The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (211 page)
Read The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Fiction
Isaac did a little calculation in his head and said, “There was no observable difference.”
“Just so. Hooke was let down, of course, but as we drove home he conceived a refinement of the experiment, which has never been carried out. But the point of the story is that our colloquium at Epsom
succeeded
at much, but
failed
in that, its most ambitious effort. Did it mean the end of Natural Philosophy? No. The end of Hooke’s career, or Wilkins’s, or mine? By no means. On the contrary, it led straight on to a
flourishing
of all those things. Which has led me to mistrust apocalyptic readings of Science or of Society. I have not been quick to learn that lesson, either. For example, I phant’sied that the Glorious Revolution would change all, but now I see that Cavaliers and Roundheads have only been replaced by Tories and Whigs, and the war goes on.”
“Am I to gather that you intend to draw some parallel between the failures of Hooke, and the prospects for our collaboration?” Fatio said, with forced hilarity. “I supposed you were here as a cat’s paw for Leibniz! He at least is a worthy opponent! He came out with calculus after Isaac and I did so, but at least he knows what it is! Hooke is nothing more than a sooty, bloody empiricist!”
“I am here as a cat’s paw for Isaac Newton, my friend of thirty years. I fear for him because I perceive that he has an idea of what Natural Philosophy is, and of what he is, that is false. He is so far above all of the rest of us that he has come to believe that he carries the burden of some millennial destiny, and that he must bring Natural Philosophy to some ultimate omega-point or be a failure. He has been encouraged to believe this by certain sycophantic admirers.”
“You want him back! You want Isaac to revoke the decision he made on Whitsunday of 1662!”
“No. I want him to
repeat
the same decision in respect of
you,
Fatio. He withdrew from
me
in ’62. From Leibniz in ’77. Now it is ’93, and your card has been dealt.”
“I know all about what happened in ’62 and ’77. Isaac told me. But with us it is a different case. With us there is a real, lasting, mutual affection.”
“Nicolas, that much is true,” Isaac said. “But you misunderstand. Daniel is working his way round towards another matter.”
“What could Mr. Waterhouse possibly say that would be of interest? He is an
amanuensis,
a
secretary.
”
“Do not make any more such offending statements about Daniel,” Isaac commanded. “He has done us the favor, Nicolas, of thinking about our future. Which is a matter we did not consider at
all, so confident were we. But Daniel is right. We have failed. Our line was not long enough to fathom the depths on which we had ventured. It will be necessary to regroup, to start over again. We shall require time and money and leisure.”
“Isaac,” Daniel said, “two or three years ago, before you set out on the Great Work that has just come to an end, you made inquiries, with Pepys and Roger Comstock and others, concerning the possibility of a position in London. Since then Trinity College has only become more impoverished—your need of a reliable income cannot have been met from that quarter. Now I have come to offer you the Mint.”
Everyone now observed a prayerful silence for a minute or two as Isaac Newton considered it.
“In normal circumstances the position would be without interest,” he said, “but Comstock has sent adumbrations my way concerning a great Recoinage.”
“It is intended that Recoinage would be your Great Work. Which I do not say in jest. For perhaps that is indeed the only way that the Philosophic Mercury could ever be recovered.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Hooke could not find the inverse-square law in a well because there was too little of what he was looking for, for his equipment to find it. You could not extract the Philosophic Mercury from gold, perhaps for a like reason.”
“You hypothesize that my methods are sound but that there is too little of it in my sample. I disprove your hypothesis by reminding you that my methods are those of the ancients, who, as I believe, did not fail to get what they sought.”
“Would you number King Solomon among them?”
“You know as well as I do that he is regarded as the father of Alchemists.”
“If King Solomon had been in command of the Grand Magisterium, he would have used it. His wealth was fabled. He must have gathered together a moiety of the world’s supply of gold, and extracted the Philosophic Mercury from it.”
“Many adepts believe that he did just that.”
“It would follow that
ordinary
gold, such as you employ in your Great Work, was
depleted,
while King Solomon’s gold was
enriched,
in the quintessence.”
“Again, this supposition is commonplace.”
“Comes now word that King Solomon’s Gold was found by a Viceroy of Mexico who then lost it to the King of the Vagabonds—who absconded with it to India, and there dispersed it, commingling
it with the ordinary gold that circulates all over the world as money.”
“That is what we are told.”
“Short of conquering the whole Orient and collecting all its riches by tyrannical confiscations, there is then no way to recover what the Vagabond King has pissed away—unless you could, by some magical incantation, cause the gold to come from every corner of the earth to London, and pass through the crucibles of the Tower.”
Fatio stepped forward, almost blocking the sight-line between Daniel and Isaac. “Now that you have got down to business, you offer up a most reasonable and attractive proposition,” he proclaimed. “Prithee explain what you meant earlier.”
“
I
shall explain it, Nicolas,” Isaac said. “Daniel has done all the explaining we may justly require of him. He means—but is unwilling to say—that your theory of gravity is nonsense and that it has weakened my position vis-à-vis Leibniz. He probably refers also to your claim to be a co-inventor of the calculus, which is, I am sorry to say, perfectly false. Perhaps he has also in mind your pretensions of becoming a medical doctor and curing thousands with a new patent-medicine, and your fanciful interpretations of the Bible, and strange prophecies drawn therefrom.”
“But he knows nothing of these!”
“But I do, Fatio.”
“What are you saying? I confess the Bible is easier to interpret than you, Isaac.”
“On the contrary, I feel that I am all too transparent, for Daniel, and God only knows how many others, have seen through me.”
“Not that many—
yet,
” Daniel said quietly.
“The nub of it is this: I have let my affection for you cloud my judgment,” Isaac said. “I have given much greater credit to your work, Nicolas, than I ever should have, and it has led me down a cul-de-sac and caused me to waste years, and ruin my health. Thank you, Daniel, for telling me this forthrightly. Mr. Locke, you have worked in a gentle way to bring about this epiphany, and I apologize for thinking poorly of you and accusing you of plotting against me. Nicolas, come to London and share lodgings with me and be my help-meet as I move forward in the Great Work.”
“I am not willing to be less than your equal partner.”
“But you cannot ever be my equal partner. Only Leibniz—”
“Then go and make love to Leibniz!” Fatio cried. He stood poised where he was for a few moments as if he could not believe he’d said it—waiting, Daniel thought, for Newton to retract everything he’d said. But Isaac Newton was long past being able to change his mind. Fatio was left with only one thing he could possibly do: He ran away.
Once Fatio had passed out of view, Daniel began to hear a distant moaning or wailing. He assumed that he was hearing Fatio crying out in grief. But it grew louder. He feared for a moment that Fatio might be coming back toward him with a weapon drawn.
“Daniel!” said Locke sharply.
Locke had gotten to his feet and was standing over Newton, blocking Daniel’s view. Locke had begun his career as a physician and seemed to have reverted to his old form now; with one hand he was throwing off the mass of blankets in which Newton had been wrapped up this whole while, with the other, he was reaching for Newton’s throat to check his pulse. Daniel rushed toward them, fearing that Isaac had suffered a stroke, or an apoplectic fit. But Newton knocked Locke’s hand away from his neck with a shout of “Murder! Murder!”
Locke took half a step back. Daniel drew up on Newton’s other side to find him flailing all of his limbs, like a man who was drowning in air. The violence of his movements seemed to levitate his whole body out of his chair for an instant. He fell hard onto the stone patio, yelped, and went stiff, his entire body trembling like a plucked twist of catgut. Daniel dropped to a knee and placed a hand on one of Newton’s bony shoulders. What meager flesh he had was hard and thrumming. Newton started away as if Daniel had touched him with a hot iron and rolled blindly against the chair leg, which caught him in the midsection. In a heartbeat he contracted into a fœtal position, wrapping his whole body round the leg of the chair like a toddler who grips his mother’s leg with his whole being because he does not want her to walk away. “Murder, murder!” he repeated, more quietly now, as if dreaming of it, though it might have been
Mother, mother
.
Locke spoke from between his hands, which he had clapped over his face like the covers of a book. “The greatest mentality of the world—demented. Oh, God have mercy.”
Daniel sat down crosslegged next to Isaac. “Mr. Locke, if you would be so good as to have one of the servants bring me a cup of coffee. I am going to do something I have not done in three decades: sit up all night worrying about Isaac Newton.”
“What you have done was necessary and in no way do I fault you for it,” Locke said, “but gravely I fear that he shall never be the same.”
“You are right. He will be merely the most successful Natural Philosopher in all of history. Which is a better thing to be than a false Messiah. It will take him years to get used to his new station in the world. By the time he is himself again, I’ll be out of his reach, in
Boston, Massachusetts.”
MARCH
1694
My lady,
I pray this intercepts you in Hamburg, but I worry that it shall never catch up with you. I am a mortal, earthbound, attempting to get a message to a Goddess who travels in a flying chariot.
Of late I wonder: Do you really ken the devastation of Trade? You might scoff at such a question, as you do naught
but
trade. But to us earthbound mortals, it seems that you float about in a golden nimbus of prosperity, like the halo about a saint. And the company you keep can only enhance this illusion. Besides you, the only people in France who are not prostrate from Famine and Want of Money are your friends Jean Bart and Samuel Bernard. Bernard because he has taken over St.-Malo, driven out what was left of the old
Compagnie des Indes,
and fitted out his own fleet. Bart because the Navy ran out of money and had to be sold off to private investors. What does it say about our commerce, when the most attractive investment in France is a fleet of buccaneers preying on the commerce of
other
Realms?
And so I have every confidence that Captain Bart has conveyed you in safety, and even in comfort, to Hamburg; for what Navy in Christendom could stand against a fleet so well financed, so richly supplied with Baltic timber, and so brilliantly led? (Though I do hope he hurries back, as the British Navy is bombarding Dieppe.) I worry, though, that the posts will fail somewhere between Paris and Hamburg. For all is bankrupt. The spring breezes are redolent, not of tilled earth
and burgeoning wildflowers, but the rotting flesh of all the livestock that froze to death during the winter. Rice—
rice!
—is coming in to Marseille from Alexandria, but no one has the means to buy it, for the wellsprings of our coinage have quite dried up. Our Army’s commanders slouch despondently around Versailles, wishing they’d had the foresight to join the Navy—as, owing to a want of specie, and even of credit, they cannot fight this year, but only squat in their fortresses, succumbing to disease, and beating back whatever assaults the English may mount against them, supposing that England has two pennies to rub together.
At any rate, my lady, do let me know if this has reached you, and of your itinerary. I know you would be informed of the latest exchanges between Vrej Esphahnian and his family. It will take me a long time to encrypt the report. If my late father’s map collection is to be credited, three hundred miles of winding Elbe lie between you and your destination; this should give you time sufficient to accomplish the decipherment. Perhaps I can arrange for it to catch up with your river-boat at Hitzacker or Schnackenburg or Fischbeck or one of the other euphoniously named villages that, according to my father’s maps, are soon to be adorned with the grace and beauty of the duchesse d’Arcachon and her baby girl Adelaide.
Bon. Ross.
MARCH
1694
Bon-bon,
Yours reached me in Hamburg, where we have been interviewing river-captains and buying provisions for the journey inland. What a grim petulant mood you were in when you let this dribble from your quill! A few remarks:
—Adelaide is no baby, but a toddler of fourteen months, careering around the deck pursued by a squadron of stooping
and waddling nurses who are all terrified she’ll go over the side.
—Hitzacker is said to be a perfectly lovely village; I’m sorry you don’t favor the name of it.
—The parlous condition of Trade is well known to me; who do you suppose arranged for the rice to be shipped from Egypt? Do you think it is a
bad
thing that there shall be no great battles this year? And have you forgotten that my son Lucien sickened and died over the winter just past? Where was my golden halo of prosperity when the Angel of Death came for him in St.-Malo? Really, you quite forget yourself.
But I forgive you. The grimness of your discourse tells me much that is useful of the mood among the Quality of Paris and Versailles. If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you complain is the death-throes of an old system—as when a man’s heart stops beating but his limbs continue to twitch for some time afterwards. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French. Or perhaps that is giving them too much credit. They did not understand, but sensed, it. The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds—some, such as Newton, almost too tight-strung to endure the world. These men had power before, but knew not what to do with it, and lost it. In exile they formed the Juncto, which with the recent elections has taken over the government. The things that the Juncto does during the coming year—the Bank of England, the Recoinage, &c.—are the beginnings of the new way of things that shall replace the old one that has died, or is dying. France lags, having more of lead and less of quicksilver in her constitution, and lacking a Juncto; but the same forces are at work there.
You need only look to Lyon for an example. When Lothar von Hacklheber journeyed to Lyon in April of 1692 and accepted, from M. Castan, half a million
livres tournoises
of French government obligations in exchange for silver deliverable at London, no one thought twice about it. It was a large transaction, to be sure, but altogether routine. If you had gone to him, or to any of the other German or Swiss bankers in Lyon, at that time, and said, “This is the last such loan that shall ever be made in Lyon, and it shall never be repaid,” they’d have thought you a madman.
Yet all through 1692 Castan temporized, and promised to
pay interest, and sought alternatives to paying it back. The bad harvest that autumn rendered payment quite out of the question, and the lines of
galériens
marching through Lyon en route to Marseille—mostly ordinary Parisians who had been caught looting bakeries—served to place the “sufferings” of Lothar in perspective. The immense military operation of last year consumed what money the Treasury had. The French victories (costly though they were) at Heidelberg, at sea, at Landen, and in Piedmont might have given Lothar some hope of seeing his money again. If so, that hope died in the winter just past, along with so many other things. The bankers of Lyon now look upon Lothar’s April 1692 loan as the moment it all went wrong; the end of an epoch. My correspondents there tell me that real estate in that city is to be had for nothing now, because the Swiss and German bankers are all turning their backs on it, cutting their losses, packing their coffers, and moving out. One day France will have its equivalent of the Bank of England, and it will probably be in Paris; but not for a long time, and until then, her finances will be in perpetual confusion.
It is for all of these reasons that I have resolved to descend on Leipzig now. But in order for me to know how best to set my pieces on the board, as it were, vis-à-vis Lothar, I must have the very latest on the Esphahnians, and the machinations of Father Édouard de Gex. For I know that hardly a day passes without his pestering you for the latest news concerning Vrej and his movements about Hindoostan.
Here, we are still shopping for a conveyance. Boats in every country are as various as breeds of dogs. In Bohemia, in the forests that surround the headwaters of the Vltava, they fashion barges of oak, and float them down to be finished around Prague. These carry Silesian coal down to places like Magdeburg and Hamburg, where local boatmen buy them and fix them up for their own uses. So though they may have all looked the same as they were being wrought in Bohemia, where the waters of the Elbe began as raindrops dripping from pine-needles, by the time I inspect them in Hamburg, where the Elbe is a mile wide, each has become as unique as its owner. The notion of conveying a Duchess, her daughter, and her household three hundred miles up the Elbe is extraordinary to these boatmen, who as a rule do not venture more than one or two days’ journey upriver; but some of the more adventurous spirits among them are warming to the idea, and
I don’t suppose it shall be long before we have come to terms with one of them, and set out. The spring thaws shall place an abundance of water under the flat bottom of our
Zille
(as these barge-boats are called), so that we shall not have to be so concerned with shoals; but by the same token, the vigorous flow of the river will make it impossible to sail upstream on any but the windiest of spring days, and so we shall progress only as fast as an ox-team on the river-bank can draw us. Figure ten miles a day, on average; from this and from your father’s maps, you may put your mathematical acumen to use in guessing whither to post your reply. I guess Magdeburg; if you are slow, Wittenberg.
Eliza
