Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “What do you mean? They can do so as well as anyone,” said a different familiar voice. “Perhaps better!”

  “Not without Neeger women.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “You must remember that the planters are short-sighted. They’re all desperate to get out of Jamaica—they wake up every day expecting to find themselves, or their children, in the grip of some tropical fever. To import female Neegers would cost nearly as much as to import males, but the females cannot produce as much sugar—particularly when they are breeding.” Daniel had finally recognized this voice as belonging to Sir Richard Apthorp—the second A in the CABAL.

  “So they don’t import females at all?”

  “That is correct, sir. And a newly arrived male is only usable for a few years,” Apthorp said.

  “That explains much of the caterwauling that has been emanating lately from the ’Change.”

  The two men had been sitting together on the steps of the fountain, facing toward the Gate, and Daniel hadn’t seen them until he’d drawn close enough to hear them. He was just getting ready to shift direction, and swing wide around the fountain, when the man who wasn’t Sir Richard Apthorp stood up, turned around, and dipped a goblet into the fountain—and caught sight of Daniel standing there flat-footed. Now Daniel recognized him—he was only too easy to recognize in a dark Trinity courtyard with blood on his hands. “I say!” Jeffreys exclaimed, “is that a new statue over there? A Puritan saint? Oh, I’m wrong, it is moving now—what appeared to be a Pillar of Virtue, is revealed as Daniel Waterhouse—ever the keen observer—now making an empiric study of us. Don’t worry, Sir Richard, Mr. Waterhouse sees all and does nothing—a model Royal Society man.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Waterhouse,” Apthorp said, managing to convey, by the tone of his voice, that he found Jeffreys embarrassing and tedious.

  “Mr. Jeffreys. Sir Richard. God save the King.”

  “The King!” Jeffreys repeated, raising his dripping goblet and then taking a swallow. “Stand and deliver like a good little scholar, Mr. Waterhouse. Why are Sir Richard’s friends in the ’Change making such a fuss?”

  “Admiral de Ruyter sailed down to Guinea and took away all of the Duke of York’s slave-ports,” Daniel said.

  Jeffreys—one hand half-covering his mouth, and speaking in a stage-whisper: “Which the Duke of York had stolen from the Dutch, a few years before—but in Africa, who splits hairs?”

  “During the years that the Duke’s company controlled Guinea, many slaves were shipped to Jamaica—there they made sugar—fortunes were built, and will endure, as long as the attrition of slaves is replaced by new shipments. But the Dutch have now choked off the supply—so I’d guess that Sir Richard’s clients at the ’Change can read the implications clearly enough—there must be some turmoil in the commodities markets.”

  Like a victim of unprovoked Battery looking for witnesses, Jeffreys turned toward Apthorp, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. Now Jeffreys had been a London barrister for some years. Daniel suspected that he knew of these events only as a mysterious influence that caused his clients to go bankrupt. “Some turmoil,” Jeffreys said, in a dramatic whisper. “Rather dry language, isn’t it? Imagine some planter’s family in Jamaica, watching the work-force, and the harvest, dwindle—trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy, yellow fever, and slave rebellion—scanning the horizon for sails, praying for the ships that will be their salvation—some turmoil, you call it?”

  Daniel could have said, Imagine a barrister watching his moneybags dwindle as he drinks them away, scanning the Strand for a client who’s got the wherewithal to pay his legal bills…but Jeffreys was wearing a sword and was drunk. So he said: “If those planters are in church, and praying, then they’ve already found salvation. Good evening, gentlemen.”

  He headed for the Gate, swinging wide round the fountain so that Jeffreys wouldn’t be tempted to run him through. Sir Richard Apthorp was applauding him politely. Jeffreys was mumbling and growling, but after a few moments he was able to get words out: “You are the same man as you were—or weren’t—ten years ago, Daniel Waterhouse! You were ruled by fear then—and you’d have England ruled by it now! Thank God you are sequestered within these walls, and unable to infect London with your disgusting pusillanimity!”

  And more in that vein, until Daniel ducked into the vault of the Great Gate of Trinity College. The gate was a hefty structure with crenellated towers at its four corners: a sort of mock-fortress, just the thing for retreating into when under attack by a Jeffreys. Between it and the side-wall of Trinity’s shotgun chapel was a gap in the College’s perimeter defenses about a stone’s throw wide, patched with a suite of chambers that had a little walled garden in front of it, on the side facing towards the town. These chambers had been used to shield various Fellows from the elements over the years, but lately Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton had been living there. Once those two bachelors had moved in their miserable stock of furniture, there had been plenty of unused space remaining, and so it had become the world’s leading alchemical research facility. Daniel knew this, because he had helped build it—was helping build it, rather, for it was perpetually under construction.

  Entering his home, Daniel pulled his robes close to his body so that they would not catch fire brushing against the glowing dome of the Reverberatory Furnace, wherein flames curled against the ceiling to strike downwards against the target. Then he pulled his skirts up so they wouldn’t drag against the heap of coal that (though the room was dark) he knew would be piled on the floor to his right. Or, for that matter, the mound of horse dung on the left (when burnt, it made a gentle moist heat). He maneuvered down a narrow lead among stacks of wooden crates, an egglike flask of quicksilver packed into each one, and came round a corner into another room.

  This chamber looked like a miniature city, built by outlandish stone-masons, and just in the act of burning down—for each “building” had a peculiar shape, to draw in the air, channel flame, and carry away fumes in a particular way, and each one was filled with flames. Some of them smoked; some steamed; most gave off queer-smelling vapors. Rather than explaining what the place smelled like, ’twere easier to list what few things could not be smelled here. Lumps of gold lay out on tabletops, like butter in a pastry-shop—it being de rigueur among the higher sort of Alchemists to show a fashionable contempt for gold, as a way of countering the accusation that they were only in it for the money. Not all operations demanded a furnace, and so there were tables, too, sheathed in peened copper, supporting oil-lamps that painted the round bottoms of flasks and retorts with yellow flame.

  Smudged faces turned towards Daniel, sequins of perspiration tumbled from drooping eyebrows. He immediately recognized Robert Boyle and John Locke, Fellows of the Royal Society, but, too, there were certain gentlemen who tended to show up at their garden-gate at perverse hours, robed and hooded—as if they really needed to conceal their identities when the King himself was practicing the Art at Whitehall. Viewing their petulant faces by firelight, Daniel wished they’d kept the hoods on. For, alas, they weren’t Babylonian sorcerers or Jesuit warrior-priests or Druidic warlocks after all, but an unmatched set of small-town apothecaries, bored noblemen, and crack-pated geezers, with faces that were either too slack or too spasmodical. One of them was markedly young—Daniel recognized him as Roger Comstock, he of the so-called Golden Comstocks, who’d been a scholar along with Daniel, Isaac, Upnor, Monmouth, and Jeffreys. Isaac had put Roger Comstock to work pumping a bellows, and the strain was showing on his face, but he was not about to complain. Too, there was a small and very trim raptor-faced man with white hair. Daniel recognized him as Monsieur LeFebure, the King’s Chymist, who’d introduced John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey and others—including the King himself—to the Art, when they’d been exiled in St.-Germain during the Cromwell years.

  But all of these were satellites, or (like Jupiter’s moons) satellites of satellites. The Sun stood at a writing-d
esk in the center of the room, quill in hand, calmly making notations in a large, stained, yellowed Book. He was dressed in a long splotched smock with several holes burnt through it, though the hem of a scarlet robe could be seen hanging beneath. His head was encased in a sort of leather sack with a windowpane let into it so that he could see out. Where Daniel stood, that rectangle of glass happened to be reflecting an open furnace-door, so instead of the bulging eyes, he saw a brilliant sheet of streaming flame. A breathing-tube, comprising segments of hollow cane plumbed together by the small intestine of some beast, was sewn through the bag. Isaac had tossed it back over his shoulder. It dangled down his back and ran across the floor to Roger Comstock, who pumped fresh air into it with a bellows. So they must be doing something with mercury this evening. Isaac had observed that quicksilver, absorbed into his body, produced effects like those of coffee or tobacco, only more so, and so he used the breathing apparatus whenever he had begun to feel especially twitchy.

  The results of some experiment appeared to be cooling down on one of the tables—a crucible hanging in darkness giving off a sullen glow, like Mars—and Daniel reckoned it was as good a time as any to interrupt. He stepped into the middle of the room and held up the bloody rag. “The menstruum of a human female,” he announced, “only a few minutes old!”

  A bit melodramatic. But these men thrived on it. Why else would they conceal their persons in wizard-cloaks, and their knowledge in occult signs? Some of them, anyway, were deeply impressed. Newton turned round and glared significantly at Roger Comstock, who cringed and gave the bellows several brisk strokes. The sack around Isaac’s head bulged and whistled. Isaac glared some more. One of the minions rushed up with a beaker. Daniel dropped the moist rag into it. Monsieur LeFebure approached and began to make calm observations in a fifty-fifty French-Latin mix. Boyle and Locke listened politely, the lesser Alchemists formed up in an outer circle, faces strained with the effort of decrypting whatever the King’s Chymist was saying.

  Daniel turned the other way to see Isaac peeling the wet sack off his head, then gathering his silver hair and holding it atop his skull to let the back of his neck cool down. He was gazing back at Daniel with no particular emotion. Of course he knew that the rag was just a diversionary tactic, but this did not affect him one way or the other.

  “There’s still time to see the second act of the play,” Daniel said. “We’re holding an empty seat for you—practically had to use muskets and pikes to keep scheming Londoners from it.”

  “You are taking the position, then, that God placed me on the earth, and in His wisdom supplied me with the resources that He has, so that I could interrupt my work, and spend my hours, watching a wicked atheistical play?”

  “Of course not, Isaac, please don’t impute such things to me, not even in private.”

  They were withdrawing to another room—which, therefore, in a more dignified sort of house would be called the w’drawing room—but here it was a workshop, the floor slick with wood-dust and shavings from a lathe, and a-crackle with failures from the glass-blowing bench, and cluttered with various hand-tools that they’d used to construct everything else. Isaac said nothing, only gazed at Daniel, all patient expectation. “From time to time—perhaps once a day—I prevail upon you to eat something,” Daniel pointed out. “Does this mean I believe God put you here to stuff food into your mouth? Of course not. But in order for you to accomplish the work that you, and I, believe God shaped you for, you must put food into your body.”

  “Is it really your belief that watching Once More into the Breeches is comparable to eating?”

  “To work, you require certain resources—nutrition is only one. A stipend, a workshop, tools, equipment—how do you get them?”

  “Behold!” Isaac said, sweeping one arm over his empire of tools and furnaces. This caused the cuff of his robe to fly out from under his smock—catching sight of it, he grasped the smock’s sleeve with the other hand and yanked it back to reveal the scarlet raiment of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Coming from any other man this would have seemed dramatic and insufferably pompous, but from Isaac it was the simplest and most concise answer to Daniel’s question.

  “The Fellowship—the chambers—the laboratory—and the Lucasian Chair—all the best that you could hope for. You have all you need—for now. But how did you get those things, Isaac?”

  “Providence.”

  “By which you mean Divine Providence. But how—”

  “You wish to examine the workings of God’s will in the world? I am pleased to hear it. For that is my sole endeavour. You are keeping me from it—let us go back into the other room and pursue an answer to your question together.”

  “By diverting your attention from those crucibles—for a few hours—you could gain a clearer understanding of, and a more profound gratitude for, what Providence has given you.” Devising that sentence had required intense concentration on Daniel’s part—he was gratified when it seemed to at least confuse Isaac.

  “If there are some data I have overlooked, by all means edify me,” Isaac said.

  “Recall the Fellowship competition of several years ago. You’d been busy doing the work God put you here to do—instead of the work that Trinity College expected of you—consequently, your prospects seemed bleak—wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I have always placed my faith in—”

  “In God, of course. But don’t tell me you weren’t worried you’d be sent packing, and live out your days as a gentleman farmer in Woolsthorpe. There were other candidates. Men who’d curried favor in the right places, and memorized all of the medieval claptrap we were expected to know. Do you remember, Isaac, what became of your competitors?”

  “One went insane,” Isaac recited like a bored scholar. “One passed out in a field from too much drink, caught a fever, and died. One fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw because of injuries suffered. The fourth—” Here Isaac faltered, which was a rare event for him. Daniel seized the moment by stepping closer and adopting a curious and innocent look.

  Isaac looked away and said, “The fourth one also fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw! Now, Daniel, if you’re trying to say that this was incredibly improbable, and fortunate for me, I have already given you my answer: Providence.”

  “But in what form did Providence exert itself? Some mysterious action at a distance? Or the earthly mechanics of colliding bodies?”

  “Now you have quite lost me.”

  “Do you believe that God stretched out a finger from Heaven, and knocked those two down the staircase? Or did he put someone on Earth who arranged for these things to happen?”

  “Daniel—surely you didn’t—”

  Daniel laughed. “Push them down stairs? No. But I think I know who did. You have the wherewithal to work, Isaac, because of certain Powers that Be—which is not to say that Providence isn’t working through them. But what it all means is that you must, from time to time, pause in your labors, and spend a few hours maintaining friendly relations with those Powers.”

  Isaac had been pacing around the chamber during this lecture, and looking generally skeptical. More than one time he opened his mouth to make some objection. But at about the time Daniel finished, Isaac seemed to notice something. Daniel thought it was one of many papers and note-books scattered upon a certain table. Whatever it might have been, the sight of it caused Isaac to reconsider. Isaac’s face slackened, as if the internal flame were being banked. He began stripping off his smock. “Very well,” he said, “please inform the others.”

  The others had already squeezed the rag out into a glass retort and were trying to distill from it whatever generative spirit they supposed must be exuded from a woman’s womb. Roger Comstock and the other minions looked crestfallen to learn that Professor Newton would be leaving them, but Locke and Boyle and LeFebure took it in stride. Newton made himself presentable very quickly—this being why academics loved robes, and fops loathed them. A contingent of five Royal Soc
iety members—Boyle, Locke, LeFebure, Waterhouse, and Newton—set out across the Great Court of Trinity College. All were in long black robes and mortarboards save Newton, who led the way, a cardinal pursued by a flock of crows, a vivid red mark on the Trinity green.

  “I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS PLAY,” Locke said, “but I have seen one or two from which the story and characters of this one were…uh…”

  Newton: “Stolen.”

  Boyle: “Inspired.”

  LeFebure: “Appropriated.”

  Locke: “Adapted, and so I can inform you that a ship has run aground in a storm, near a castle, the seat of a foppish courtier probably named something like Percival Kidney or Reginald Mumblesleeve—”

  “Francis Buggermy, according to the Playbill,” Daniel put in. Isaac turned around and glared at him.

  “So much the better,” Locke said. “But of course the fop’s in London, never comes to the country—so a Vagabond named Roger Thrust or Judd Vault or—”

  “Tom Runagate.”

  “And his mistress, Madeline Cherry or—”

  “Miss Straddle, in this case.”

  “Are squatting there. Now, seeing a group of castaways from the ship coming ashore, these two Vagabonds dress up in the fop’s clothing and impersonate Francis Buggermy and his mistress-of-the-moment—much to the surprise of a withered Puritan Bible-pounder who comes upon the scene—”

  “The Reverend Yahweh Pucker,” Daniel said.

  “The rest we can see for ourselves—”

  “Why’s that old fellow all charred black?” Boyle demanded, catching sight of a performer up on the stage.

  “He’s a Neeger slave,” Daniel said.

  “Which reminds me,” Locke put in, “I need to send a message to my broker—time to sell my stock in the Guinea Company, I fear—”

  “No, no!” Boyle said, “I mean black as in charred, burnt, with smoke coming out of his hair!”

  “No such thing was in the version I saw,” Locke said.