The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Including,” Monckton continued as though he had not heard, “letters from the Dutch Republic, with whom we are in deadly conflict.”

  “I do but translate observations of the natural world, for publication in Philosophical Transactions,” said Malcolm in a constricted voice. Surely, he thought but could not say, this constitutes no treasonous communication with the enemy.

  “I have read the letters.” Monckton turned his head to study the sheets, then nodded. “The draper from Delft is no naturalist, but has simply extended the efforts of Robert Hooke.”

  “Indeed,” said Malcolm, mind awhirl, “the man but carries forward studies initiated here.” Copies of the first proofs had been circulated to several of the senior fellows for approval. He wondered how they could have reached His Majesty’s agents.

  “Yet the spyglass was invented in Holland,” said Monckton. “Its application for military purpose was swiftly undertaken. And a Dutchman named Huygens, known to your Society, has lately devised a new method for grinding lenses that signally improves the power of the telescope.”

  “I did not know these things,” replied Malcolm, mystified.

  The spymaster settled into Malcolm’s chair, not taking his eyes off the young man, and planted his stick between them like a banner. “The draper’s microscope uses a single lens, knowest thou not that? yet is more powerful than any in England. Their lenses achieve greater power than ours, and avoid the distortions ours suffer. Canst thou not conceive, son of the nether lands, how these things might aid their prowess in war?”

  “A stronger spyglass means farther vision,” said Malcolm carefully, “yet the curvature of the Earth sets a firmer limit on their range. The greatest glass conceivable cannot see from Ipswich to the Hague.”

  Monckton looked at him carefully, like a vivisectionist wondering where to begin. “Hast thou seen schoolboys playing with a lens, such as cloth-merchants use to study the weave of a fabric? Hast seen them focus the sun’s rays so to kindle a fire, or roast a nest of ants?”

  “Aye, this I have.” Dawning realization crossed Malcolm’s features. “But none of these contrivances can be turned to warlike uses.”

  “No? Have none of the scientists of the Royal Society, formed by decree of His Majesty himself, thought to wonder whether it is possible for a magnifying glass to set fire to a ship, as Archimedes of Syracuse was said to have done?”

  “Archimedes of Syracuse supposedly used a refracting mirror,” said Malcolm. He remembered something about Dutchmen and mirrors, but could not order his thoughts. Sitting undoubleted on his low bed, his hair disordered and his bladder bursting, he spoke incautiously. “And His Majesty has expressed nothing but disdain for the science of microscopy.”

  “You shut your gob,” cried the second man angrily. He raised a gnarled fist and took a step forward.

  “Enough, Pitcairn,” said Monckton. “Mister Weymouth may not mean to speak treason.”

  “I speak only facts.” Frightened as he was, Malcolm found himself provoked by this avenue of intimidation. “I know nothing of your reports, nor anything of the Dutch war save what I hear in the coffeehouses.” He stood, to dispel the detriment of being gazed down upon, and tried to think. “No lens could set a ship afire; it is simply not possible. The focal length is too short, and the angle between sun, lens, and target wrong. It is possible—” Professional caution urged him stay, but he felt he had better give something—“It is possible, under ideal circumstances, that a powerful mirror might perhaps burn a pinpoint hole in a sail.”

  “I see.” Monckton leaned slightly back, and the imbalance was restored: Malcolm was standing abjectly before his seated interrogator.

  Doggedly Malcolm continued: “The ship, however, would do better to arm itself with a cannon, which would still function in cloudy weather. It would also prove more durable, and easily aimed.”

  “I’m sure the Naval Office will be relieved by thy assurances.” Though seemingly at ease, Monckton was regarding him with a curious intensity, which seemed not quite curiosity, nor amusement, nor disdain. With a start Malcolm recognized it as hatred. Large-skulled and horse-jawed, a former lieutenant (so the story went) to John Thurloe himself, Monckton brought the Roundheads’ fanatical rigor to the cause of the libertine Charles, as though the savage pursuit of a former enemy’s interests conferred its own dour grace. The Dutch Republic in particular he seemed to hate with the virulence of any royalist, and Malcolm could feel the man’s gaze lighting on those of his features thought to betray Dutch blood: the sensuous lips, the milk-fair features.

  “The Naval Office has not asked my advice on any matter,” said Malcolm, taking refuge in fact. “I do but work for the Royal Society, in matters mostly secretarial.”

  “The Royal Society would do well to examine more closely its hiring practices,” said Monckton acidly. “This Dutchman writes accounts of lenses more powerful than any we know, and you look only to the descriptions of chaff and slime with which he busies himself. Other intelligences reach us of wonders emerging from the Dutch kilns, even as our navy falters in its war against the frogs. And when His Majesty’s agents enquire as to why the members of the Royal Society have not brought matters in their knowledge to our attention, we discover that important letters have been entrusted to an equivocating straddler, a supposed Englishman neither truly English nor truly a man—”

  Malcolm remembered making an angry exclamation, but whether he had taken a step forward or raised his hand he could never recall. He crashed backward, a stick against his throat and someone’s foul breath in his face. Impact drove the wind from him, and before he was able to raise his hands he was struck between the legs with the force of a mallet. Gasping airlessly, Malcolm gaped upward to see, beyond Pitcairn’s leering nearness, the austere gaze of Monckton standing over them.

  “Let him up, Pitcairn. Our Royal Fellow may be as much Dutch as English, but he will do earnest labor, like a pilgrim marshaling his better half against his worse, in the service of virtue. It is our role, like figures of allegory, to persuade him of his duty.”

  * * *

  No laughter at this, for laughter acknowledges to the world one’s enjoyment, which Puritans will not acknowledge to themselves. Malcolm would not either, at least according to Grietje, who expressed hers freely. Having gotten behind her and set to work at loosening the strings belting her skirt, he heard her giggle. “Most men lift the hem,” she observed with a glance over her shoulder. “Those who tug down the waistband are usually pretending they’ve got a sailor.” And she galed into laughter to Malcolm’s shriveling shock.

  But even this did not deflate him for long. She threw her arms about him and thrust her beery tongue against his, uncorseted teats pressed against his chest. Grietje smelled of soap and sweat, and bent complaisantly to let Malcolm confirm, with clinical aplomb, that she was disease-free. Lying now drowsing, his leased love departed for other commerce, Malcolm feels peace in dissipation, as though, like a rock salmon, he has traveled up the estuary of his scarce-remembered homeland to convulse forth his seed.

  Someone was knocking on the door. Malcolm came awake with a horrible start, although the knock was neither deferential nor peremptory. “Meynheer Weymouth!” called a young voice. The door swung open and an adolescent, grinning insolently, entered holding a steaming mug. “Meynheer Spoors’s respects, sir,” he said cheerfully, “and an invitation to come forth this night to observe the wonders of a new telescope.”

  Dumbly Malcolm accepted the cup, which hotly radiated the aroma of coffee. The first sip raced through his veins like the phantasmic pneuma and he felt his mind waken to join his body. Even the discovery that the voluptuous Dutch had put a dollop of cream in the coffee did nothing to still his dawning wonder.

  The young man picked up Malcolm’s breeches, turned them right-sideto, and slung them over the back of the chair. “It’s a two-hour journey,” he remarked, “so we must leave soon, I’m told to say, to catch the crescent Venus. I’ll be wi
thout.” And he closed the door behind him. He had not, Malcolm realized, said how he had known where to find Malcolm.

  He drank more deeply of the coffee. An extraordinary experience, he reflected, having coffee in your room without having to go out to a coffeehouse for it. A second pleasure this day to which he could accustom himself.

  The last time he had drunk coffee, he recalled as their carriage sped across a causeway separating two fields, was the afternoon before his departure. It was at Jonathan’s, which the Secretary Member (he jestingly called himself that, though Malcolm did not dare) was wont to frequent. Malcolm had known the Secretary from his late visits to the Royal Society; but his appointment last year had elevated him beyond further acquaintance with Malcolm, who had no business in matters Naval or Parliamentary. Yet the Secretary (who heard everything) hailed Malcolm and came himself to his table—Malcolm standing with a start and a stammer—to demand whether it was true that “You go now to the court of Nicholas Frog?”

  “To Delft, rather, sir,” answered the junior fellow, blushing like a Dutchman. “To study late advances in the art of Microscopy for the Society.” He wondered whether the Secretary knew better.

  “Jesu, and should you profit from your expedition thence, you’ll be the first.” The Secretary’s coffee was being delivered to his table, and he beckoned the waiter over. “The Dutch have sunk seven hundred of our ships in this God-forsaken war, while we have scarce touched theirs. They have flooded their own lands to stop the French advance, did you know that?”

  Malcolm, who never listened to coffeehouse talk of the Dutch war, shook his head solemnly. The waiter’s tray bore three gold-rimmed cups, the Secretary’s and his two clerks’, and Malcolm was served one of them. He sipped the steaming brew carefully, and discovered that the Secretary for the Affairs of the Admiralty was served a better bean than the common gentleman.

  “Has the navy,” he asked, “exacted a comparable toll against the Dutch?”

  The Secretary scowled. “Their merchant ships hole up in harbor like rats, and scarce expose themselves. Such is the Dutchmen’s wealth that they can stifle their trade thus, yet do not starve. Louis should have overrun them by now, but their terrible measures have stopped the French cold.”

  “You have visited Holland,” Malcolm began.

  “I have visited the Dutch, and the Dutch have visited me.” He said it grandly, like one who would tread the stage.

  Malcolm knew what the Secretary signified, and though he had heard the tale before, he asked again now. “You heard their guns yourself?” he asked.

  “All London heard them,” the Secretary answered solemnly. “The sound of enemy fire as the Dutch burned our ships beat a tattoo I hear yet.” He seemed to brood. “Yet their landing party did not kill our townspeople, nor plunder their houses. I spoke afterward to the folk of Medway, who told me that our own soldiers, who entered the country-towns after the Dutch withdrew, were far more terrible to the populace.”

  If the Secretary had wished to pull apart the knit loyalties of peaceable Malcolm like a digger prising a clam, he was going about it the right way. Malcolm smiled painfully, proud of his scrupulous Dutch forebears, ashamed of his ignoble English ones, and miserable that the Republican Dutch and the once-Republican English were not making common cause against the Popish Louis, who set ally against ally with the heft of his purse. Did the Secretary know how he was perturbing the fragile orrery of Malcolm’s composure?

  “So,” continued the Secretary, as though proceeding from melancholy matters to others possibly less so, “you are to study the Dutchmen’s facility with the flea-glass?”

  “Mister Leeuwenhoeck’s device, though it employs but a single lens, appears readily the equal of Hooke’s,” replied Malcolm cautiously. “I do not yet know whether the Holland gentility use them for amusements.”

  “I wish our gentility thought them more than amusements,” said the Secretary morosely. “When His Majesty dismissed the study of microphenomena as ‘the mere weighing of Ayre,’ the apes of fashion took it as license to mock any investigation graver than gaping at a louse on a pin. I do fear that the sons of the gentry, from whom we look to recruit the naturalists of tomorrow, will think it no true calling.”

  And perhaps the Dutch thought it no true calling, reflected Malcolm in the carriage, if their best researches were conducted by a draper. The Dutch astronomers, on the other hand, were gentlemen of the finest education, their accomplishments recognized even in France. Huygens had contacts with the Dutch government through his father, who had introduced Leeuwenhoeck to the Royal Society. Uneasily Malcolm wondered how closely the Dutch government followed its citizens’ optical researches.

  “Here we are,” announced the boy cheerfully from his perch behind Malcolm’s seat. Malcolm peered into the twilight, and saw several men standing on the levee ahead of them like an assignation of smugglers. After a second’s further scrutiny, he realized that they were bending over a large tube, like a band of gunners aiming a bombard. One straightened and came forward as Malcolm climbed down.

  “You are Mister Weymouth, the English gentleman,” he said in Dutch-accented Latin. “I am Cornelius van der Pluym, astronomer of Leiden. With my reflecting telescope, based on the newest principles from Paris, I hope to discover that Venus, like Jupiter, Saturn, and our own Earth, possesses orbiting moons.”

  “I am honored that you have agreed to let me observe your observations,” replied Malcolm gravely in the same word-scant tongue. He did not know whether the astronomer assumed he knew no Dutch, or always conducted his discussions in the language of science.

  “Come this way, then, and see how the reflecting lens improves upon the aerial design of Huygens,” said van der Pluym, gesturing that Malcolm precede him. “Keep him out of trouble,” he added in quiet Dutch to the servant.

  Grinning in complicity, the servant led Malcolm around the telescope, which stood on a brass-and-wood tripod as though meant for a professor’s study. The eyepiece, Malcolm noted with surprise, emerged from the end of the tube rather than its side, as Newton’s model had. Peering into it, van der Pluym murmured something which an assistant, shielding the light of a candle with his body, transcribed into a notebook.

  “Have you seen Meynheer Huygens’s new telescope?” asked a young man next to Malcolm, who introduced himself as Rudolf Moete. Malcolm said he had not. “It comprises two distinct tubes, separated by fifty feet or more. A train of mechanisms is required to keep them aligned, for which Huygens must keep a crew ready. Still, it is better than handling a single tube of such length, which presents terrible difficulties.”

  “The reflecting model uses a convex mirror, does it not?” asked Malcolm casually.

  “Aye, and it must be perfectly formed, else the design be no improvement upon Huygens’s. I do fear that van der Pluym’s model does not meet this standard.”

  Eventually Malcolm was given an opportunity to peer into the eyepiece while the astronomer sketched his observations. A perfect sickle, Venus showed nearly as large as the Moon but without flaw or feature in its whiteness. Malcolm saw no pinpoint of light that would signify a moon, but doubted his ability to resolve detail through the impediment of his spectacles. He had not yet found an ideal distance at which to set his eye when the astronomer tapped his shoulder, and he relinquished his place.

  Moete stood a few yards off, smoking his pipe as he looked over the levee. Malcolm joined him, wondering how to raise the subject of mirror-making.

  “The air is a lens,” the young man said thoughtfully. “Have you ever seen waves of heat ripple above the ground on a hot day? So, faintly, does air refract light as it passes between warm and cool regions. It is my contention that twilight, with heat escaping from the earth, will ever be a poor time for viewing, and that the moons of Venus will be seen only on winter dawns.”

  “How interesting,” murmured Malcolm. Those craftsmen who wrought mirrors must work closely with the lens grinders, he thought; the arts are too si
milar. He took a step forward, looking down as though to watch his footing, then stumbled on the sloping ground. Malcolm caught himself only as he fell to his knees, and his spectacles flew off his nose, to disappear with a splash into the water below.

  “Oh, heavens,” he cried as Moete helped him to his feet. “I have lost my eyeglasses in the polder. How could I get another pair made?”

  * * *

  Sunlight glittered off the Delft shop windows, still wet from a morning shower. Malcolm, back from the Hague and shaking rain from his hat, found everything made new, each glint bespeaking fresh-planed edges. He walked the streets with more familiarity now, without imagining that every face he met saw him for a foreigner. Was it myopia that made one suspicious of others’ motives?

  Leeuwenhoeck seemed pleased enough to see him. “My investigations continue,” he said as he led the Englishman to his office. “An improved cutting blade has allowed me to refine my observations of the tubules within wood. I have also made studies of the sting of a bee.”

  Malcolm was more interested in the tiny animals, but knew Leeuwenhoeck’s reticence on the subject. Looking about the office for a more friendly subject, he was startled to see a small canvas propped against the wall, an oil painting portraying (it appeared) the torments of Hell. Damned figures writhed and supplicated the empty sky as a variety of demons prodded them, tore their flesh, or consumed them whole.

  “I did not know you favored paintings of a religious nature,” said Malcolm uncertainly.

  “It is by my friend Vermeer,” said Leeuwenhoeck, glancing at it. “He seeks to allay his debt, so has accepted a commission from a pious widow to produce an allegory in the manner of Bosch. He consulted with me regarding plausible designs for his imps.”

  Malcolm looked closer and saw that one of the demons, its head a wheel of waving limbs, bore an unmistakable resemblance to the animalcules he had seen earlier. Another seemed to possess the magnified features of a louse.