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

by Neal Stephenson

  Like boys who have waded along a creek-bed to the place where it loses itself in river, the troops had come to a broad swale that rolled up from undulating farm-country below—generally to their left—and, to their right, fetched up against the limey buttresses of a chalk hill—a down, as they named it in this part of the country. There this convenient highway of dry fescue and sporadic trees was barred by a furry tonsure of beeches that gripped the rougher parts of the down, indeed seemed to cover it all the way to the top—until he peered through spare places in the wood and saw pale, sere meadows on the high side.

  The order of battle would have been clear to him at that point, even if he’d been a private soldier with no hand in its planning: there was an estate on the top of this down, hedged on this approach by the beech-belt. Proper visitors would approach it by (he guessed) some sort of carriageway that would come up the gentler slope on its yonder side; he and his company, however, were going to assault it from its (he hoped) unguarded and unwatched rear by toiling up the wooded chalk-bluff until they could break out of the trees and into the open ground above and beyond.

  As he was collecting all of this together in his head, the wee hairs on the back of his neck stirred. He turned and drew this new breeze into his nostrils. It was damp and smelled of the river. It was going to precede them up through the trees.

  He spoke now for the first time in hours, and gave the word to begin at once, each platoon holding hands, to use a figure of speech, with those to either side of it, so that they’d not lose one another in the fog, and fragment the line. “What fog, Sergeant?” someone asked, for the air was as clear as snow-melt. But Sergeant Bob only turned his back on this fellow and began stalking up-hill. One measure of soldierly experience, he had found, was how long it took for a man to wot that an engagement had commenced. For Bob Shaftoe, it had commenced the moment this moist breeze had begun its journey up from the Thames, and the battle was now more than half over. For this chap who had just asked him “What fog?” the onset of the battle still lay at some indefinite point in the future. Taken to its extreme, this particular form of military incompetence led to men being surrounded and slaughtered while sleeping, or eating. In less extreme forms it caused excessive casualties. Bob knew of no remedy for it other than to act, which would shock and embarrass laggardly sergeants and corporals to follow him. By the time he reached the verge of the beech-wood, he could feel the moisture clammy on his arms. By the time he led his company out on to the high pasture-land on the lid of the down, it was hushed under a new fog. He had not gone ten paces into this hilltop estate when a dog began to bark. The company had been moving with admirable quiet; but the breeze was at their backs, their scent had preceded them, indeed was now a mile in their van, and the dog knew they were coming.

  They were now seven-eighths of the way through this engagement that, in the minds of most of his men, still lay in the future. Bob was not the only one who heard the dog barking: voices up ahead were calling it by name, telling it to shut up. If Bob was lucky, they’d still be lying in their beds cursing the dog at the moment he kicked the door down. But that would have been very lucky indeed. A squall of whinnies and hoofbeats erupted from far ahead, off to their right: Whig Association cavalry, which had converged on this place from another quarter. Even Bob’s wrecked ears could make out that much, and one of the younger soldiers insisted that he could hear a carriage moving somewhere off to their right. It was too soon for the inhabitants of this farm, estate, or whatever it was, to have gotten a carriage of their own out on to the road, and so Bob supposed this must be some officers or gentlemen come to observe, remark, criticize, countermand, or otherwise improve upon Bob’s conduct of the operation.

  “Permission is given to be audible,” he said, loudly, and loudness spread like panic down the line to his left and to his right. Though because of the fog it was not so much a line as a chopped-up scribble. The drummers began to beat an advance, and sergeants began to scream in outrage as they understood, from that, just how badly spattered over the field they had become. One platoon was far to the rear, and confused, and (what was much worse) unwilling to accept just how badly they’d got it wrong; Bob crossed them off his mental Order of Battle as hors de combat. Other platoons seemed to be moving perpendicular to the line of march. And so Bob finally screamed an order that all should simply march toward the barking dog. This worked better than anything else he had tried. It forced them to go up-slope. Word propagated up the line that a wall had been encountered on the right, and Bob ordered them to hold there. Presently the middle, and finally the left, found that wall, and stopped, forming (Bob supposed) an arc a few hundred yards long, curved inwards to face in the general direction of the dog. Its barking had been joined by the blowing of a post horn; shouting; colliding blades; and pistol-shots. The wall was a linear rock-pile, snarled and teeming with hedge-life. Bob vacillated there, for a few moments, until he heard cavalry behind him, and noted that the fog was beginning to dissolve into the light of day. Then he gave the order to clamber over the wall and proceed double-time toward the melee. They would serve better as beaters than as hunters. The horsemen coming round across their rear could round up anyone who dashed through their line.

  THE STREETS OF LONDON, EACH so particular and unique to the terrified, benighted pedestrian, were, to a coach-passenger, as anonymous and same as waves on the sea. As Waterhouse, Newton, and Leibniz had sailed through them during the early hours of the morning, Daniel had teased himself with the phant’sy that they would settle the Calculus Dispute now, perhaps with Christian reconciliation or perhaps with a roadside duel in the dead of night. But Sir Isaac had made it plain that he had no intention of talking about anything, and had pretended to sleep, and shifted and glared when Leibniz and Waterhouse disturbed his repose with candle-light and chit-chat. This made perfect sense. Isaac held the upper hand in the dispute, and was going to triumph; why talk to Leibniz at all? Leibniz would have to make Newton want to talk.

  Daniel neither slept, nor pretended to. As soon as there was light, he dropped the carriage’s window-shutters, giving them a pleasant enough view of a tree-lined Surrey carriageway. But this lasted only for a quarter of an hour or so before it dissolved in fog. Leibniz, then Newton, stirred from feigned or genuine sleep. “Do you suppose we are riding to the Clubb’s final meeting, then?” Daniel asked, now desperate to get them talking about something.

  “If by that what you are really asking is, ‘are we about to catch Jack?’ then I should say no,” Isaac answered. “This does not seem his sort of place. It looks like the country house of some lord.”

  “You seem disquieted by that,” Leibniz said, “but has it not been obvious from the beginning that Jack must be conniving with men of high rank?”

  “Of course,” said Isaac, “but I had not expected to drive right through the gate of some Duke’s country-house! Where are we?”

  “Be at ease,” said Daniel, who sat facing forward, and had a view ahead. “We are being hailed by one of Roger’s pseudo-Mohawks. He is bidding the driver turn left.”

  “And what is to the left?”

  “A lesser road—not so impressively tree-lined as this. Perhaps it leads away to some humble down-top farm-stead.”

  But having turned on to that road they immediately drove through a stone gate: clearly not the formal main entrance, but a side door, of some substantial demesne. It seemed to Daniel, as they trundled along the rutted road, that they must be following in the steps of the Whig Association Foot, who must all have paused along this stretch to void their bladders. But then he got it. And for once in his life, he got it slightly quicker than Newton or Leibniz. The last few minutes’ travel—the roads, the turns, and the odor—tallied with the penultimate leg of Mr. Kikin’s journey. They were there—almost. “Driver!” Daniel exclaimed, “tell me—do you see, up ahead, a place where one might turn to the right, and go up-hill a short distance on an old track that is paved in patches with flat stones?”


  “No, guv’nor,” said the driver. But then they rounded a bend and he saw just what Daniel had described. As did Newton and Leibniz, who by this point had their heads thrust out of windows. “Go that way!” they all began to shout, for all of them recognized this from Mr. Kikin’s narration. The driver complied. They were now ascending a knoll.

  At its top was a cluster of old Norman-looking farm-buildings, very down at heels. A dog was barking. Hooves sounded behind; it was their minder from the cavalry. “Turn about! You are going the wrong way!” he called.

  “We are going the right way!” insisted Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse in unison; which set them all to laughing, and sent the dog into a frenzy.

  “Who goes there?” came a call from far away down the hill, and something in the tone of voice gave Daniel the idea that this was not some resident of the place, challenging an intruder, but a fellow intruder, trying to make out what was going on. Which was quite striking, and (an instant later) a wee bit disturbing. Until now, he’d been supposing that they were going over ground that had already been traversed, and laid claim to, by friendlies, operating according to some coherent plan. But now he could hear a simply ludicrous amount of effort being expended by several units and individuals, all within earshot of one another, and all on the same side, for the simple purpose of trying to make out who the other blokes were, what direction they were headed, et cetera. So for all he knew, he and Newton and Leibniz might be in front of the rest of the force. And finally—as a sort of crowning ornament to this edifice of startling realizations that had been set a-building by the shouted “Who goes there?”—he understood that all military operations were this way, that no one here, other than Daniel, was surprised by any of it, and that (as in so many other situations in life) no remedy was possible and no apologies would be forthcoming.

  It kept his mind occupied, anyway, until they crested the knoll and found themselves lost in and surrounded by the Odor: a stench of sal ammoniac so bad that it panicked the horses and forced the driver to use every bit of his wit, will, and whip-skill to rein them in, wheel them about, and drive them up-wind, out of the bad air. This confused and wild U through the hilltop lasted for all of ten seconds, and left a farrago of weird impressions in Daniel’s mind: the hysterical dog at the end of its tether, the gutted buildings, stained ground. The phrase “abomination of desolation” hung in his head; he could hear the voice of Drake intoning the words out of the Geneva Bible. The ancient half-timbered buildings of the farmstead—which had probably been in ruins even before Jack and his gang had gotten to them—had been attacked, as beetles scavenge a fallen carcass, and holed, torn, gutted, stripped, and remade into some monstrous novelty. The sides that faced out into the surrounding countryside had not been changed much, but the middle of the compound had been turned into something that was part giant machine, part Alchemist’s laboratory. Vast boilers, stained black with smoke, narrowed to serpentine tubes of hammered copper, frosted with dripping beads of solder and fuzzy with fertile encrustations of chymical crystals. Patches of soil lay burned and dead where they’d been plashed with murderous tinctures.

  It finally occurred to him to look at Isaac to see how the arch-Alchemist reacted to this glimpse of the Art writ large. Daniel saw in Isaac’s face neither fascination nor disgust but a kind of pensive bewilderment: the look he got when he was drawing connexions in his mind that were beyond Daniel’s powers. But he looked suddenly at Daniel and remarked, “Clarke’s house.”

  Which was a reference to a thing he had taken Daniel to see fifty years earlier, on a visit to Grantham, Lincolnshire: an apothecary’s house where Isaac had boarded as a schoolboy. Clarke had dabbled in Alchemy and had filled a side yard of the house with wreckage of his experiments. It was much smaller than what they had just seen, but to young Isaac must have seemed as large, and as glamourous with hazards, and as seething with mystery. In the half-century since, all things Alchemical had become familiar to Isaac; but what he had just seen must have jolted him with the same emotions he had known as a boy making illicit forays into Mr. Clarke’s laboratory.

  For Daniel’s part, he wanted to loathe what Jack had made of this good old farm, and to be outraged, and to hate Jack all the more for it. But none of these feelings came to him. They would never come, because Daniel had already seen in Devon the works of Mr. Thomas Newcomen, which were like a harbinger of this thing. Or perhaps the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, and Jack’s phosphorus-mill, were both harbingers of something else, which he could scarce picture in his mind—and scarcely wished to. He had once said to Mr. Threader, in a very self-righteous way, that England did not need Slaves, if she could learn to make Engines, and that Engines, being clever, were a more English sort of thing than toiling Negroes; but now he was beginning to think that he ought to be more careful of what he wished for. The first phosphorus laboratory ever made—that of the Alchemist Heinrich Brand—had been so clever that it had inspired Leibniz to write a poem about it. But Daniel could see from the look on Leibniz’s face that he’d be writing no poems about this place, unless it was a supplementary Canto of Dante’s Inferno.

  They debarked from the carriage, for the horses would on no account draw any nearer to the noisome Works. They knew that the dog was tethered, for they had nearly run over it, and they knew that no humans would be about, because who could or would sleep atop such a hell-mouth? So Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse strode rather than crept toward the Factory, and when they heard hoofbeats coming up behind, none of them paid it much mind, knowing that it was the young Mohawk who had been detailed to keep an eye out for them.

  The last breaths of the fog had at last blown off from this hilltop, though the low places among the downs were still gloomed under fat gray rivers. One could see ten miles from this place—and anyone save a Natural Philosopher would turn his back to the ugly scene in the center to enjoy the prospect. But these men, who thought nothing of dissecting a beautiful corpse to examine a necrotic ulcer, had eyes only for the phosphorus-works.

  The compound was ringed by an old hedgerow that had been viciously trimmed back by its new tenants, and cut down to the height of a man’s mid-section. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse passed through a gap where it was pierced by a little side-track, and the Mohawk, who was angling in from another direction, jumped it easily on his mount, wheeled round, and trotted toward them. Waterhouse, well knowing his place, assumed the tedious duty of talking to the rider so that the great ones’ observations would not be disturbed. “Never mind what orders you have been given,” said Daniel, “this place is the objective of the day—it is why we have all come here.”

  “Shall I go and summon others?”

  “I do not think it necessary—they’ll find us anon.”

  “I meant, sir, in case we should meet with resistance.”

  “There will be none,” said Daniel, “except for that!” And he pointed toward the dog, who was sprinting for them.

  It turned out that this animal’s tether was very long indeed, so that it could range over the entire hilltop, provided it did not commit the classic error of getting the rope wound around anything—and it was one of those dogs who was clever enough to avoid that. Having (or so it imagined) chased off the carriage of Newton, Leibniz, et al., it had found employment on the opposite side of the compound, barking at some untoward noises. But now it was coming for them, angling in on their larboard quarter. It faltered as it perceived a choice between going for Newton and Leibniz—who were several paces ahead—or Daniel and the mounted Mohawk. Wisely, it chose the former. Newton and Leibniz, so different in matters of high philosophy, were absolutely the same when it came to being chased across a farm-yard by a huge ravening mastiff. They cheated to the right, and got up against the hedgerow, prepared to clamber over it if they had to—but this was a last resort, at their age. Then they hustled forward, hoping to get out of the tether’s fatal radius. But that tether simply kept uncoiling—just when it looked as if it were about to jerk taut, fre
sh miles of it would appear, as if by some conjuror’s trick. Newton almost tripped over something, and Leibniz bent down and picked it up: it was a long wooden paddle, chymically gnawed and stained, its handle snapped off at one end, but still a fathom long. For they had drawn nigh the boiler where such implements were used to stir and test the thickening coction. Leibniz waved this find around, sending a message that the dog collected instantly; it broke off the frontal assault and shifted fluidly into a feinting-and-lunging style of flank-attack. Daniel caught up with the others about now, and, passing behind Leibniz’s defense, went to haul Isaac Newton up off the ground. Meanwhile the Mohawk had ridden up behind the dog and was shouting to draw its attack: a plan his mount well understood and little favored, so that this rider must devote all his powers to managing the mental states of the dog on one hand and the horse on the other.

  Isaac was down, not because he had tripped, but because he had gotten interested in something. He held out his hand. A reddish nodule lay in the middle of his palm. “Behold,” he announced, “Jack has learnt the art of making red phosphorus. It is scattered all about.”