The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  A teeming buller had started up back in the woods. At first it might have been mistaken for a gust of wind becoming snared in the branches of the trees. But it grew relentlessly, and began to take on spattering and searing overtones. Somewhere far outside the boundaries of the garden, a man was hauling on a great wheel, flooding buried pipes that conducted Leine-water here. Caroline picked up her skirts and rushed to a nearby intersection of diagonal ways where she turned inwards toward the great round pool that stood in the center of the garden’s darker and wilder half. It had already been brought to a rolling boil. A vertical jet had emerged from a stone orifice in the center and shaped itself into a blunt probe, fighting its way upwards like a sailmaker’s needle pushing through a stack of heavy canvas. As it grew, it began to cast off a mantle of writhing vapor. From here, this looked almost like smoke generated by its rubbing against the air. The jet grew higher and higher until it seemed finally to reflect off the white sky (for the day had become overcast). There it shattered into an incoherent cloud of white spray. The whole garden now was suffused with the roar of the artificial tempest, perfecting the illusion that it was some wild and remote place. The clouds of mist hurled forth by this fountain spread outwards from the pool and infiltrated the corridors among the trees, blurring details of what was near and erasing what was more than a bow-shot away, so soon did things in this gleaming cloud lose their distinctness and fade into the darkness of the trees.

  The land about the garden was flat, and provided no heights from which to spy down into it. There was a church-steeple nearby, with a black pyramidal roof that loomed like a hooded Inquisitor glowering down on the pagan spectacle below. Supposing anyone was watching from that belfry, by walking round the pool Caroline could vanish behind the upside-down cataract of the great fountain. By the same trick the gloomy spire was eliminated from her prospects and she was left perfectly alone.

  The breeze was out of the south. It stretched the fountain-mist out into shimmering, rippling curtains that raced across the pool and rushed up the broad path that led directly to Sophie’s house. The Palace was visible indistinctly, as if seen in a befogged mirror. Caroline thought she could resolve a white frock on one of the stairways, and a white head of hair above it, and a white arm waving off the carriage that had been trotted out, and shooing away the offered sedan chair.

  Sophie always told Caroline to stand in the mist because it was good for her complexion. Caroline had managed to get married and have four children notwithstanding all grievances that might be leveled at her skin. But she always tried to stand in the mist anyway because she knew it would please Sophie. It was cold on her cheeks, and smelled fishy. The sheets and vortices of mist looked like pages of ghostly books tumbling towards her. Over the pool they were so white and substantial she could almost read them. But once they hurtled past her they quickly paled and vanished, diluted by vacant air.

  A man was standing near her at the rim of the pool. He was already too close. A stranger should never have been in the garden anyway! But she did not cry out, for he was very old. He was not looking at Caroline, but at the fountain. He was habited something like a gentleman, but no wig covered his bald pate and no sword dangled at his side. He was encompassed in a long traveling-cloak. This was no mere affectation of style, for the garment was rumpled and spattered, and the man’s boots had not been touched by a servant in weeks.

  When he sensed that Caroline was looking his way, he reached into a cloak-pocket, drew out a gravid purse of crimson leather, and worried it open with parsimonious movements of his worn-out fingers. Out of it he plucked a large golden coin. This he flipped into the air above the pool. It shone, a yellow mote, for an instant before the silver torrent smashed it down into the pool.

  “A penny for your royal highness’s thoughts,” the man said, in English.

  “To me it looked like a guinea,” she returned. She was annoyed beyond words that this interloper was here; but she was well-brought-up, and would no sooner let her annoyance be known than George Augustus would fall off his horse while inspecting the royal guard.

  The old man shrugged, then pulled the purse all the way open and turned it inside out with a thrust of his thumbs, disbursing a shower of golden guineas into the pool.

  “A village could live on that for a year,” Caroline observed. “When you have excused yourself I shall have those coins taken up and put in the poor-box.”

  “Then do you be prepared for your Lutheran vicar to send them back to you with a curt note,” the old man returned.

  “To what effect?”

  “He might write, ‘Your Royal Highness should save these artifacts and give them to paupers in England, where they have some worth, because the Sovereign says they do.’ ”

  “This is a very odd conversation—” Caroline began.

  “Forgive me. I come from people who are no respecters of royals. Our byword is the equality of all men before God. And so when a Princess inflicts upon me an odd, unlooked-for conversation, I cannot rest until I have sought her out and repaid her.”

  “When and where did I do you this injury?”

  “Injury? Nay, ’twas a sort of curious favor. When? Last October, though you must have set it in motion long before. Where? Boston.”

  “You are Daniel Waterhouse!”

  “Your humble and obedient servant. Oh, how it would goad my father to hear his son saying that to a Princess.”

  “You deserve honors, Doctor, and all the comforts I can afford you. Why are you come to me in the style of a Vagabond? And why do you open with these queer remarks about guineas?”

  Daniel Waterhouse was shaking his head. “Queen Anne has writ another of her letters to Sophie…”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Or rather Bolingbroke has, and set it before the poor woman to paw her signature at the end. The letter has been sped hence by a delegation of Englishmen: a few Tories, to inflict the humiliation, and some Whigs, to suffer it. The former are grand and consequential—many who would be in Bolingbroke’s graces vied for few positions. But for the whipping-boy slots, there was very little enthusiasm shown, among Whigs. Rather, a few dried-up third-raters had to be herded aboard the ship at Tower Wharf, like so many Blackamoors on the Guinea coast. I construed this as an opportunity to come and repay my debt to your royal highness.”

  “What, with guineas?”

  “Nay, not a monetary debt. I refer, again, to when you surprized me in Boston with a queer and unlooked-for conversation, which led presently to sea-voyage and adventure.”

  “It pleases me to be having the conversation,” Caroline said, “and to be sure, I should like nothing better than to be repaid with a sea-voyage and an adventure. But such things are for picaroon-romances. Not for Princesses.”

  “You shall have the voyage soon enough, though it be nothing more than a Channel crossing. Once you set foot on English soil at Greenwich, an adventure—of what sort I daren’t guess—will be inevitable.”

  “That much was true whether or not you came here,” Caroline said, “so why did you come? To see Leibniz?”

  “He is not in town, alas.”

  “It bears on the guineas, does it not?”

  “It does.”

  “Then by the same token it must have something to do with the man who makes them: Sir Isaac Newton.”

  “Leibniz told me that you required little instruction—that you worked things out for yourself. I see that this was more than avuncular pride.”

  “Then I am sorry to let you know I have come to the end of my deductions. I asked you to go to London. It pleased me very much that you did. You have sought out Sir Isaac there, and renewed your old acquaintance with him—this is praiseworthy.”

  “Only in the sense that a geek at a fair is to be praised for swallowing a sword.”

  “Pfui! To cross the Atlantic in winter and enter into the Lion’s Den is a Herculean labor. I could not be more pleased with what you have accomplished to this point.”

  �
��You forget that I do not care whether you are pleased. I do nothing to earn your praise. I have undertaken this work simply because I phant’sy that my ends are akin to yours; and to those ends, you have provided me with some of the means.”

  Caroline had to turn her face full into the mist to cool it now—like a red-hot iron that must be tempered in water lest it shatter in proof.

  “I have heard that there were still men like you about England,” she said finally, “and it is good that I have now met you privily and in advance, lest I should spoil my first weeks there crying ‘Off with his head!’ several times each day before breakfast.”

  “What is at issue today, is whether you, or George Louis, or Sophie, shall ever reign in England at all,” Daniel Waterhouse said. “Or will a Jacobite Mobb, or a Stuart King, cry off with your heads?”

  This thought was less frightening than it was interesting. Princess Caroline quite forgot her anger, and entertained it. “Of course I am aware that England contains many Jacobites,” she said. “But the Act of Settlement has been the law of the land since 1701. Our right to the throne cannot really be in question, can it?”

  “We decapitated Sophie’s uncle. I was there. There were sound reasons for it. But it brought unforeseen perils. It put the heads of Princes and Princesses into play, as it were, like kick-balls on a field, to be booted back and forth by whichever gang of players was most numerous, or most adroit. Do you believe what some say, that Sophie Charlotte was assassinated in Berlin?”

  “We will not speak of it!” Caroline announced; and here she really would have ordered his head to be struck off if any guards had been in earshot. Or done the deed with her own hand, given a sharp object. Her rage must have showed, for Daniel Waterhouse now raised his white eyebrows, elevated his chin, and spoke in a voice that was so soothing and gentle that it dissolved like sugar in the murmur of waves along the pool’s edge.

  “You forget that I know Leibniz, and that through him I shared his sweet love for that Queen, and his grief. Grief and anger.”

  “He thinks she was poisoned?” This was one of the few topics Leibniz refused to discuss with Caroline.

  “The manner of her death is not as important as the consequence. If half of what people say about her is true, she had made Berlin into a Protestant Parnassus. Writers, musicians, and scientists converged on the Charlottenburg from every quarter. But she died. Quite recently her husband went to join her. Where the former King of Prussia amused himself by attending the opera, the new one plays with toy soldiers…I see amusement on your face, your royal highness. Familial affection, I think this must be, for this cousin of yours who adores parades and goose-stepping soldiers. But to those of us who do not share in the family joke, it is dreadfully serious. For the war is over; most of the great conflicts have been sorted out; Natural Philosophy has conquered the realm of the mind; and now—today—as we stand here—the new System of the World is being writ down in a great Book somewhere.”

  “The System of the World—that is the title of the book we have anticipated for so many years from Sir Isaac Newton. A new volume of Principia Mathematica…or am I mistaken?”

  “Indeed. But I refer to a different unfinished work: mine and yours. We have lost Sophie Charlotte, and with her we have lost Prussia. I do not wish to lose you, and lose Britain. Those are precisely the stakes.”

  “But this is why I have sought you out in Massachusetts!” Caroline protested. “I cannot manage a house divided between partisans of Leibniz on the one hand, and of Newton on the other. As German and British dominions are united under one crown, so German and British philosophy must be brought together under a grand unification. And you, Doctor Waterhouse, are the one—”

  But she was speaking into a cloud. Daniel Waterhouse had vanished. Caroline looked far up the path to see a crone storming towards her with a letter whipping back and forth in one hand.

  Sophie as usual moved at the pace of a dragoon. But the garden was large. Caroline would have a few moments, yet, to collect herself. She turned toward the fountain, for if shock were still written on her face it were better that Sophie not read it. But all told, she was not as rattled by the conversation just finished as the average Continental princess might have been. For as long as she had been in Hanover, strange people had been coming over from England, bearing cryptic messages and making odd requests. None of it made much sense to her, since she’d never visited the place. She and George Augustus had been invited to come over by some people called Whigs—a challenging term for Germans to pronounce—but some other English called Tories were dead set against their coming. It was all academic anyhow, since George Louis had forbidden his son and daugher-in-law to leave.

  High above her head, where the towering water-jet surrendered to gravity, Caroline could see clumps of water that somehow held together even as the rest of the flow shattered. These could be seen as dark streaks against the incoherent spray. But those water-clumps came down with much greater speed and force than the dissipating clouds, and as they fell, each broke apart into a shower of smaller lumps that left spreading comet-trails behind. Swarms and squadrons of these comets raced down to the pool, messengers carrying strange information from above.

  She strolled round until she was very close to where most of the plume struck the pond. The spray made a solid white hiss and roar, and her dress grew heavy as it stole water from the air. She tried to follow the comets. When they smashed into the foaming surface of the pond they made indistinct noises, like individual voices trying to shout messages in the midst of the Mobb. But whatever intelligence the comets were carrying down from on high was swallowed up by the pool. When the bubbles burst and the froth died away, nothing was left but the clear water of the pond, a bit choppy from the breeze. Caroline supposed that the information was still there to be decyphered, if she’d only stand and stare into the pool long enough. But all she could make out was a constellation of yellow speckles on the stone floor of the pool.

  “This cannot be a coincidence.”

  “Good morning, Grandmama.”

  Sophie was staring at the coins. At eighty-three she had no difficulty seeing them without glasses. She could even tell heads from tails, and recognize the portrait of Queen Anne stamped into the former.

  “I see that bitch going and coming,” she remarked.

  Princess Caroline said nothing.

  “It is a symbol, a sign,” the Electress of Hanover announced, “planted here by one of those horrid visiting Englishmen.”

  “What do you think it signifies?”

  “That depends on what you think of the English money,” Sophie replied. “Which is the same thing as to ask, is it worth anything?”

  This, being oddly similar to some remarks made moments ago by the horrid visiting Englishman in question, caused Caroline to look away from the coins, and gaze into Sophie’s face. In order to do this Caroline had to look slightly down, for Sophie had lost a few inches of height. She had the loose skin that one would expect in a woman of that age, but this had lent to her eyes a marvelous clarity. The walls of Herrenhausen and of the Leine Schloß were adorned with old family portraits, not only of Sophie and her sisters but of their mother. These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes, and tiny mouths, seeing much and saying little. They were certainly not the first girls in a salon that an insecure young man would approach, and engage in conversation. Now Caroline knew as well as anyone that portraits of royals must be taken with a grain of salt. But the visage she was regarding now did not look all that far removed from the ones in those paintings. The eyes, the mouth were the same. More so the feeling of self-possession, of completeness, the sense that this woman was by no means standing around waiting to be joined, or wishing that someone would talk to her. The only changes were in clothing. Sophie, though never responsive to fashion, had adopted the fontange, a tall vertical screen of white lace that rose from the hairline, added some inches to her height, and kept her thinning white hair
out of view, and out of the way of those wonderful eyes.

  Caroline had a funny thought then, which was that Sophie and Daniel Waterhouse might be a match for each other. For he had great staring eyes too, and a disposition to match Sophie’s. They could threaten to chop each other’s heads off well into the Eighteenth Century.

  “Have you spoken to any of the English? I mean the ones who have just arrived, not of the Braithwaite type.”

  “Briefly.”

  “Come, I wish to be away from those coins, and that woman,” Sophie said, turning her back on the pool and leaning towards Caroline, knowing that she’d find a strong arm there. The two women clasped together like halves of a locket and began to walk away from the pool’s rim. Sophie steered Caroline firmly in the direction she wanted. But she had nothing further to say for a little while.

  This half of the garden was partitioned into quadrants, each of which was laid out around a fountain much smaller than the great one in the center. Small paths radiated from each of those fountains, sectioning each quadrant into several pie-wedges. Each of those wedges—thirty-two all told—had been made into a little garden-plot, and each was a bit different: some as clean and tidy as parlours, others as dark and overgrown as the Thüringer Wald. Sophie steered Caroline to one that was screened by a high wall of trimmed trees. Passing through a gap they found themselves in a pleasant green atrium with a little pool in the center, and stone benches around it. Sophie let it be known that she wished to sit on one of these—unusual since for her, a walk in the garden was precisely that.

  “One of the English was using a funny word yester evening—‘currency.’ Do you know it?”