Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  There was an ovation. Daniel could hear nothing else, but he saw some odd sort of pratfall directly in front of him: a young man in severe dark clothing, who’d been standing in front of Daniel and blocking his view with a sort of Pilgrim-hat, turned round and splayed his limbs out like a squashed bug, let his head loll back on his white collar, stuck his tongue out, and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. He was mocking the pose of several “Dutch” defenders who were now hors de combat up on the demilune. He did not make a very pretty picture. Something was grievously wrong with his face: a dermatological catastrophe about the cheeks.

  Behind him, a scene-change was underway: the dead defenders were resurrecting themselves and scurrying round back of the ramparts to prepare for the next act. Likewise the man in front of Daniel now recovered his balance and turned out not to be a dead Dutchman at all, just a young English bloke with a sour look about him. His attire was not just any drab garb but the specific drab garb worn, nowadays, by Barkers. But (now that Daniel thought about it slightly harder) it was very like the clothing worn by the mock-Dutchmen pretending to defend Maestricht. Come to think of it, those “Dutchmen” had looked a great deal more like English religious Dissenters than they had like actual Dutchmen, who (if the grapevine was to be believed) had long ago ditched their old Pil-grimish togs (which had been inspired by Spanish fashions anyway) and now dressed like everyone else in Europe. So in addition to being a re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht, this show was also a parable about well-dressed rakes and blades overcoming dull severe Calvinists in the streets of London town!

  The slowness with which Daniel realized all this was infuriating to the young Barker in front of him—who had the cannonball head and mighty jawbone of an authentic Bolstrood.

  “Is that Gomer?” Daniel exclaimed, when the ovation had died away into a thrum of thirsty squires calling for beer. Daniel had known the son of Knott Bolstrood as a little boy, but hadn’t set eyes on him in at least a decade.

  Gomer Bolstrood answered the question by staring Daniel full in the face. On the front of each of his cheeks, just to either side of his nose, was an old wound: a complex of red trenches and fleshy ramparts, curved round into the crude glyph “S.L.” These marks had been made by a branding iron in the open-air court before the Sessions House at the Old Bailey, a few moments after Gomer had been pronounced guilty of being a Seditious Libeller.

  Gomer Bolstrood could not be more than twenty-five years old, but that munition-like head, combined with those brands, gave him the presence of a much older man. He aimed his chin significantly towards a location off behind the stands.

  Gomer Bolstrood, son of His Majesty’s Secretary of State Knott, son of ur-Barker Gregory, led Daniel into a Vagabond-camp of tents and wagons set up to serve and support this gala re-enactment. Some of the tents were for the actors and actresses. Gomer led Daniel between a couple of those, which meant fighting their way against a flood tide of “French Mistresses” coming back from the “Sun King’s” throne. Even as the sensitive eyes of Isaac Newton had been semi-permanently branded with the image of the solar disk during his colors experiments, so Daniel’s retinas were now stamped with a dozen or more cleavages. All of those cleavages must have had heads up above them somewhere—but the only one he noticed was speaking to one of the other girls in a French accent. From which he reckoned (in retrospect, somewhat simple-mindedly) that she must be French. But before Daniel could drift off into a full reverie, Gomer Bolstrood had grabbed his upper arm and pulled him ’tween the flaps of an adjoining beer tent.

  The beer was Dutch. So was the man sitting at the table. But the waffle that the man was eating was indisputably Belgian.

  Daniel sat in the chair indicated, and watched the Dutch gentleman eat the waffle for a while. He aimed his eyes in that direction, anyway. The image that still persisted before his eyes was cleavages, and the face of that “French” lass. But after a while this, sadly, faded, and was replaced by a waffle that had been put in front of him on a Delft china plate. And none of your crude heavy Pilgrim-ware, but the good stuff, export-grade.

  He sensed an implicit demand that he should Partake. So he dissected a corner from the waffle, put it in his mouth, and began to chew it. It was good. His eyes were adjusting to the dimness of the tent, and he was noticing stacks of handbills piled up in the corners, neatly wrapped up in old proof-sheets. The words on the proof-sheets were in every language save English—these bills had been printed in Amsterdam and brought over on a beer-ship or perhaps a waffle-barge. Every so often the tent-flaps would part, and Gomer, or one of the taciturn, pipe-smoking Dutchmen in the corners, would peer out and thrust a brick of hand-bills through the gap.

  “Whaat doo Belgian waffles and the cleavages of those girls haave in common?” said the Dutch Ambassador; for it was none other. He dabbed butter from his lips with a napkin. He was blond, and pyramidal, as if he consumed a lot of beer and waffles. “I saaw you staaring at them,” he added, apologetically.

  “I haven’t the merest idea—sir!”

  “Negateev Spaace,” the Dutch Ambassador intoned, letting those double vowels resonate as only a heavyweight Dutchman could. “Have you heard of thees? It is an aart woord. Wee know about negateev spaace because we like peectures soo muuch.”

  “Is it anything like negative numbers?”

  “Eet ees the spaace between twoo theengs,” said the other, and put his hands on his chest and forced his pectorals together to create a poor impression of cleavage. Daniel watched with polite incredulity, and tried not to shudder. The Dutchman plucked a fresh waffle off a plate and held it up by one corner, like a rag soaked with something unpleasant. “Likewise—the waffle of Belgium is shaaped and defiined, not by its own essential naatuure, but by the hot plaates of haard iron that encloose it on toop and boottom.”

  “Oh, I see—you’re making a point about the Spanish Netherlands!”

  The Dutch Ambassador rolled his eyes and tossed the waffle back over his shoulder—before it struck the ground, a stout, disconcertingly monkey-like dog sprang into the air and snatched it, and began to masticate it—literally—for the sound it made was like a homunculus squatting on the floor muttering, “masticate masticate masticate.”

  “Traaped between Fraance and the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands is raapidly consuumed by Louis the Quatorze Bourbon. Fine. But when Le Roi du Soleil reaches Maestricht he touches—what?”

  “The political and military equivalent of a hot iron plate?”

  The Dutch Ambassador probed negative space with a licked finger, seemed to touch something, and drew back sharply, making a sizzling noise through his teeth. Perhaps by Dutch luck, perhaps by some exquisite sense of timing, Daniel felt the atmosphere socking him in the gut. The tent clenched inwards, then inflated. Waffle-irons chattered and buzzed in the dimness, like skeletons’ teeth. The monkey-dog scurried under the table.

  Gomer Bolstrood pulled back a tent-flap to provide a clear view to the top of the demilune-work, which had been ruptured by detonation of a vast internal store of gunpowder. It looked like a steaming loaf that had been ripped in half. Resurgent Dutchmen were prancing around on the top, trampling and burning those French and English flags. The spectators were on the brink of riot.

  Gomer let the tent-flap fall shut again, and Daniel turned his attention back to the ambassador, who had never taken his gaze off of Daniel.

  “Maybe Fraance taakes Maestricht—but not so easily—they lose the hero D’Artagnan. The war will be won by us, however.”

  “I am pleased to know that you will have success in Holland—now will you consider changing your tactics in London?” Daniel said this loudly so that Gomer could share in it.

  “In whaat waay?”

  “You know what L’Estrange has been doing.”

  “I know what L’Estrange has been failing to do!” the Dutch Ambassador chortled.

  “Wilkins is trying to make London like Amsterdam—and I’m not speaking of wooden shoes
.”

  “Many churches—no established religion.”

  “It is his life’s work. He has given up on Natural Philosophy, these last years, to direct all of his energies toward that goal. He wants it because it is best for England—but the High Anglicans and Crypto-Catholics at Court are against anything that smacks of Dissidents. So Wilkins’s task is difficult enough—but when those same Dissidents are linked, in the public mind, with the Dutch enemy, how can he hope for success?”

  “In a year—when the dead are counted, and the true costs of the war are understood—Wilkins’s task will be too easy.”

  “In a year Wilkins will be dead of the stone. Unless he has it cut out.”

  “I can recommend a chirurgeon-barber, very speedy with the knife—”

  “He does not feel that he can devote several months to recovery, when the pressure is so immediate and the stakes so high. He is just on the verge of success, Mr. Ambassador, and if you would let up—”

  “We will let up when the French do,” the Ambassador said, and waved at Gomer, who pulled the flap open again to show the demilune being re-conquered by French and English troops, led by Monmouth. To one side, “D’Artagnan” lay wounded in a gap in the wall. John Churchill was supporting the old musketeer’s head in his lap, feeding him sips from a flask.

  The tent-flap remained open for rather a long time, and Daniel eventually understood that he was being shown the door. As he walked out he caught Gomer’s elbow and drew him outside onto the dirt street. “Brother Gomer,” he said, “the Dutch are deranged. Understandably. But our situation is not so desperate.”

  “On the contrary,” said Gomer, “I say that you are in desperate peril, Brother Daniel.”

  Anyone else would have meant physical peril by that, but Daniel had spent enough of his life around Gomer’s—which was to say, Daniel’s—ilk to know that Gomer meant the spiritual kind.

  “I don’t suppose that’s just because I was staring at a pretty girl’s bosom just now—?”

  Gomer did not much fancy the jest. Indeed, Daniel sensed before those words were out of his mouth that they would only confirm Gomer’s opinion of him as Fallen, or at best, Falling fast. He tried something else: “Your own father is Secretary of State!”

  “Then go and speak to my father.”

  “The point I am making is that there is no harm—or peril, if that is what you want to call it—in employing tactics. Cromwell used tactics to win battles, did he not? It did not mean he lacked faith. On the contrary—not to use the brains God gave you, and making every struggle into a frontal charge, is sinful—thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God!”

  “Wilkins has the stone,” Gomer said. “Whether ’twas placed in his bladder by God, or the Devil, is a question for Jesuits. Anyway, he has it, and shall likely die of it, unless you and your Fellows can gin up a way to transmute it into some watery form that can be pissed out. In dread of his death, you have wrought in your mind this phant’sy that if I, Gomer Bolstrood, leave off distributing handbills in the streets of London, it shall set in motion a lengthy chain of consequences that shall somehow end in Wilkins’s suffering some chirurgeon to cut him for the stone, him surviving the operation, and living happily ever after, as the kind father you never had. And you say that the Dutch are deranged?”

  Daniel could not answer. The discourse of Gomer had struck him in the face with no less heat, force, and dumbfounding pain than the branding iron had Gomer’s.

  “As you phant’sy yourself a master of tactics, consider this whor-ish spectacle we have been witnessing.” Gomer waved at the demilune-work. Up on the parapet, Monmouth was planting the French and English flags anew, to the cheers of the spectators, who broke into a lusty chorus of “Pikes on the Dikes” even as “D’Artagnan” breathed his last. John Churchill carried him down the slope of the earthwork in his arms and laid him on a litter where his body was bedecked with flowers.

  “Behold the martyr!” Gomer brayed. “Who gave his life for the cause, and is fondly remembered by all the Quality! Now there is a tactic for you. I am sorry Wilkins is sick. I would not put him in harm’s way on any account, for he was a friend to us. But it is not in my power to keep Death from his door. And when Death does come, ’twill make of him a Martyr—not so romantick as D’Artagnan perhaps—but of more effect in a better cause. Beg your pardon, Brother Daniel.” Gomer stalked away, tearing open the wrapper on a sheaf of libels.

  “D’Artagnan” was being carried along the front of the bleachers in a cortege of gorgeously mussed and tousled Cavaliers, and spectators were doing business with roving flower-girls and showering bouquets and blossoms on those heroes living and “dead.” But even as petals were fluttering down on the mock-Musketeer, Daniel Waterhouse found slips of paper coming down all around him, carried on a breeze from the bleachers. He slapped one out of the air and was greeted with a cartoon of several French cavaliers gang-raping a Dutch milkmaid. Another showed a cravated musketeer, silhouetted in the light of a burning Protestant church, about to catch a tossed baby on the point of his sword. All around Daniel, and up in the stands, spectators were passing these bills hand-to-hand, sometimes wadding them into sleeves or pockets.

  So the matter was complicated. And it only become more so ten minutes later, when, during a bombardment of “Maestricht,” a cannon burst in full view of all spectators. Most people assumed it was just a stage-trick until bloody fragments of artillerymen began to shower down all among them, mingling with the continual flurry of handbills.

  Daniel walked back to Gresham’s College and worked all night with Hooke. Hooke stayed below, gazing up at various stars, and Daniel remained on the roof, looking at a nova that was flaring in the west end of London: a Mobb of people with torches, milling around St. James’s Fields and discharging the occasional musket. Later, he learned that they had attacked Comstock House, supposedly because they were furious about the cannon that had burst.

  John Comstock himself showed up at Gresham’s College the next morning. It took several moments for Daniel to recognize him, so altered was his countenance by shock, by outrage, and even by shame. He demanded that Hooke and the rest drop what they were doing and investigate the remnants of the burst cannon, which he insisted had been tampered with in some way “by mine enemies.”

  College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

  1672

  There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by a fiction.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  Once More into the Breeches

  A COMEDY

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  MEN: MR. VAN UNDERDEVATER, a Dutchman, founder of a great commercial empire in sow’s-ears and potatoes’-eyes NZINGA, a cannibal Neeger, formerly King of the Congo, now house-slave to Mr. van Underdevater JEHOSHAPHAT STOPCOCK, the Earl of BRIMSTONE, an enthusiast

  TOM RUNAGATE, a discharged soldier turned Vagabond THE REV. YAHWEH PUCKER, a Dissident divine EUGENE STOPCOCK, son of Lord Brimstone, a Captain of Foot FRANCIS BUGGERMY, Earl of Suckmire, a foppish courtier DODGE AND BOLT, two of Tom Runagate’s accomplices

  WOMEN: MISS LYDIA VAN UNDERDEVATER, the daughter and sole heiress of Mr. van Underdevater, recently returned from a Venetian finishing-school LADY BRIMSTONE, wife to Jehoshaphat Stopcock Miss STRADDLE, Tom Runagate’s companion

  SCENE: SUCKMIRE, a rural estate in Kent

  ACT I. SCENE I.

  SCENE: a Cabin in a Ship at Sea. Thunder heard, flashes of Lightning seen.

  Enter Mr. van Underdevater in dressing-gown, with a lanthorn.

  VAN UND: Boatswain!

  Enter Nzinga wet, with a Sack.

  NZINGA: Here, master, what—

  VAN UND: Odd’s bodkins! Have you fallen into the tar-pot, boatswain?

  NZINGA: It is I, Master—your slave, My Royal Majesty, by the Grace of the tree-god, the rock-god, river-god, and diverse other gods who have slipped my mem’ry, of the Congo, King.

  VAN UND: SO it is. What have you in the bag?


  NZINGA: Balls.

  VAN UND: Balls! Sink me! You have quite forgot your Civilizing Lessons!

  NZINGA: Of ice.

  VAN UND: Thank heavens.

  NZINGA: I gathered ’em from the deck—where they are falling like grape-shot—and for this you thank heaven?

  VAN UND: Aye, for it means the boatswain is still in possession of all his Parts. Boatswain!

  Enter LYDIA in dressing-gown, dishevelled.

  LYDIA: Dear father, why do you shout for the boatswain so?

  VAN UND: My dear Lydia, I would fain pay him to bring this infernal storm to an end.

  LYDIA: But father, the boatswain can’t stop a tempest!

  VAN UND: Perhaps he knows someone who can.

  NZINGA: I know a weather-god in Guinea who can—and at rates very reasonable, as he will accept payment in rum.

  VAN UND: Rum! You take me for a half-wit? If this is what the weather-god does when he is sober—

  NZINGA: Cowrie-shells would do in a pinch. If master would care to despatch My Majesty on the next southbound boat, My Majesty would be pleased to broker the transaction—

  VAN UND:You prove yourself a shrewd man of commerce. I am reminded of when I traded the holes in a million cannibals’ ears, for the eyes of a million potatoes, and beat the market at both ends of the deal—

  More thunder.

  VAN UND: TOO, slow, too slow! Boatswain!

  Enter Lord Brimstone.

  LORD BRIMSTONE: Here, here, what is this bawling?

  LYDIA: Lord Brimstone—your servant.

  VAN UND: The price of ending this tempest is too high, the market in Pagan Deities too remote—

  LORD B: Then why, sir, do you call for the boatswain?

  VAN UND: Why, sir, to tell him to be of good courage and to remain firm in the face of danger.