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

by Neal Stephenson

  “It matters not to me, for my voyaging days have ended,” said Moseh. “If Edmund de Ath tries to do any mischief I’ll put on my poncho and sombrero and ride north with saddlebags full of silver.”

  “Very well,” Jack said, “but first you had better learn how to ride. It is more difficult than pulling on an oar.”

  Book 5

  The Juncto

  Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin

  JULY 1701

  “YOUR HIGHNESS, WHEN I WAS a boy—rather younger than you are now, hard as that might be to imagine—I was locked out of a library for a time, and I did not care for it at all,” said the bald man leading the young woman down the gallery. “I pray you understand how it has pained me to have locked you out of yours for the last week—”

  “It’s not really mine, is it? The library is the property of Uncle Freddy and Aunt Figgy!”

  “But you have made it yours by spending so much time there.”

  “While it was closed, you’ve brought me every book I asked for without delay, Doctor. So whyever should I mind?”

  “It’s true, Highness, my desire to apologize to you is wholly irrational, Q.E.D.”

  “Is it just one of those Barock apologies that courtiers put at the beginnings of letters?”

  “I should hope not. An apology may be heartfelt without being rational.”

  “Whereas a courtier’s apology is the opposite,” said the Princess, “in that it is insincere but calculated.”

  “It is well said—but said too loudly,” answered the proud Doctor. “Your voice carries for a mile down these echoing galleries; and a courtier who has just snatched an indiscretion out of the air will prance about to all the salons like a puppy who has just stolen a drumstick.”

  “Then let’s in here, where my voice will be muffled by books, and where courtiers never venture,” answered Caroline, and paused before the doors to the library, waiting for Leibniz to open them for her.

  “Now you will see your birthday present, and I hope you like it,” said the Doctor, drawing a key on a blue silk ribbon from his pocket. The key was a rod of steel having a fabulously ornate handle at one end, and at the other, a sort of three-dimensional maze carved into a steel cube. He inserted this into a square hole in the door-lock, wiggled it to and fro to make it one with the mechanism concealed inside, then turned it. Before opening the doors, he removed the key from the lock and hung it on its blue ribbon around the Princess’s neck. “Since you cannot carry your present with you, I hope you’ll carry this key as a token. May you never be locked out again.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. When I am Queen of some country or other, I shall build you a library greater than that of Alexandria, and give you a golden key to it.”

  “I fear that I shall be too old and blind to make good use of the library—but I shall accept the key with gratitude, and carry it to my grave.”

  “That would be irresponsible of you—then no one else would be able to get into the Library!” Caroline answered, with a roll of the eyes, and a sharp sigh of exasperation. “Open the doors, Doctor, I want to see it!”

  Leibniz unlatched the double doors, turned around, and backed through them so that he could watch her face. He saw light reflected in her blue eyes: light from high windows all around the room, and from sparking fire-works set in buckets of sand to make it look like one great birthday-cake.

  The library had been built two stories high, with a catwalk all around, halfway up, to afford access to the higher shelves, and its walls and the frescoed vault overhead had been generously arched with windows so that “Aunt Figgy” (short for Figuelotte, as Queen Sophie Charlotte was known to her family) and her bookish friends could read into the evening without need of candles. The high windows had been cracked open to let the room breathe in warm summer air and to exhale the smoke from the fizzing sparklers. The frescoes depicted the same assortment of Classical scenes that covered the ceiling of every rich person in Christendom nowadays, though the gods and goddesses had been provided with blond hair and blue eyes so that Jupiter might as well have been Wotan. Trompe l’oeil made it look as if the library had no ceiling but was open to the blue skies, and the gods were all springing out of frothy clouds. The writhing columns of smoke from the fireworks spread out against the plaster-work and swirled about to make the illusion that much better.

  A cheer and a little song followed, from the dozen or so people who had come to wish Caroline Glück on her Geburtstag. It was a small party, for a Princess, and it was an older crowd. Sophie was the eldest of all at seventy-one—she had come out from Hanover, crammed into a carriage with Leibniz and her grandchildren: George August (who was a few months younger than Caroline) and Sophie Dorothea (four years younger yet). Sophie Charlotte (Figuelotte), Queen of Prussia and the mistress and namesake of the palace, was here with her son Frederick William, a legendary brat of thirteen. Filling out the guest list was the motliest collection of metaphysicians, mathematicians, radical theologians, writers, musicians, and poets ever brought together for a princess’s eighteenth birthday.

  The Queen of Prussia liked to stage operas, when she wasn’t inciting riotous dinner-table debates among her friends, and the only sense in which she was ever a tyrant was in ordering some poor physicist to don a mad-cap and warble a role for which he was untrained and ill-suited. Princess Caroline had been dragooned, from time to time, to sing a Nymph or Angel part. Nothing, except perhaps for fighting side-by-side in a war, forged bonds among disparate persons so well as performing together on stage, and so Caroline had become a great friend of these grownups, her fellow-sufferers on the boards of the Charlottenburg.

  With wine-glasses and sparklers in hand they had gathered round a pedestal that had been built of polished cherry-wood in the center of the library. Surmounting this, and spreading out above the heads of the revelers, was a large spherical object—

  “A cage!” Caroline exclaimed.

  Dismay flowed over Leibniz’s face. But very soon that emotion gave way to a sort of distracted, intrigued look, as his curiosity had been somehow provoked. He bobbed his head in a way that might have been a nod, or a bow. “C’est juste,” he said. “Geometers have, with their parallels and meridians, ruled the globe that, being unmarked, save by irregular coastlines and river-courses, seemed wild to eyes that only in order could see beauty. But one who loves Nature for her variety might see the geometers’ devices as a disfigurement—no bird is as beautiful when seen through the bars of a cage, as it is in the wild. But I pray, Highness, that you will construe this rather as an inventory of the known. It is a map of the world, not as flattened out by cartographers, but as it is.”

  The globe had been set at an angle, as the earth was tilted with respect to the ecliptic. An unexplored portion of the South Pacific bore on the pedestal. Not far away from it, the south pole presented itself just at the level of Caroline’s head. This globe was indeed fashioned like a spherical bird-cage, with curving brass bars following the lines of longitude and latitude. Most of it (the oceans) was open-work. But the continents were curved plates of brass riveted to those bars. They were mounted to the inside of the cage, rather than the outside, so that the bars passed in front of them—at least, for the celebrants who were standing around it. An irregular, wholly factitious continent had been placed around the south pole, representing the hypothetical land of Antarctica, and this had a round hatchway cut into it, and steps leading up to it from the floor.

  Dr. Krupa (a Bohemian mathematician who had become a sort of permanent houseguest here) said, “Highness, some have proposed that at the world’s poles are openings where one may descend into the earth’s interior. Here is your opportunity personally to put that hypothesis to the test.”

  The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick Willi
am shut up for a moment, sensing a frisson running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte’s doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

  Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded—giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. “It begins,” she said, “already the boys are vying for Caroline’s attention.”

  “Is that what they’re doing?” Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,* who was five years older than, and twice the size of, his assailant, body-slammed Frederick William† against a smaller and more traditional sort of globe that had been shoved into a corner to make way for the new one. The papier-mâché sphere crumpled inward and Frederick William ended up wearing it on his head, making him look like some antipodean creature with a monstrously oversized brain.

  These antics had gone unnoticed, or been deliberately ignored, by Monsieur Molyneux, a Huguenot writer who had been haunting Berlin since his family had been wiped out in Savoy. “Why indeed should we not view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?” he reflected.

  “Because God is not a prison-warden,” Leibniz answered sharply, but stopped when an elbow even sharper (Sophie’s) caught him in the ribs.

  Princess Caroline had taken her seat: a swivel-stool mounted in the middle of the globe. Planting one of her party-shoes at the junction of the Twentieth West Meridian and the Fortieth South Parallel, so that the toe seemed to breach out of the South Atlantic like an immense white whale, she gave a little kick that sent her spinning around. “I’m rotating!” she reported, “the world is revolving around me!”

  “Solipsistic, that,” somone remarked drily.

  “It is more than that,” Leibniz said, “it is a profound question of Natural Philosophy. How indeed can we tell whether we do stand still in a rotating universe, or spin in a fixed cosmos?”

  “Eeehuhh, I’m dizzy!” Caroline said, explaining why she had planted her feet, and stopped.

  “There’s your answer,” Dr. Krupa said.

  “Not at all. You assume that dizziness is a symptom—internally produced—of our spinning. But why might it not just as well be an effect exerted upon us from a distance, by a revolving universe?”

  “No one should be forced to listen to metaphysics at her eighteenth birthday-party,” Sophie decreed.

  “It’s dark in here,” Caroline said, “I can’t see the maps.”

  Wladyslaw—a Polish tenor who sang the lead in just about every one of Sophie Charlotte’s operas—lit a fresh sparkler and handed it through the central Pacific Ocean to Caroline. Leibniz’s view of the girl happened to be blocked by Brazil, but he saw the inside of the sphere light up as the sparkler was drawn into the middle; the freshly buffed brass seemed to ignite as it sieved the light from the air and spilled it out in every direction. For a moment it seemed as if the globe-cage was filled with flame, and Leibniz’s heart ached and pounded with fear that Caroline’s dress had caught fire; but then he heard her delighted voice, and decided that the fear he felt was of something else, of some larger and longer calamity than the fate of one orphan Princess.

  “I can see now all the rivers set in turquoise, and all the lakes, too, and forests of green tortoise-shell! The cities are jewels, which the light shines through.”

  “It is how the world would look if it were transparent and you could sit in the middle looking outward,” said Father von Mixnitz, a Jesuit from Vienna who had somehow arranged to get himself invited.

  “I am aware of that,” said Caroline, annoyed. A long, irritable silence followed. Caroline was quickest to forgive and forget. “I see two ships in the Pacific, and one is full of quicksilver, and the other is full of fire.”

  “I do not recall putting those in the drawings,” Leibniz joked, trying to obey Sophie’s command to lighten things up a bit. “I shall have to have a word with the workmen about that!”

  “Consider this, your royal highness,” continued Father von Mixnitz, “you may spin yourself all the way round, three hundred and twenty degrees—”

  “Three hundred and sixty!”

  “Yes, highness, that is what I meant to say—three hundred and sixty degrees—and never shall you pass out of sight of the Spanish Empire. Is it not remarkable, how vast, how wealthy, are the dominions of Spain?”

  “Aunt Sophie says it may be the dominions of France soon,” Caroline demurred.

  “Indeed, the French pretender does sit on the throne in Madrid at the moment…”

  “Aunt Sophie says it’s the woman behind that throne who matters.”

  “Indeed,” the Jesuit said, twitching his eyes toward Sophie, “many argue that the duc d’Anjou, or King Philip V of Spain as he styles himself, is a mere pawn of the princesse des Ursins, who is herself a notorious soulmate of Madame de Maintenon—but this is beside the point, as Anjou cannot possibly endure long on the Spanish throne, when he is opposed by women far more cunning, more powerful, and more beautiful.”

  “Aunt Sophie says she does not care for flatterers,” said the voice from the center of the brass world.

  Sophie, who had been about to squash the priest like a bug, now did something rare for her: She hesitated, torn between annoyance with the Jesuit and delight in Caroline.

  “It is no flattery, highness, to say that Sophie, in league with King William, or Queen Anne as the case may one day be, is a stronger hand than Maintenon and des Ursins. All the more so if the rightful heir to the Spanish throne—Archduke Charles—were wed to a Princess in the mold of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte.”

  “But Archduke Charles is Catholic while Aunt Sophie and Aunt Figgy are Protestants—as am I,” said Caroline, absent-mindedly kicking at meridians to twist herself left, right, left, right, peering first to one side, then the other, of the Isthmus of Panama.

  “It is hardly unheard-of for Persons of Quality to change their religion,” the Jesuit said. “Especially if they are intellectually active, and are presented with compelling arguments. As I am taking up residence here in Berlin, I shall look forward to exchanging views with your royal highness on such matters in coming years, as you grow in wisdom and maturity.”

  “We needn’t wait,” Caroline said helpfully. “I can explain it to you now. Dr. Leibniz has taught me all about religion.”

  “Oh, has he now?” Father von Mixnitz asked uneasily.

  “Yes, he has. Now tell me, Father, are you one of those Catholics who still refuses to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun?”

  Father von Mixnitz swallowed his tongue and then hacked it back up. “Highness, I believe in what Dr. Leibniz was saying just a minute ago, namely, that it is all relative.”

  “That’s not exactly what I said,” Leibniz protested.

  “Do you believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, Father?” Caroline asked.

  “How could I be a Catholic if I did not, Highness?”

  “This is not how we do birthday parties in Poland,” commented Wladyslaw, ladling himself another cup of wine.

  “Hush! I am enjoying it greatly,” Sophie returned.

  “What if you ate it and then you got sick and threw up? When it came out, would it be Jesus’s flesh and blood? Or would it de-transubstantiate on the way out, and become bread and wine again?”

  “Such solemn questions do not comport with the frothy imaginings of an eighteen-year-old girl,” said Father von Mixnitz, who had gone all red in the face and was biting the words off one at a time, as if
his tongue were a trip-hammer in a mill.

  “Here’s to frothy imaginings!” said Queen Sophie Charlotte, raising her glass with a beautiful smile; but her eyes were like those of a falcon tracking a mink as she watched Father von Mixnitz take his leave and stalk out of the room.

  “What else do you see in the empty places, besides the ships of quicksilver and of fire?” asked Dr. Krupa.

  “I see the very first ship sailing into the Tsar’s new city of St. Petersburg. It is a Dutch ship, I phant’sy. And in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ships of the Dutch and of the English sailing to war against the French and the Spanish…” but suddenly her sparkler fizzled out. A groan of sympathy ran through her audience. “Now I can see nothing!” she complained.

  “The future is a mystery,” Sophie said.

  Sophie Charlotte’s smile had been forced and fragile the last few minutes. “At least she got to use the thing as it was intended for a few minutes,” she said to Leibniz.

  “What do you mean, Majesty?”

  “I mean, innocently, as a wonder to marvel at—and not as a Visual Aid for choosing her husband.”

  “She can learn all she needs to know of husband-choosing from you, Majesty,” Leibniz answered. Those words led to a brief sweet moment between the savant and Sophie Charlotte—which was cut short by Frederick William, who came running in to shield himself behind his mother’s skirts. George August had ascended to one of the library catwalks with a big fire-stick he had plucked from a sand-bucket. Copying his pose directly from the fresco above, he drew back and aimed it at his cousin just like Jupiter readying a thunderbolt.

  Leibniz excused himself so that Sophie Charlotte could scold her son. As he passed beneath the globe he saw Princess Caroline’s shoes flashing out first to one side, then the other, as she reciprocated to and fro, first towards George August, then towards Frederick William. She was singing a little nursery rhyme she had picked up from her English tutor: “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe…catch a suitor by the toe…to England or Prussia shall I go…to be made high or be laid low…eeny, meeny, miney, moe.”