Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  They say Fernod will do nothing in his cell but pray. He will not eat, or take water, and when asked any question he replies only with the Lord’s Prayer. They say, too, that a French ship has arrived in the City; and under heavy guard, including from our own soldiers, the delegation has been brought to Whitehall. It is hard to know what to infer from this. To Whitehall, but found the King was indisposed and would not see me.

  With nothing to do, went back to the City. Went to brave the edge of the Abyss, as close as any man would dare. How strange it is, this thing which is no thing, and yet by its very absence amounts to something. It is blacker than my cloak, even than a night with no moon or lamps, since there’s no sense of anything lurking in the shadows. Just an unfathomable nothingness. But a nothing does not become a nothing until illuminated by a something; and by then, of course, it is something too. Perhaps this nothingness is God’s answer to the sins and disorders of our City. Once the Great Flood had covered the entire Earth; and the Earth sat suspended at the very centre of the nothingness, which God had created out of nothingness. And so perhaps one day the universe will return to nothing. Here, foolhardy urchins were teasing the edge of the Abyss. One showed me a wound on his arm where the Black Fire had grazed him. It was white and puckered and painless, he said. Then he ran off again into the growing darkness of the evening, and played at pushing his friend at the Abyss, catching him by his skinny shoulders as he tipped towards his death, and making the boy scream with terror and delight.

  Our surveyors are already proposing a grand new London; a City in the South. This new City will be guarded by our river, and its Governors will gather in Greenwich. It would take a dozen years, the engineers say, for this hole to drain the Thames entirely, and by then our best minds will certainly have found a remedy for the invading Darkness. Water flows in, too, from the sea, where it covers most of the Earth. Meanwhile the nothingness remains. Nothingness cannot be vanquished like an ordinary enemy. The shape of our fear is a rough circle, crawling slowly west and north, and by the east in quiet inches towards my place in Seething Lane.

  Monday 10 September, 1666

  Up at seven with a fright. To Woolwich with much haste, to retrieve my wife, who was extremely vexed at me.

  A Woman Out of Time

  Kim Curran

  “…why for so many centuries, not one good tragedy, one good poem, one esteemed history, one beautiful painting, one good book of physics, has come from the hands of women. Why do these creatures whose understanding appears in all things equal to that of men, seem, for all that, to be stopped by an invincible force?”

  Emilie Du Chatelet

  Translator’s Preface for The Fable of the Bees

  1735

  Paris, May, 1716.

  Or is it June, 1717?

  One certainty: we have found him. Our man of his time. He has the potential to become the voice of his age. With the right influence, the subtle exertion of force, we will make that potential manifest.

  The heat in the salon is equally as unbearable as the noise to our delicate ears. The intellectual élite — those who claim fine titles for themselves: mathematician, poet, philosopher — have gathered here to trade ideas. Yet, all they deal in is gossip.

  Their chatter rises above the sounds of the harpsichord and we see him, walking among the crowd. François Marie Arouet. Although history will remember him by a different name. One he will give to himself.

  Voltaire.

  Light radiates from him. A soft, soothing glow like the faint rings around a moon. It is how we know him. How we have known those like him before and how we will know those to come. It is what draws us to them — like moths to a flame. It is our duty to ensure that their gentle, guiding light continues to shine.

  He is short, unimpressive physically: pallid and frail, recently returned from exile. He makes a joke out of his punishment, but we were with him in the darkness when his God abandoned him. His pleasure with himself outstrips his talent, for now. Men and women stop him to talk, to compliment his first publication. They believe him to be a radical thinker. He believes it too, which amuses us. There is nothing radical about him.

  If there were…

  As he passes, we whisper ideas into his heart. Liberty. Divinity. The nature of the soul. Fertile seeds that will find their ground.

  It is time for humanity to take a step closer to the final echelon of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe is evolving. Or will evolve. As long as we are able to do our work.

  It is a subtle game. A push too far and their feeble minds will retreat. Not enough and they will stagnate, their minds becoming dull and indolent.

  Voltaire’s wit will make the ideas easier for them to accept. He will challenge church, state, the universe itself and they will laugh. And in laughing, they will think. But not too much. Not too far.

  We have done our work. We fade back into the shadows, unseen and unseeable once more. Darkness is our habitat. And yet, without light, we cease to be. It is a delicate balance. A balance we exist to maintain.

  As the salon — with its golden façade in imitation of golden times gone by and its stink of musk and jasmine and humanity — begins to diminish a new light appears. It grows till we are blinded. This ray, and the person from which it radiates, is an irregularity. It is dangerous. It threatens to destroy us. A shadow can be both created and banished by light.

  We materialise once more, bewildered and blinking, seeking out the source. We consult our records but find nothing. Have we failed to notice another great mind? Another man of his time?

  The light appears to be coming from a man named Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil. He owns this salon, is a favourite of the king. And yet, he has remained unnoticed by us. How have we missed this? His light should have been contained, focused and directed, years before. It is unharnessed energy.

  The man raises his arms, addressing the crowd, and introduces the next speaker.

  We are wrong. The light is not coming from within him but from behind him. From a child.

  A hush passes over the gathering as they indulge this creature. Even our man watches as the child lifts its head, square chin tilted upward, strong hands clasped before it. It begins to recite:

  Alors levez vos yeux et de recherche, et une fois que vous le trouverez. Retirez les branche. Il viendra volontiers,

  Facilement, si vous êtes appelé par le destin.

  Sinon, de toute ta force que vous ne pouvez pas vaincre,

  Impossible de lop-le avec le bord de l’épée .

  We recognise the words. We were there when they were written in their original tongue centuries before, bending over the man who wrote them, guiding his hand. What is this child doing with them?

  The audience applaud, delighted by the child’s precociousness: its talent for translation. We are not delighted. We are disturbed.

  The child takes a bow, the embarrassment of the attention dimming their light slightly. It is then we see that the child is a girl.

  Just a girl.

  The relief is shared among us all. Rippling from one agent to the next across time and space. A female. We will not need to intercede. Society will do our duty for us.

  And yet… we have to know where the spark began and where it will lead.

  Paris, 1710

  A girl — plain and already too tall for her young age — reaches up to take hold of a wooden doll that has been made for her. We breathed the idea of the toy’s creation into the mind of one of her father’s servants.

  Please the girl, we whispered into his ear, please your master.

  She is only a child and yet must be taught to receive all of her satisfaction and contentment from the bearing of children. We must ensure that her nature is contained by the expectations of her time. This is how we will distract her from the other path. The path that leads to our undoing.

  We can apply only the faintest pressure to change the course of a life. Like a breeze catching the sails of a ship. There a
re laws. Principles. The forces that control the movements of the spheres control us too. It is how we have always, will always, operate.

  The child looks at the doll, strokes the pale blue cotton of its dress, picks at the white ribbon of the cloth gathered around its wooden legs in lieu of slippers. She peers under the skirts, more fascinated by what lies beneath than the surface of the thing. In a single swoop she pulls the dress off — sending the doll’s roughly painted face crashing to the ground — to reveal the structure over which this toy was built: the closed V of a mathematician’s dividers. The servant must have taken this tool from her father’s study.

  She opens and closes the wooden arms of the device, presses the fleshy pad of her little finger against the pointed end, attempting to divine its true purpose. She runs, giggling, to find a scrap of drawing paper and uses the dividers to scratch a circle into the parchment. Uneven and imperfect. But a circle none the less. She hugs the instrument to her chest, rocking it like a baby.

  She begins to glow.

  There is still time, we think, time yet to extinguish this light.

  Versailles, 1731

  The glowing child is now a woman and, we are relieved to see, wife and mother. She adores writing her new name in full: Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet. She elongates the ascenders, indulges the descending Q in marquis.

  It is a good marriage. The husband: a sturdy, predictable man with many titles and much land spends most of his time away fighting wars. The wife: daughter of finance and influence. In the trade of bloodlines this has been a good bargain.

  She strides through the scented gardens, a bright yellow domino mask hiding her unexpected beauty from the world, arm in arm with friends. Her only delicacy is in her wit. She is a colossus — with terrible feet and formidable limbs. And yet, despite her lack of grace she has embraced and restricted herself to the feminine world. She has put aside her studies or any attempt to unravel the mysteries of that which is hidden from her. She laughs with her friends about her latest delicate purchase from L’Empereur, directs her intellect towards the winning of card games.

  Her life and the life of our man, Voltaire, run in parallel. Overlapping briefly but impacting little on each other. We have mapped the consequences of what would happen should they intersect and we will, we must, keep them apart.

  The time will come when women will contribute to the progress of history, to the cultivation of ideas. When their light will shine as brightly as that of men. But that time is not now. We are here to ensure that.

  We follow her up the steps and through the glowing corridors. As her laughter drifts through the windows to the gardens below we fade into the shadows almost certain that things are as they should be. Chaos has been bridled. And yet: almost certain? We work in light and darkness, absolutes.

  Lunéville, Summer, 1749

  She sits, bent over a parchment, leather apron over a green silk dress, black India ink freckling her face. The candles are stumps, but we do not need their flickering flame to see her. The light within her glows once more. And it has found its focus.

  We watch as she bites down on her lip, trying to find the right word to convey a subtlety of meaning. We approach as her quill skips across the page, leaving a spider’s web of marks in its wake.

  Ours are not the only eyes watching. A large portrait of her and her husband peers down from the wall. In the painting, in her left hand, there is a small book. A delicate finger holds her place. We look closer. The Bible? A moral text?

  We should have known she would never have acquiesced to such conformity. Not for her. Not for this woman out of time. She has chosen to immortalise herself in pigment and oil holding a treaty on geometry.

  Her library is chaotic: books and papers piled high and close to toppling. How does she ever find anything in this farrago? We blow open a blue folio of pages, using the breeze from an unlocked window, and see an essay.

  Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu by Émilie du Châtelet.

  She has made her study the nature of fire. Of energy. The irony is too much.

  We lean in to see what she is working on, our presence causing a curl of her dark hair to tickle her cheek. She brushes it away.

  “Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward.”

  No. It cannot be. We loom over and watch as she works from his original Latin, translating the works of another of our men.

  She dares not only to translate Newton but to correct him! We read her messy, untamed handwriting. She has examined his assumption on the homogeneity of the universe and found it erroneous. The cosmological principle — a principle we ensured was in place — cannot be questioned, not for generations upon generations.

  And more! She has turned her unique, anomalous intellect on the nature of light and found it to be without substance. Without mass. She scratches letters onto a page — the sound of her quill claws into our very substance — MV2. Before it, she places a single letter and symbol. E =.

  She is so close. Too close. To an idea that will not, should not, exist for over one hundred and fifty years. That idea belongs in a time and place far from here. June, 1905, Vienna. It is a fixed point.

  How did she come to this? Fearing for our very existence, we must understand her transformation from the laughing fool at the palace, to this dazzling, dangerous mind, in eighteen short years.

  Semur, Spring, 1732

  She is with child again. She has turned away from the excitements and heady liberty of Paris and seconded herself in her husband’s family home. The very model of the dutiful wife. All should be well.

  And yet, her light still burns.

  As the life within her grows, so does an idea. She is a thinking creature. Blessed by nature with a hot, male temperament, which permits her, she believes, to pursue a life beyond that of wife and mother. She knows, now, what she wants to do. Not for her a life of foolish things, swimming in the sea of uncertainty. She has direction. She has focus.

  She surrounds herself with men of geometry. Reacquaints herself with philosophers. She drinks ideas as other women drink wine. She is aglow with knowledge.

  She must be stopped.

  Paris, Winter, 1733

  She is attending the opera, adorned in her yellow domino once more. She is impatient to hear the music, has missed these entertainments during her confinement at Semur. Perhaps the attractions of Parisian life have taken hold again? Perhaps indulging in the frivolousness of culture and art will satisfy her hunger for knowledge and her ember passion for geometry was nothing but a passing whim?

  And yet, the light glows still.

  Worse, our man is here.

  We whisper in the ear of her companion.

  They should leave now, during the interval, and go on to the Villars-Brancas’ for supper, cards and conversation.

  She cannot meet him. Not now. Not as the spark of her fire threatens to catch.

  But it is too late. He enters the box.

  They exchange a few words about the performance. We try and distract him. Other women. Other men. We almost succeed and then, without warning, she begins to talk about her lessons in mathematics. They share a tutor. They share ideas. She quizzes him on his interpretation of Locke.

  In desperation, we see to it that the opera resumes ahead of schedule.

  It is too late. Voltaire is bewitched by her.

  Cirey, Autumn, 1737

  She sits in the window, picking at a golden croissant as Voltaire, our man and her man too now, reads his latest essay aloud. It is his study into the nature of fire. His attempt to reveal its mystery. He intends to enter it to the French Academy of Science, assured that it will win the prize set by them.

  She interrupts him at times to challenge an assumption he has made, correct an erroneous calculation. He bears the interruptions well, knowing that her grasp of mathematics is superior to his. And all the time she smi
les. She has been working in secret on the same topic. Forbidding the servants to tell him. She wants it to be a surprise.

  We know him better than her it seems. When her essay is chosen alongside his, his damaged pride will douse his passion for her. It is a risk, allowing her work to receive even momentary acclaim. And yet it will divide them.

  It is a risk we will take.

  Cirey, Summer, 1788

  She lies, covered in a peacock-blue silk quilt, her black hair now grey. And yet, she still glows.

  Light streams in from the open window, a gentle wind causing the curtains to dance. She knows death is on its way and welcomes it. She mutters to herself as she drifts in and out of wakefulness, believing herself to be in conversation with our man once more. But we took him over a decade ago.

  They remained close till the last, our attempts to divide them foiled by the bonds of friendship. We quenched their lust, but their respect for each other was not so easily unpicked.

  Visitors have been coming and going all afternoon: friends who have known her; admirers who wanted to see her before it was too late. The greatest mind of her generation. They talk of her great legacy, of how she has pushed forward the frontiers of science beyond anything thought possible. They call her the female Newton.

  She is loved. She is respected. She will never be forgotten.

  This cannot be allowed to happen.

  Lunéville, Late summer, 1749

  She is still at work. As if the weeks between our last visit to this place and this time have not happened.

  She leans back in her chair stretching out her neck and we have to scuttle out of the way or risk intersection. She has been at her work for fourteen hours straight, with nothing but her dark syrup to nourish her. Why the urgency, we wonder. Then we see, the swell of her belly. She is with child again. Her fourth. At such an advanced age? It is madness. It could be our chance.