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

by Neal Stephenson

  As the great wheel ground away on its axle of greased iron, muffled thumps and booms sounded from within: sometimes a steady tattoo, as of running feet, always culminating in a series of thuds like a man falling down stairs.

  “The therapy is compleat!” Stubbs announced. The laborers gladly let go and stood up straight to stretch their tired backs, whilst keeping wary vigil on the crank-handle, which continued to rotate—its vis inertiae might break the jaw of an unwary man. After the drum had slowed to a low idling speed they seized the crank again and nudged it around a quarter-turn or so. It was now possible to see that the near face of the drum was fitted with a long narrow hatch nearly spanning the interval between hub and rim. The crank-men made sure that this was down and vertical, like an hour-hand at the stroke of six. Then they tromped down the stairs in quest of refreshment.

  Stubbs leaned into the space between axle-support and drum-side and unlatched the door. It flew open all the way and banged against the outside of the Machine, revealing that its inner surface was entirely covered by a quilted canvas bag, so filthy that it gleamed with a hard shine, stuffed with straw or horse-hair. The open hatchway was mostly empty; but down low, something reminiscent of a human figure could be seen draining lumpily onto the floor, like a half-melted wax statue being poured out of a saucepan.

  “You see?” Stubbs announced. “The Machine works!”

  The man who had emerged from the Machine seemed to want in the worst way to get clear of it. But he knew better than to stand, or even sit. He straightened himself out on the floor, supporting himself on his forearms and his forehead, and began to creep along like an inchworm, pausing every few inches for an episode of dry heaves. In a minute or so he reached a waiting chamber-pot, dashed its lid off with a blind arm-swing, hugged it, and used it to pull himself up off the floor. With some further exertions, and the aid of a man in indigo, he got himself seated upon this vessel and immediately began to generate sounds of a hydraulic and pneumatic character.

  “Has he assaulted any more walls?” Daniel asked.

  “Only the one, Doctor. It is a part of his mania that he phant’sies he knows just where the treasure is hidden.”

  “What treasure do you refer to?” Isaac asked.

  “Why, the same one all the lunaticks are searching for, sir,” said Stubbs, “the Gold of King Solomon.”

  JOHN DOE WAS in no condition for an interview just yet. While the attendants busied themselves putting Doe’s chains back on his wrists and ankles, and returning him to his cell, Daniel, Isaac, and Peter Hoxton ascended to the storey above and walked back to the center of Bedlam along a gantlet of cells similar to those below. Fewer visitors came up here. The ones who did tended to be gangs of bloody-minded ’prentices, or the most distasteful sort of fops, or solitary men who looked as if they might themselves benefit from a few hours in the Machine. The prisoners here remained locked in their cells, and for the best reasons. Daniel prudently walked as close to the windows, and as far from the doors, as was practical, and tried not to hear the mutterings of the faces framed in some of those little door-hatches. He led the others on, and they gladly followed, at a brisk pace. Presently they exeunted from the men’s wing and entered the central part of the edifice, above the main entrance, and below the cupola. Here they ascended another stair into a vaulted space: technically an attic, but a carefully finished one, airy and well-lit.

  Seen from Mr. Witanoont’s Vinegar-Yard, Bedlam’s center looked as if a squarish funnel had been turned upside-down and clapped on top of it. The broad part of the funnel was a high mansard roof enclosing the ample space in which Daniel, Isaac, and Saturn were now standing. The narrow nozzle was the cupola, which pierced the ceiling, admitting sky-light and (as its windows were ajar) exhausting the fouled air of the asylum. “This was Hooke’s favorite part of the building, his ærie and his atelier,” Daniel said, “though it then looked much different.” He approached a railing and gazed down into the central well that vented cupola-light into the entrance hall. “This had planks thrown across it, making it into one great floor, uninterrupted.”

  “I only paid one visit, and that was for your going-away party,” said Isaac.

  This was of interest to Saturn, who had been distracted, leaning over the rail and beckoning to some blokes loitering on the ground floor, two storeys below them. Now those fellows were ascending the stair in a gang. A man in indigo was moving to intercept them on the landing. Saturn, whilst keeping an eye on their progress, attended to Daniel. “Was that before you went off to Massachusetts?” he inquired.

  “Long before. I departed for Massachusetts, at long last, in 1695. The party to which Sir Isaac refers was in 1689.”

  “That makes no sense,” Saturn pointed out. Then he leaned over the railing, turning his attention to what was happening on the landing below: the man in indigo had barred the path of the blokes—four in all—who had answered Saturn’s call. They were big, rough-looking lads who could have mowed this man down in an instant, but they had piled to a stop anyway, and were looking up to Saturn for their cue.

  “ ’S al’right, sir,” Saturn called, “they’re with us.”

  “And who the hell are you?”

  Daniel silenced Saturn with a hand on his shoulder, and gave the answer: “Sir Isaac Newton, the Master of Her Majesty’s Mint, investigates an act of High Treason. You are impeding his deputies. Pray stand aside.”

  Isaac was as startled to hear this, as was the indigo-suited maniac-wrangler, and stepped up to the railing. He did this not for effect, but simply to see what in heaven’s name was going on. But the apparition of the ancient white-haired sorcerer-knight struck the attendant, and moved him aside, like a blast of wind blowing a door open. “I do beg your pardon, guv’nor,” he said, in a much more moderate tone, after Saturn’s ruffians had filed past him. “Is there any way I can be of service?”

  “Prevent sight-seers from coming up here, thank you,” Daniel returned, then wheeled round and began to scan the walls. This upper storey was not as prized by the Governors of Bedlam as it had been by Hooke; rather than situating their best offices here, they had sprinkled tables and trunks about the place, making it into a dovecote for clerks, and a dump for little-used documents.

  “When we were here for my party it looked much as it does now,” Daniel said to Isaac, “which is to say that these inward-sloping walls—which are, of course, the inner surface of the roof’s structure—had been plastered over.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I often visited Hooke here much earlier—back in the seventies. This part of Bedlam went up first—as you’ll recall, the wings took years to complete.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am trying to recollect what it looked like, before lath and plaster were put up. I phant’sy that behind these surfaces are large cavities—particularly—if memory serves—here, between where the chimney is hidden as it pierces the roof, and the corner. There are four chimneys—hence, four such cavities.” Daniel had been dragging a hand along the plaster as he spoke, occasionally thumping with his knuckles. He’d stopped at a place, near the corner, where it answered with an especially resonant boom. Without allowing his hand to move, he turned round now to scan the other three corners. His gaze lit on one that was stained with fresh plaster. Then—fortuitously—he noticed that Timothy Stubbs had finally caught up with them.

  Pleasantly baffled might have described Stubbs’s state of mind when he’d reached the head of the stairs; horrified was nearer the mark now. Daniel favored him with a thin smile. “Does my discourse have a familiar ring to you, Mr. Stubbs?”

  “Indeed, Doctor, it is very like what John Doe was saying to his confederates, after I followed them hither that night.”

  “You showed commendable nerve, Mr. Stubbs, in sneaking up on a gang of madmen.”

  The praise caused Stubbs to relax a bit. “Wish I’d been so cool as to’ve tackled all of ’em, guv.”

  “You did just the proper thing by capturi
ng their leader. Is that the place, over yonder, where they attacked the wall?” Daniel asked, pointing to the fresh plaster.

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Mad as hatters—or so ’twould seem,” Daniel mused. “On the other hand, suppose there really is treasure, or something, hidden in one of these corners. Then John Doe is no madman, but a burglar or worse; and all of the treatments I have prescribed for him are to no purpose. They might even be detrimental! He should in that event be at Newgate awaiting justice, not at Bedlam seeking a cure. The only way to be certain is to look. I take it that Doe found nothing, when he broke through the wall?”

  “Wasps’ nests and bat droppings only,” Stubbs returned, speaking slowly, as he was a bit lost.

  “That is not surprising. Mr. Hooke would have placed his cache in the corner most sheltered from the prevailing winds—there,” Daniel said, and pointed along the wall to the next corner. Saturn looked at him, and Daniel nodded. Saturn turned his back to the others and sauntered to the corner indicated. He gave his right arm a little twitch as he went, and a loggerhead of black iron dropped out of his sleeve, fat end first. His fingers closed round the narrow end just in time to keep it from dropping to the floor. Then with a sudden movement he brought it diagonally up and across his body, and with a ponderous swing of his whole trunk delivered a massive back-hand blow to the wall. The loggerhead burst through the plaster and the underlying lath like a musket-ball piercing a melon. Saturn drew it out, transferred the loggerhead to the other hand, and shoved half of his arm through the hole.

  Mr. Timothy Stubbs was not in the least pleased by any of this, and looked as though the only thing preventing him from adding Saturn to Bedlam’s roster was the implicit threat of the four lads Saturn had summoned up. But Peter Hoxton quickly settled the issue by declaring: “The verdict is in. John Doe is no lunatick, but a common burglar.” And he drew his arm out of the hole, and held up, as proof, a rolled sheaf of dusty papers. “Or perhaps an uncommon one.”

  “ ’TWOULD APPEAR YOU HAD WARNED Mr. Stubbs to be on alert for madmen who would wish to knock holes in the walls,” Isaac said, “but how could you have anticipated this?”

  He and Daniel had retreated to the opposite corner of the upper storey to get away from the dust and noise created by the assault on the wall. Saturn’s lads, who had come with diverse crowbars, steve-dore’s hooks, &c., secreted on their persons, had demolished a few square yards of plaster and lath, exposing a prism of dark space in which two or three bodies might have been concealed, if Hooke had been that sort of chap. Instead, he had packed in two wooden trunks, and a few leather wallets, then caulked the interstices with wadded or rolled papers. The dust was now settling to the point where Daniel and Isaac were tempted to approach. But first Isaac wanted an explanation.

  “The story is not wholly known to me,” Daniel said. “Several of Hooke’s buildings, including the Royal College of Physicians and my lord Ravenscar’s house, have recently been invaded.”

  “Catherine told me about the attack on her domicile,” Isaac said. “A queer lot of burglars they were—knocking holes in my lord Ravenscar’s walls to discover naught, while ignoring treasures that were sitting out in plain view.”

  “Simple extrapolation told me that Bedlam might be next. I paid Mr. Stubbs to show especial vigilance. John Doe was captured a week ago. He has done his utmost, I am told, to keep up the façade of a raving lunatick. Now that he knows what treatment lunaticks may expect in Bedlam, he may confess to simple burglary.” Daniel caught Stubbs’s eye—which was not easily done, as Stubbs was paralyzed with astonishment to see what was being dragged out of the walls. “Pray go to John Doe’s cell. Tell him nothing about what has really occurred. Rather, tell him that Dr. Waterhouse has knocked holes in all four corners, and found nothing—proof that Doe is a madman indeed, who may, therefore, look forward to a stay here of indefinite duration.”

  Peter Hoxton had been carrying out a rough sort of the booty from the wall. Which was to say, he had raked out all that was of Saturnine interest and put the discards in another, larger pile. He had already culled out enough to keep him rapt for weeks: for the trunks were packed with small wooden chests, and the chests with fine instruments wrought of brass, and even of gold. Many of these were obviously clock-work. Saturn, wary of the dust, peered quickly at these, then closed them up and stacked them out of harm’s way, covering them with a large drawing which he pressed into service as a tarpaulin. But the drawing itself—a phantastickal rendering of the skeleton of a bird—had now cozened him into rigid fascination. Isaac too was drawn to it. “I thought it were a rendering of a bird, at first,” Saturn said, “until I spied this cull—” and he pointed to a snarl of lines that Hooke had, over the course of a few seconds’ lazy yet furious drawing, scrawled and slashed onto the page. These by some miracle added up to a perfectly intelligible rendering of a man in breeches, waistcoat, and periwig, standing with arms raised above his head to support one joint of the wing. If this was supposed to be a bird, it would have a wingspan several times that of the largest albatross. But where a bird would have muscles to pull, this skeleton had pistons and cylinders to push, the great bones of the wings. It was inside-out and backwards, exoskeletal.

  Daniel’s gaze fell on a great leather wallet, gnawed at the corners by rodents, but still intact. He unwound the ribbon that held it closed, and spread it out on the lid of a trunk. It was a stack of foolscap sheets rising to the thickness of three fingers, creased and compressed from long immurement, but still perfectly legible. It contained notes, written in Hooke’s hand, and illustrated with more admirable diagrams, on divers subjects:

  Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits expos’d

  Animadversions upon Dr. Vossius’s Hypothesis of Gravitation

  Acerbity in Fruits

  Plagiarism in the Parisian Academy

  Cryptography of Trithemius

  Sheathing ships with lead, as practic’d by the Chinese

  Telescopick Sights for Instruments Vindicated

  Inconceivable Distance of the Fixt Stars

  Parisian philosophers evade Proof from Observations, when they are unwilling to allow Consequences

  272 Vibrations of a String in a Second, make the sound of G Sol re ut

  Python explain’d

  Of the Rowing of Ancient Gallies

  Structure of Muscles explain’d

  Iron and Sp. Salis take fire with explosion

  Unguent for Burns, a Receipt

  Ideas are corporeal, with their Explication, and the possible number that may be formed in a Man’s Life

  Monkeys wherein different from Men

  How Light is produced in putrifying Bodies

  Micrometer of a new contrivance

  A Cause hinted of the Libration of the Moon

  Flints: of their formation and former fluidity

  French Academy have published some Matters first discovered here

  Why freezing expands water

  Effects of Earthquakes on the Constitution of Air

  Hills generated by Earthquakes

  Hob’s Hypothesis of Gravity defective

  Flying Fish, and of Flying in general

  Center of the Earth not the Center of Gravity

  Decay in human bodies observed

  Anthelme’s Opinion of Light refuted

  The Genuine Receipt for making Orvietano

  Why heat is not sensible in the Moon’s Rays

  Gravity and Light the two great Laws of Nature, are but different Effects of the same Cause

  Hodometrickal Method for finding the Longitude

  Effects on one Experimenter of the Plant, call’d Bangue by the Portugals, & Gange by the Moors

  Mechanical Way of drawing Conical Figures

  Burning-glasses of the Ancients

  Implicit was that Hooke had concealed these in the walls of Bedlam because he would not entrust the Royal Society—specifically, Newton—with his legacy. And so Daniel began to read these titles aloud
as a sort of rebuke to Isaac. But having started in on such a Litany, he found it difficult to stop. This was a sort of concentrated essence of that quicksilver spirit that had animated Daniel’s, and the Royal Society’s, halcyon days. To handle these pages was to drink deep from the Fountain of Youth.

  What eventually stopped him was a page written, not in English like most of the others, and not in Latin like some of them, but in a wholly different alphabet. The characters on this page bore no relationship to any from the Roman, Greek, or Hebrew script; they were not Cyrillic, not Arabic, and yet bore no connection to any of the writing-systems of Asia. It was an admirably simple, clean, and lucid way of writing—if only one could understand it. And Daniel almost could. The sight of it stopped him cold for a minute. He was just beginning to decipher the glyphs of the title when Saturn put in: “I have already come across several of those, Doc—what tongue is that?”

  Isaac, gazing at the leaf in Daniel’s hand from three yards away, answered the question: “It is the Real Character,” he said, “a language invented by the late John Wilkins, on philosophical principles, in hopes that it would drive out Latin. Hooke and Wren adopted it for a time. Can you still read it, Daniel?”

  “Can you, Isaac?” Daniel asked; for it might be important for him to know this.

  “Not without revising Wilkins’s book.”

  “It is a receipt,” Daniel said, elevating the page slightly, “for a restorative medicine, made from gold.”

  “Then pray do not waste time translating it,” Isaac said, “for we all know of the late Mr. Hooke’s susceptibility to quackery.”

  “This is not Hooke’s receipt,” Daniel said. “He wrote it out, but did not invent it. He gives credit to the same fellow who shewed the Royal Society how to make Phosphorus.” To Saturn and diverse other eavesdroppers this signified nothing, but to Isaac it was as good as saying Enoch the Red. As such it drew Isaac’s full and disconcertingly sharp attention. “Pray go on, Daniel.”

  “It begins with a sort of narration. An account of something Hooke witnessed somewhere…” A long pause now for difficult translation, then sudden knowledge: “No, here! Just here, where we are standing. The date given is…if my arithmetick is to be credited…anno domini 1689.”