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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Who has delegated you to harry me round the poop deck?”

  “Why, the aforementioned very polite criminal.”

  “A colonel commands a regiment, is it not so?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that a colonel, in turn, is commanded by a Black-guard?”

  “That is the custom in most armies,” Barnes returned dead-pan. “True, ’twas sometime different under my lord Marlborough, but since he was stripped of command, why, it has been Black-guards all the way to the top.”

  Daniel had a natural impulse here to laugh; but some other part of him was recommending that he proceed cautiously with this Barnes. What the colonel had just said was witty, but it was also reckless.

  Most of the Guards were off the ship now, leaving only two platoons of some fourteen men each, each under its own sergeant. One of them had congregated at the forward end of the deck, the other aft, directly below where Colonel Barnes and Daniel were standing. This left a large clear space amidships, claimed by Sergeant Bob Shaftoe. He was facing toward the wharf, so Daniel was viewing him in profile; but now he adjusted his posture slightly toward them and glanced, for a quarter of a second, in Barnes’s direction.

  “Your sloop, Cap’n,” Barnes sang out.

  The skipper retaliated with a series of histrionic commands that caused the gangplanks to be drawn back onto the wharf, and the sloop’s lines to be cast off.

  “You and Sergeant Bob make war together,” Daniel said. “It is what you do.”

  “If that’s true, our life’s work has been a failure!” Barnes answered, mock-offended. “I should prefer to say, we make peace, and have achieved success.”

  “Say it however you like. Either way, you’ve spent a quarter-century marching around with him, and have heard every joke and anecdote he knows how to tell, a thousand times over.”

  “ ’Tis a common outcome in our line of work,” Barnes allowed.

  “Now you phant’sy you know everything about me, because ten or twenty years ago, in a tent along the Rhine or a bothy in Ireland, Sergeant Bob told you a tale about me. You suppose you may approach me in a companionable way, and divulge things to me, and thereby make me your bound accomplice, as when two boys cut their thumbs on purpose and bleed on each other and then say that they are brothers. Please do not be offended if I recoil from your tender. There is a reason why old men are aloof, and it has nothing to do with being pompous.”

  “You should renew your acquaintance with Marlborough,” Barnes said, putting on a little show of being impressed. “The two of you would get along famously.”

  “An unfortunate choice of adverb, that.”

  Barnes was silent for a while now. The two horse-barges were coming up to the wharf at Gravesend to discharge the loads. The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard were dragoons, meaning that they fought on foot, using the tactics and the arms of infantry. But they maneuvered round the field of battle on horseback. To put it crudely, they were shock troops. Clearly the companies that had disembarked had orders to mount, get on the turnpike that paralleled the river, and ride east, pacing the sloop.

  “Everyone is scared to death just now,” Barnes said. He sidled up to Daniel along the rail and offered him half a small loaf of bread, which Daniel practically lunged at. “Why, to listen to certain Whigs, a Jacobite invasion is just over the horizon, driven on a Popish wind. And yet Sir Isaac fears the arrival of the German! ’Tis an impossibility for both the Hanovers and the Jacobites to occupy the same space. Yet the Whigs’ fears, and Sir Isaac’s, are equally real.”

  When he alluded to the impossibility of two objects occupying the same space, Barnes was resorting to a verbal tic that had its origins in Descartes. He had, in other words, been to Oxford or Cambridge. He ought to be a vicar, or even a Dean, in some church. What was he doing here?

  “When Sir Isaac refers, with such trepidation, to the German, he does not mean George Louis.”

  Barnes looked startled, then fascinated. “Leibniz—?”

  “Yes.” And this time Daniel could not prevent himself smiling a bit.

  “So it’s not that Sir Isaac is a Jacobite…”

  “Far from it! He fears the arrival of the Hanovers, only in that Leibniz is the advisor to Sophie, and to Princess Caroline.” Daniel wasn’t entirely certain he ought to be telling Barnes so much, but it was better for Barnes to understand the truth than to harbor the suspicion that Isaac was a covert supporter of the Changeling.

  “You skipped a generation,” Barnes said puckishly. Or as puckish as a maimed colonel of dragoons could be.

  “If George Louis has any interest whatever in philosophy—for that matter, in anything at all—’tis a secret close kept,” Daniel returned.

  “So am I to understand that the present expedition has its origins in a philosophical dispute?” Barnes asked, looking about himself as if seeing the sloop in a new light.

  Atalanta had reached the middle of the channel now and, freed from the slow horse-barges, spread more canvas to the wind than she had done before. They were sailing due east on Gravesend Reach. On their right, the chalky hills would draw back from the river, widening the marshes that spread at their feet. The town of Tilbury was on the left. It was the last port on that bank of the river, for beyond it the Thames sloshed between mud-flats instead of streaming between proper banks. Even at their improved pace, they had a few hours’ sail ahead of them; and Isaac was nowhere to be seen. There was no harm, Daniel concluded, in conversing with a philosophy-hobbyist.

  He glanced around the sky, looking for a convenient Cœlestial Body, but the day had slowly become overcast. Instead he fastened upon the river-water rippling along the hull-planks, and glanced too at the mud-flats below Tilbury. “I cannot see the sun—can you, Colonel Barnes?”

  “We are in England. I have heard rumors of it. In France I saw it once. But not today.”

  “And the moon?”

  “She is full, and she set over Westminster as we were loading on Tower Wharf.”

  “The moon’s behind the world, the sun’s behind clouds. Yet the water that buoys us is obeying the dictates of both, is it not?”

  “I have it on good authority that the tides are operational today,” Barnes allowed, and checked his watch. “Sheerness expects a low tide at seven o’clock.”

  “A spring tide?”

  “Uncommon low. Why, feel how the river’s current bears us along, hastening to the sea.”

  “Why does the tide rush out to sea?”

  “The influence of the sun and the moon.”

  “Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?”

  “Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot.

  “That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’ It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”

  “I’ve never claimed to understand them.”

  “Ah, that is very wise practice.”

  “All that matters is, he does,” Barnes continued, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck-planks.

  “Does he then?”

  “That’s what you lot have been telling everyone.”

  “Meaning the Royal Society?”

  Barnes nodded. He was eyeing Daniel with some alarm. Daniel, cruelly, said nothing, and let Barnes simmer until he could stand it no more, and continued, “Sir Isaac’s working on Volume the Third, isn’t he, and that’s going to settle the lunar problem. Wrap it all up.”

  “He is working out equations that ought to agree with Mr. Flamsteed’s observations.”<
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  “From which it would follow that Gravity’s a solved problem; and if Gravity predicts what the moon does, why, it should apply as well to the sloshing back and forth of the water in the oceans.”

  “But is to describe something to understand it?”

  “I should think it were a good first step.”

  “Yes. And it is a step that Sir Isaac has taken. The question now becomes, who shall take the second step?”

  “You mean, is it to be he or Leibniz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leibniz has not done any work with Gravity, has he?”

  “You mean, it seems obvious that Sir Isaac, having taken the first step, should be better positioned to take the second.”

  “Yes.”

  “One would certainly think so,” Daniel said sympathetically. “On the other hand, sometimes he who goes first wanders into a cul-de-sac, and is passed by.”

  “How can his theory be a cul-de-sac if it describes everything perfectly?”

  “You heard him, a short time ago, expressing concern about Leibniz,” Daniel pointed out.

  “Because Leibniz has Sophie’s ear! Not because Leibniz is the better philosopher.”

  “I beg your pardon, Colonel Barnes, but I have known Sir Isaac since we were students, and I say to you, he does not strain at gnats. When he is at such pains to gird for battle, you may be sure that his foe is a Titan.”

  “What weapon could Leibniz possibly have that would do injury to Sir Isaac?”

  “To begin with, a refusal to be over-awed, and a willingness, not shared at this time by any Englishman, to ask awkward questions.”

  “What sort of awkward questions?”

  “Such as I’ve already asked: how does the water know where the moon is? How can it perceive the Moon through the entire thickness of the Earth?”

  “Gravity goes through the earth, like light through a pane of glass.”

  “And what form does Gravity take, that gives it this astonishing power of streaming through the solid earth?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Neither does Sir Isaac.”

  Barnes was stopped in his tracks for a few moments. “Does Leibniz?”

  “Leibniz has a completely different way of thinking about it, so different as to seem perverse to some. It has the great advantage that it avoids having to talk rubbish about Gravity streaming through Earth like light through glass.”

  “Then it must have as great disadvantages, or else he, and not Sir Isaac, would be the world’s foremost Natural Philosopher.”

  “Perhaps he is, and no one knows it,” Daniel said. “But you are right. Leibniz’s philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can.”

  “Then what good is Leibniz’s philosophy?”

  “It might be the truth,” Daniel answered.

  Cold Harbour

  THE SAME AFTERNOON

  THE TOWER MIGHT HAVE ENDURED forever with very little upkeep, had it not been for a nasty infestation of humans. From a janitorial standpoint, the problem with this particular race was not that they were de-, but avidly con-structive, and would on no account leave off bringing new building-stuff in through the all-too-numerous gates, and fashioning them into shelters. Left to the elements, such improvisations would break down naturally in decades or centuries, leaving the Tower as God and the Normans had intended it to be. But the difficulty with a human was that where he found a shelter he would occupy it, and when it broke, fix it, and if not prevented, build annexes onto it. To the management of the Tower, it was less an infestation of termites than a plague of mud-daubing wasps.

  Every time the Constable brought in a surveyor, and compared his work to the plan his predecessor had drawn up some decades before, he would discover new nests that had insensibly grown in the corners, as dust-balls under a bed. If he went to eject the people who lived in them, so that he could tear them down, he would be confronted with documents and precedents, showing that those people were not squatters but tenants, and that they’d been paying rent for decades to some other squatter-cum-

  tenant, who in turn paid rent or performed necessary services for some Corporation or Office or other sui generis queer ancient Entity that claimed long standing or warrant Royal.

  Short of a concerted arson campaign, the only brake on this infestation was a lack of space within the walls that circumscribed the hive. It came down, then, to a question of how much crowding human beings could endure. The answer: not as much as wasps, but still rather a lot. In fact, there was a certain type of human who thrived on it, and those types gravitated naturally to London.

  Dart the Barber lived in a garret above a storehouse in Cold Harbour. Most of the year, Cold Harbour was cold without a doubt. To Dart and his roommates—Pete the Sutler and Tom the Boot-black—it was also a sort of metaphorical harbour. But beyond that the name made no sense at all. It was nowhere near the water, and performed no harbour-like functions. Cold Harbour was a patch of turf and a few storehouses in the middle of Tower Green, just off the southwest corner of the ancient Conqueror’s keep called the White Tower.

  A wee hole had been worried through the wattle near the vertex of the gable, just large enough to admit a pigeon, vent smoke from a rush-light, or frame a man’s face. At the moment it was giving Dart a sort of dove’s-eye-view of the Parade. Accounting for about half of the Inner Ward, the Parade was the largest open space in the Tower. A well-tended patch of English turf it was. But it was scarred, below Dart, with ridges of rain-worn stone: the exposed foundations of walls that had been thrown down, æons ago, by long-dead Constables. For perhaps the only thing that could stir a Constable to use force against the gnawing accretion of sheds, annexes, pop-outs, &c., was the combined awareness of (a) his own mortality and (b) the fact that there was no place left in the Tower complex to dig his grave. At any rate, there was evidence here that Cold Harbour had once been a bigger thing than it was now. From ground level, these ruins were a meaningless maze of tripping-hazards. From Dart’s privileged viewpoint they could be made out as a page of rectilinear glyphs stroked in gray and yellow paint on green baize.

  If Dart had been as keenly interested in the several centuries just past as he was in the several hours just beginning, he could have decyphered that grassy palimpsest to tell a tale about the fortifications of the Inmost Ward, and how they had changed over time, from a picket to keep out die-hard Angles, to the innermost of half a dozen lines of circumvallation, to a security checkpoint for a royal palace, to an outmoded slum, to a tripping-hazard. The part where Dart dwelt had only been suffered to remain standing because it was easily made over into storehouses.

  And if Dart were one for profound introspection he might ponder the queerness of his circumstance: he (an illiterate barber), a sutler, and a Black-guard (as boys who polished boots were called) sharing an apartment twenty paces distant from William the Conqueror’s chief Fort.

  However none of these thoughts came to him, or even came near him, as he peered out through the gable-vent on the afternoon in question, heaving ruby-colored blood up from his lungs onto a crusty brown rag. Dart was living for the moment.

  The Parade stretched an hundred paces from east (the line of barracks huddled along the footing of the White Tower) to west (a wee street of warders’ houses backed against the west wall). A hundred and fifty paces separated its north (the Chapel) from its south (the Lieutenant’s Lodging). The Cold Harbour dwelling of Dart the Barber, Tom the Black-guard, and Pete the Sutler was about half-way ’long the eastern edge of it. So to his left Dart had a good view over the northern half of the Parade, but to his right all was obliterated by the high White Tower, which squatted in the heart of the complex like a solid cube of stone. Its formidable lines had been cluttered, on its western and southern sides, by low skirts of identical barrack-houses, jammed in wall-to-wall so that their peaked roofs merged to form a sawtooth fringe. Two companies
of the Guard regiment lived in these and similar ones near by. The other dozen companies were packed into various spaces around the periphery of the Inner Ward, along Mint Street, or wherever space could be found for them. All told, they numbered near a thousand.

  A thousand men could not live without victuals, which was why sutlers’ houses had been allowed, nay, encouraged to occupy various crannies around the Tower and the Wharf. Pete’s was one such; he was the tenant of this garret, and he sublet hammock-space to Dart and, more recently, to Tom.

  The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards often drew duty of a ceremonial nature, such as greeting foreign ambassadors on Tower Wharf, and so they were more than normally concerned with the upkeep of their kit. This meant no lack of work for Tom and the other boot-blacks. And any congregation of humans required barbers to dress wounds and see to the removal of redundant hairs, whiskers, bodily humours, and necrotizing limbs. So Dart had been permitted to wind some bloody gauze round a pike and plant it outside a certain door in Cold Harbour as the customary hall-mark of his trade.

  He was not plying that trade now but nervously honing a razor, again and again, on a leather strop, and peering down the line of barracks doors, watching Tom the Black-guard make his rounds. Most of the garrison was extra muros on Tower Hill; in their absence Tom was going to each door in turn to polish the boots that had been left out by the soldiers. To look at him, Tom was a boy of about twelve. But he spoke with the voice, and answered to the urges, of a grown man, which made Dart suspect he was really a bloke who’d not grown properly.

  Tom had been doing this for the best part of two hours and had settled into a fixed routine, which was that he would squat down to polish a pair of boots, then stand up when he was finished, as though feeling a need to stretch, and look idly around the Parade, then glance up into the sky to see if any change in the weather was coming. Then he would turn his attention to the next pair of boots.