Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “What makes you say so?”

  “The mountains and valleys have a settled shape to them—no matter how rugged the landforms, there is nothing to be seen, on that whole orb, that would fall over under gravitation. With better lenses I could measure the Angle of Repose and calculate the force of her gravity.”

  “If the moon gravitates, so must everything else in the heavens,” Daniel observed.*

  A long skinny package arrived from Amsterdam. Daniel opened it up, expecting to find another telescope—instead it was a straight, skinny horn, about five feet long, with helical ridges and grooves. “What is it?” he asked Wilkins.

  Wilkins peered at it over his glasses and said (sounding mildly annoyed), “The horn of a unicorn.”

  “But I thought that the unicorn was a mythical beast.”

  “I’ve never seen one.”

  “Then where do you suppose this came from?”

  “How the devil should I know?” Wilkins returned. “All I know is, you can buy them in Amsterdam.”

  Kings most commonly, though strong in legions, are but weak in Arguments; as they who have ever accustom’d from the Cradle to use thir will onely as thir right hand, thir reason alwayes as thir left. Whence unexpectedly constrain’d to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny Adversaries.

  —MILTON, PREFACE TO Eikonoklastes

  DANIEL GOT USED TO SEEING the Duke of York out riding and hunting with his princely friends—as much as the son of Drake could get used to such a sight. Once the hunters rode past within a bow-shot of him, near enough that he could hear the Duke talking to his companion—in French. Which gave Daniel an impulse to rush up to this French Catholic man in his French clothes, who claimed to be England’s next king, and put an end to him. He mastered it by recalling to mind the way that the Duke’s father’s head had plopped into the basket on the scaffold at the Banqueting House. Then he thought to himself: What an odd family!

  Too, he could no longer muster quite the same malice towards these people. Drake had raised his sons to hate the nobility by wasting no opportunity to point out their privileges, and the way they profited from those privileges without really being aware of them. This sort of discourse had wrought extraordinarily, not only in Drake’s sons but in every Dissident meeting-house in the land, and led to Cromwell and much else; but Cromwell had made Puritans powerful, and as Daniel was now seeing, that power—as if it were a living thing with a mind of its own—was trying to pass itself on to him, which would mean that Daniel was a child of privilege too.

  The tables of the Philosophical Language were finished: a vast fine-meshed net drawn through the Cosmos so that everything known, in Heaven and Earth, was trapped in one of its myriad cells. All that was needed to identify a particular thing was to give its location in the tables, which could be expressed as a series of numbers. Wilkins came up with a system for assigning names to things, so that by breaking a name up into its component syllables, one could know its location in the Tables, and hence what thing it referred to.

  Wilkins drained all the blood out of a large dog and put it into a smaller dog; minutes later the smaller dog was out chasing sticks. Hooke built a new kind of clock, using the Microscope to examine some of its tiny parts. In so doing he discovered a new kind of mite living in the rags in which these parts had been wrapped. He drew pictures of them, and then performed an exhaustive three-day series of experiments to learn what would and wouldn’t kill them: the most effective killer being a Florentine poison he’d been brewing out of tobacco leaves.

  Sir Robert Moray came to visit, and ground up a bit of the unicorn’s horn to make a powder, which he sprinkled in a ring, and placed a spider in the center of the ring. But the spider kept escaping. Moray pronounced the horn to be a fraud.

  Wilkins hustled Daniel out of bed one night in the wee hours and took him on a dangerous nighttime hay-wain ride to the gaol in Epsom town. “Fortune has smiled on our endeavours,” Wilkins said. “The man we are going to interview was condemned to hang. But hanging crushes the parts that are of interest to us—certain delicate structures in the neck. Fortunately for us, before the hangman could get to him, he died of a bloody flux.”

  “Is this going to be a new addition to the Tables, then?” Daniel asked wearily.

  “Don’t be foolish—the anatomical structures in question have been known for centuries. This dead man is going to help us with the Real Character.”

  “That’s the alphabet for writing down the Philosophical Language?”

  “You know that perfectly well. Wake up, Daniel!”

  “I ask only because it seems to me you’ve already come up with several Real Characters.”

  “All more or less arbitrary. A natural philosopher on some other world, viewing a document written in those characters, would think that he were reading, not the Philosophical Language, but the Cryptonomicon! What we need is a systematic alphabet—made so that the shapes of the characters themselves provide full information as to how they are pronounced.”

  These words filled Daniel with a foreboding that turned out to be fully justified: by the time the sun rose, they had fetched the dead man from the gaol, brought him back out to the cottage, and carefully cut his head off. Charles Comstock was rousted from bed and ordered to dissect the corpse, as a lesson in anatomy (and as a way of getting rid of it). Meanwhile, Hooke and Wilkins connected the head’s wind-pipe to a large set of fireplace-bellows, so that they could blow air through his voice-box. Daniel was detailed to saw off the top of the skull and get rid of the brains so that he could reach in through the back and get hold of the soft palate, tongue, and other meaty bits responsible for making sounds. With Daniel thus acting as a sort of meat puppeteer, and Hooke manipulating the lips and nostrils, and Wilkins plying the bellows, they were able to make the head speak. When his speaking-parts were squished into one configuration he made a very clear “O” sound, which Daniel (very tired now) found just a bit unsettling. Wilkins wrote down an O-shaped character, reflecting the shape of the man’s lips. This experiment went on all day, Wilkins reminding the others, when they showed signs of tiredness, that this rare head wouldn’t keep forever—as if that weren’t already obvious. They made the head utter thirty-four different sounds. For each one of them, Wilkins drew out a letter that was a sort of quick freehand sketch of the positions of lips, tongue, and other bits responsible for making that noise. Finally they turned the head over to Charles Comstock, to continue his anatomy-lesson, and Daniel went to bed for a series of rich nightmares.

  Looking at Mars had put Hooke in mind of cœlestial affairs; for that reason he set out with Daniel one morning in a wagon, with a chest of equipment. This must have been important, because Hooke packed it himself, and wouldn’t let anyone else near it. Wilkins kept trying to persuade them to use the giant wheel, instead of borrowing one of John Comstock’s wagons (and further wearing out their welcome). Wilkins claimed that the giant wheel, propelled by the youthful and vigorous Daniel Waterhouse, could (in theory) traverse fields, bogs, and reasonably shallow bodies of water with equal ease, so they could simply travel in a perfectly straight line to their destination, instead of having to follow roads. Hooke declined, and chose the wagon.

  They traveled for several hours to a certain well, said to be more than three hundred feet deep, bored down through solid chalk. Hooke’s mere appearance was enough to chase away the local farmers, who were only loitering and drinking anyway. He got Daniel busy constructing a solid, level platform over the mouth of the well. Hooke meanwhile took out his best scale and began to clean and calibrate it. He explained, “For the sake of argument, suppose it really is true that planets are kept in their orbits, not by vortices in the æther, but by the force of gravity.”

  “Yes?”

  “Then, if you do some mathematicks, you can see that it simply would not work unless the force of gravity got weaker, as the distance from the center of attraction increased.”

  “So the weight of an object
should diminish as it rises?”

  “And increase as it descends,” Hooke said, nodding significantly at the well.

  “Aha! So the experiment is to weigh something here at the surface, and then to…” and here Daniel stopped, horror-stricken.

  Hooke twisted his bent neck around and peered at him curiously. Then, for the first time since Daniel had met him, he laughed out loud. “You’re afraid that I’m proposing to lower you, Daniel Waterhouse, three hundred feet down into the bottom of this well, with a scale in your lap, to weigh something? And that once down there the rope will break?” More laughing. “You need to think more carefully about what I said.”

  “Of course—it wouldn’t work that way,” Daniel said, deeply embarrassed on more than one level.

  “And why not?” Hooke asked, Socratically.

  “Because the scale works by balancing weights on one pan against the object to be weighed, on the other…and if it’s true that all objects are heavier at the bottom of the well, then both the object, and the weights, will be heavier by the same amount…and so the result will be the same, and will teach us nothing.”

  “Help me measure out three hundred feet of thread,” Hooke said, no longer amused.

  They did it by pulling the thread off a reel, and stretching it alongside a one-fathom-long rod, and counting off fifty fathoms. One end of the thread Hooke tied to a heavy brass slug. He set the scale up on the platform that Daniel had improvised over the mouth of the well, and put the slug, along with its long bundle of thread, on the pan. He weighed the slug and thread carefully—a seemingly endless procedure disturbed over and over by light gusts of wind. To get a reliable measurement, they had to devote a couple of hours to setting up a canvas wind-screen. Then Hooke spent another half hour peering at the scale’s needle through a magnifying lens while adding or subtracting bits of gold foil, no heavier than snowflakes. Every change caused the scale to teeter back and forth for several minutes before settling into a new position. Finally, Hooke called out a weight in pounds, ounces, grains, and fractions of grains, and Daniel noted it down. Then Hooke tied the free end of the thread to a little eye he had screwed to the bottom of the pan, and he and Daniel took turns lowering the weight into the well, letting it drop a few inches at a time—if it got to swinging, and scraped against the chalky sides of the hole, it would pick up a bit of extra weight, and ruin the experiment. When all three hundred feet had been let out, Hooke went for a stroll, because the weight was swinging a little bit, and its movements would disturb the scale. Finally it settled down enough that he could go back to work with his magnifying glass and his tweezers.

  Daniel, in other words, had a lot of time to think that day. Cells, spiders’ eyes, unicorns’ horns, compressed and rarefied air, dramatic cures for deafness, philosophical languages, and flying chariots were all perfectly fine subjects, but lately Hooke’s interest had been straying into matters cœlestial, and that made Daniel think about his roommate. Just as certain self-styled philosophers in minor European courts were frantic to know what Hooke and Wilkins were up to at Epsom, so Daniel wanted only to know what Isaac was doing up at Woolsthorpe.

  “It weighs the same,” Hooke finally pronounced, “three hundred feet of altitude makes no measurable difference.” That was the signal to pack up all the apparatus and let the farmers draw their water again.

  “This proves nothing,” Hooke said as they rode home through the dark. “The scale is not precise enough. But if one were to construct a clock, driven by a pendulum, in a sealed glass vessel, so that changes in moisture and baroscopic pressure would not affect its speed…and if one were to run that clock in the bottom of a well for a long period of time…any difference in the pendulum’s weight would be manifest as a slowing, or quickening, of the clock.”

  “But how would you know that it was running slow or fast?” Daniel asked. “You’d have to compare it against another clock.”

  “Or against the rotation of the earth,” Hooke said. But it seemed that Daniel’s question had thrown him into a dark mood, and he said nothing more until they had reached Epsom, after midnight.

  THE TEMPERATURE AT NIGHT began to fall below freezing, and so it was time to calibrate thermometers. Daniel and Charles and Hooke had been making them for some weeks out of yard-long glass tubes, filled with spirits of wine, dyed with cochineal. But they had no markings on them. On cold nights they would bundle themselves up and immerse those thermometers in tubs of distilled water and then sit there for hours, giving the tubs an occasional stir, and waiting. When the water froze, if they listened carefully enough, they could hear a faint searing, splintering noise come out of the tub as flakes of ice shot across the surface—then they’d rouse themselves into action, using diamonds to make a neat scratch on each tube, marking the position of the red fluid inside.

  Hooke kept a square of black velvet outside so that it would stay cold. When it snowed during the daytime, he would take his microscope outside and spread the velvet out on the stage and peer at any snowflakes that happened to fall on it. Daniel saw, as Hooke did, that each one was unique. But again Hooke saw something Daniel missed: “in any particular snowflake, all six arms are the same—why does this happen? Why shouldn’t each of the six arms develop in a different and unique shape?”

  “Some central organizing principle must be at work, but—?” Daniel said.

  “That is too obvious to even bother pointing out,” Hooke said. “With better lenses, we could peer into the core of a snowflake and discover that principle at work.”

  A week later, Hooke opened up the thorax of a live dog and removed all of its ribs to expose the beating heart. But the lungs had gone flaccid and did not seem to be doing their job.

  The screaming sounded almost human. A man with an expensive voice came down from John Comstock’s house to enquire about it. Daniel, too bleary-eyed to see clearly and too weary to think, took him for a head butler or something. “I shall write an explanation, and a note of apology to him,” Daniel mumbled, looking about for a quill, rubbing his blood-sticky hand on his breeches.

  “To whom, prithee? asked the butler, amused. Though he seemed young for a head-butler. In his early thirties. He was in a linen night-dress. His scalp glistered with a fine carpet of blond stubble, the mark of a man who always wore a periwig.

  “The Earl of Epsom.”

  “Why not write it to the Duke of York?”

  “Very well then, I’ll write it to him.”

  “Then why not dispense with writing altogether and simply tell me what the hell you are doing?”

  Daniel took this for insolence until he looked the visitor in the face and realized it was the Duke of York in person.

  He really ought to bow, or something. Instead of which he jerked. The Duke made a gesture with his hand that seemed to mean that the jerk was accepted as due obeisance and could they please get on with the conversation now.

  “The Royal Society—” Daniel began, thrusting that word Royal out in front of him like a shield, “has brought a dead dog to life with another’s blood, and has now embarked on a study of artificial breath.”

  “My brother is fond of your Society,” said James, “or his Society I should say, for he made it Royal.” This, Daniel suspected, was to explain why he was not going to have them all horsewhipped. “I do wonder at the noise. Is it expected to continue all night?”

  “On the contrary, it has already ceased,” Daniel pointed out.

  The Lord High Admiral preceded him into the kitchen, where Hooke and Wilkins had thrust a brass pipe down the dog’s windpipe and connected it to the same trusty pair of bellows they’d used to make the dead man’s head speak. “By pumping the bellows they were able to inflate and deflate the lungs, and prevent the dog from asphyxiating,” explained Charles Comstock, after the experimenters had bowed to the Duke. “Now it only remains to be seen how long the animal can be kept alive in this way. Mr. Waterhouse and I shall spell each other at the bellows until Mr. Hooke pronounces an
end to the experiment.”

  At the mention of Daniel’s family name, the Duke flicked his eyes towards him for a moment.

  “If it must suffer in the name of your inquiry, thank Heaven it does so quietly,” the Duke remarked, and turned to leave. The others would follow; but the Duke stopped them with a “Do carry on, as you were.” But to Daniel he said, “A word, if you please, Mr. Water-house,” and so Daniel escorted him out onto the lawn half wondering whether he was about to be carved up worse than the dog.

  A few moments previously, he’d mastered a daft impulse to tackle his royal highness before his royal highness reached the kitchen, for fear that his royal highness would be disgusted by what was going on in there. But he’d not reckoned on the fact that the Duke, young though he was, had fought in a lot of battles, both at sea and on land. Which was to say that as bad as this business with the dog was, the Duke of York had seen much worse done to humans. The R.S., far from seeming like a band of mad ruthless butchers, were dilettantes by his standards. Further grounds (as if any were wanted!) for Daniel to feel queasy.