The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  Not that he or any other Chancellor made any difference. The college was run by the Senior Fellows. Twenty-five years earlier, just at the moment Daniel and Isaac had entered Trinity, Charles II had kicked out the Puritan scholars who had nested there under Wilkins and replaced ’em with Cavaliers who could best be described as gentlemen-scholars—in that order. While Daniel and Isaac had been educating themselves, these men had turned the college into their own personal termite-mound. Now they were Senior Fellows. The High Table diet of suet, cheese, and port had had its natural effect, and it was a toss-up as to whether their bodies or their minds had become softer.

  No one could recollect the last time Isaac had set foot in this Hall. His lack of interest was looked on as proving not that something was wrong with Trinity but that something was wrong with Isaac. And in a way, this was just; if a College’s duty was to propagate a certain way of being to the next generation, this one was working perfectly, and Isaac would only have disrupted the place by bothering to participate.

  The Fellows seemed to know this (this was how Daniel thought of them: not as a roomful of individuals but as The Fellows, a sort of hive or flock, an aggregate. The question of aggregates had been vexing Leibniz to no end. A flock of sheep consisted of several individual sheep and was a flock only by convention—the quality of flockness was put on it by humans—it existed only in some human’s mind as a perception. Yet Hooke had found that the human body was made up of cells—therefore, just as much an aggregate as a flock of sheep. Did this mean that the body, too, was just a figment of perception? Or was there some unifying influence that made those cells into a coherent body? And what of High Table at Trinity College? Was it more like a flock of sheep or a body? To Daniel it seemed very much like a body at the moment. To carry out the assignment given him by Roger Comstock he’d have to interrupt that mysterious unifying principle somehow, disaggregate the College, then cut a few sheep from the flock). The aggregate called Trinity noticed that Isaac only came to church once a week, on Sunday, and his behavior in the chapel was raising Trinity’s eyebrows, though unlike Puritans these High Church gentles would never come out and say what they were thinking about religion. That was all right with Daniel, who knew perfectly well what Newton was doing and what these men were thinking about it.

  But later, after Daniel and several of the Fellows had filed out of the Hall and gone upstairs to a smaller room, to sit around a smaller table and drink port, Daniel used this as a sort of lure, dragging it through the pond to see if anything would rise up out of the murk and snap at it: “Given the company Newton’s been known to keep, I can’t help but wonder if he has become attracted to Popery.”

  Silence.

  “Gentlemen!” Daniel continued, “there’s nothing wrong with it. Remember, our King is a Catholic.”

  There were thirteen other men in the room. Eleven of them found his remark to be in unspeakably poor taste (which was true) and said nothing. Daniel did not care; they’d forgive him on grounds that he’d been drinking and was well-connected. One of them understood immediately what Daniel was up to: this was Vigani, the alchemist. If Vigani had been following Isaac as closely, and listening to him as intently, as he had followed and listened to Daniel this evening, he would know a lot. For now, the ends of his mustache curled up wickedly and he hid his amusement in a goblet.

  But one man, the youngest and drunkest in the room—a man who’d made no secret of the fact that he desperately wanted to get into the Royal Society—rose to the bait.

  “I’d sooner expect all of Mr. Newton’s nocturnal visitors to convert to his brand of religion than he to theirs!”

  This produced a few stiff chuckles, which only encouraged him. “Though God help ’em if they tried to get back into France afterwards—considering what King Louis does to Huguenots, imagine what kind of welcome he’d give to a full-blown—”

  “To say nothing of Spain with the Inquisition,” said Vigani drolly. Which was a heroic and well-executed bid to change the topic to something so banal as to be a complete waste of breath—after all, the Spanish Inquisition had few defenders locally.

  But Daniel had not endured years among courtiers without developing skills of his own. “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for an English Inquisition to find out what our friend was just about to say!”

  “That should be coming along any day now,” someone muttered.

  They were beginning to break ranks! But Vigani had recovered: “Inquisition? Nonsense! Freedom of Conscience is the King’s byword—or so Dr. Waterhouse has been telling everyone.”

  “I have been a mere conduit for what the King says.”

  “But you have just come from releasing a lot of Dissenters from prison, have you not?”

  “Your knowledge of my pastimes is uncanny, sir,” Daniel said. “You are correct. There are plenty of empty cells available just now.”

  “Shame to waste ’em,” someone offered.

  “The King will find some use for those vacancies,” predicted someone else.

  “An easy prediction to make. Here’s a more difficult: what will that King’s name be?”

  “England.”

  “I meant his Christian name.”

  “You’re assuming he’s going to be a Christian, then?”

  “You’re assuming he’s one now?”

  “Are we speaking of the King who lives in Whitehall, or the one who has been spotted in the Hague?”

  “The one in Whitehall has been spotted ever since his years in France: spotted on his face, on his hands, on his—”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen, this room is too warm and close for your wit, I beg you,” said the most senior of the Fellows present, who looked as if he might be on the verge of having a stroke of his own. “Dr. Waterhouse was merely enquiring about his old friend, our colleague, Newton—”

  “Is this the version we’re all going to relate to the English Inquisition?”

  “You are merry, too merry!” protested the Senior Fellow, now red in the face, and not with embarrassment. “Dr. Newton might serve as an example to you, for he goes about his work with gravity, and it is sound work in geometry, mathematics, astronomy…”

  “Eschatology, astrology, alchemy…”

  “No! No! Ever since Mr. Halley came up to enquire on the subject of Comets, Newton has had many fewer visitors from outside, and Signore Vigani has had to seek companionship in the Hall.”

  “I need only enter the Hall and companionship is found,” said Vigani smoothly, “there is never seeking.”

  “Please excuse me,” Daniel said, “it sounds as if Newton might welcome a visitor.”

  “He might welcome a crust of bread,” someone said, “lately he has been scratching in his garden like a peckish hen.”

  I cannot choose but condemn those Persons, who suffering themselves to be too much dazzled with the Lustre of the noble Actions of the Ancients, make it their Study to Extol them to the Skies; without reflecting, that these later Ages have furnished us with others more Heroick and Wonderful.

  —GEMELLI CARERI

  PASSING THROUGH the Great Gate, he borrowed a lantern from a porter and exited onto a walkway that led to the street, hemmed in by crenellated walls. The wall to his left had a narrow gate let into it. Using his old key, Daniel opened the lock on this gate and stepped through into a sizable garden. It was laid out as a grid of gravel walkways with squares of greenery between. Some of the squares were planted with small fruit trees, others with shrubs or grass. To his left a line of taller trees screened the windows of the row of chambers that filled the space between the Great Gate and the Chapel. The buds in their branches were just evolving to nascent leaves, and where light shone from Isaac’s windows they glowed like stopped explosions, phosphorus-green. But most of the windows were dark, and the stars above the muzzles of the chimneys were sharp and crystalline, not blurred by heat or dimmed by smoke. Isaac’s furnaces were cold, the stuff in their crucibles congealed. Their heat had all gone into
his skull.

  Daniel let his lantern-hand fall to his side so that the light shone across the gravel path from the altitude of his knee. This made Isaac’s chicken-scratchings stand out in high relief.

  Every one had started the same way: with Isaac slashing the toe of his shoe, or the point of his stick, across the ground to make a curve. Not a specific curve—not a circle or a parabola—but a representative curve. Everything in the universe was curved, and those curves were evanescent and fluxional, but with this gesture Isaac snatched a particular curve—it didn’t matter which—down from the humming cosmos, like a frog flicking its tongue out to filch a gnat from a swarm. Once trapped in the gravel, it was frozen and helpless. Isaac could stand and look at it for as long as he wanted, like Sir Robert Moray gazing at a stuffed eel in a glass box. After a while Isaac would begin to slash straight lines into the gravel, building up a scaffold of rays, perpendiculars, tangents, chords, and normals. At first this would seem to grow in a random way, but then lines would intersect with others to form a triangle, which would miraculously turn out to be an echo of another triangle in a different place, and this fact would open up a sort of sluice-gate that would free information to flood from one part of the diagram to another, or to leap across to some other, completely different diagram—but the results never came clear to Daniel’s mind because here the diagram would be aborted and a series of footsteps—lunar craters in the gravel—would plot Isaac’s hasty return to his chambers, where it could be set down in ink.

  Daniel followed these footsteps into the chambers he had once shared. The ground floor was cluttered with alchemical droppings, but not as dangerous as usual, since everything was cold. Daniel shone his lantern around one quiet room and then another. Everything that gave light back was hard mineral stuff, the inert refractory elements to which nature always returned: crusty crucibles, sooty retorts, corroded tongs, black crystals of charcoal, globs of quicksilver trapped in floor-cracks, a box of golden guineas left open next to a window as if to prove to all passers-by that the man who lived here cared nothing for gold.

  On a desk he saw letters in Latin from gentlemen in Prague, Naples, St.-Germain, addressed to JEOVA SANCTUS UNUS. Through gaps between them Daniel saw parts of a large drawing that had been pinned down to the surface of the table. It looked like a floor plan of a building. Daniel moved some papers and books out of the way to expose more of it. He was wondering whether Isaac—like Wren, Hooke, and Daniel himself—had gone into Architecture.

  Isaac appeared to be designing a square, walled court with a rectangular structure in the middle. Sweeping a trapezoid of lantern-light over a block of writing, Daniel read the following: The same God gave the dimensions of the Tabernacle to Moses and Temple with its Courts to David & Ezekiel & altered not the proportion of the areas but only doubled them in the Temple…So then Solomon and Ezekiel agree, and are double to Moses.

  “I am only trying to recover what Solomon knew,” Isaac said.

  Knowing that the lantern would blind Isaac’s burnt eyes, Daniel raised it up and blew it out before turning around. Isaac had come in silence down a stone staircase. His atelier on the first story had candles burning, and these warmed the stone behind Isaac with orange light. He was a black silhouette robed in a dressing-gown, his head cloaked with silver. He had not grown any heavier since College days, which was no surprise if the rumors about his dining habits were to be credited.

  “I can’t help but wonder if you—perhaps even I—don’t know a hell of a lot more about practically every subject than Solomon ever did,” Daniel said.

  Isaac said nothing for a moment, but something about his silhouette looked wounded, or sad.

  “It’s right there in the Bible, Daniel. First chapter: the Garden of Eden. Last chapter: the Apocalypse.”

  “I know, I know, the world started out perfectly good and has gotten worse and worse since then, and the only question is how bad will it get before God brings down the curtain. I was raised to believe that this tendency was as fixed and unavoidable as gravity, Isaac. But the Apocalypse did not come in 1666.”

  “It will occur not long after 1867,” Isaac said. “That is the year when the Beast will fall.”

  “Most Anglican cranks are guessing 1700 for the demise of the Catholic Church.”

  “It is not the only way that the Anglicans are wrong.”

  “Could it be, Isaac, that things are getting better, or at worst remaining more or less the same, rather then getting worse all the time? Because I really think you may know certain things that never entered Solomon’s head.”

  “I am working out the System of the World upstairs,” Isaac said offhandedly. “It is not beyond reason to think that Solomon and other ancients knew that System, and encrypted it in the design of their Temples.”

  “But according to the Bible those designs were given to them directly by God.”

  “But go outside and look up at the stars and you see God trying to give you the same thing, if only you will pay attention.”

  “If Solomon knew all of this, why didn’t he just come out and say, ‘The sun is in the middle of the solar system and planets go round about it in ellipses?’”

  “I believe he did say so, in the design of his temple.”

  “Yes, but why are God and Solomon alike so damned oblique in everything? Why not just come out and say it?”

  “It is good that you do not waste my time with tedious letters,” Isaac said. “When I read a letter I can follow the words, but I cannot fathom the mind, of him who sent it. It is better that you come to visit me in the night-time.”

  “Like an alchemist?”

  “Or an early Christian in pagan Rome…”

  “Scratching curves in the dust?”

  “…or any Christian who dares oppose the idolators. If you were to use me thus in a letter, I would conclude you were in the employ of the Beast, as some say you are.”

  “What, merely for suggesting that the world does something other than rot?”

  “Of course it rots, Daniel. There is no perpetual motion machine.”

  “Except for the heart.”

  “The heart rots, Daniel. Sometimes it even begins to rot while its owner still lives.”

  Daniel dared not follow that one up. After a silence Isaac continued, in a throatier voice: “Where do we find God in the world? That is all I want to know. I have not found Him yet. But when I see anything that does not rot—the workings of the solar system, or a Euclidean proof, or the perfection of gold—I sense I am drawing nearer to the Divine.”

  “Have you found the Philosophick Mercury yet?”

  “In ’77, Boyle was certain he had it.”

  “I remember.”

  “I agreed with him for a short time—but it was wishful thinking. I am seeking it in geometry now—or rather I am seeking it where geometry fails.”

  “Fails?”

  “Come upstairs with me Daniel.”

  DANIEL RECOGNIZED THE first proof as easily as his own signature. “Objects governed by a centripetal force conserve angular momentum and sweep out equal areas in equal times.”

  “You have read my De Motu Corporum in Gyrum?”

  “Mr. Halley has made its contents known to the Royal Society,” Daniel said drily.

  “Some supporting lemmas come out of this,” Isaac said, pulling another diagram over the first.

  “and thence we can move on immediately to” “That is the great one,” Daniel said. “If the centripetal force is governed by an inverse-square law, then the body moves on an ellipse, or at any rate a conic section.”

  “I would say, ‘That heavenly bodies do move on conic sections proves the inverse-square law.’ But we are only speaking of fictions, so far. These proofs only apply to infinitesimal concentrations of mass, which do not exist in the real world. Real heavenly bodies possess geometry—they comprise a vast number of tiny particles arranged in the shape of a sphere. If Universal Gravitation exists, then each of the motes that make u
p the Earth attracts every other, and attracts the moon as well, and vice versa. And each of the moon’s particles attracts the water in Earth’s oceans to create tides. But how does the spherical geometry of a planet inform its gravity?”

  Isaac produced another sheet, much newer-looking than the rest.

  Daniel did not recognize this one. At first he thought it was a diagram of an eyeball, like the ones Isaac had made as a student. But Isaac was speaking of planets, not eyes.

  A few awkward moments followed.

  “Isaac,” Daniel finally said, “you can draw a diagram like this one and say, ‘Behold!’ and the proof is finished. I require a bit of explanation.”

  “Very well.” Isaac pointed to the circle in the middle of the diagram. “Consider a spherical body—actually an aggregate of countless particles, each of which produces gravitational attraction according to an inverse square law.” Now he reached for the nearest handy object—an inkwell—and set it on the corner of the page, as far away from the “spherical body” as it could go. “What is felt by a satellite, here, on the outside, if the separate attractions of all of those particles are summed and fused into one aggregate force?”

  “Far be it from me to tell you how to do physics, Isaac, but this strikes me as an ideal problem for the integral calculus—so why are you solving it geometrically?”

  “Why not?”

  “Is it because Solomon didn’t have the calculus?”

  “The calculus, as some call it, is a harsh method. I prefer to develop my proofs in a more geometric way.”

  “Because geometry is ancient, and everything ancient is good.”