Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  He comes to what must be the greatest intersection in the town, where this road from the city gate crosses a very broad street that runs straight down to salt water, and continues on a long wharf that projects far out into the harbor, thrusting across a ruined rampart of stones and logs: the rubble of a disused sea-wall. The long wharf is ridged with barracks. It reaches far enough out into the harbor that one of the Navy’s very largest men-of-war is able to moor at its end. Turning his head the other way he sees artillery mounted up on a hillside, and blue-coated gunners tending to a vatlike mortar, ready to lob iron bombs onto the decks of any French or Spanish galleons that might trespass on the bay.

  So, drawing a mental line from the dead criminals at the city gate, to the powder-house on the Common, to the witch-gallows, and finally to the harbor defenses, he has got one Cartesian number-line—what Leibniz would call the Ordinate—plotted out: he understands what people are afraid of in Boston, and how the churchmen and the generals keep the place in hand. But it remains to be seen what can be plotted in the space above and below. The hills of Boston are skirted by endless flat marshes that fade, slow as twilight, into Harbor or River, providing blank empty planes on which men with ropes and rulers can construct whatever strange curves they phant’sy.

  He enters into narrower streets, and heads north, leading his horse over a rickety wooden bridge thrown over a little mill-creek. Flotillas of shavings from some carpenter’s block-plane sail down the stream like ships going off to war. Underneath them the weak current nudges turds and bits of slaughtered animals down towards the harbor. It smells accordingly. No denying there is a tallow-chandlery not far upwind, where beast-grease not fit for eating is made into candles and soap.

  “Did you come from Europe?”

  He had sensed someone was following him, but seen nothing whenever he looked back. Now he knows why: his doppelgänger is a lad, moving about like a drop of quicksilver that cannot be trapped under the thumb. Ten years old, Enoch guesses. Then the boy thinks about smiling and his lips part. His gums support a rubble of adult teeth shouldering their way into pink gaps, and deciduous ones flapping like tavern signs on skin hinges. He’s closer to eight. But cod and corn have made him big for his age—at least by London standards. And he is precocious in every respect save social graces.

  “Europe,” Enoch repeats, “is that what you name it here? Most people there say Christendom.”

  “But we have Christians here.”

  “So this is Christendom, you are saying,” says Enoch, “but, obviously to you, I’ve come from somewhere else. Perhaps Europe is the better term, now that you mention it. Hmm.”

  “What do other people call it?”

  “Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?”

  “No, but you talk like one.”

  “You know something of schoolmasters, do you?”

  “Yes sir,” the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg.

  “Yet here it is the middle of Monday—”

  “The place was empty ’cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and—”

  “And what?”

  “Get more ahead of the others than I was already.”

  “Come, you belong in school.”

  “School is where one learns,” says the boy. “If you’d be so kind as to answer my question, sir, then I should be learning something, which would mean I were in school.”

  The boy is obviously dangerous. So Enoch decides to accept the proposition. “You may address me as Mr. Root. And you are—?”

  “Ben. Son of Josiah. The tallow-chandler. Why do you laugh, Mr. Root?”

  “Because in most parts of the Christendom—or Europe—tallow-chandlers’ sons do not go to grammar school. It is a peculiarity of… your people. Now, Ben. I grow cold. My horse is restless. I shall be pleased to teach you things, so that when you go home to-night you may claim to Josiah that you were in school the whole day. However, I do require certain minor services in return.”

  “Only name them, Mr. Root.”

  “I have come to Boston to find a certain man who at last report was living here. He is an old man.”

  “How old?”

  “He watched the head of King Charles the Fist being chopped off.”

  “At least threescore and four then.”

  “Ah, I see you have been learning sums and differences. Work this into your reckonings, then: he had an excellent view of the beheading, for he was sitting upon his father’s shoulders.”

  “Couldn’t have been more than a few years old. Unless his father was a sturdy fellow indeed.”

  “His father was sturdy in a sense,” says Enoch, “for Archbishop Laud had caused his ears and his nose to be cut off in Star Chamber some two decades before, and yet he was not daunted, but kept up his agitation against the King. Against all Kings.”

  “He was a Barker.” Again, this word brings no sign of contempt to Ben’s face. Shocking how different this place is from London.

  “But to answer your question, Ben: Drake was not an especially big or strong man.”

  “So the son on his shoulders was small. By now he should be, perhaps, threescore and eight. But I do not know of a Mr. Drake here.”

  “Drake was the father’s Christian name.”

  “Pray, what then is the name of the family?”

  “I will not tell you that just now,” says Enoch. For the man he wants to find might have a very poor character among these people—might already have been hanged on Boston Common, for all Enoch knows.

  “How can I help you find him, sir, if you won’t let me know his name?”

  “By guiding me to the Charlestown ferry,” Enoch says.

  The Ferry is crowded with hanging-watchers, and Enoch must pay the waterman extra to bring the horse aboard. Enoch pulls his purse open and peers into it. The King of Spain’s coat of arms stares back at him, stamped in silver, variously blurred, chopped and mangled. He churns the purse up and down, making the coins-fragments fly, hoping to spy a single pie-slice—one-eighth of a Piece of Eight, or a bit, as they are called. But he already knows he’s spent most of his bits for small necessaries along the road. The smallest piece he has in his purse right now is half of a coin—four bits.

  He looks up the street and sees a blacksmith’s forge only a stone’s throw away. Some quick work with a hammer and that smith could make change for him.

  The ferryman’s reading Enoch’s mind. He couldn’t see into the purse, but he could hear the massive gonging of whole coins colliding, without the clashing tinkle of bits. “We’re shoving off,” he is pleased to say.

  Enoch comes to his senses, remembers what he’s doing, and hands over a silver semicircle. “But the boy comes with me,” he insists, “and you’ll give him passage back.”

  “Done,” says the ferryman.

  This is more than Ben could have hoped for, and yet he was hoping for it. He goes from wharf to ferry without touching the gangplank.

  Charlestown is less than a mile distant, across the mouth of a sluggish river. It is a low green hill shingled with long slender hay-mows limned by dry-stone fences. On the slope facing toward Boston, below the summit but above the endless tidal flats and cattail-filled marshes, a town has occurred: partly laid out by geometers, but partly growing like ivy.

  The ferryman’s hefty Africans pace short reciprocating arcs on the deck, sweeping and shoveling the black water of the Charles Basin with long stanchion-mounted oars. The sky’s a matted reticule of taut jute and spokeshaved tree-trunks. Gusts make the anchored ships start and jostle like nervous horses hearing distant guns. Irregular waves slap curiously at the lapping clinkers of their hulls, which are infested with barefoot jacks paying pitch and oakum into troublesome seams. The ships appear to glide this way and that as the ferry’s movement plays with the parallax.

  A colonist in a black hat is attempting to make friends with one of the Africans, who doesn’t speak much English—but this is no hindrance
, the white man has taught himself a few words of some African tongue. The slave is very dark, and the arms of the King of Spain are branded into his left shoulder, and so he is probably Angolan. Life has been strange to him: abducted by Africans fiercer than he, chained up in a hole in Luanda, marked with a hot iron to indicate that duty had been paid on him, loaded onto a ship, and sent to a cold place full of pale men. After all of that, you’d think that nothing could possibly surprise him. But he’s astonished by whatever this Barker is telling him. The Barker’s punching at the air and becoming quite exercised, and not just because he is inarticulate. Assuming that he has been in touch with his brethren in London (and that is a very good assumption) he is probably telling the Angolan that he, and all of the other slaves, are perfectly justified in taking up arms and mounting a violent rebellion.

  “Your mount is very fine. Did you bring him from Europe?”

  “No, Ben. Borrowed him in New Amsterdam. New York, I mean.”

  “Why’d you sail to New York if the man you seek’s in Boston?”

  “The next America-bound ship from the Pool of London happened to be headed thither.”

  ‘You’re in a terrible hurry then!”

  “I shall be in a terrible hurry to toss you over the side if you continue to draw such inferences.”

  This quiets Ben, but only long enough for him to circle round and probe Enoch’s defenses from another quarter: “The owner of this horse must be a very dear friend of yours, to lend you such a mount.”

  Enoch must now be a bit careful. The owner’s a gentleman of quality in New York. If Enoch claims his friendship, then proceeds to make a bloody hash of things in Boston, it could deal damage to the gentleman’s repute. “It is not so much that he is a friend. I’d never met him until I showed up at his door a few days ago.”

  Ben can’t fathom it. “Then why’d he even admit you to his house? By your leave, sir, looking as you do, and armed. Why’d he lend you such a worthy stallion?”

  “Because he and I are Fellows in the same Society, and I am here, in a way, to do an errand for that Society.”

  “Is it a Society of Barkers, like?” asks Ben, stepping in close to whisper, and glancing at the one who’s proselytizing the slave. For by now Ben has taken note of Enoch’s various pistols and blades, and matched him with tales his folk have probably told him concerning that fell Sect during their halcyon days of Cathedral-sacking and King-killing.

  “No, it is a society of philosophers,” Enoch says, before the boy’s phant’sies wax any wilder.

  “Philosophers, sir!”

  Enoch had supposed the boy should be disappointed. Instead he’s thrilled. So Enoch was correct: the boy’s dangerous.

  “Natural Philosophers. Not, mind you, the other sort—”

  “Unnatural?”

  “An apt coinage.”

  “What then is a Natural Philosopher?”

  “One who tries to prevent his ruminations from straying, by hewing to what can be observed, and proving things, when possible, by rules of logic.” This gets him nowhere with Ben. “Rather like a Judge in a Court, who insists on facts, and scorns rumor, hearsay, and appeals to sentiment. As when your own Judges finally went up to Salem and pointed out that the people there were going crazy.”

  Ben nods. Good. “What is the name of your Clubb?”

  “The Royal Society of London.”

  “One day I shall be a Fellow of it, and a Judge of such things.”

  “I shall nominate you the moment I get back, Ben.”

  “Is it a part of your code that members must lend each other horses in time of need?”

  “No, but it is a rule that they must pay dues—for which there is ever a need—and this chap had not paid his dues in many a year. Sir Isaac—who is the President of the Royal Society—looks with disfavor on such. I explained to the gentleman in New York why it was a Bad Idea to land on Sir Isaac’s Shit List—by your leave, by your leave—and he was so convinced by my arguments that he lent me his best riding-horse without further suasion.”

  Inland of Charlestown spreads a loose agglomeration of hamlets conjoined by a network of cowpaths. The largest cowpath goes all the way to Newtowne, where Harvard College is. But most of it just looks like a forest, smoking without being burned, spattered with muffled whacks of axes and hammers. Occasional musket shots boom in the distance, and are echoed from hamlet to hamlet—some kind of system for relaying information across the countryside. Enoch wonders how he’s ever going to find Daniel in all that.

  He moves toward a talkative group that has formed on the center of the ferry’s deck, allowing the less erudite (for these must be Harvard men) to break the wind for them. It is a mix of pompous sots and peering quick-faced men basting their sentences together with bad Latin. Some of them have a dour Puritan look about them, others are dressed in something closer to last year’s London mode. A pear-shaped, red-nosed man in a tall grey wig seems to be the Don of this jury-rigged College. Enoch catches this one’s eye and lets him see that he’s bearing a sword. This is not a threat, but an assertion of status.

  “A gentleman traveler from abroad joins us. Welcome sir to our humble Colony!”

  Enoch goes through the requisite polite movements and utterances. They show a great deal of interest in him, a sure sign that not much new and interesting is going on at Harvard College. But the place is only some three-quarters of a century old, so how much can really be happening there? They want to know if he’s from a Germanic land; he says not really. They guess that he has come on some Alchemical errand, which is an excellent guess, but wrong. When it is polite to do so, he tells them the name of the man he has come to see.

  He’s never heard such scoffing. They are, to a man, pained that a gentleman should’ve crossed the North Atlantic, and now the Charles Basin, only to spoil the journey by meeting with that fellow.

  “He is accounted a Doctor,” says the pear-shaped Don, “but—”

  “Of what?” someone asks.

  “Gears,” someone suggests, to great hilarity.

  “Nay, nay!” says the Don, shouting them down, in a show of false goodwill. “For all of his gears are to no purpose without a primum mobile, a source of motive power—”

  “The Franklin boy!” and all turn to look at Ben.

  “Today it might be young Ben, tomorrow perhaps little Godfrey Waterhouse. Later perhaps a rodent on a tread-mill. But in any case, the vis viva is conducted into Dr. Waterhouse’s gear-boxes by—what? Anyone?” The Don cups a hand to an ear Socratically.

  “Shafts?” someone guesses.

  “Cranks!” another shouts.

  “Ah, excellent! Our colleague Waterhouse is, then, a Doctor of—what?”

  “Cranks!” says the entire College in unison.

  “Are you, perhaps, coming to join his Institute then?”

  “Or foreclose on’t?” Too hilarious.

  “I have heard of his Institute, but know little of it,” Enoch Root lies. He looks over at Ben, who has gone red in the neck and ears, and turned his back on all to nuzzle the horse.

  “Many learned scholars are in the same state of ignorance—be not ashamed.”

  “He has founded—”

  “—and personally endowed”

  “—and laid the cornerstone—”

  “—corner-log, if truth be told—”

  “—of—what does he call it?”

  “The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts.”

  “Where might I find Dr. Waterhouse’s Institute?” Enoch inquires.

  “Midway from Charlestown to Harvard. Follow the sound of grinding gears ‘til you come to America’s smallest and smokiest dwelling—”

  “Sir, you are a learned and clear-minded gentleman,” says the Don. “If your errand has aught to do with Philosophy, then is not Harvard College a more fitting destination?”

  “Mr. Root is a Natural Philosopher of note, sir!” blurts Ben, only as a way to prevent himself bursting int
o tears. “He is a Fellow of the Royal Society!”

  Oh, dear.

  The Don steps forward and hunches his shoulders like a conspirator. “I beg your pardon, sir, I did not know.”

  “It is quite all right, really.”

  “Dr. Waterhouse, you must be warned, has fallen quite under the spell of Herr Leibniz—”

  “—him that stole the calculus from Sir Isaac—” someone footnotes.

  “—and labors now, like a possessed man, on a Mill—designed after Leibniz’s principles—that he imagines will discover new truths through computation!”

  “Perhaps our visitor has come to exorcise him of Leibniz’s daemons!” some very drunk fellow hypothesizes.

  The Charlestown waterfront is drawing near, the slaves already shortening their strokes. He must have results. He’d rather get this done discreetly. But that is hopeless now that Ben has unmasked him. More important is to get it done quickly.

  Besides, Enoch has lost his temper.

  He draws a folded and sealed Letter from his breast pocket and, for lack of a better term, brandishes it.

  The Letter is borrowed, scrutinized—one side is inscribed “Doktor Waterhouse-Newtowne-Massachusetts”—and flipped over. Monocles are quarried from velvet-lined pockets for the scientific Examination of the Seal: a lump of red wax the size of Ben’s fist. Lips move and strange mutterings occur as parched throats attempt German.

  All of the Professors seem to realize it at once. They jump back as if the letter were a specimen of white phosphorus that had burst into flame. The Don is left holding it. He extends it towards Enoch the Red with a certain desperate pleading look. Enoch punishes him by being slow to accept the burden.

  “Bitte, mein herr…”

  “English is perfectly sufficient,” Enoch says. “Preferable, in fact.”

  At the fringes of the robed and hooded mob, certain nearsighted faculty members are frantic with indignation over not having been able to read the seal. Their colleagues are muttering to them words like “Hanover” and “Ansbach.”

  A man removes his hat and bows to Enoch. Then another.

  “Sir, if you’d only told me ‘twas Daniel Waterhouse you sought, I’d have taken you to him without delay—and without all of this bother.”