Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Dyadic, or binary numbers—old news,” the Doctor said, waving a hand in the air so that the lace cuff flopped around. “My late friend and colleague Mr. John Wilkins published a cryptographic system based on this more than forty years ago in his great Crypto-nomicon—unauthorized Dutch editions of it are still available over yonder in the Booksellers’ Quarter should you desire. But what I take away from the Chinese method of fortune-telling is the notion of producing random numbers by the dyadic technique, and by this Wilkins’s system could be incomparably strengthened.” All of which was like the baying of hounds to Jack.

  “Crypto, graphy…writing of secrets?” Eliza guessed.

  “Yes—an unfortunate necessity in these times,” the Doctor said.

  About now, they escaped the closeness of the Fun Fair and stopped in an open square near a church. “Nicolaikirche—I was baptized there,” the Doctor said. “Kuxen! A topic strangely related to dyadic numbers in that the number of Kuxen in a particular mine is always a power of two, videlicet: one, two, four, eight, sixteen…But that is a mathematical curiosity in which you’ll have little interest. I am selling them. Should you buy them? Formerly a prosperous industry, upon which the fortunes of great families such as the Fuggers and Hacklhebers were founded, silver mining was laid low by the Thirty Years’ War and the discovery, by the Spaniards, of very rich deposits at Potosí in Peru and Guanajuato in Mexico. Buying Kuxen in a European mine that is run along traditional lines, as is done in the Ore Range, would be a waste of the lady’s money. But my mines or I should say the mines of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which I have been given the responsibility to manage, will be, I think, a better investment.”

  “Why?” Eliza asked.

  “It is extremely difficult to explain.”

  “Oh, but you’re so good at explaining things…”

  “You really must leave the flattery to me, milady, as you are more deserving of it. No, it has to do with certain new sorts of engines, of my own design, and new techniques for extracting metal from ore, devised by a very wise and, as alchemists go, non-fraudulent alchemist of my acquaintance. But a woman of your conspicuous acumen would never exchange her coins—”

  “Silk, actually,” Jack inserted, turning half round to flash the goods.

  “Er…lovely silks, then, for Kuxen in my mine, just because I said these things in a market.”

  “Probably true,” Eliza admitted.

  “You would have to inspect the works first. Which I invite you to do…we leave tomorrow…but if you could exchange your goods for coin first it would be—”

  “Wait!” Jack said, it being his personal duty to play the role of coarse, armed bumpkin. Giving Eliza the opportunity to say: “Good Doctor, my interest in the subject was just a womanish velleity—forgive me for wasting your time—”

  “But why bother talking to me at all then? You must’ve had some reason. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  “Where is it?” Jack asked.

  “The lovely Harz Mountains—a few days’ journey west of here.”

  “That’d be in the general direction of Amsterdam, then?”

  “Young sir, when I spied your Turkish sword, I took you for some sort of Janissary, but your knowledge of the lands to the West proves otherwise—even if your East London accent hadn’t already given you away.”

  “Uh, okay, so that’s a yes, then,” Jack mumbled, leading Eliza a few paces away. “A free ride in the Doctor’s train—can’t be too much wrong with that.”

  “He’s up to something,” Eliza protested.

  “So are we, lass—it’s not a crime.”

  Eventually she wafted back over to the Doctor and allowed as how she’d be willing to “leave my entourage behind” for a few days, with the exception of “my faithful manservant and bodyguard,” and “detour to the Harz Mountains” to inspect the works. They talked, for a while, in French.

  “He says a lot in a hurry sometimes,” Eliza told Jack as they followed the Doctor, at a distance, down a street of great trading-houses. “I tried to find out approximately what a kux would cost—he said not to worry.”

  “Funny, from a man who claims he’s trying to raise money…”

  “He said that the reason he first took me for Parisian was that ostrich plumes, like the sample in my hat, are in high fashion there just now.”

  “More flattery.”

  “No—his way of telling me that we should ask a high price.”

  “Where’s he taking us?”

  “The House of the Golden Mercury, which is the factory of the von Hacklheber family.”

  “We’ve already been kicked out of there.”

  “He’s going to get us in.”

  AND THAT HE DID, by means of a mysterious conversation that took place inside the factory, out of their view. This was the biggest courtyard they’d seen in Leipzig: narrow but long, lined with vaulted arcades on both sides, a dozen cranes active at once elevating goods that the von Hacklhebers expected to rise in price, and letting down ones they thought had reached their peak. At the end nearest the street, mounted to the wall above the entry arch, was a skinny three-story-high structure cantilevered outwards over the yard, like balconies on three consecutive floors all merged into one tower. It was enclosed with windows all round except on the top floor, where a golden roof sheltered an open platform and supported a pair of obscenely long-necked gargoyles poised to vomit rain (should it rain) out onto the traders below. “Reminds me of the castle on the butt-end of a galleon,” was Eliza’s comment, and it wasn’t for a few minutes that Jack understood that this was a reminder of the naughty business off Qwghlm years ago, and (therefore) her oblique female way of saying she didn’t like it. This despite the gold-plated Mercury, the size of a man, bracketed to it, which seemed to be springing into flight above their heads, holding out a golden stick twined about with snakes and surmounted by a pair of wings. “No, it’s a Cathedral of Mercury,” Jack decided, trying to get her mind off the galleon. “Your Cathedral of Jesus is cross-shaped. This one takes its plan from that stick in his hand—long and slender—the vaults on the sides like the snakes’ loops. The wings of the factory spreading out from the head of it, where is mounted the bishop’s pulpit, and all of us believers crowded in below to celebrate the Messe.”

  Eliza sold the stuff. Jack assumed she sold it well. He knew they were soon to leave Leipzig and so amused himself by looking around. Watching the bales and casks ascend and descend on their ropes, his eye was drawn to a detail: from many of the countless windows that lined the courtyard, short rods projected horizontally into the air, and mounted to their ends, on ball-joints like the one where the thigh-bone meets the pelvis, were mirrors about a foot square, canted at diverse angles. When he first noticed them Jack supposed that they were a clever trick for reflecting sunlight into those many dim offices. But looking again he saw that they shifted frequently, and that their silvered faces were always aimed down toward the courtyard. There were scores of them. Jack never glimpsed the watchers who lurked in the dark rooms.

  Later he chanced to look up at the highest balcony, and discovered a new gargoyle looking back at him: this was made of flesh and blood, a stout man who hadn’t bothered to cover his partly bald, partly grizzled head. He had battled smallpox and won at the cost of whatever good or even bad looks he might ever have had. Quite a few decades of good living had put a lot of weight into his face and drawn the pocked flesh downwards into jowls and wattles and chins, lumpy as cargo nets. He was giving Eliza a look that Jack did not find suitable. Up there on that balcony he was such an arresting presence that Jack did not notice, for a few minutes, that another man, much more finely turned out, was up there, too: the Doctor, talking in the relentless way of one who’s requesting a favor, and gesturing so that those white lace cuffs seemed to flit around him like a pair of doves.

  Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed,
leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for a evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.

  Saxony

  LATE APRIL 1684

  LEAVING LEIPZIG WITH THE DOCTOR did not happen at any one particular moment—it was a ceremonial procession that extended over a day. Even after Jack and Eliza and Turk the Horse had located the Doctor’s entourage, several hours of wandering around the town still awaited them: there was a mysterious call at the von Hacklheber factory, and a stop at the Nicolaikirche so that the Doctor could make devotions and take communion, and then it was over to the University (which like all else in Leipzig was small and serious as a pocket-pistol), where the Doctor simply sat in his carriage for half an hour, chatting with Eliza in French, which was the language he preferred for anything of a high-flown nature. Jack, restlessly circling the carriage—which was chocolate-brown, and painted all over with flowers—put his ear to the window once and heard them talking about some noble lady named Sophie, a second time, a few minutes later, it was dressmaking, then Catholic vs. Lutheran views on transubstantiation…Finally Jack pulled the door open. “Pardon the interruption, but I had a notion to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawling there and back on my hands and knees, and wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t delay our departure…”

  “Ssh! The Doctor’s trying to make a very difficult decision,” Eliza said.

  “Just make it—that’s what I say—doesn’t get easier if you think about it,” Jack advised. The Doctor had a manuscript on his lap, and a quill poised above it, a trembling drop of ink ready to break loose, but his hand would not move. His head teetered and tottered through a ponderous arc (or maybe it was the wig that magnified all movements) as he read the same extract over and over, under his breath, each time adopting a different sequence of facial expressions and emphasizing different words, like an actor trying to make sense of some ambiguous verse: should this be read as a jaded pedant? A dim schoolmaster? A skeptical Jesuit? But since the words had been written by the Doctor himself, that couldn’t be it—he was trying to imagine how the words would be received by different sorts of readers.

  “Would you like to read it out loud, or—”

  “It is in Latin,” Eliza said.

  More waiting. Then: “Well, what is the decision that wants making?”

  “Whether or not to heave it over the transom of yonder doorway,” Eliza said, pointing to the front of one of those Leipziger houses-that-weren’t-houses.

  “What’s it say on that door?”

  “Acta Eruditorum—it is a journal that the Doctor founded two years ago.”

  “I don’t know what a journal is.”

  “Like a gazette for savants.”

  “Oh, so that stack of papers is something he wants to have printed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if he founded it, it’s his journal, so why’s he got leeches in his breeches?”

  “Ssh! All the savants of Europe will read the words on that page—they must be perfect.”

  “Then why doesn’t he take it with him and work on it some more? This is no place to make anything perfect.”

  “It has been finished for years,” the Doctor said, sounding unusually sad. “The decision: should I publish it at all?”

  “Is it a good yarn?”

  “It is not a narrative. It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it,” the Doctor said. “When published, it will bring about enormous changes in not only mathematics, but all forms of natural philosophy and engineering. People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel to other planets, and its very power and brilliance will sweep old, tottering, worn-out systems of thought into the dustbin.”

  “And you invented it, Doctor?” Eliza asked, as Jack was occupied making finger-twirling movements in the vicinity of his ear.

  “Yes—seven or eight years ago.”

  “And still no one knows about it, besides—”

  “Me, and the other fellow.”

  “Why haven’t you told the world about it?”

  “Because it seems the other fellow invented it ten years before I did, and didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve been waiting for him to say something. But it’s been almost twenty years since he did it, and he doesn’t show the slightest inclination to let anyone else in on it.”

  “You’ve waited eight years—why today? It’s well after midday,” Jack said. “Take it with you—give it another two or three years’ thought.”

  “Why today? Because I do not believe God put me on this earth, and gave me either the best or second-best mind currently in existence, so that I could spend my days trying to beg money from the likes of Lothar von Hacklheber, so that I could dig a large hole in the ground,” the Doctor said. “I don’t want my epitaph to be, ‘He brought the price of silver down one-tenth of one percent.’”

  “Right! Sounds like a decision to me,” Jack said. Reaching into the carriage he gathered up the manuscript, carried it up the walk to the door in question, and heaved it through the transom. “And now, off to the mountains!”

  “One more small errand in the Booksellers’ Quarter,” the Doctor said, “as long as I’m getting myself into trouble.”

  THE BOOKSELLERS’ QUARTER LOOKED AND worked like the rest of Leipzig except all the goods were books: they tumbled out of casks, rose in unsteady stacks, or were arranged into blocks that were wrapped and tied and then stacked into larger blocks. Bent porters carried them around in hods and back-baskets. The Doctor, never one to accomplish anything in a hurry, devoted several minutes to arranging his carriage and escort-train before the widest and clearest of the Book-Fair’s exits. In particular he wondered if Jack wouldn’t mind mounting Turk and (for lack of a better word) posing between the booksellers and the carriage. Jack did so, and was reasonably merry about it, having given up any hope that they’d escape the city before nightfall.

  The Doctor squared his shoulders, adjusted numerous subsystems of clothing (today he wore a coat embroidered with flowers, just like the ones painted on his carriage), and walked into the Book-Fair. Jack couldn’t see him any more, but he could hear him. Not his voice, actually, but rather the effect that the Doctor’s appearance had on the overall sound of the fair. As when a handful of salt is thrown into a pot that’s about to boil: a hush, then a deep steady building.

  The Doctor came running. He moved well for a man on high heels. He was pursued by the booksellers of* Königsberg, Basel, Rostock, Kiel, Florence, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Seville, Paris, and Danzig, with a second echelon not far behind. The Doctor made it past Jack well before any of them. The sight of a mounted man with a heathen saber brought them to a jagged halt. They contented themselves after that with flinging books: any book that was handy. They gang-tackled porters, molested promotional displays, kicked over casks to get ammunition, and the air above and around Jack grew rather dark with books, as when a flock passes overhead. They fell open on cobblestones and spilled out their illustrative woodcuts: portraits of great men, depictions of the Siege of Vienna, diagrams of mining-engines, a map of some Italian city, a dissection of the large bowel, vast tables of numbers, musketeer drills, geometers’ proofs, human skeletons in insouciant poses, the constellations of the Zodiac, rigging of foreign barkentines, design of alchemical furnaces, glaring Hottentots with bones in their noses, thirty flavors of Baroque window-frames. This entire scene was carried out with very little bellowing, as if ejection of the Doctor was a routine matter for the booksellers. At the crack of the coachman’s whip, they made a few desultory final heaves and then turned back to resume whatever conversations the Doctor had interrupted. Jack for his part adopted a ceremonial rear-guard position behind the Doctor’s baggage-cart (inadvertently laden, now, with a few random books). The brittle sparking impacts of horse-shoes and wheel-rims against cobblestones were like heavenly chimes to his Va
gabond-ears.

  HE COULD NOT GET AN explanation until hours later, when they had put Leipzig’s north gate a few miles behind them, and stopped at an inn on the road to Halle. By this time Eliza had been thoroughly saturated with the Doctor’s view of events as well as his gloomy and resentful mood. She stayed in the Ladies’ Bedchamber, he stayed in the Men’s, they met in the Common-Room. “He was born in Leipzig—educated himself in Leipzig—went to school in Leipzig—”

  “Why’d he go to school if he educated himself? Which is it?” “Both. His father was a professor who died when he was very young—so he taught himself Latin at the same age when you were hanging from dead men’s legs.”

  “That’s funny—you know, I tried to teach myself Latin, but what with the Black Death, the Fire, et cetera…”

  “In lieu of having a father, he read his father’s library—then went to school. And you saw for yourself how they treated him.”

  “Perhaps they had an excellent reason,” Jack said—he was bored, and getting Eliza steamed up would be as good an entertainment as any.

  “There is no reason for you to be gnawing at the Doctor’s ankles,” Eliza said. “He is one of that sort of man who forms very profound friendships with members of the gentler sex.”

  “I saw what sort of friendship he had with you when he was pointing out your gentle bosom to Lothar von Hacklheber,” Jack returned.

  “There was probably a reason—the Doctor is a tapestry of many threads.”

  “Which thread brought him to the Book-Fair?”

  “For some years he and Sophie have been trying to persuade the Emperor in Vienna to establish a grand library and academy for the entire Empire.”

  “Who is Sophie?”

  “Another one of the Doctor’s woman friends.”