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

by Neal Stephenson

  Something did not make sense. He looked up into the man’s gray eyes and noticed crows’ feet. He was older than he looked, probably in his forties. The beginnings of an explanation there.

  “You have judged me aright,” the man said, in an encouraging tone. “I am a horologist gone bad.”

  “You deal in stolen time—”

  “Don’t we all, sir? Each striking his own bargain, as ’twere.”

  “I was going to say, ‘time-pieces,’ but you interrupted me.”

  “ ’Tis a common error of those who buy time dear, and sell it cheap, Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “You know my name? What is yours?”

  “My surname is Hoxton. My father christened me Peter. Hereabouts, I am called Saturn.”

  “The Roman god of time.”

  “And of surly dispositions, Doctor.”

  “I have inspected your shop, Mr. Hoxton, quite a bit more closely than I should have liked.”

  “Yes, I was just inside the window, smoking my pipe, and observing you in return.”

  “You have told me in your own words that you have gone bad. You operate under an alias that is a byword for foul temper. I think I know the nature of your business. Yet you ask me to believe that you are returning me my watch, without any…complications…and you expect me to approach within your reach…” Daniel here trailed off, keeping an eye on the watch, trying not to seem as interested in getting it back as he really was.

  “You’re one of those coves f’r whom everything has to make sense? Then you and I are fellow-sufferers.”

  “You say that because you are a horologist?”

  “Mechanic since I was a lad, clock-maker since I came to my senses,” said Saturn. “The piece of information you are wanting, Doctor, is this: this here is an old Hooke balance-spring watch, this is. When the Master made it, why, it might’ve been the best time-piece ever fashioned by human hands. But now there’s a score of proper horologists round Clerkenwell who can make ones that’ll keep better time. Technology ages, dunnit?”

  Daniel pursed his lips to keep from laughing at the spectacle of this new, five-guinea word, Technology, emerging from that head.

  “It ages faster’n we do. It can be difficult for a bloke to keep up.”

  “Is that your story, Saturn? You could not keep up, and so you went bad?”

  “I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more æternal nature.”

  “Do you claim to have found it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I was afraid this was going to turn into a homily.”

  Daniel now felt safe in advancing two more steps. Then a question occurred to him, and he stopped. “How did you know my name?”

  “It’s inscribed on the back of the watch.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Very clever,” said Saturn. Daniel could not tell which of them was the target of the sarcasm. Saturn continued, “Very well, sir. A certain flash cull of my acquaintance, a file-cly with a specialization in tatlers, who had run afoul of a Harmon in Fleet Street, and been condemned to shove the tumbler from Newgate to Leadenhall, came by my ken of an afternoon, desiring employment of a sedentary nature while his stripes healed. And after taking sensible precautions, which is to say, making sure that he was not running a type of service-lay to slum my ken, I said to this buz, my business here has fallen on hard times because I cannot run it without transitory knowledge. And yet my brain has had its fill of the same, and all I wish to do is to sit in my shop reading books, to acquire knowledge æternal, which benefits me in ways intangible, but in no way helps me to receive and sell stolen property of a horologickal nature, which is the raison d’être of the shop. Therefore, go ye out into the Rumbo, the Spinning-Ken, to Old Nass, go to the Boozing-kens of Hockley-in-the-Hole and the Cases at the low end of the Mount, go to the Goat in Long-lane, the Dogg in Fleet Street, and the Black-boy in Newtenhouse-

  Lane, and drink—but not too much—and buy drinks—but never too many—for any flash culls you spy there, and acquire transitory knowledge, and return to my ken and relate to me what you have learnt. And back he comes, a week later, and informs me that a certain old Gager has lately been making the rounds, trying to recover some lost property. ‘What has he lost?’ I inquired. ‘Not a thing,’ came the answer, ‘he is after another cull’s lost property—some gager who was Phinneyed ten years since.’ ‘Go and learn that dead cove’s name,’ says I, ‘and the quick one’s, too.’ Come the answers: Robert Hooke, and Daniel Waterhouse, respectively. Why, he even pointed you out to me once, when you walked past my shop on your way to visit your swine-yard. That’s how I knew you.”

  Peter Hoxton now extended his arms. His left hand held the chain of the Hooke-watch, swinging it like a pendulum, and his right offered a handshake. Daniel accepted the watch greedily, and the handshake with reluctance.

  “I have a question for you, Doctor,” said Saturn, as he was shaking Daniel’s hand.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve made a study of you, and know you are a bit of a Natural Philosopher. Been meaning to invite you into my ken.”

  “Did you—sir, did you cause my watch to be stolen!?” Daniel demanded, trying to draw back; but Saturn’s hand had engulfed his, like a python swallowing a gerbil.

  “Did you—Doctor, did you fling yourself against my shop-window on purpose!?” Saturn answered, perfectly mocking Daniel’s tone.

  Daniel was too indignant to speak, which the other took as permission to go on: “Now philosophy is the study of wisdom—truths æternal. Yet, long ago you went over the sea, didn’t you, to set up an Institute of Technologickal Arts. And here you are back in London, aren’t you, on some similar errand. Why, Doctor? You had the life I dream of: to sit on your arse and read of truths æternal. And yet I cannot make my way through a chapter of Plato without glancing up to see you sprawled against my shop-window like an enormous spate of bird-shite. Why turn away from the study of truths æternal, to traffick in transitory knowledge?”

  Somewhat to his own surprise, Daniel had a ready answer, which came out of his mouth before he had had time to consider it. “Why does the minister tell mundane stories during his homily? Why not simply quote direct from sublime works of theology?”

  “Anecdotes serve to illustrate the ideas he’s getting at,” Saturn surmised, “and anyway, if those ideas have no relation to mundane things, why, they’re probably rubbish.”

  “Then if Newton and Leibniz are sublime theologians, sir, I am an humble vicar. Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the æternal by way of the mundane. Does that answer your question, and may I have my hand back?”

  “Yes,” said Saturn. “You have your watch, sir; you have your hand; and you have a parishioner.”

  “But I do not want a parishioner,” said Daniel, turning on his heel and walking west into Liquor-pond Street.

  “Then you ought to give up preaching, and those religious observances you just spoke of,” said Peter Hoxton, falling into step beside Daniel. “You are a Cambridge man?”

  “I am.”

  “And is not the ancient purpose of Cambridge to turn out clerics, and send them out into England to minister to the unwashed?”

  “You know that perfectly well! But I’ll not minister to you or any other man, Peter Hoxton, for if ever I was a vicar, I am a fallen one now, and not fit to minister to a dog. I went astray early, and have strayed far. The only way I can think of to find my way closer to God is through the strange ministry I spoke of earlier, whereof Hooke and Spinoza were prophets. It is not a way I recommend to any man, for I am as ’stranged from the main line of religion as a stylite monk, sitting on a pillar in a waste.”

  “I have strayed further and grown more ’stranged than you, Doc. I have been wandering in that same waste without any pillar to sit upon—therefore, you, perched on your post, are like a Pharos to me.�
��

  “I say to you one more time—”

  “There’s that word again! Time. Let me speak of time, Doc, and say to you this: if you continue to walk through Hockley-in-the-Hole unaccompanied, and to wander about the city as you’ve been doing, your time may be measured in days, or hours. You are not leery enough. This fact has been made note of by certain coves who make unleery gagers their prey. Every foot-scamperer and bridle-cull on the upper Fleet pricks up his ears when you trudge out to your swine-yard and disappear into your hole in the ground. Your time will be up very soon, and you will wind up as a scragg’d, naked corpse, floating down Fleet Ditch to Bridewell, if you do not make some large friends soon.”

  “Are you nominating yourself my bodyguard, Saturn?”

  “I am nominating myself your parishioner, Doc. As you lack a church, we shall have to worship peripatetically, ambling about the streets, as now, and making Hockley-in-the-Hole our Agora. As I am half as old, and twice as big, as you, why, many an idle cove, who does not wot the true nature of our relationship, may ignorantly assume that I am your bodyguard, and, on account of that foolish misapprehension, refrain from stabbing you or bludgeoning you to death.”

  They had reached Gray’s Inn Lane. The lawyer-infested gardens and walks behind Gray’s Inn lay to either side of the road here, and beyond them were the settled confines of various Squares: Red Lyon, Waterhouse, Bloomsbury. Roger’s estate was on the far corner of Bloomsbury, where London gave way again to open countryside. Daniel did not want to lead Saturn directly to it. He stopped.

  “I am dafter e’en than you guess, Saturn.”

  “Why, impossible!”

  “Have you heard of a pirate in America, called Edward Teach?”

  “Blackbeard? Of course, sir, he is legendary.”

  “I say that not so long ago, I heard Blackbeard standing on the poop of Queen Anne’s Revenge, calling for me by name.”

  For the first time, Peter Hoxton was taken a-back.

  “As you see, I am insane—best leave me alone,” Daniel said, and turned his back on Saturn yet again, looking for an opening in traffic on Gray’s Inn Lane.

  “Concerning Mr. Teach, I shall make inquiries among the Black-guard,” said Peter Hoxton.

  The next time Daniel dared to look over his shoulder, Saturn had vanished.

  Bloomsbury

  HALF AN HOUR LATER

  “A ROMAN TEMPLE, on the edge of the city. Modest. Nothing gaudy,” had been Roger’s instructions to him, some twenty-five years earlier.

  “I suppose that rules out having it be a Temple of Jupiter or Apollo,” Daniel had returned.

  Roger had looked out the window of the coffee-house, feigning deafness, which was what he always did when he guessed Daniel was making fun of him.

  Daniel had sipped his coffee and considered it. “Among your modest and humble Roman Gods would be…let me think…Vesta. Whose temples, like your house, stood outside the old boundaries of the city.”

  “Well enough. Splendid god, Vesta,” Roger had said, a bit distantly.

  “Goddess, actually.”

  “All right, who the hell was she!?”

  “Goddess of the hearth, chaste above all others…”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Worshipped around the clock—or the sundial, I should say—by the Vestal virgins…”

  “Wouldn’t mind having a few of those around, provided they were not pedantic about the virginity.”

  “Not at all. Vesta herself was almost seduced by Priapus, the ithyphallic God…”

  Roger shivered. “I can’t wait to find out what that means. Perhaps we should make my house a Temple of Priapus.”

  “Every shack you walk into becomes a Temple of Priapus. No need to spend money on an architect.”

  “Who said I was going to pay you?”

  “I did, Roger.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “I will not make you a Temple of Priapus. I do not think that the Queen of England would ever come to call on you, Roger, if you lived in such a place.”

  “Give me another humble, unassuming God then!” Roger had demanded, snapping his fingers. “Come on, I’m not paying you to drink coffee!”

  “There’s always Vulcan.”

  “Lame!”

  “Indeed, he was a bit gouty, like many a gentleman,” Daniel had said patiently, “but he got all the most beautiful goddesses—including Venus herself!”

  “Haw! The rogue!”

  “He was master of metals—though humble, and scorned, he fettered Titans and Gods with his ingenuity—”

  “Metals—including—?”

  “Gold and silver.”

  “Capital!”

  “And of course he was God of Fire, and Lord of Volcanoes.”

  “Volcanoes! An ancient symbol of fertility—sending their gouts of molten stone spurting high into the air,” Roger had said meditatively, prompting Daniel to shove his chair away several inches. “Right! That’s it, then—make me a Temple of Vulcan—tasteful and inexpensive, mind you—just off Bloomsbury there. And put a volcano in it!”

  This—put a volcano in it—had been Roger’s first and last instructions to Daniel concerning interior decoration. Daniel had fobbed that part of it off on a silversmith—not a money one, but an old-school silversmith who still literally smote silver for a living. This had left Daniel free to design the Temple of Vulcan itself, which had presented no difficulties at all. A lot of Greeks had figured out how to make buildings of that general type two thousand years ago, and then Romans had worked out tricks for banging them out in a hurry, tricks that were now second nature to every tradesman in London.

  Not really believing that Roger would ever actually build it, Daniel had sat down in front of a large clean sheet of paper and proceeded to pile element on element: and quite a few Plinths, Pilasters, Architraves, Urns, Archivolts, and Finials later, he had ended up with something that probably would have caused Julius Cæsar to clap his hands over his laureled and anointed head in dismay, and order the designer crucified. But after a brief sell job from Daniel in the back room of a coffee-house (“Note the Lesbian leaf pattern at the tops of the columns…. Ancient symbols of fertility are worked into the groins…. I have taken the liberty of depicting this Amazon with two breasts, rather than the historically attested one”), Roger was convinced that it looked exactly like a Temple of Vulcan ought to. And when he actually went and built the thing—telling everyone it was an exact reproduction of a real one on Mount Vesuvius—nine out of ten Londoners were content to believe it. Daniel’s only consolation was that because of the bald lie about Vesuvius, hardly anyone knew he—or indeed any living person—had been responsible for it. Only the Gods knew. As long as he avoided parts of the world with a lot of volcanoes, he would go unscathed.

  During his most melancholy times, he was kept awake at night by the phant’sy that, of everything he’d ever done, this house would last the longest, and be seen by the most people. But with the one exception of being cut for the stone, every fear that had ever tormented Daniel in his bed had turned out, in the light of day, to be not all that bad really. As he plodded westwards on Great Russell Street toward its cross with Tottenham Court Road, passing by Bloomsbury Square, he sensed a massy white Presence in the corner of his eye, and forced himself not to look at it. But at some point this became absurd, and he had to square his shoulders, perform a soldierly right-face, and look his shame in the eye. And, mirabile dictu, it was not so very bad! When it had first gone up, twenty years ago, in the middle of a hog-lot, cater-corner from a timber depot, it had been screamingly bizarre. But now it was in the middle of a city, which helped a little, and Hooke had added on to it, which helped a great deal. It was no longer an alienated Temple but the buckle in a belt of Corinthian-columned arcades that surrounded Roger’s parcel. The wings gave it proportion and made it seem much less likely to topple over sideways. The friezes had been added to the pediment and to the tablatures while Daniel had been in Bos
ton, a tangle of togas and tridents that diverted the viewer’s eye from the underlying dreadfulness (or so Daniel thought) of the architecture. Here Hooke had done him more favors by extending the horizontal features of the Temple into the wings, giving Daniel’s phant’sies and improvisations more authority than they probably deserved. All in all, Daniel was able to stare at the place for a solid five or ten minutes without dissolving in embarrassment; London’s boundaries enclosed much worse.

  For the thirtieth time since crossing Gray’s Inn Road, he looked to see if Saturn was following him. The answer was again no. He crossed Great Russell and walked up the steps, feeling like a wee figure sketched into a rendering to show the scale. Passing between two fluted columns he swept across the Portico and raised his walking-stick to beat upon one of the massive front doors (gold leaf, with details in silver and copper, all part of the metallurgical theme). But the doors were drawn open so swiftly that they seemed to leap away from him. It gave him a turn—his eye was foxed into thinking that the doors were stationary, and he falling backwards away from them. He took a step forward to compensate; and, entering the cleavage between the doors, nearly fell into the one between a pair of breasts. It required some effort to stop himself, straighten his carriage, and look the owner in the eye. She was giving him a knowing look, but the dimples in her cheeks said, All in good fun, go on, have a good long stare then!

  “Doctor Waterhouse! You have kept me waiting far too long! How can I ever forgive you?”

  This sounded like an opportunity for Daniel to say something witty, but it whooshed past him like grapeshot.

  “Er…I have?”

  Ah, but the lady was accustomed to dealing with numb-tongued Natural Philosophers. “I should have heeded Uncle Isaac, who has spoken so highly of your strength of character.”

  “I…beg your pardon?” He was beginning to feel as if he should perhaps hit himself with his stick. Perhaps it would restore circulation to his brain.