The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  A cheer and a little song followed, from the dozen or so people who had come to wish Caroline Glück on her Geburtstag. It was a small party, for a Princess, and it was an older crowd. Sophie was the eldest of all at seventy-one—she had come out from Hanover, crammed into a carriage with Leibniz and her grandchildren: George August (who was a few months younger than Caroline) and Sophie Dorothea (four years younger yet). Sophie Charlotte (Figuelotte), Queen of Prussia and the mistress and namesake of the palace, was here with her son Frederick William, a legendary brat of thirteen. Filling out the guest list was the motliest collection of metaphysicians, mathematicians, radical theologians, writers, musicians, and poets ever brought together for a princess’s eighteenth birthday.

  The Queen of Prussia liked to stage operas, when she wasn’t inciting riotous dinner-table debates among her friends, and the only sense in which she was ever a tyrant was in ordering some poor physicist to don a mad-cap and warble a role for which he was untrained and ill-suited. Princess Caroline had been dragooned, from time to time, to sing a Nymph or Angel part. Nothing, except perhaps for fighting side-by-side in a war, forged bonds among disparate persons so well as performing together on stage, and so Caroline had become a great friend of these grownups, her fellow-sufferers on the boards of the Charlottenburg.

  With wine-glasses and sparklers in hand they had gathered round a pedestal that had been built of polished cherry-wood in the center of the library. Surmounting this, and spreading out above the heads of the revelers, was a large spherical object—

  “A cage!” Caroline exclaimed.

  Dismay flowed over Leibniz’s face. But very soon that emotion gave way to a sort of distracted, intrigued look, as his curiosity had been somehow provoked. He bobbed his head in a way that might have been a nod, or a bow. “C’est juste,” he said. “Geometers have, with their parallels and meridians, ruled the globe that, being unmarked, save by irregular coastlines and river-courses, seemed wild to eyes that only in order could see beauty. But one who loves Nature for her variety might see the geometers’ devices as a disfigurement—no bird is as beautiful when seen through the bars of a cage, as it is in the wild. But I pray, Highness, that you will construe this rather as an inventory of the known. It is a map of the world, not as flattened out by cartographers, but as it is.”

  The globe had been set at an angle, as the earth was tilted with respect to the ecliptic. An unexplored portion of the South Pacific bore on the pedestal. Not far away from it, the south pole presented itself just at the level of Caroline’s head. This globe was indeed fashioned like a spherical bird-cage, with curving brass bars following the lines of longitude and latitude. Most of it (the oceans) was open-work. But the continents were curved plates of brass riveted to those bars. They were mounted to the inside of the cage, rather than the outside, so that the bars passed in front of them—at least, for the celebrants who were standing around it. An irregular, wholly factitious continent had been placed around the south pole, representing the hypothetical land of Antarctica, and this had a round hatchway cut into it, and steps leading up to it from the floor.

  Dr. Krupa (a Bohemian mathematician who had become a sort of permanent houseguest here) said, “Highness, some have proposed that at the world’s poles are openings where one may descend into the earth’s interior. Here is your opportunity personally to put that hypothesis to the test.”

  The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick William shut up for a moment, sensing a frisson running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte’s doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

  Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded—giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. “It begins,” she said, “already the boys are vying for Caroline’s attention.”

  “Is that what they’re doing?” Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,* who was five years older than, and twice the size of, his assailant, body-slammed Frederick William† against a smaller and more traditional sort of globe that had been shoved into a corner to make way for the new one. The papier-mâché sphere crumpled inward and Frederick William ended up wearing it on his head, making him look like some antipodean creature with a monstrously oversized brain.

  These antics had gone unnoticed, or been deliberately ignored, by Monsieur Molyneux, a Huguenot writer who had been haunting Berlin since his family had been wiped out in Savoy. “Why indeed should we not view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?” he reflected.

  “Because God is not a prison-warden,” Leibniz answered sharply, but stopped when an elbow even sharper (Sophie’s) caught him in the ribs.

  Princess Caroline had taken her seat: a swivel-stool mounted in the middle of the globe. Planting one of her party-shoes at the junction of the Twentieth West Meridian and the Fortieth South Parallel, so that the toe seemed to breach out of the South Atlantic like an immense white whale, she gave a little kick that sent her spinning around. “I’m rotating!” she reported, “the world is revolving around me!”

  “Solipsistic, that,” somone remarked drily.

  “It is more than that,” Leibniz said, “it is a profound question of Natural Philosophy. How indeed can we tell whether we do stand still in a rotating universe, or spin in a fixed cosmos?”

  “Eeehuhh, I’m dizzy!” Caroline said, explaining why she had planted her feet, and stopped.

  “There’s your answer,” Dr. Krupa said.

  “Not at all. You assume that dizziness is a symptom—internally produced—of our spinning. But why might it not just as well be an effect exerted upon us from a distance, by a revolving universe?”

  “No one should be forced to listen to metaphysics at her eighteenth birthday-party,” Sophie decreed.

  “It’s dark in here,” Caroline said, “I can’t see the maps.”

  Wladyslaw—a Polish tenor who sang the lead in just about every one of Sophie Charlotte’s operas—lit a fresh sparkler and handed it through the central Pacific Ocean to Caroline. Leibniz’s view of the girl happened to be blocked by Brazil, but he saw the inside of the sphere light up as the sparkler was drawn into the middle; the freshly buffed brass seemed to ignite as it sieved the light from the air and spilled it out in every direction. For a moment it seemed as if the globe-cage was filled with flame, and Leibniz’s heart ached and pounded with fear that Caroline’s dress had caught fire; but then he heard her delighted voice, and decided that the fear he felt was of something else, of some larger and longer calamity than the fate of one orphan Princess.

  “I can see now all the rivers set in turquoise, and all the lakes, too, and forests of green tortoise-shell! The cities are jewels, which the light shines through.”

  “It is how the world would look if it were transparent and you could sit in the middle looking outward,” said Father von Mixnitz, a Jesuit from Vienna who had somehow arranged to get himself invited.

  “I am aware of that,” said Caroline, annoyed. A long, irritable silence followed. Caroline was quickest to forgive and forget. “I see two ships in the Pacific, and one is full of quicksilver, and the other is full of fire.”

  “I do not recall putting those in the drawings,” Leibniz joked, trying to obey Sophie’s command to lighten thing
s up a bit. “I shall have to have a word with the workmen about that!”

  “Consider this, your royal highness,” continued Father von Mixnitz, “you may spin yourself all the way round, three hundred and twenty degrees—”

  “Three hundred and sixty!”

  “Yes, highness, that is what I meant to say—three hundred and sixty degrees—and never shall you pass out of sight of the Spanish Empire. Is it not remarkable, how vast, how wealthy, are the dominions of Spain?”

  “Aunt Sophie says it may be the dominions of France soon,” Caroline demurred.

  “Indeed, the French pretender does sit on the throne in Madrid at the moment…”

  “Aunt Sophie says it’s the woman behind that throne who matters.”

  “Indeed,” the Jesuit said, twitching his eyes toward Sophie, “many argue that the duc d’Anjou, or King Philip V of Spain as he styles himself, is a mere pawn of the princesse des Ursins, who is herself a notorious soulmate of Madame de Maintenon—but this is beside the point, as Anjou cannot possibly endure long on the Spanish throne, when he is opposed by women far more cunning, more powerful, and more beautiful.”

  “Aunt Sophie says she does not care for flatterers,” said the voice from the center of the brass world.

  Sophie, who had been about to squash the priest like a bug, now did something rare for her: She hesitated, torn between annoyance with the Jesuit and delight in Caroline.

  “It is no flattery, highness, to say that Sophie, in league with King William, or Queen Anne as the case may one day be, is a stronger hand than Maintenon and des Ursins. All the more so if the rightful heir to the Spanish throne—Archduke Charles—were wed to a Princess in the mold of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte.”

  “But Archduke Charles is Catholic while Aunt Sophie and Aunt Figgy are Protestants—as am I,” said Caroline, absent-mindedly kicking at meridians to twist herself left, right, left, right, peering first to one side, then the other, of the Isthmus of Panama.

  “It is hardly unheard-of for Persons of Quality to change their religion,” the Jesuit said. “Especially if they are intellectually active, and are presented with compelling arguments. As I am taking up residence here in Berlin, I shall look forward to exchanging views with your royal highness on such matters in coming years, as you grow in wisdom and maturity.”

  “We needn’t wait,” Caroline said helpfully. “I can explain it to you now. Dr. Leibniz has taught me all about religion.”

  “Oh, has he now?” Father von Mixnitz asked uneasily.

  “Yes, he has. Now tell me, Father, are you one of those Catholics who still refuses to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun?”

  Father von Mixnitz swallowed his tongue and then hacked it back up. “Highness, I believe in what Dr. Leibniz was saying just a minute ago, namely, that it is all relative.”

  “That’s not exactly what I said,” Leibniz protested.

  “Do you believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, Father?” Caroline asked.

  “How could I be a Catholic if I did not, Highness?”

  “This is not how we do birthday parties in Poland,” commented Wladyslaw, ladling himself another cup of wine.

  “Hush! I am enjoying it greatly,” Sophie returned.

  “What if you ate it and then you got sick and threw up? When it came out, would it be Jesus’s flesh and blood? Or would it de-transubstantiate on the way out, and become bread and wine again?”

  “Such solemn questions do not comport with the frothy imaginings of an eighteen-year-old girl,” said Father von Mixnitz, who had gone all red in the face and was biting the words off one at a time, as if his tongue were a trip-hammer in a mill.

  “Here’s to frothy imaginings!” said Queen Sophie Charlotte, raising her glass with a beautiful smile; but her eyes were like those of a falcon tracking a mink as she watched Father von Mixnitz take his leave and stalk out of the room.

  “What else do you see in the empty places, besides the ships of quicksilver and of fire?” asked Dr. Krupa.

  “I see the very first ship sailing into the Tsar’s new city of St. Petersburg. It is a Dutch ship, I phant’sy. And in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ships of the Dutch and of the English sailing to war against the French and the Spanish…” but suddenly her sparkler fizzled out. A groan of sympathy ran through her audience. “Now I can see nothing!” she complained.

  “The future is a mystery,” Sophie said.

  Sophie Charlotte’s smile had been forced and fragile the last few minutes. “At least she got to use the thing as it was intended for a few minutes,” she said to Leibniz.

  “What do you mean, Majesty?”

  “I mean, innocently, as a wonder to marvel at—and not as a Visual Aid for choosing her husband.”

  “She can learn all she needs to know of husband-choosing from you, Majesty,” Leibniz answered. Those words led to a brief sweet moment between the savant and Sophie Charlotte—which was cut short by Frederick William, who came running in to shield himself behind his mother’s skirts. George August had ascended to one of the library catwalks with a big fire-stick he had plucked from a sand-bucket. Copying his pose directly from the fresco above, he drew back and aimed it at his cousin just like Jupiter readying a thunderbolt.

  Leibniz excused himself so that Sophie Charlotte could scold her son. As he passed beneath the globe he saw Princess Caroline’s shoes flashing out first to one side, then the other, as she reciprocated to and fro, first towards George August, then towards Frederick William. She was singing a little nursery rhyme she had picked up from her English tutor: “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe…catch a suitor by the toe…to England or Prussia shall I go…to be made high or be laid low…eeny, meeny, miney, moe.”

  *The future King of England.

  †The future King of Prussia

  Book 4

  Bonanza

  Mexico City, New Spain

  SUKKOTH 1701

  That Golden Sceptre which thou didst reject

  Is now an Iron Rod to bruise and breake

  Thy disobedience.

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  “CARAMBA!” EXCLAIMED DIEGO DE FONSECA, “a cucaracha has fallen onto the tortillas of my wife!”

  Moseh had seen it before de Fonseca had, and had jumped to his feet even before the initial Caramba! had echoed off the far wall of the prison’s courtyard. As he reached over the table, the beads of his colossal rosary—walnut-shells strung on a cowhide thong—whacked the rim of a honey-filled serving-crock. His arm shot free of its sleeve, revealing a ladder of welts and scars, some fresher than others. His shoulder-joint rumbled and popped like a barrel rolling over cobblestones. Most of the men at the table felt twinges of sympathetic pain in their own shoulders, and inhaled sharply. Moseh’s ingratiating smile hardened into a scary grimace, but he got a grip on Señora de Fonseca’s tortilla-plate and pulled it clear. “Allow me to fetch some fresh ones…”

  Diego de Fonseca glanced sidelong at his wife, who had tilted her head back, reducing her chin count to a mere three, and was glaring at the net-work of vines above the table, which was vibrant with six-legged life. The Director, who was not a thin specimen either, leaned slightly towards Moseh and said, “That is most Christian of you…but we prefer our tortillas made with rich lard, and in fact have never seen them made with olive oil before—”

  “I could send out an Indian, Señor Director—”

  “Don’t bother, we are satiated. Besides—”

  “I was just about to say it!” Jack put in. “Besides, you and the Señora get to go home tonight!”

  Diego de Fonseca adjusted the set of his jaw slightly, and favored Jack with the same look his wife had aimed at the cockroach moments earlier. Fortunately, Señora de Fonseca’s attention had been drifting: “Over there, you pay such attention to cleanliness,” she observed, casting a look down an adjacent gallery, where several prisoners were sweeping the paving-stones with bundles of willow-branches. “Yet you lay out yo
ur feast with nothing to protect you from the sky, save this miserable thatching of infested vines.”

  “I gather from your tone that you are bemused by our ineptitude where a señora less imbued with Christian charity would be angry at our rudeness,” Moseh said.

  “Quite! Why, those fellows with the willow-branches are not so much sweeping the pavement as spanking it!”

  “Those are from that batch of Jewish monks we arrested at the Dominican monastery three years ago,” said Diego.

  From any other Inquisition prison warden, this might have sounded judgmental—even condemnatory. But Diego de Fonseca presided over what was widely held to be the mellowest and most easy-going Inquisition prison in the whole Spanish Empire, and he said it in mild conversational tones. Then he popped a honey-dipped pastry into his mouth.

  “That explains it!” said Moseh. “Those Dominicans are so rich, each monk hires half a dozen Indians as housekeepers, and consequently they know nothing of the domestick arts.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Say, Brother Christopher! Brother Peter! Brother Diaz! There are ladies present! Try to move some dirt as long as you are sweeping the courtyard, will you?”