Van Hoek was about to spring to his feet, but Enoch restrained him with a hand on the shoulder, and glanced out his cabin window lest they be observed by some Japanese. “Hold,” he said, “it is a subtle trap and subtle we must be to escape it. Jack, on my bed there is a flask.”

  Jack, who was too tall to stand upright in the cabin, crab-walked sideways a step or two, and found one of the quicksilver-flasks nestled among Enoch’s bed-clothes.

  “Hold it out at arm’s length,” Enoch said.

  Jack did so, though it took the strength of both arms. The quicksilver inside the flask swirled about as he moved it, but then it settled. His hands became still. Then the liquid metal began sloshing back and forth, forcing his hands to move left, right, left, right, no matter how hard he tried to hold it still.

  “Mark the lantern,” said Enoch. Attention shifted from the sloshing flask to the swinging light.

  Van Hoek saw it first. “They move at the same period.”

  “Which is the same as what?” Enoch asked, like a schoolmaster leading his pupils forward onto new ground.

  “The natural rhythm of the waves at the entrance to this harbor,” Jack said.

  “I have tried three flasks in this way, and all of them slosh at the same frequency,” Enoch said. “I submit to you that they have been tuned, as carefully as the pipes in a cathedral-organ. When this ship is fully loaded, and we try to sail out the harbor’s mouth—”

  “We will hit those waves…ten tons of quicksilver will began to heave back and forth…we will be torn apart,” van Hoek said.

  “It is a simple matter to remedy,” Enoch said. “All we need is to go down and open the flasks and fill each one up so that they cannot slosh. But we must not let the Japanese know that we have figured out their plan, or else they will swarm on us. The warehouse on shore has an oily smell. I believe that there are many archers concealed in the woods, waiting with fire-arrows.”

  THEY FINISHED THE TRANSFER OF goods with plenty of daylight left. The Samurai in charge of the barge bid them farewell with a perfunctory bow and then turned his attention to getting his hoard of exotic goods in to shore. Van Hoek ordered preparations made for sailing, but they were of a highly elaborate nature, and took much longer than they might have. Belowdecks he had pulled one man off of each gun crew and put as many as he could muster to work unstoppering the quicksilver-flasks and decanting the mercury from one to the next, until each one was brim-full. Aboard ship there was never a shortage of pitch and black stuff used for caulking seams, and so each one of the flasks was sealed shut in that way. Half an hour before sunset van Hoek ordered the anchors weighed, a procedure that lasted until twilight had fallen over the harbor.

  From that point onwards it was mad, black toil for many hours. There was a full moon (they’d planned it that way long in advance, so that they’d have better light during the tricky parts of the journey) and it shone very bright in the cold sky. As they traversed the harbor entrance, all of the ship’s officers gathered in Enoch’s cabin to watch the one quicksilver flask that had not been changed; it seemed to come alive at a certain point, when the rhythmic waves struck the hull, and thrashed around as if some djinn were trapped inside trying to fight its way out.

  This was the point when the Japanese must have realized that their trap had been foiled, and out they came in longboats that were all ablaze with many points of fire from burning arrows. But van Hoek was ready. Abovedecks, the riggers had quietly readied all the courses of sail that Minerva had to offer, and they spread it all before the wind as soon as they heard the war-drums booming from the shore. Belowdecks, every cannon had been loaded with grape-shot. The Japanese boats could not hope to match Minerva’s speed once she got under way, and the few that came close were driven back by her cannons. All of about half a dozen burning arrows lodged in her teak-wood and were quickly snuff
ed out by officers with buckets of sand and water. They were able to get well clear of the shore, and of their pursuers, by the moon’s light.

  When the sun rose over Japan the next morning, a soldier’s wind came up out of the west—which meant it blew perpendicular to their southerly heading, and was therefore so easy to manage that even soldiers could have trimmed the sails. Nevertheless van Hoek kept her speed low at first, because he was concerned that the flasks would shift about in their straw packing as they entered into heavier seas. As Minerva worked through various types of waves, van Hoek prowled around her decks sensing the movements of the cargo like a clairvoyant, and frequently communing with the spirit of Jan Vroom (who had died of malaria a year ago). His verdict, of course, was that they’d done a miserable job of packing the flasks, and that it would all have to be re-done when they got to Manila, but that, given the hazards of pirates and typhoons, they had no choice but to raise more sail anyway. So that is what they did.

  They added one or two more knots to their speed thereby, and after three days, ran the Straits of Tsushima: a procedure that might have been devised by some fiendish engineer specifically to drive van Hoek mad with anxiety, as it involved running down a complex and current-ridden, yet poorly charted chute hemmed in on one side by pirate-islands of Korea and on the other by a country (Japan) where it was death for a foreigner to set foot. The paintings of Gabriel Goto’s father were of very little use because that ronin had been piloting a boat of much shallower draft than Minerva and invariably chose to hug shorelines and squirt through gaps between islands where Minerva could not go.

  At any rate they made it through, and putting the mountains of Japan on their larboard quarter they ventured into the East China Sea. Immediately the lookout identified sails to larboard: a ship emerging through a spacious gap between certain outlying Japanese islands, and coming about into a course roughly parallel with their own. This was curious, because the charts showed nothing but Japanese land in the direction from which the ship had come—beyond that, it was the Pacific Ocean for one hundred degrees, and then vague sketches of a supposed American coastline. And yet this ship was unmistakably European. More to the point, as van Hoek announced after peering at it for a while through his spyglass, it was Dutch. And that settled the mystery. This was one of those Dutch vessels that was allowed to sail into the harbor of Nagasaki and anchor before Deshima—a walled and guarded island-compound near that city, where a handful of Europeans were suffered to dwell for brief periods as they traded with the representatives of the Shogun.