Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “It is rather Metaphysickal,” was all Daniel could come back with. “What’s the common center? God?”

  “God arranged things from the beginning so that Mind could understand Nature. But He did not do this by continual meddling in the development of Mind, and the unfolding of the Universe…rather He fashioned the nature of both Mind and Nature to be harmonious from the beginning.”

  “So, I have complete freedom of action…but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is my nature to act in harmony with the world, and God partakes of that harmony.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is odd that we should be having this conversation, Doctor, because during the last few days, for the first time in my life, I have felt as if certain possibilities have been set before me, which I may reach out and grasp if I so choose.”

  “You sound like a man who has found a patron.”

  The notion of Roger Comstock as patron made Daniel’s gorge rise a bit. But he could not deny Leibniz’s insight. “Perhaps.”

  “I am pleased, for your sake. The death of my patron has left me with very few choices.”

  “There must be some nobleman in Paris who appreciates you, Doctor.”

  “I was thinking rather of going to Leiden to stay with Spinoza.”

  “But Holland is soon to be overrun…you could not pick a worse place to be.”

  “The Dutch Republic has enough shipping to carry two hundred thousand persons out of Europe, and around the Cape of Good Hope to the furthermost islands of Asia, far out of reach of France.”

  “That is entirely too phantastickal for me to believe.”

  “Believe. The Dutch are already making plans for this. Remember, they made half of their land with the labor of their hands! What they did once in Europe, they can do again in Asia. If the last ditch is stormed, and the United Provinces fall under the heel of King Louis, I intend to be there, and I will board ship and go to Asia and help build a new Commonwealth—like the New Atlantis that Francis Bacon described.”

  “For you, sir, such an adventure might be possible. For me, it can never be anything more than a romance,” Daniel said. “Until now, I’ve always done what I had to, and this went along very well with the Predestination that was taught me. But now I may have choices to make, and they are choices of a practical nature.”

  “Whatever acts, cannot be destroyed,” said the Doctor.

  Daniel went out the door of the coffee-house and walked up and down London for the rest of the day. He was a bit like a comet, ranging outwards in vast loops, but continually drawn back toward certain fixed poles: Gresham’s College, Waterhouse Square, Cromwell’s head, and the ruin of St. Paul’s.

  Hooke was a greater Natural Philosopher than he, but Hooke was busy rebuilding the city, and half-deranged with imaginary intrigues. Newton was also greater, but he was lost in Alchemy and poring over the Book of Revelation. Daniel had supposed that there might be an opportunity to slip between those two giants and make a name for himself. But now there was a third giant. A giant who, like the others, was distracted by the loss of his patron, and dreams of a free Commonwealth in Asia. But he would not be distracted forever.

  It was funny in a painful way. God had given him the desire to be a great Natural Philosopher—then put him on earth in the midst of Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz.

  Daniel had the training to be a minister, and the connections to find a nice congregation in England or Massachusetts. He could walk into that career as easily as he walked into a coffee-house. But his ramble kept bringing him back to the vast ruin of St. Paul’s—a corpse in the middle of a gay dinner-party—and not just because it was centrally located.

  Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

  NOVEMBER 1713

  These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep

  Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,

  Which into hallow Engins long and round

  Thick-rammed, at th’ other bore with touch of fire

  Dilated and infuriate shall send forth

  From far with thundring noise among our foes

  Such implements of mischief as shall dash

  To pieces, and oerwhelm whatever stands

  Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd

  The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  SNATCHING A FEW MINUTES’ REST in his cabin between engagements, Daniel’s mood is grave. It is the solemnity, not of a man who’s involved in a project to kill other men (they’ve been doing that all day, for Christ’s sake!), but of one who’s gambling his own life on certain outcomes. Or having it gambled for him by a Captain who shows signs of—what’s a diplomatic way to put it—having a rich and complicated inner life. Of course, whenever you board ship you put your life in the Captain’s hands—but—

  Someone is laughing up there on the poop deck. The gaiety clashes with Daniel’s somber mood and annoys him. It’s a derisive and somewhat cruel laugh, but not without sincere merriment. Daniel’s looking about for something hard and massive to thump on the ceiling when he realizes it’s van Hoek, and what has him all in a lather is some sort of technical Dutch concept—the Zog.

  Trundling noises from the upperdeck,* and all of a sudden Minerva’s a different ship: heeling over quite a bit more than she was, but also rolling from side much more ponderously. Daniel infers that a momentous shifting of weights has occurred. Getting up, and going back out on the quarterdeck, he sees it’s true: there are several short bulbous carronnades here—nothing more or less than multi-ton blunderbusses, with large-bore, short-range, miserable accuracy. But (not to put too fine a point on it) large bores, into which gunners are shoveling all manner of messy ironmongery: pairs of cannonballs chained together, nails, redundant crowbars, clusters of grapeshot piled on sabots and tied together with ostentatiously clever sailors’ knots. Once loaded, the carronnades are being run out to the gunwales—hugely increasing the ship’s moment of inertia, accounting for the change in the roll period—

  “Calculating our odds, Dr. Waterhouse?” Dappa inquires, descending a steep stair from the poop deck.

  “What means Zog, Dappa, and why’s it funny?”

  Dappa gets an alert look about him as if it isn’t funny at all, and points across half a mile of open water toward a schooner flying a black flag with a white hourglass. The schooner is on the weather bow* parallelling their course but obviously hoping to converge, and grapple, with Minerva in the near future. “See how miserably they make headway? We are outpacing them, even though we haven’t raised the mainsail.”

  “Yes—I was going to inquire—why haven’t we raised it? It is the largest sail on the ship, and we are trying to go fast, are we not?”

  “The mainsail is traditionally raised and worked by the gunners. Not raising it will make Teach think we are short-handed in that area, and unable to man all our cannon at one time.”

  “But wouldn’t it be worthwhile to tip our hand, if we could outrun that schooner?”

  “We’ll outrun her anyway.”

  “But she wants us to draw abeam of her, does she not—that is the entire point of being a pirate—so perhaps she has thrown out drogues, and that is why she wallows along so pitiably.”

  “She doesn’t need to throw out drogues because of her appalling Zog.”

  “There it is again—what, I ask, is the meaning of that word?”

  “Her wake, look at her wake!” Dappa says, waving his arm angrily.

  “Yes—now that we are so, er, unsettlingly close, I can see that her wake’s enough to capsize a whaleboat.”

  “Those damned pirates have loaded so many cannon aboard, she rides far too low in the water, and so she’s got a great ugly Zog.”

  “Is this meant to reassure me?”

  “It is meant to answer your question.”

  “Zog is Dutch for ‘wake,’ then?”

  Dappa the linguist smiles yes. Half his teeth are white, the others made of gold. “And
a much better word it is, because it comes from zuigen which means ‘to suck.’”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Any seaman will tell you that a ship’s wake sucks on her stern, holding her back—the bigger the wake, the greater the suck, and the slower the progress. That schooner, Doctor Waterhouse, sucks.”

  Angry words from van Hoek above—Dappa scurries down to the upperdeck to finish whatever errand Daniel interrupted. Daniel follows him, then goes aft, skirts the capstan, and descends a narrow staircase to the aftmost part of the gundeck. Thence he enters the room at the stern where he’s been in the habit of taking his temperature measurements. He commences a perilous traversal of the room, headed towards that bank of undershot windows. To a landlubber the room would look pleasingly spacious, to Daniel it appears desperately short of handholds—meaning that as the ship rolls, Daniel stumbles for a greater distance, and builds up more speed, before colliding with anything big enough to stop him. In any case, he gets to the windows and looks down into Minerva’s Zog. She has one, to be sure, but compared to that schooner to windward, Minerva hardly sucks at all. The Bernoullis would have a field day with this—

  There is also a pirate-ketch converging on them from leeward, in much the same way as the schooner is doing from windward, and Daniel is fairly certain that this ketch doesn’t suck much at all. He is certain he saw drogues trailing behind her. Minerva is lying dead upon the wind, which is to say, she’s as close-hauled as possible—she can fall off to leeward but she cannot turn into the wind any farther. Since the ketch is to leeward—downwind of Minerva—falling away from the wind will send Minerva straight into the musket-fire and grappling-irons that are no doubt being readied on her decks and fighting-tops. But the ketch, being fore-and-aft rigged, can sail closer to the wind anyway. So even if Minerva holds her course, the ketch will be able to cut her off—driving her into the sucking (because heavily armed) schooner.

  All of which goes to explain Daniel’s second reason for having gone to this room: it’s as far from the fighting as he can get without jumping overboard. But he does not find the solace he wants, because from here he can see two additional pirate-ships gaining on them from astern, and they seem bigger and better than any of the others.

  An explosion, then another, then a lot of them at once—obviously something organized. Daniel’s still alive, Minerva’s still afloat. He flings open the door to the gundeck but it’s dark and quiet, the gunners all convened around the cannons on the larboard side—none of which has been fired. It must have been those carronnades on the upperdeck firing their loads of junk.

  Daniel turns round and looks out the window to see the ketch being left behind, fine on the lee quarter.* It is no longer recognizable as a ketch, though—just a hull heaped with tangled, slack rigging and freshly splintered blond wood. One of her guns sparks and something terrible comes out of it, directly towards him—big and spreading. He begins to fall down, more out of vertigo than any coherent plan. All the glass in all those windows explodes toward him, driven on a wall of buckshot. Only some of it hits him in the face, and none in the eyes—more luck than a natural philosopher can comfortably account for.

  The door’s been flung open again, either by the blast of shot or by his falling back into it, so half of him is lying on the gundeck now. Suddenly, radiance warms his tightly closed eyelids. It could be a choir of angels, or a squadron of flaming devils, but he doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. Or it could be Minerva’s powder magazine exploding—but that would involve loud noises, and the only noises he hears are the creaking and grumbling of gun-carriages being hauled forward. There’s a refreshing sea breeze in his nostrils. He takes a big risk and opens his eyes.

  All of the gunports on the larboard side have been opened at once, and all of the cannon rolled out. Gunners are hauling on blocks and tackles, slewing their weapons this way or that—others levering the guns’ butts up with crowbars and hammering wedges underneath—there are, in short, as many feverish preparations as for a royal wedding. Then fire is brought out, the roll of the ship carefully timed, and Daniel—poor Daniel doesn’t think to put his hands over his ears. He hears one or two cannon-blasts before going deaf. Then it’s just one four-ton iron tube after another jerking backwards as lightly as shuttlecocks.

  He is fairly certain that he is dead now.

  Other dead men are around him.

  They are lying on the upperdeck.

  A couple of sailors are sitting on Daniel’s corpse, while another tortures his deceased flesh with a needle. Sewing his dismembered parts back on, closing up the breaches in his abdomen so stuff won’t leak out. So this is what it felt like to have been a stray dog in the clutches of the Royal Society!

  As Daniel is lying flat on his back, his view is mostly skywards, though if he turns his head—an astonishing feat, for a dead man—he can see van Hoek up on the poop deck bellowing through his trumpet—which is aimed nearly straight down over the rail.

  “What on earth can he be shouting at?” Daniel asks.

  “Apologies, Doctor, didn’t know you’d come awake,” says a Looming Column of Shadow, speaking in Dappa’s voice, and stepping back to block the sun from Daniel’s face. “He’s parleying with certain pirates who rowed out from Teach’s flagship under a flag of truce.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They want you, Doctor.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re thinking too hard—there’s naught to understand—it is entirely simple,” Dappa says. “They rowed up and said, ‘Give us Dr. Waterhouse and all is forgotten.’”

  Dr. Waterhouse now ought to spend a long time being dumbstruck. But his stupefaction lasts only a little while. The sensation of nubby silk thread being drawn briskly through fresh holes in his flesh, makes serious reflection all but impossible. “You’ll do it—of course,” is the best he can come up with.

  “Any other captain would—but whoever arranged to put you aboard, must’ve known about Captain van Hoek’s feelings concerning pirates. Behold!” and Dappa steps out of the way to give Daniel an unobstructed view of a sight stranger than anything gawkers would pay to view at St. Bartholomew’s Fair: a hammer-handed man climbing up into the rigging of a ship. That is to say that one of his arms is terminated, not by a hand, and not by a hook, but by an actual hammer. Van Hoek ascends to a suitably perilous altitude, up there alongside the colors that fly from the mizzenmast: a Dutch flag, and below it, a smaller one depicting the Ægis. After getting himself securely tangled in the shrouds—weaving limbs through rope so that his body is spliced into the rigging—he begins to pluck nails out of his mouth and drive them through the hem of each flag into the wood of the mast.

  It seems, now, that every sailor who’s not sitting on Daniel is up in the rigging, unfurling a ludicrously vast array of sails. Daniel notes with approval that the mainsail’s finally been hoisted—that charade is over. And now moreover Minerva’s height is being miraculously increased as the topmasts are telescoped upwards. An asymptotic progression of smaller and smaller trapezoids spreads out upon their frail-seeming yards.

  “It’s a glorious gesture for the Captain to make—now that he’s sunk half of Teach’s fleet,” Daniel says.

  “Aye, Doctor—but not the better half,” Dappa says.

  The City of London

  1673

  A fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth, is, that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excludeth the right of the sovereign.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  DANIEL HAD NEVER been an actor on a stage, of course, but when he went to plays at Roger Comstock’s theatre—especially when he saw them for the fifth or sixth time—he was struck by the sheer oddity of these men (and women!) standing about on a platform prating the words of a script for the hundredth time and trying to behave as if hundreds of persons weren’t a few yards away goggling at them. It was strangely mannered, hollow, and false, and all
who took part in it secretly wanted to strike the show and move on to something new. Thus London during this the Third Dutch War, waiting for news of the Fall of Holland.

  As they waited, they had to content themselves with such smaller bits of news as from time to time percolated in from the sea. All London passed these rumors around and put on a great pompous show of reacting to them, as actors observe a battle or storm said to be taking place off-stage.

  Queerly—or perhaps not—the only solace for most Londoners was going to the theatre, where they could sit together in darkness and watch their own behavior reflected back to them. Once More into the Breeches had become very popular since its Trinity College debut. It had to be performed in Roger Comstock’s theatre after its first and second homes were set on fire owing to lapses in judgment on the part of the pyrotechnicians. Daniel’s job was to simulate lightning-flashes, thunderbolts, and the accidental detonation of Lord Brimstone without burning down Roger’s investment. He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a cannonball rolling down a Spiral of Archimedes in a wooden barrel, and he abused his privileges at the world’s leading alchemical research facility to formulate a new variant of gunpowder that made more flash and less bang. The pyrotechnics lasted for a few minutes, at the beginning of the play. The rest of the time he got to sit backstage and watch Tess, who always dazzled him like a fistful of flash-powder going off right in the face, and made his heart feel like a dented cannonball tumbling down an endless hollow Screw. King Charles came frequently to watch his Nellie sing her pretty songs, and so Daniel took some comfort—or amusement at least—in knowing that he and the King both endured this endless Wait in the same way: gazing at the cheeks of pretty girls.

  The small bits of news that did come in, while they waited for the big one, took various forms at first, but as the war went on they seemed to consist mostly of death-notices. It was not quite like living in London during the Plague; but more than once, Daniel had to choose between two funerals going on at the same hour. Wilkins had been the first. Many more followed, as if the Bishop of Chester had launched a fad.