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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Sir Isaac has good ears,” Daniel explained to the incredulous Bob.

  “Then he’d best plug them,” answered Bob and picked up a musket. A moment later the boat flinched from its recoil as he fired it into the air. He handed it to one of the dragoons, who set about furiously reloading.

  “As long as you are wasting balls and powder, waste them on the parapet,” said the Colonel.

  Within a few moments, several other muskets had been fired at the top of the tower, and a large glutinous mass of smoke had been set adrift on the calm evening air. No answering fire came back from Shive Tor. But the little fusillade had the effect Bob wanted: the dragoons off the Isle of Grain were dismounting, sending their horses back to dry land, and advancing on foot. Daniel was noticing that they now looked like dark motes against the gray sand. A few minutes ago their coats had been a proud red. The difference was not that they were all covered in greasy mud now (though they probably were), but that it was getting dark, and the colors were draining from everything. The evening star had come out, very bright, near the Tor.

  A colossal thud came out of the far west. It was impressive enough to divert Isaac’s concentration from the hooker. “What was that?” he demanded—the first voice to violate the stillness that had descended upon all.

  “A lot of powder was touched off at once,” said Colonel Barnes. “On a field of battle, it would signify a dreadful accident. Here, I guess it was the bridge over Yantlet Creek being demolished by a mine.”

  “Why did you mine the bridge, Colonel?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Isaac was gobsmacked. “Then—who did!?”

  “Now you ask me to speculate, Sir Isaac,” Barnes said coldly.

  “But you have men posted at that bridge,” Isaac said.

  “Or had, sir.”

  “How could it have been mined, when it was under guard?”

  “Again, speculation: it was mined in advance, the mine concealed from view,” Barnes said.

  “Then, pray tell, who put fire to the fuse?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “No man was needed to put fire to it,” Daniel said.

  “Then how was it lit?” Barnes demanded.

  “The same way as that was,” Daniel answered, and shrugged an arm free of the blanket to point at the Tor.

  Moments earlier he had seen a blue spark in his peripheral vision, and mistaken it for the evening star coming out near Shive Tor. But by now it had become brighter than any heavenly body save the Sun, brighter by far than any Comet. And it was not in the sky, but in one of those small irregular windows in the wall of the Tor.

  Everyone was now looking at it, though it was growing brilliant enough to burn the eyes. Only Daniel and Isaac knew what it was.

  “Phosphorus is burning inside the Tor,” Isaac remarked, more fascinated than alarmed.

  “Then someone must be in there,” said Bob reaching for a musket.

  “No,” Daniel said. “It was lit by an Infernal Device.”

  The door of the Tor swung inward, shouldered out of the way by a waxing draught. The archway was a gem of yellow light. A small mountain of split and dried cord-wood had been piled on the floor, and had now been set a-blaze. Sparks had begun to fountain up into the sky, jetting through orifices that had been hacked through the upper floor and the roof.

  “It is an admirable piece of work,” said Sir Isaac Newton, flatly and with no trace of rancor. “The rising tide obliges all to run inward to the Tor. But packed as it is with excellent fuel, this will soon become a furnace, and anyone near it will be roasted like a suckling pig. It truly is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  Barnes stood up in the boat, putting all his weight on his one leg and bracing his peg against a bench. He cupped his hands round his mouth and bellowed towards the darkling isle: “Turn back! Retreat! There is not room for you here!” And then he fell back on his arse as the boat was lifted and shoved by a tidal swell. “I do not wish to hear my First Company being drowned,” he said.

  “Colonel, let us row toward the Isle of Grain—you can warn them all, and rescue most,” Daniel suggested.

  “Leave me on yonder vessel,” Isaac demanded, gesturing toward the hooker, which was now upright and adrift.

  “I cannot abandon Sir Isaac Newton on a derelict fishing-boat!” shouted Barnes, exasperated.

  “Then do you stay with him, Colonel,” suggested Sergeant Bob, “and take a few men. I’ll row toward the land, advancing with the tide—warning the men off as I go, rescuing the mired.”

  A thud and crackle from the Tor as a floor-beam gave way. A billion orange sparks spewed from the openings and schooled in the dark.

  “I too shall remain with Sir Isaac,” Daniel heard himself saying, like a man lying in state, listening to his own eulogy. “We’ll get the hooker clear of the fire, and navigate by the stars. Sir Isaac and I have some knowledge of the stars.”

  The Monument

  SUNSET

  “FIRE,” SAID JACK, down on a knee, perspective glass steady on the railing.

  This command—given in a mild conversational tone—was not answered with the expected hellish noises and exhalations. He peeled his eye from the lens and was abruptly reminded that he was two hundred feet above London. A bad time for a dizzy spell. He spanked the railing, clenched his eyes shut, and announced: “The Scotsman is inside the White Tower; I say, Fire!” Then he opened his eyes, got up, and backed round the stony bole of the Monument, for these things were as likely to explode as to fly. He heard Jimmy and Danny murmuring to each other, then a sputter as the fuse caught, then running feet. The lads came into view. Immediately a basilisk-sound, half hiss and half scream, erupted on the other side and rapidly dwindled.

  Jack ran around to see a ray of black fog cantilevered out over the city. On the near side its billows were weirdly lit up, like a squall-line at sunset. But this paled and dissolved in a few moments. The only evidence that remained of this grievous and execrable crime against all known precepts of safe rocketry was a house with a hole in its roof, just short of Mincing Lane, and a gossamer thread connecting said hole with the large pulley lashed to the lantern of the Monument above their heads. From there it ran almost straight down into a polished copper kettle about three paces away from Jack, between the feet of a large Red Indian. The Indian grabbed the thread in one hand lest all of what remained be sucked from the kettle by its own weight.

  Jack looked over the railing and saw the filament plunge down and away toward the east. He lost track of it in the Monument’s shadow. But he could see a lot of boyish ferment on the roof of the Church of St. Mary-at-Hill, five hundred feet away: some leaping, some hopping into the air, some hurling of stones with strings tied to ’em. To any observer who did not know, as Jack did, that a thread of silk was floating in the air a few yards above these people’s heads, it would have looked like the cavorting of men and boys made mad by witchcraft or syphilis, a kind of Bedlam al fresco.

  A distant rocket-scream sounded from near the Tower of London. Such was the speed of this second rocket’s flight that by the time its sound carried to the top of the Monument, and drew Jack’s gaze that way, it was gone, and there was nothing to be seen but a black rainbow bent over Tower Hill and the Moat, connecting the Barking Churchyard behind All Hallows Church to the battlements of the White Tower. “Not a pot of gold, but close to one,” Jack remarked. He was fortunate enough, now, to be looking in the right direction to see yet another dart of white flame jump up from the River Thames, pulling a shroud of black powder-smoke behind it. It reached apogee above Tower Wharf and then winked out. Momentum carried it north over the Outer Wall to crash in Tower Lane. “Damn, too short!” Jack cried, as the sound of the launch reached them.

  “They’ve spares on the barge, Dad,” Danny said.

  He glanced down onto the Church of St. Mary-at-Hill. The men and boys on the roof had settled down noticeably—in fact, most of them were running away, which was, o
f course, the normal practice, from the scene of their crimes. Only two remained. One was working on his lap. The other was acting as a sort of lookout. He needn’t have bothered; the rocket that had screamed over his head a few moments ago had ignited a fire in the attic of that house on Mincing Lane, and there, rather than the church’s roof, was where the attentions of the (paltry number of mostly self-appointed) authorities and the (vastly more energetic and numerous) Mobb were now directed.

  The one who had been working on his lap suddenly sprang back, jumping to his feet, and elevated his chin, as if he had released a carrier pigeon and were watching it take flight. The Indian beside Jack began to pull in string, hand-over-hand, as rapidly as he could. “Look out below!” called Jimmy, as he picked up the copper string-vat and simply dropped it over the rail.

  A curse from Danny: “Hit the Lanthorn Tower this time.” Then another whooshing scream from the river. Jack glimpsed another smoke-prong in the distance.

  The kettle made a funny noise, a cross between a splat and a bong, as it hit the pavement below them. Tomba was grinning beneath a perspective glass. “Men in kilts on the battlements of the White Tower,” he announced.

  “And just what are those men doing?” inquired Jack, whose attention was fixed on the roof of the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, where a scene had just played out remarkably like that moments earlier on the roof of St. Mary-at-Hill.

  “It appears that they are drinking usquebaugh and line dancing,” returned Tomba.

  “One day your wit shall be the death of you, and my hands around your throat shall be the instrument,” Jack remarked calmly.

  “Some of them are pulling in the string from Barking Churchyard,” Tomba returned, “others raising a banner.”

  “Raising a banner!? I gave no instructions touching a banner,” Jack hollered.

  “A Cross of St. Andrews, and—”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. Is any of those Highlanders concerning himself with a pulley?”

  “The pulley is being worked on—hold—oh, my God!” Tomba exclaimed, and drew back from the perspective glass laughing.

  “What is it?”

  “The rocket. It nearly knocked one of them down,” Tomba explained, as yet another basilisk-shriek reached them from the river.

  “So the last one flew true?”

  “Skipped across the roof of the White Tower itself like a flat stone on a pond,” confirmed Danny, who had watched with his naked eyes. “Passed between a Scotsman’s legs and smacked into the north parapet.”

  “I hope that the Scotsman has had the presence of mind to stomp on the string.”

  “They appear to be pulling it in—there’s a chap working by the pulley now—good! The pulley is threaded—”

  “The roof of Trinity House is cleared!” Tomba mentioned, having trained his spyglass on a building halfway between them and the White Tower.

  “Take up the slack smartly now!” Jack called down over the railing. He was awash in fiery light up here. The men at the base of the column were toiling in blue dusk, pulling in loose thread from above as fast as their hands could move. They were working in a clear space, a sort of defensive perimeter that had been set up round the base of the column. Around it the black lint of the Mobb was rapidly gathering, kept at bay by very large hoodlums with whips, and archers who had scaled the plinth of the great column to take up sniping-positions under the wings of its dragons.

  “What rumor did you put out?” Jack asked of Jimmy. Directly below he could see the flattened kettle gleaming like a newly minted coin.

  “That Jack the Coiner would appear atop the Monument at sundown and throw guineas,” Jimmy answered.

  “Barking Churchyard is clear!” announced Danny, which meant that although none of them could see it, the silken filament now stretched in a single uninterrupted catenary from the great pulley, above their heads, across a distance of a bit less than half a mile to a similar device that the Scotsmen had strung from the southeastern turret of the White Tower. From there it ran over the inner and outer walls, above the Wharf, to a barge that had drifted down the river during the last hour or so and then tossed out an anchor. Though this would not have been obvious to anyone viewing it from the level of the water, it was plain from this elevated viewpoint that a great wheel, several yards across, was mounted in that barge. Its axis was vertical, so its rim was parallel to the deck. It was not a mighty sort of wheel, not like an anchor cable’s windlass, but more like a spinning-wheel laid on its side. A dozen or more crewmen stood around it, and now, evidently on some signal from the White Tower, they began to turn that wheel—reeling in the same string that they had sent rocketing over the battlements a minute ago. Within a few moments the result of their exertions could be detected up atop the Monument. For a change in the string’s angle was plainly visible as the tension increased.

  “Supply!” screamed Jack to the men below, who were gathered round an exceptionally large wagon chocked at the foot of the Monument. A patchwork of work-out sails had covered its contents until now. These were flung off to expose a huge cylindrical vat in which miles of cordage had been expertly coiled. But this was not ordinary line, of uniform thickness. That up here at the top of the Monument, running through the pulley at an accelerating clip, was fine silken cord. But what was emerging from the vat was noticeably coarser. And what was coiled in the bottom-most part of the vat was as thick as a man’s wrist.

  “Righto,” Jack said, and caught the eye of the Indian. “And so ’twould seem that very soon I shall require the Chariot of Phaethon. And another for His Reverence.”

  His Reverence let it be known that he was amused. The Indian heaved a sigh and shambled through the door to begin the long journey down stairs.

  “What are you snickering at?” Jack demanded, making a semicircular excursion round the column to discover Father Édouard de Gex. The Jesuit had, for lack of a better word, cornered the four Jewish tourists at the southwestern vertex of the platform. At his feet rested a black strong-box. The lid was open. Diverse gnarled keys and hand-hammered padlocks littered the deck all round. He had mostly emptied the casket by this point, but some of its contents could still be seen: it had been full of small leathern bags, each bag filled with something of High Specific Gravity that clinked as de Gex transferred them one by one into a stout ox-hide satchel. A second satchel, already full, sat next to the one he was packing.

  “You lay a curse on yourself without knowing it,” de Gex answered. “You should call it the Chariot of Apollo.”

  “Apollo is the sobriquet of Leroy—I was trying to show deference.”

  “All right, Helios then. Never Phaethon.”

  “Half the young blades in town are rattling about in Phaethons,” Jack returned, “why can’t I fly above London in one?”

  “Phaethon was a sort of bastard son of Helios. He borrowed his papa’s gleaming Vehicle and went for a heavenly Drive. But seeing the great height to which he had ascended, and terrified by the Heroes, Legends, and Titans hung in the sky by the Gods as Constellations, he lost his wits; the chariot ran out of control, scorching the earth; Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt and he crashed into a river. So when you refer to your conveyance as the Chariot of Phaethon—”

  “The import of your Tale is not lost on me,” Jack let it be known, watching de Gex transfer the last of the clinking bags into the satchel. Then, in a different tone, he reflected: “It is curious. I always phant’sied that the rites of the ancient Pagans, prosecuted as they were in airy temples by naked maidens and prancing butt-boys, and enlivened by feasts and orgies, must have been infinitely more diverting than the insufferable ceremonies of Christians; yet the dramatick yarn of this Phaethon, intoned by Your Reverence, is as dry, tedious, and didactic as the litanies of the Baptists.”

  “I am speaking to you, Jack, of your pride, of your ignorance, and of your doom. I am sorry that I can not make it any more festive.”

  “When night fell, who rode the moon-chariot?”<
br />
  “Selene. But that was of silver.”

  “If those layabouts on the barge do not spin that wheel any faster, we shall be compared to her.”

  “The twilight will linger for a while yet,” de Gex predicted.

  Jack went to inspect the rope coming up from below, and passing over the pulley and out into the air above London en route to the said barge. He was surprised to find that it had already waxed to the thickness of his finger. Surprised, and a bit dismayed, for he’d been hoping that it would snag on a weathercock somewhere and snap while it was still slender and fragile. But now that it had achieved such a thickness it was unlikely to break. He would actually have to do this thing.

  Some minutes passed. London as always continued in roiling feverish busy-ness: the Mobb around the base of the Monument, swollen to a thousand, chanting for their promised guineas, here parting to make room for a mad dog, there clumping to assault a pick-pocket. The fire brigades at their pumping-engines in the Tower hamlets and now in Mincing Lane, surrounded by more of the Mobility, protected by cordons of lobsterbacks. The Highlanders atop the White Tower, victorious but somehow forlorn, as no one seemed to have noticed what they’d accomplished. The men on the barge spinning the giant wheel, like the main gear of an immense clock. The ships on the Pool as ever, going about their toils and quotidian adventures perfectly oblivious to all of these things.

  Phaethon himself was just in the act of crash-landing on the upper Thames, some leagues to the west of town. With any luck he’d set fire to Windsor Castle on his way down. The radiance of his final approach sprayed flat across London and made the whole city jagged and golden. Jack looked at it all, most carefully, as he had once looked out over Cairo, and indeed the place suddenly looked as queer and as outlandish to him as Cairo once had. Which was to say that he saw all through a traveler’s dewy eye, and perceived all that was overlooked by the Cockney’s brass-tacks stare. He owed it to Jimmy and Danny and all his posterity to look at it thus. For de Gex was right, Jack was a bastard who had ascended to a great height and hob-nobbed with Heroes and Titans and seen things he was never meant to see. This might be the last time in many a generation that a Shaftoe might gaze down from such a vantage-point and see so much so clearly. But what was he seeing?