Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  There was another rubble-heap on Holborn, so fresh that it was still sledding toward its angle of repose. Daniel charged up it, almost afraid to look down lest he should discover Drake’s furniture beneath his feet. But from the top of the heap he obtained a perfect view of Drake’s house, still standing, but standing alone now, in a sag-shouldered posture, as the houses to either side of it had been blown up. The walls had begun to smoke, and firebrands were raining down around it like meteors, and Drake Waterhouse was up on the roof holding a Bible above his head with both hands. He was bellowing something that could not be heard, and did not need to be.

  The street below was crowded with an uncommon number of Gentlemen, and better, brandishing swords—their gay courtiers’ clothing burnt and blackened—and musketeers, too, looking somewhat unhappy to be standing in such a place with containers of gunpowder strapped to their midsections. Very wealthy and prominent men were looking up at Drake, shouting and pointing at the street, insisting he come down. But Drake had eyes only for the fire.

  Daniel turned round to see what his father was seeing, and was nearly slapped to the ground by the heat and the spectacle of it—the Fire. Everything between East and South was flame, and everything below the stars. It fountained and throbbed, jetted and pulsed, and buildings went down beneath it as blades of grass beneath John Wilkins’s giant Wheel.

  And it was approaching, so fast that it overtook some persons who were trying to run away from it—they were blurring into ghosts of smoke and bursting into flames, their sprinting forms dissolving into light: the Rapture. This had not escaped Drake’s notice—he was pointing at it—but the crowd of Court fops below were not interested. To Drake, these particular men had been demons from Hell even before London had caught fire, because they were the personal bootlicks of King Charles II, an arch-daemon of King Louis XIV himself. Now, here they were, perversely convened in front of his house.

  Daniel had been waving his arms over his head trying to get Drake’s attention, but he understood now that he must be an indistinct black shape against a vast glare, the least interesting thing in Drake’s panorama.

  All of the courtiers had turned inward, attent on the same man—even Drake was looking at him. Daniel caught sight of the Lord Mayor, and thought perhaps he was the center of attention—but the Lord Mayor had eyes only to look at another. Sidestepping to a new position on the heap, Daniel finally saw a tall dark man in impossibly glorious clothing and a vast wig, which was shaking from side to side in exasperation. This man suddenly moved forward, seized a torch from a toady, looked up one last time at Drake, then bent down and touched the fire to the street. A bright smoking star rolled across the pavement toward Drake’s front door, which had been smashed open.

  The man with the torch turned around, and Daniel recognized him as England.

  There was a kind of preliminary explosion of humanity away from the house. Courtiers and musketeers formed a crowd behind the King to shield his back from flying harpsichords. Up on the roof, Drake aimed a finger at His Majesty and raised his Bible on high to call down some fresh damnation. From the burning timbers that were now coming down from Heaven like flaming spears hurled by avenging angels, he might have thought, in these moments, that he’d played an important part in Judgment Day. But nothing hit the King.

  The spark was climbing the front steps. Daniel plunged forward down the piled house-guts, because he was fairly certain that he could outrun the spark, reach the fuse, and jerk it loose before it touched whatever powder-kegs had been rolled into Drake’s parlor. His path was blocked by members of the King’s personal bodyguard who were running the other way. They looked at Daniel curiously while Daniel changed course to swing round them. In the corner of his eye he saw one of them understand what Daniel was doing—that slackening of the face, the opening of the features, that came over the faces of students when, suddenly, they knew. This man stepped clear from the group and raised a yawning tube to his shoulder. Daniel looked at his father’s house and saw the star snaking down the dark hallway. He was tense for the explosion, but it came from behind him—at the same moment he was bitten in a hundred places and slammed face-down into the street.

  He rolled over on his back, trying to snuff the fires of pain burning all over him, and saw his father ascending into heaven, his black clothes changing into a robe of fire. His table, books, and grandfather clock were not far behind.

  “Father?” he said.

  Which was senseless, if the only kind of sense you heeded was that of Natural Philosophy. Even supposing Drake was alive at the moment Daniel spoke to him—a daring supposition indeed, and not the sort of thing that contributed to a young man’s reputation in the Royal Society—he was far away, and getting farther, washed in apocalyptic roar and tumult, beset by many distractions, and probably deaf from the blast. But Daniel had just seen his house exploded and been shot with a blunderbuss in the same instant, and all sense of the Natural-Philosophic kind had fled from him. All that remained to shape his actions was the sentimental logic of a five-year-old bewildered that his father seemed to be leaving him: which was hardly the natural and correct order of things. Moreover, Daniel had another twenty years’ important things to say to his father. He had sinned against Drake and would make confession and be absolved, and Drake had sinned against him and must needs be brought to account. Determined to put a stop to this heinous, unnatural leaving, he used the only means of self-preservation that God had granted to five-year-olds: the voice. Which by itself did naught but wiggle air. In a loving home, that could raise alarms and summon help. “Father?” he tried again. But his home was a storm of bricks and a spray of timbers, each tracing its own arc to the smoking and steaming earth, and his father was a glowing cloud. Like a theophany of the Old Testament. But whereas fiery clouds were for YHWH a manifestation, a means of revealing Himself to His children below, this one swallowed Drake up and did not spit him out but made him one with the Mysterium Tremendum. He was hidden from Daniel now forever.

  Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

  NOVEMBER 1713

  HIS MIND HAS QUITE RUN ahead of his quill; his pen has gone dry, but his face is damp. Alone in his cabin, Daniel indulges himself for a minute in another favorite pastime of five-year-olds. Some say that crying is childish. Daniel—who since the birth of Godfrey has had more opportunities than he should have liked to observe crying—takes a contrary view. Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.

  There’s a rhythmical chant down on the gundeck that slowly builds and then explodes into a drumming of many feet on mahogany stair-steps, and suddenly Minerva’s deck is crowded with sailors, running about and colliding with each other, like a living demonstration of Hooke’s ideas about heat. Daniel wonders if perhaps a fire has been noticed down in the powder-magazine, and the sailors have all come up to abandon ship. But this is a highly organized sort of panic.

  Daniel pats his face dry, stoppers his ink-well, and goes out onto the quarter-deck, chucking his ink-caked quill overboard. Most of the sailors have already ascended into the rigging, and begun to drop vast white curtains as if to shield landlubber Daniel’s eyes from the fleet of sloops and whaleboats that seems now to be converging on them from every cove and inlet on Plymouth Bay. Rocks and trees ashore are moving, with respect to fixed objects on Minerva, in a way that they shouldn’t. “We’re moving—we are adrift!” he protests. Weighing anchor on a ship of Minerva’s bulk is a ludicrously complicated and lengthy procedure—a small army of chanting sailors pursuing one another round the giant capstan on the upperdeck, boys scrubbing slime off, and sprinkling sand onto, the wet anchor cable to afford a better purchase for the messenger cable—an infinite loop, passed three times round the capstan, that
nimble-fingered riggers are continually lashing alongside the anchor cable in one place and unlashing in another. None of this has even begun to happen in the hour since the sun rose.

  “We are adrift!” Daniel insists to Dappa, who’s just vaulted smartly off the edge of the poop deck and nearly landed on Daniel’s shoulders.

  “But naturally, Cap’n—we’re all in a panic, don’t you see?”

  “You are being unduly harsh on yourself and your crew, Dappa—and why are you addressing me as Captain? And how can we be adrift, when we haven’t weighed anchor?”

  “You’re wanted on the poop deck, Cap’n—that’s right, just step forward—”

  “Let me fetch my hat.”

  “None of it, Cap’n, we want every pirate in New England—for they’re all out there, at the moment—to see your white hair shining in the sun, your bald pate, pale and pink, like that of a Cap’n who ain’t been abovedecks in years—this way, mind the wheel, sir—that’s right—could you dodder just a bit more? Squint into the unaccustomed sunlight—well played, Cap’n!”

  “May the Good Lord save us, Mr. Dappa, we’ve lost our anchors! Some madman has cut the anchor cables!”

  “I told you we were in a panic—steady up the stairs, there, Cap’n!”

  “Let go my arm! I’m perfectly capable of—”

  “Happy to be of service, Cap’n—as is that lopsided Dutchman at the top o’ the stairs—”

  “Captain van Hoek! Why are you dressed as an ordinary seaman!? And what has become of our anchors!?”

  “Dead weight,” van Hoek says, and then goes on to mutter something in Dutch.

  “He said, you are showing just the sort of impotent choler that we need. Here, take a spyglass! I’ve an idea—why don’t you peer into the wrong end of it first—then look befuddled, and angry, as if some subordinate had stupidly reversed the lenses.”

  “I’ll have you know, Mr. Dappa, that at one time I knew as much of opticks as any man alive, save one—possibly two, if you count Spinoza—but he was only a practical lens-grinder, and generally more concerned with atheistical ruminations—”

  “Do it!” grunts the one-armed Dutchman. He is still the captain, so Daniel steps to the railing of the poop deck, raises the spyglass, and peers through the objective lens. He can actually hear pirates on distant whaleboats laughing at him. Van Hoek plucks the glass from Daniel, spins it around on the knuckles of his only hand, and thrusts it at him. Daniel accepts it and tries to hold it steady on an approaching whaler. But the forward end of that boat is fogged in a bank of smoke, rapidly dispersing in the freshening breeze. For the last few minutes, Minerva’s sails have been inflating, frequently with brisk snapping noises, almost like gunshots—but—

  “Damn me,” he says, “they fired on us!” He can see, now, the swivel-gun mounted in the whaleboat’s prow, an unsavory-looking fellow feeding a neatly bound cluster of lead balls into its small muzzle.

  “Just a shot across the bow,” Dappa says. “That panicky look on your face—the gesticulating—perfect!”

  “The number of boats is incredible—are these all pirating together?”

  “Plenty of time for explanations later—now’s the moment to look stricken—perhaps get wobbly in the knees and clutch your chest like an apoplectic—we’ll assist you to your cabin on the upperdeck.”

  “But my cabin, as you know, is on the quarter-deck…”

  “Today only, you’re being given a complimentary upgrade—Cap’n. Come on, you’ve been in the sun too long—best retire and break open a bottle of rum.”

  “DON’T BE MISLED BY THESE exchanges of cannon-fire,” Dappa reassures him, thrusting his woolly and somewhat grizzled head into the Captain’s cabin. “If this were a true fight, sloops and whaleboats’d be simply exploding all round us.”

  “Well, if it’s not a fight, what would you call it when men on ships shoot balls of lead at each other?”

  “A game—a dance. A theatrickal performance. Speaking of which—have you practiced your role recently?”

  “Didn’t seem safe, when grapeshot was flying—but—as it’s only an entertainment—well…” Daniel gets up from his squatting position underneath the Captain’s chart-table and sidles over toward the windows, moving in a sort of Zeno’s Paradox mode—each step only half as long as the previous. Van Hoek’s cabin is as broad as the entire stern of the ship—two men could play at shuttlecocks in here. The entire aft bulkhead is one gently curved window commanding (now that Daniel’s in position to see through it) a view of Plymouth Bay: wee cabins and wigwams on the hills, and, on the waves, numerous scuttling boats all flocked with gunpowder-smoke, occasionally thrusting truncated bolts of yellow fire in their general direction. “The critical reaction seems hostile,” Daniel observes. Off to his left, a small pane gets smashed out of its frame by what he takes to have been a musket-ball.

  “Excellent cringing! The way you raise your hands as if to clap them over your ears, then arrest them in midair, as if already seized in rigor mortis—thank God you were delivered into our hands.”

  “I am meant to believe that all of these goings-on are nothing more than an elaborate manipulation of the pirates’ mental state?”

  “No need to be haughty—they do it to us, too. Half of the cannon on those boats are carved out of logs, painted to look real.”

  A large meteor-like something blows the head door off its hinges and buries itself in an oaken knee-brace, knocking it askew and bending the entire cabin slightly out of shape—wreaking some sort of parallelogram effect on Daniel’s Frame o’ Reference, so it appears that Dappa’s now standing up at an angle—or perhaps the ship’s beginning to heel over. “Some of the cannon are, of course, real,” Dappa admits before Daniel can score any points there.

  “If we are playing with the pirates’ minds, what is the advantage in making the ship’s captain out as a senile poltroon—which, if I may read ’tween the lines, would appear to be my role? Why not fling open every gunport, run out every cannon, make the hills ring with broadsides, set van Hoek up on the poop waving his hook in the air?”

  “We’ll get round to all that later, in all likelihood. For now we must pursue a multilayered bluffing strategy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have more than one group of pirates to contend with.”

  “What!?”

  “This is why we captured and questioned—”

  “Some would say tortured—”

  “—several pirates before dawn. There are simply too many pirates in this Bay to make sense. Some of them would appear to be mutually hostile. Indeed, we’ve learned that the traditional, honest, hardworking Plymouth Bay pirates—the ones in the small boats—get over, Cap’n, I say! Two paces over to larboard, if you please!”

  Dappa’s adverting on something outside the window. Daniel turns round to see a taut manila line dangling vertically just outside—not an unusual sight in and of itself, but it wasn’t there a few seconds ago. The stretched line shudders, tattooing a beat on the window-pane. A pair of blistered hands appears, then a broad-brimmed hat, then a head with a dagger clenched in its teeth. Then behind Daniel a tremendous FOOM while something unsightly happens to the climber’s face—clearly visible through a suddenly absent pane. A gout of smoke roils and rebounds against the panes that are still there, and by the time it’s cleared away the pirate is gone. Dappa’s in the middle of the cabin holding a hot smoky shooting-iron.

  He rummages in van Hoek’s chest and pulls out a hook with various straps and stump-cups all a-dangle. “That was one of the sort I was speaking of. Never would’ve tried anything so foolhardy if the newer breed hadn’t brought such hard times down on ’em.”

  “What newer breed?”

  Dappa, wearing a fastidious and disgusted look, threads the hook out through the missing window-pane and catches the dangling pirate-rope, then draws it inside the cabin and severs it with a smart swing of his cutlass. “Lift your head toward the horizon, Cap’n, and beho
ld the flotilla of coasting craft—sloops and topsail schooners, and a ketch—that is forming up there in Plymouth Bay. Half a dozen or more vessels. Strange information glancing from one to the next embodied in pennants, guns, and flashes of sunlight.”

  “It is because of them that the riffraff in the small craft cannot make a living?”

  “Just so, Cap’n. Now, if we’d put up a brave front, as you suggested, they’d’ve known their cause was hopeless, and might’ve been tempted to make common cause with Teach.”

  “Teach?”

  “Cap’n Edward Teach, the Admiral of yonder pirate-fleet. But as it is, these small-timers have spent themselves in a futile try at seizing Minerva before Teach could make sail and form up. Now we can address the Teach matter separately.”

  “There was a Teach in the Royal Navy—”

  “He is the same fellow. He and his men fought on the Queen’s side in the War, helping themselves to Spanish shipping. Now that the treaty is signed and we are friendly with Spain, these fellows are at loose ends, and have crossed the Atlantic to seek a home port for American piracy.”

  “So I ween it’s not our cargo that Teach wants, so much as—”

  “If we threw every last bale overboard, still he would come after us. He wants Minerva for his flagship. And a mighty raider she would be.”

  There’s been no gunfire recently, so Daniel crosses over to the window and watches sail after sail unfurling, Teach’s fleet developing into a steady cloud on the bay. “They look like fast ships,” he says. “We’ll be seeing Teach soon.”

  “He’s easily recognized—according to them we questioned, he’s a master of piratical performances. Wears smoking punks twined about his head, like burning dreadlocks, and, at night, burning tapers in his thick black beard. He’s got half the people in Plymouth convinced he’s the Devil incarnate.”