How can one spy stars in so cloudy a sky? One reason for the peculiar quality of Dutch light was surely its shifting nature, for the immense sky had been at least partly obscured for all three of Malcolm’s days here. A stacked mass of cloud, topped with asymmetrical turrets and domes like a fortress hewn from a knoll, was moving in from the west like Mahomet’s mountain, drizzling a rainy smudge from its flattened bottom.
Holland inhabits the bottom of a basin, where the turbid air settles like precipitate in cloudy water. Malcolm knew nothing about the weather, but the analogy seemed sound. Live in the bilges of the macrocosme and the splendors of the macrocosme must be diminished. Small wonder if the researchers of the Low Countries should turn their lenses from the heavens above to the muck beneath their feet.
But is it any greater wonder (he asked himself) that the telescopists, balked by the cataractous air above their heads, should turn rather to grinding mirrors, swing their instruments sidelong rather than upward like swivel’d cannons? Impressive enough their achievements—Huygens had erected a telescope 210 feet long, thus defeating the hobgoblin of chromatic aberration—in despite of their sodden weather; to what use would they put Newton’s late contrivance of a telescope that worked by Reflection?
Malcolm fretted these matters as he walked the canal-path toward the center of Delft, so did not see his acquaintance until hailed. “Meister Veymout!” cried a voice, and Malcolm turned, startled, to see a hatted burgher looking up from what appeared to be a telescope. The figure straightened and waved, and Malcolm recognized the surveyor, who had yesterday spoken to him when the object of his inquiries took ill.
“Heer Spoors,” said Malcolm, raising his hat. The object on the tripod was a theodolite, which was sighted along the frontage of a lot filled with workmen wielding barrows and picks, who seemed to be sinking piles for a foundation even as the remains of a previous structure were being cleared. “You are at your labors early this day.”
“The daylight wanes, while work only multiplies. It is like that doctrine Antoni reviles, of nonlife erupting into life?”
“Generatio spontanea,” said Malcolm.
“Like maggots in meal!” The master craftsman laughed, and began to walk beside Malcolm. “You have lived in London, you say. How goes the pest there?”
Malcolm was anxious not to be taken for a spy, but saw no point in hiding his origin from Leeuwenhoeck’s colleagues, since it was as a fellow of the Royal Society that he was presenting himself. “It lingers,” he allowed. “Though certainly not like before the Fire.”
Spoors pulled a long face. “Plagues light on cities, like sparks on dry tinder.” Then, apparently moved by the theme of bodily infirmity, he asked, “You go today to see if Antoni is better? He had, you understand, an attack of diarrhoea.”
Malcolm said that he had realized this. “I hope that Heer Leeuwenhoeck is able to receive me today. His letters to the Royal Society take long to reach us, and we are anxious to hear of his newest researches.” It occurred to him that Spoors, who worked with farseeing lenses, might be more valuable a source than Leeuwenhoeck.
Malcolm paused at a footbridge that arched across the canal, a sturdy wooden structure such as one might expect to find spanning a brook in an English deer park. The low arch blocked the waterway to all boats, even skiffs, and Malcolm stared at it, wondering whether it swung like a tollgate. Of course, he realized suddenly: This canal isn’t for navigation, it merely drains some polder. The narrow channel was in fact a ruled gutter, engineered as carefully as an aqueduct.
Spoors, taking his surprise for uncertainty, pointed to the left. “The comptoir is this way,” he offered, taking Malcolm’s arm. “Allow me to conduct you; I would see that my friend is recovered before returning to work.” And the surveyor led him into central Delft, past a street that stank of scorched hops and another crowded with pilgrims heading for the New Church (“The tomb of William the Silent,” Spoors explained) to the garment district where Malcolm, who had come to it yesterday from the opposite direction, recognized at last the clothier’s shop of Antoni Leeuwenhoeck, who gazed through microscopes.
“You must pardon my yesterday’s indisposition,” said the draper as he led them to his small office in back. “I suffered, it seems, from a fluxion of kleijne diertgens.” Malcolm did not get a chance to ask what the Dutchman meant before they were standing about his crowded worktable, which was littered with drawings, bits of metal, and stoppered bottles and jars. No instruments were in view, and every visible object was small.
Malcolm began to murmur some expression of well-being, but Leeuwenhoeck was on to business. “What had I been showing you?” he asked, frowning at his lapse in recollection. He looked more the tradesman he plainly was than the microscopist his letters proclaimed. His wig and coat were in the fashion of the mercantile class, and his manners, like a new lens, were ground but unpolished.
“You had begun to demonstrate the ‘globules’ in a smear of human sperm,” said Malcolm. “You said they bore tails and thrashed like tadpoles.”
Leeuwenhoeck and the surveyor exchanged glances. “That was a trifle,” Leeuwenhoeck said shortly. He gestured at a phial lying on the table. “Your Heer Oldenburgh asked that I examine the constituent parts of saliva, sweat, and other fluids of the body, but it is an investigation best left to anatomists.”
Malcolm looked at the sample, which he had hoped to be shown through a microscope, and suddenly understood. “Of course,” he said diplomatically. “Mr. Oldenburgh will see the sense of that.” Indeed. He reminded himself that it was the microscope he was here to see, and wondered where Leeuwenhoeck’s cabinet was.
“Show him the diertgens,” said Spoors.
Leeuwenhoeck brightened at the suggestion. “Good idea,” he said. He picked up a bottle of cloudy liquid, which he unstoppered and began to decant into a fine glass pipe. Malcolm recognized, with a small thrill, the vessel Leeuwenhoeck had described in his letters for the viewing of aqueous substances.
“This water was taken from a stagnant pool upon which the sun had shone for two days,” Leeuwenhoeck remarked. Stopping the pipe with a pinch of gum, he reached into his coat pocket and produced a metal plate about the size of a calling card. A bead of glass glinted in its center like a gem. The draper secured the pipe to a metal arm protruding from the plate, then held the plate up to the window and peered into the bead as ’twere a keyhole. “There they are,” he said. Nodding with satisfaction, he handed the device to Malcolm and gestured that he look.
Wordlessly Malcolm took the scrap and peered into its tiny lens. He had to remove his spectacles and bring the lens so close to his eye that his lashes brushed the metal, but after a moment’s adjustment the realm beyond jumped into view: the kleijne diertgens—which Malcolm had translated as animalcula, Latinizing the tradesman’s homely Dutch—were swirling through a featureless medium like motes in a beam, and only those that slowed could be apprehended to have limbs. Legs there were, innumerable as a centipede’s, and protuberances that might be heads. Malcolm stood rapt, staring at the swarming creatures until a perceptible dimming—the sun gone behind a Dutch pall—roused him to recollection of his surroundings. He lowered the microscope.
“They are quite as you describe them, Mijn Heer,” said Malcolm. “No one in England has yet seen such wonders; Mr. Hooke has devoted his attentions to studying the minute parts of visible objects. But”—holding up the metal lozenge—“I am surprised by the simplicity of your device. It seems in design little more than a flea-glass, though greatly more powerful; but the microscopists of England use instruments that align paired lenses through a viewing tube.”
“I have found,” said Leeuwenhoeck, “that using lenses in train compounds not only their magnifying power, but their distortions as well. A single lens, well made, provides clearer results.”
This was the opening Malcolm had been seeking. “Are the lenses ground to your own specifications?” he asked.
“I make my own lenses,” Le
euwenhoeck answered. He seemed to notice Malcolm’s surprise, for he added, “There are in this town no others who practice this art, and so the lens-makers decline to learn its mysteries.”
“I see.” Malcolm covered his confusion by looking back to the pipe mounted on the microscope. “These myriad creatures flourish where the sun shines on water?”
“Not only there.” Leeuwenhoeck produced another pipe, containing a darker liquid. “The tiny creatures appear also to inhabit the interior of human bodies, as mites and fleas do the surface.” He unclamped the first pipe from the microscope and affixed the second. “This is from a sample I took yesterday of my own diarrhoea,” he said, handing it over.
Both men watched as Malcolm reluctantly raised the instrument to his face. “I see,” he said again, wondering if he would be expected to clasp hands on taking leave of the draper.
Murky objects swam across the face of the lens, different (so far as Malcolm could tell) from the bright monsters of the infusoria. “Fascinating,” Malcolm said gamely. “Have you catalogued the species of diertgens found in the human bowels?”
“No.” Leeuwenhoeck picked a page off the desk and turned it face-down. “That again belongs to the realm of physicians. I had wondered whether the sites of illness—well, no matter.”
Malcolm seemed to have stepped into another patch of boggy ground. “Indeed,” he said, trying at levity, “it would be a serious matter should the physician find sperm globules in such a sample.” The two Dutchmen stared at him. “But I have taken too much of your time,” he added quickly. “I hope that I shall be able to call upon you when my business returns me to Delft.” And the elaborate business of taking leave began, with Malcolm careful to show the draper the courtesy he would extend a British gentleman.
“A marvelous contrivance,” said Spoors as they returned the way they had come. “As an ant may crawl upon a steeple, so creatures minute beyond ken may traverse a grain of sand. Bodies there are, which stand to us as we do to mountains; and we stride through life unsuspecting their existence.”
The surveyor seemed disposed to talk, and Malcolm wished that the Dutch had coffeehouses. Instead they engaged in furious commerce, relieved only in the evening by tobacco and drink. What Malcolm would lief bring round by degrees he would have to broach directly.
“It is indeed a marvelous device,” he said casually. “I wonder not that Heer Leeuwenhoeck is reluctant to disclose the birthplace of such potent lenses.”
“He makes them himself, as he said,” replied Spoors. “I have dealt with grinders in Delft and beyond, and know that Antoni buys only unpolished blanks.”
“Lenses and mirrors for your own work?” Malcolm said this carelessly.
“Indeed, for measurements must be exact.” Spoors’s voice held a trace of pride. This, thought Malcolm, might prove the entrypoint he could pry wide to disclose the secret he sought.
“For the finest optical instruments one must go to the Hague,” Spoors continued. “Telescopic devices must use twin lenses in train, and those who study the stars employ tubes of tremendous length.” He chuckled. “Christiaan Huygens, who saw a ring around Saturn like a wedding band, constructed one three hundred feet long!”
“So I have heard,” said Malcolm blandly. “Though my business follows the inquiries of the Royal Society, I would visit the Hague if I could. But I do misgive myself, for the state of war that exists between our countries counsels against my entry to that city.”
Spoors made a scoffing sound. “Our countries share more qualities in common than does either with France,” he said. “Your Charles recognized this when he made peace with us seven years ago in the face of a common enemy. Now, unable to forget how we burned his navy, he joins the French in attacking us. The beating we have given him this past year will soon convince him to forgo seeking by war what he cannot win in open trade.”
This bluff effort at graciousness left Malcolm with feelings so stirred that he could not sort them to tell which lay paramount. Confusedly he asked without thinking: “What does a Surveyor of the Navy do?”
“Eh?” said Spoors. “You mean a surveyor of harbors and straits?”
“I beg your pardon; I mean one who surveys for a nation’s navy.” Malcolm reddened as he spoke: ’Twas a foolish subject to touch upon. “I know one who works in His Majesty’s naval office, and he does know that gentleman who bears this title.”
Spoors grunted. “And what does he say of the Dutch?”
The question took Malcolm by surprise, though he might have anticipated it. “I have never met Sir William Batten,” he confessed. “But—” His countenance had deepened to the brick red of an oven, and felt as hot. “My friend hath spoken with him often, and remembered Sir William’s dismay after the Dutch expedition sailed up the Thames and burned His Majesty’s fleet.”
“Ha! And what did he say?”
“Actually it was in July,” Malcolm temporized, “when a second fleet appeared at Gravesend.”
“And the English Surveyor of the Navy said…?”
Malcolm’s mouth, he thought miserably, would someday lead him to destruction. “He said, ‘I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.’”
And the Delft surveyor threw back his head and roared, startling the street with a burst of Dutch laughter.
* * *
Malcolm knew Dutch laughter, though he had never heard so pure a specimen in his score and four of English life. His mother laughed like none of their neighbors, though not in latter years; and the pamphlets and broadsheets assailing the Dutch which he had surreptitiously read made much of the vile fun the lowlanders directed at their benefactors and superiors. The Dutch, young Malcolm gathered, were carefree and ungrateful children such as he could only dream of being, living across the ocean in a country where it did not hurt one to be Dutch.
Reading newer pamphlets, his last night in London, Malcolm found the same slurs he recalled from a dozen years earlier, probably the same sentences. “An Hollander is not an High-Lander, but a low-lander for he loves to be down in the dirt and wallow therein,” said one, much taken by his own wit. Malcolm’s unmet kinsmen were frugal yet frivolous; they kept Jews in their midst as a swineherd might live with pigs, they neglected proper distinctions between master and servant, and granted their women scandalous freedoms. “Escutcheons are as plentiful as Gentry is scarce, each man his own herald,” observes the author of a nasty work entitled A Brief Character of the Low Countries. “They are generally so bred up to the Bible that each cobbler is a Dutch doctor of divinity,” claimed another.
But most of the scurrilous pamphlets had the Dutchmen devilized by geography: Such low and boggy country could give rise only to such creatures as they. Holland is “the buttock of the world, full of veins and blood but no bones in it.” Another called it a “universal quagmire,” while a poetaster characterized the industrious Dutch as a
Degenerate Race! Sprung out of Mire and Slime
And like a mushroom, ripen’d in small time.
(The repeated allusions to the Republic’s brief history bewildered Malcolm. Had the English disdained their Commonwealth’s short pedigree?) “A Dutchman is a lusty, Fat, Two-Legged Cheese-Worm.” The author of Observations Concerning the Present Affairs of Holland, pretending to impartiality, called the Dutch “usurpers that deprive fish of their dwelling places,” provoking in Malcolm a bark of startled laughter. Most pamphlets, however, bore such forthright titles as The Dutch-Mens Pedigree as a Relation, showing how They Were first Bred and Descended from a Horse Turd which Was Enclosed in a Butter-Box or The Obligations of the Dutch to England and their Continual Ingratitude, and were crudely if vigorously illustrated.
Yet these creatures of amphibious repugnancy, splashing in mud and worse, were reviled particularly for their sense of mirth, an odd quality to impute to vermin. Malcolm knew already that his ancestral home was Europe’s hotbed for the production of satirical broadsides and engravings, which deeply affronted both England and France; and that Hollan
d’s carefree production of gazettes—the coffeehouse chatter of the Dutch, imprudently preserved on paper—gave even deeper offense. One can understand an enemy’s hatred, but his laughter can only urge his destruction.
Malcolm tosses fitfully on a hard bed more like his pallet in Gresham than the stuffed bolster of Vrouw Kluyver’s hostelry. The scent of stale tobacco lingers in its sheets along with more corporeal whiffs, apprising the Englishman that the Dutch, with careless sybaritism, smoke after fucking. Loin-wrung and shallowly asleep, Malcolm shifts a hip against the mean bedding just as a door slams in an adjacent room. The jamb of sensations cracks memory like a nutshell, and the Englishman’s pale Dutch face, smoothed by dissolution, frowns.
* * *
He had worked late, and so was yet asleep in the English dawn when the knocking boomed through his chamber, hardwood against his door like the knell of doomsday. Disoriented, Malcolm thrashed free of his sheets to find his door swung open and two men standing over him, foreshortened British faces gazing down as though he were an eel on a plate.
“Malcolm Weymouth,” said the hawk-faced man, as though warning him not to deny it.
“Who are you?” Malcolm had sat up, but they were not granting him room to stand.
“Shut up,” warned the shorter one in an ugly tone, but his superior gestured him silent.
“You are Malcolm Weymouth of Battersea,” he said, “born of Richard Weymouth, mariner, and his wife Marte, a Dutchwoman.”
“That I am.” Malcolm wished he could reach for his hat.
“I am Silas Monckton, with warrant of the Council of State.” Monckton straightened, carrying himself with the assurance of authority, and turned to survey the room. A batch of proof sheets lay upon his table, partially corrected. Monckton pointed at them with his stick. “Thou art a clerk for the Royal Society, and dost translate letters from French and Dutch correspondents.”
“I am a junior fellow,” Malcolm protested weakly. He had recognized the spymaster’s name, and his entrails were gone weak with fear.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 54