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

by Neal Stephenson

  “The great machine that manipulates knowledge according to a set of logical rules?”

  “Yes. That would be a good thing for my Academy of Science to have. No one else has one.”

  “On both counts I am in full agreement, your Imperial Majesty.”

  “What do you need, to build it?”

  “Just as St. Petersburg cannot be built without architects’ drawings, or a ship without plans—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, you need the tables of knowledge, written down as binary numbers, and you need the rules of symbolic logic. I have supported this work for many years!”

  “With generosity worthy of a Cæsar, sire. And I have developed a logical calculus well adapted to regulate the workings of the machine.”

  “What of the tables of knowledge!? You told me a man was working on this in Boston!”

  By this point the Tsar had stormed up and put his face quite close to mine and gone into one of his twitching fits, which had spread to involve his arm. To steady himself he had gripped the rim of the wheel upon which I was seated, and was twisting it back and forth, rotating me first this way, then that.

  For what I said next, it may help to exonerate me slightly in your eyes, Daniel, if I mention that this Tsar still breaks men on the wheel, and does even worse things to those who have incurred his displeasure; which was impossible for me to put out of my mind in my current circumstance, viz. mounted on a large wheel. Before I could think better of it, I blurted, “Oh, Dr. Waterhouse is on his way across the Atlantic at this very moment, and should, God willing, reach London soon!”

  “He is turning over the work I paid for, to the Royal Society!? I knew I should have throttled that Newton when I had the opportunity!” (For when Peter visited London some years ago he met Sir Isaac at the Mint.)

  “Not at all, Clement Lord, for indeed, your humble servant and all his works are reviled by the Royal Society, which would never accept anything linked to my name, even if Dr. Waterhouse were to behave so dishonestly, which is inconceivable!”

  “I am building up my Navy,” Peter announced.

  This, I confess, made little impression on me, for he is never not building up his Navy.

  “I have ordered three men-of-war to be constructed in London,” he continued, “and to sail into the Baltic when weather permits in the spring, to join my fleet for a further assault upon the Swedes; for I have not yet fully purged Finland of those vermin. It is my wish that when those ships sail from London, they are to be laden with tools for my savants to use at the Academy of Science, and they are to carry the fruits of the labors of Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “It shall be as you say, your Imperial Majesty,” I answered, as it seemed unwise to give any different response.

  Then he could not shoo me away fast enough. I was dragged, breakneck, back into the center of Carlsbad on a troika and re-united with my driver. Thence we proceeded to Hanover with only a brief detour to Leipzig, where all of my affairs are in a state of upheaval. Publication of Monadology has gone forward with only the normal amount of bickering with printers. Now that the war is over, Prince Eugene, the Duke of Marlborough’s valiant brother-in-arms, has taken an interest in Philosophy—which may or may not be an affectation. At any rate, he asked me to write down some of my ideas in a form that would be readable by people like him, who are literate, and intelligent, but do not make a professional study of Philosophy (and he is not the first. It would be interesting to ask one of these people why they assume it is possible to do this in the case of philosophy when they would never dream of asking Sir Isaac to write a version of Principia Mathematica with all of the mathematicks taken out). I have done the best I can to satisfy Prince Eugene. The tract is called Principles of Nature and of Grace, and its printing moves forward too, attended by a completely different set of distractions and controversies. But most of my time in Leipzig was spent, not on the publication of new work, but on the most tedious re-hashing of what I was doing forty years ago. Since you are in the bosom of the Royal Society, Daniel, you know what I refer to: the dispute with Sir Isaac as to who first invented the calculus. Letters have been flying back and forth like kites over a knacker’s yard ever since this became warm about six years ago, but it has been hot during the last two years, or ever since Sir Isaac began to convene “committees” and, God help us, “tribunals” at the Royal Society to render an impartial verdict. In short, by the time you read this, anything I might say concerning the Priority Dispute will be out of date, and you can get better intelligence by stopping anyone in the hallway and asking him for the latest.

  By this point, Daniel, you are no doubt frantic with anxiety that I’m about to ask for your help in my war with Sir Isaac. Indeed, I confess I might have stooped so low, if Peter had not laid more pressing burdens upon me. As it happened, during the ride from Leipzig to Hanover I scarcely thought of Newton at all, save in one, purely practical sense: I could not imagine how I was going to get a letter to you at Crane Court without someone—possibly even Newton himself—recognizing my handwriting, and tearing it open.

  Upon my arrival, however, I learned that Providence had shed some favor on me. My old friend (and yours, I believe) Eliza, the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, had come to town incognito.

  Several members of the English nobility have gravitated to Hanover in the last year or two, as the war ground to a halt like an unwound clock, and it became evident that England would not suffer the Pretender to succeed Queen Anne. These English courtiers—all Whigs, of course—have probably earned the scorn of London society for turning their backs on a reigning Queen and leaving their country to curry favor with Sophie and her son. And perhaps some of them deserve it. But they have performed invaluable services, not only to the Hanoverians but to England, by forging contacts, teaching their future rulers a few words of English, and coaxing them to think concretely about preparations. If the change of reign goes smoothly, you may thank them for it. They will be sure to compensate themselves handsomely!

  This is not the place to tell the nature of Eliza’s work in Hanover. Suffice it to say that her incognito is not just a histrionic fashion statement. She is not seen in Court. Almost no one knows she is here. She corresponds frequently with a certain distinguished Englishman who lived in Frankfort until recently, when he moved to Antwerp. And if she receives letters from the Pretender’s court in St.-Germain, it is not because she is in league with the Jacobites, but because she makes it her business to know every detail of the plots that are being laid there, to bring a Catholic king back to the Court of St. James. At any rate, the Duchess’s network of couriers is peerless and more than equal to the task of getting a letter from my hands to yours without it falling into the grasping claws, and passing beneath the bulging eyeballs, of Sir Isaac.

  So, to the matter at hand: Peter’s three new warships are supposedly being completed at Orney’s ship-yard in a place called Rotherhithe, across the river from Limehouse, adjacent to the Shepherd and Dog Stairs, off Lavender Street. I hope that these names mean something to you!

  If you are feeling up to a minor adventure, and if it would in no way interfere with whatever it is you are supposed to be doing for Princess Caroline, I should be indebted if you were to (1) learn from Mr. Orney when those ships are expected to sail for St. Petersburg, and (2) before they do so, freight them, as much as you can, with goods that might be of use, or at least of interest, to aspiring Russian Natural Philosophers, viz. thermometers, scales, lenses, toad’s-eyes, unicorn’s-gallbladders, Philosopher’s Stone, and the like; and (3) for God’s sake give the Tsar something to show for our work of the last fifteen years. If you can arrange for your note-cards to be shipped over from Boston in time, that is ideal. Short of that, any tangible evidence that you have been doing something at the Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts, may help to keep your humble and obedient servant from being broken on a wheel before the Russian Academy of Sciences, as an example to Scientists who draw stipends without yielding Science. />
  Yours, & c.,

  Leibniz

  Daniel got dressed. Much of his clothing had been blown up. In the two weeks since, however, Mrs. Arlanc had brokered the procurement of new garments. Daniel had been too debilitated to meddle. Consequently he was now closer to being à la mode than at any time in his life.

  The last fifty years had not witnessed anything like the thorough-going revolution in gentlemen’s attire that had come about after the Plague and the Fire, when doublets, and other medieval vestiges, had finally vanished from the world by decree of Charles II. The garments stacked on the table next to Daniel’s bed bore the same names, and covered more or less the same bits of the humane anatomy, as the ones that had become fashionable at that time: hose up to the knee, breeches, a linen shirt, a long, skirted, many-buttoned vest, and over that a long-sleeved coat with even more buttons. They had even managed to scare up a periwig for him. The old Louis XIV lion-mane wig was no longer in use; the new ones were narrower and more compact. A bizarre affectation seemed to have taken hold, of dusting them with white powder. The one Mrs. Arlanc had put on the block-head here was as plain as could be, and simply made it look as if Daniel had a luxuriant head of snow-white hair, tied back in a queue. Daniel put it on, if only to keep his bald head warm. He had avoided freezing to death in this room only by wearing a woolen night-cap twenty-four hours a day.

  While he was putting on these clothes, which took a long time—his fingers were stiff with age and chill, and the buttons never ended—he glanced through the basket Mrs. Arlanc thought of as a repository, and Daniel thought of as a dustbin, for his mail. There were five separate communications from Mr. Threader, two from Roger Comstock, one from the Earl of Lostwithiel, and diverse cards and notes from Fellows who had stopped by to look in on him, and been turned away by the adamant Mrs. Arlanc. His London relations, some of whom he had never even heard of (these were children of the late Sterling and of Raleigh, and of William Ham) had written, somewhat perfunctorily. As promised, Monadology was in there from Leibniz, and there was a 2nd edition of Isaac’s Principia Mathematica, its leather cover still reeking of the tannery. This had been dropped off, not by Isaac—indeed, there was nothing in the basket from him—but by one of his young acolytes, who had thoughtfully piled on top of it a recent issue of Journal Literaire, a Royal Society document from last year called Commercium Epistolicum, and a litter of broadsheets and pamphlets in diverse languages, all tied together with narrow black ribbon. Daniel recognized these as several years’ worth of attacks and counter-attacks in the calculus dispute. Apparently he was expected to familiarize himself with them—which could only mean that they intended to call him before their tribunal to render testimony.

  So much for mail from persons he actually knew. He worked his way deeper into the basket. Metallic clanking and scraping noises issued from its depths as he stirred through it. There were a few letters from Londoners who, starting as of a month ago, had become his fellows on the Court of Directors of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. There were two from chaps whose names he did not recognize at all, but who had orderly minds—or so he guessed from their handwriting. These two were the only letters he actually bothered to open and read, simply because they were the only ones whose contents were not wholly predictable. As it turned out, both were from men who had come up with inventions for determining longitude, and sought Daniel’s help in bringing their ideas before the Royal Society. Daniel threw them away.

  There were no letters from his wife, or from little Godfrey, which was in no way surprising, given the season of the year and the rough weather. Groping to the very bottom of the basket, he scraped his hand on something jagged, and jerked back. He was not too old to die of tetanus. His fingers emerged sooty, rather than bloody. Pulling all the mail out of the basket and then tilting it towards the window he observed several twisted and blackened shreds of wood and of metal in the bottom. The largest bit was a miniature cask, no more than gallon-sized, such as might be used to transport distilled spirits. One end of it was intact—badly damaged to be sure, but still recognizable as having once been a keg. The staves were bound together by an iron band at the end, and spread out, like lines of longitude from the pole, until they reached the equator. But none of them continued very far into the opposite hemisphere. Some were snapped off clean, some bent outwards, some smashed into splintery brooms. That end of the keg, and its metal band, were gone entirely, though they might be accounted for by some of the loose fragments in the bottom of the basket. Other things were in there, too: gears, springs, levers of wrought brass.

  Part of Daniel wanted to overturn this basket on a well-illuminated table and piece the device back together. But instead he buried it again under his unread mail. He had spent a fortnight immobilized by melancholy, and tormented by unreasonable fears. Today his humours had gone back into balance. The Daniel Waterhouse who had cowered in that bed for two weeks was a different chap from the one who was standing by the door, dressed and periwigged. But they could easily change places if he dwelled too long on the dark relics in that basket. They had grown cold, waiting for his attention; let them grow colder still.

  THE ROYAL SOCIETY’S HEADQUARTERS comprised two separate houses and a tiny courtyard separating them. During the fund-raising effort, some had gone so far as to style it a “compound.” One of the houses was the northern terminus of Crane Court. Above its ground floor it had two addtional full storeys, plus a garret in the roof space. This garret, which was where Daniel had been lodged, had two small dormer windows facing the Crane Court side, which would have afforded a clear view all the way down to Fleet Street, and even to the Thames, had they not been partially blocked by a low parapet-wall that had been added to the front of the house to make it seem a few feet higher than it really was. So from his bed, Daniel’s view had been of a sort of lead-lined ditch formed where the steeply sloping roof plunged down to die in the base of the parapet: a bathing-place for birds when it rained, and a raceway for rodents in all weathers. For a few hours in the afternoon the sun would traverse the rectangle of sky that showed above the parapet, if the weather happened to be clear. If Daniel stood up and approached the window he could see over the lip of the parapet, where moss, soot, and birdshit vied for hegemony, down into Crane Court, and scan the jumble of rooftops all around. A view of the dome of St. Paul’s was denied him unless he opened the window, thrust his head out, and craned it to the left. Then it was startlingly close. Yet it seemed inapproachable because of the wide crevasse of Fleet Ditch, which broke the city in twain half-way between. If he turned one hundred eighty degrees and looked west, he was confronted by a church that was much closer, and infinitely older: the Rolls Chapel, which appeared to be sinking or collapsing into a spacious church-yard just across Fetter Lane. This medieval pile, which had been used by Chancery as a records dump for many centuries, had turned black with coal-smoke during Daniel’s lifetime. A bow-shot to the south of it, fronting on Fleet Street, was the Church of St. Dunstan-in-the-

  West, a Wren production, duly turning black.

  Much less strenuous for an old stiff-necked man was simply to gaze southward down the length of Crane Court and hope to glimpse a bit of open water between the buildings that filled most of the space between Fleet Street and the river. This view, every time he spied it, made Daniel feel as if he had, by some error in navigation, been taken to some city as strange as Manila or Isfahan. For the London in which he had grown up had been a congeries of estates, parks, and compounds, thrown up over centuries by builders who shared a common dream of what a bit of English landscape ought to look like: it should be a generous expanse of open ground with a house planted in it. Or, in a pinch, a house and wall built around the perimeter of a not-so-generous patch of ground. At any rate, there had been, in Daniel’s London, views of sky and of water, and little parks and farmlets scattered everywhere, not by royal decree but by some sort of mute, subliminal consensus. In particular, the stretch of riverbank D
aniel could see from this garret had been a chain of estates, great houses, palaces, courts, temples, and churches put up by whatever powerful knights or monks had got there first and defended them longest. During Daniel’s lifetime, every one of these, with the exceptions of the Temple (directly across from the outlet of Crane Court) and Somerset House (far off to his right, towards where Whitehall Palace had stood, before it had burned down), had been demolished. Some had been fuel for the Fire and others had fallen victim to the hardly less destructive energies of Real Estate Developers. Which was to say that with the exception of the large open green of the Temple, every inch of that ground now seemed to be covered by Street or Building.

  Turning his back on the window and opening his bedchamber door brought him back to London straightaway—not the London of average Londoners, but the circa-1660, Natural-Philosophic London of John Wilkins and Robert Hooke. For the remainder of the attic was packed to the rafters with material that Daniel recognized and identified under the broad heading of, Science Crapp. All had been brought over from the Royal Society’s crèche at Gresham’s College.

  Gresham’s College had been precisely the sort of structure that had no place in modern-day London: a compound, rather than a house, built around a court that was spacious enough to house hundreds of Londoners if razed and jammed with town-houses. Gresham’s had been Tudor wattle-and-daub, a style that encouraged builders to make it up as they went along, and generally suffered them to get away with it. Whatever it might have looked like in Sir Thomas Gresham’s mind’s eye, when he had come back from Antwerp, famous from mending Gloriana’s coinage, and rich from speculating in it, by the time Daniel had got there it seemed to have been made not by human architects but by wasps.

  At any rate it had been huge: ten times the size of the two Crane Court houses combined. They had not had the whole thing to themselves, but they’d had a lot of it.