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

by Neal Stephenson

  “That gold is gold?”

  Peter broke in now, and there was a pause as Kikin translated: “The Tsar has decreed that, since the finest gold on earth was used to make the first batch of plates, with which he is well pleased, the remainder of the plates are to be made using the same stuff. What the hell do you suppose he means by that?”

  Leibniz rolled his eyes. “Some have put it into his head that there exists a superior form of gold.” He regarded Solomon Kohan none too benignly.

  Meanwhile Peter had been unburdening himself further. Kikin translated: “Every plate sent to St. Petersburg henceforth shall, before it is accepted, be quoined in the same manner by Solomon Kohan.”

  “For your sake, and for your friend’s,” said Solomon to Daniel, with a glance toward Leibniz, “I hope you have an adequate supply of this type of gold.”

  “Perfectly adequate, thank you,” said Daniel, and nodded at Minerva. He let a few moments elapse for Kikin to translate. By the time Daniel was ready to resume speaking, all the others had followed his gaze, and marked certain members of Minerva’s crew bringing up out of her hold flat packets of something heavy, wrapped in sack-cloth.

  “Is that a Vroom?” asked Peter in Dutch. “She is a beauty.”

  “Indeed!” broke in van Hoek, who had been loitering on the edge of the crowd, “she is the last ship that the great Vroom ever designed, and if his Tsarish Majesty would care to—”

  “I would,” said Peter, and then he and van Hoek went off ranting in Dutch ship-jargon for some minutes. A lot of throat-clearing and eyebrow-wiggling on Daniel’s part finally penetrated the awareness of van Hoek, who with reluctance brought the Tsar’s attention back round to Daniel.

  “Months ago,” Daniel announced, “we set in motion work that has culminated, within the last few days, in the arrival of that Vroom that his Tsarish Majesty is admiring. She brought the gold that is to be used for the completion of the Logic Mill. It is being down-loaded at this very moment…” here Daniel trailed off, for Peter was already bounding across the muck of the yard to intercept one of those burlap bundles. Kikin ran after him, translating as he went, and the rest of the group hustled along behind. Daniel found himself bringing up the rear, alongside Solomon Kohan.

  “It is curious,” said Daniel, “that you take so keen an interest in this matter.”

  “It is curious,” returned Solomon, “that you incorporate such gold into your device and expect that it shall go unnoticed by the Wise.”

  Solomon stared at Daniel with eyes that rarely blinked and that were such a pale gray as to be nearly colorless, though they were rimmed and flecked with black. His features were generally Semitic. This gave Daniel the idea that Monsieur Kohan had been born with dark eyes, befitting his race, but that they had become washed out and faded over time, like garments that have seen too many washings and too much sun. Immersed in that gaze, Daniel felt like a lump of sugar plunged into a stream of warm water. He was at a loss to answer, and so trudged across the churned muck of the yard in silence until he and Solomon had re-joined the group. All were gathered round a bundle that Peter had wrested from a barefoot seaman, thrown down on a barrel-head, and slashed open. The package was perhaps a foot and a half wide, four long, and an inch thick. Peeled bare, it was revealed as a metal plate, scratched and speckled, but unquestionably gold. Solomon muttered something in Hebrew. Peter regarded it with mild curiosity. “He says it looks like any other gold,” Kikin explained.

  “As how could it not,” Leibniz said, “as there is no difference—” but here he was cut off by a sudden commotion. Mr. Orney, who as a rule was not the sort of chap one looked to to disrupt any proceedings with spontaneous outbursts, had thrust his way into the middle of the group, gathered up the dangling shreds of burlap, and begun trying to cover up the exposed gold as if it were no less shocking to him than a naked woman. Peter watched the frantic efforts of the Nonconformist with the same hungry curiosity as he applied to everything else, and asked Kikin a question. Kikin explained, gesturing to the scores of fascinated loiterers watching from along the road, from the branches of nearby trees, and from the roofs of houses. Suddenly Peter understood, and looked back at Orney, seeing him in a new light, and comprehending the reason for his pronounced nervousness. The Tsar looked over toward a formation of some two dozen Cossacks who had been prowling around the perimeter of the yard, and shouted some command at them.

  “Nyet!” Kikin exclaimed; but the Cossacks were already fanning out towards the road, drawing sabers.

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘Kill them all,’ ” Kikin said, and then began trying to explain to the Tsar something complicated that the Tsar was not in any sort of mood to learn about. Anyway, half of his words were drowned out by noises off. Cossacks were at large, and the game was afoot, in Rotherhithe, and the amount of shouting and screaming was prodigious. Peter plainly enough told Kikin to shut up. Kikin looked around pleadingly. Daniel spoke, catching Peter’s eye briefly, afterwards staring at his belt-buckle. “So lax is the treatment of criminals here, and so disorderly is this country as a result, that even if his Tsarish Majesty had brought a whole regiment of Cossacks, and put everyone within a mile radius to the sword, the security of Mr. Orney’s establishment could not be vouchsafed once the sun set, if the gold were known to be here. It must be transported to safekeeping in London. We could summon wagons; or—” and he nodded at the Russian galley.

  “The Doctor’s proposal is accepted,” announced Kikin in due course. “Aboard the galley is yet more gold: some to pay Mr. Orney for the ships, provided they pass a thorough inspection, and some to pay the Institute of Technologickal Arts for the next phase of the Logic Mill. All of it must be conveyed safely to various places in London. His Tsarish Majesty has therefore decreed that the special gold from Minerva be transferred into the galley immediately. We shall then set out for London, all of us.”

  Van Hoek relayed all of this to his crew. Meanwhile Orney said: “As much as part of me is pleased to see the blood of the Mobile running in the gutters of Rotherhithe, I would respectfully beseech Brother Peter to summon the furry chaps with the sabers back to the confines of my property.”

  “It shall be done,” said Kikin after the usual pause; though Daniel thought Peter looked just a bit wounded. But then the Tsar’s face screwed itself around as the result of some sort of neurological cock-up, and the moment passed.

  Billingsgate Dock

  LATER THAT DAY

  PETER SPIED A queue of massive coal-wagons before the steelyard of Billingsgate, and decided that these were a better way to convey tons of gold around London than the frail coaches and sedan chairs scurrying like cockroaches up and down the river’s banks. And so all commerce in fish and coal was suspended for an hour as the galley forced its way into Billingsgate Dock. It was most inadvisable for anyone but a visiting Tsar. Anyone the least bit English-looking would have been torn limb from limb by the fishwives the moment he stepped onto the wharf. Daniel—who did happen to be English-looking—was paralyzed by anxiety throughout this maneuver. But within thirty seconds of the Tsar’s leaping from the gunwale of the galley to the scaly lid of Billingsgate Wharf, he was in the driver’s seat, and holding the reins, of an empty coal-wagon. Its owner, seeing Peter stride toward him, had simply flung the reins at the Tsar’s head and jumped out. Later he tossed the whip up in case Peter had need of it. The fishwives, too, were strangely compliant; they abandoned their stalls and lined up along wharf’s edge to enjoy the spectacle. That, Daniel realized, was what enabled Peter to get away with it: not that he was the Tsar (for no one knew this), but the pageant of his coming. It did not matter how much business these people were losing; any money they made to-day would be spent to-morrow, but this event was one they’d tell tales of for as long as they lived. Moreover, the place was after all a Market, not a Palace, Parliament, College, or Church. Markets drew a particular sort of person, just as those other places drew different sorts. And the sorts who f
ound a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial. The driver of that coal-cart had perhaps ten seconds in which to make up his mind what he ought to do. Yet he had decided. And probably rightly. Daniel noted at least one purse being tossed at him by an aide of the Tsar.

  They drove through the streets of London in this wagon, made to carry chalders of coal, now creaking under as great a mass of gold, Cossacks, and Natural Philosophers. The load was lightened somewhat on Threadneedle Street, where the gold that was to pay for the ships was deposited into the vaults of the Bank of England, and credited to an account controlled by Mr. Kikin. After that Daniel was made to sit in the driver’s seat next to Peter, so that he could supply directions to Clerkenwell Court.

  Kikin had been relegated somehow to the back of the coal-cart, where he was conversing in Russian with Solomon Kohan and a nobleman who seemed to have some say over affairs financial. Peter and Daniel, lacking an interpreter, batted sentence-fragments back and forth in diverse tongues until they settled on French. The Tsar spoke it passably, once he had set his mind to it; but to discourse in a second language demanded more patience than Peter generally had. Sensing as much, Daniel limited his remarks to the likes of “turn left at the next corner” and “to run over pedestrians is frowned on,” &c. But after a while his curiosity got the better of him. Partly it was that they were passing along the back of Bedlam, and Daniel was terrified that Peter would take an interest in it, and go inside to learn all about lunaticks. “Alors,” Daniel said, “that Solomon Kohan is an interesting chap. Where on earth did you find him?”

  “The Sack of Azov,” Peter replied. “He had wandered there for some reason, and was dwelling in the Palace as a guest of the Pasha, when we laid siege to the place. Why do you ask?”

  “Er…I don’t know, really. Call it a commoner’s curiosity as to how an Emperor goes about assembling his staff.”

  “There is no secret. Find the best people and don’t let them go.”

  “How did you know that Monsieur Kohan was one of the best people?”

  “The sheer quantity of gold we found on his person,” Peter said, “served as his credentials.”

  They exited London at Cripplegate and thereby passed within a block of Grub Street. Yet they were not noticed, which confirmed in Daniel’s mind a doubt that had been nagging him about newspapermen, and their choices as to what to be interested in, which struck him as bizarrely random. Though, as they worked their way to the west, he began to understand how it was that a gigantic Tsar could drive a coal-wagon full of gold and Don Cossacks through the city without attracting all that much notice. They were drawing nigh to Smithfield, with its connotations of cattle-drives, meat-markets, burnings at the stake, and seekers after violence. Many of the bonfires that had been lit on Wednesday evening were still burning now, on Saturday; for die-hard Tory Mobbs had persisted in clashing with their Whig counterparts all day Thursday, even as Ravenscar had been pressing his advantage on the loftier fronts of Whitehall and Westminster. Those disturbances had insensibly blended into the usual riotous panoply of the Hanging-March yesterday. So Smithfield, and all to its west, were now one vast smoking reeking aftermath. Peter had spoken of the Sack of Azov; Daniel wondered if it had looked anything like what they were now driving through. Shopkeepers and residents were beginning to place doors back on hinges, shovel human turds out of their forecourts, &c., but the place was still infested with feckless young men. Daniel mentally sorted these into such categories as armed irregulars, phanatiques, Vagabonds, and hanging-watchers—hasty judgments all, built on slight evidence. Any commerce-minded person passing through here must find it impossible to believe that any œconomically productive activity ever happened in England at all. And yet England prospered, and Peter knew it; how could he reconcile it with the evidence before his eyes?

  “This place used to lie beyond the edge of the city,” Daniel explained, “and bloody-minded young men would come here to practice at sword-play, or even to fight. This was more than a hundred years ago, when it was the fashion to have a wee shield on the left hand—a buckler. The sound of rapiers swashing against bucklers could be heard from far away, when they fought. Young men of that mentality came to be known, in the vernacular, as—”

  “Bucklerswashers! Yes, I have heard of this,” said Peter. “Which way do I go here?”

  “Take the left fork, if you please, your Tsarish Majesty,” Daniel said, “and then straight on to Clerkenwell.”

  As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner but to particular persons, and to divers men divers things.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  UPON ARRIVAL IN Clerkenwell Court, Daniel discovered that Roger Comstock, or someone claiming to speak for him, had quartered two squadrons of Whig Association cavalry in the Court of Technologickal Arts: one Mohawk, the other normally coiffed. He was past caring, and no longer capable of being surprised by anything. It was fortuitous. The Templar-tomb made an impressive vault, with its new set of ironbound doors. The presence of the cavalry only made it seem that much better suited for storing a pile of gold, in Peter’s eyes.

  Daniel had been steeling himself, on the drive over, for a long day or two of explaining all of the marvels and oddities on view in the Court of Technologickal Arts—for really it was the worst kind of Peter-the-Great-bait. But most of the ingénieurs and projectors who frequented the place had locked their stuff up, or taken it away, when they had moved out to make room for the cavalry. So there was relatively little on view. Peter did venture underground for a cursory inspection of the Templar-tomb. But the ceiling was too low for him, and he seemed as bored as any other royal on any other ceremonial inspection, which gave Daniel the idea that hidden vaults of bizarre ancient military-religious sects must be altogether common and unremarkable in Russia. Solomon Kohan showed more interest in it than his boss. And so while Baron von Leibniz and Saturn (who had recovered admirably after having been rousted from bed at saber-point) showed the Tsar some of the machinery pertaining to the Logick Mill, Solomon and Daniel sat round a slate sarcophagus down below, and oversaw the transfer of the gold plates from Minerva into the Tomb of the Templars. This was a matter of weighing all that was brought down, and pricking down the weights in ledgers, and getting all of the numbers and the sums to agree: not especially demanding labor for two men such as these. During lulls they engaged in Solomon Kohan’s idea of small talk:

  “This is an interesting place.”

  “I am pleased you find it interesting.”

  “It puts me in mind of an operation I used to have in Jerusalem a long time ago.”

  “Now that you mention it, the full name of the Templars was the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. So if you are that Solomon—”

  “Do not play word games with me. I refer, not to this hole in the ground, which is but an indifferent crypt for long-forgotten knights, but to what lies over.”

  “The Court of Technologickal Arts?”

  “If that is what you call it.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “A temple.”

  “Oh? Of what religion?”

  “A religion that presupposes that we may draw closer to God by better understanding the World that He made.”

  “That being the only evidence available to us, you mean, as to what He was thinking.”

  “Available to most of us,” Solomon allowed.

  “Oh? Is there a rest of us who have other ways of knowing God?”

  “In truth, yes,” Solomon said, “but it is dangerous to say so, for almost all who claim to belong to this rest are charlatans.”

  “How gratifying, then, that you judge me fit to partake of this secret. Does this mean you have found me worthy to distinguish between the majority of charlatans and the minority of—”


  “The Wise? Yes.”

  “Does that mean I am Wise?”

  “No. You are not Wise but erudite. You are a member of the Societas Eruditorum.”

  “Leibniz has spoken of it, but I did not know I was a member.”

  “It is not like these guys,” Solomon said, rapping a knuckle on a Templar-sarcophagus, “with bylaws and initiation-rites and such.”

  “Are you a member?”

  “No.”

  “Are you Wise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means you have ways of knowing things that we erudite fellows don’t. We have to be satisfied with practicing our religion.”

  “You make it sound unsatisfactory. Change your mind about this. It is better to know why you know things than simply to have things revealed to you.”

  “Enoch Root—is he Wise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Leibniz?”

  “Erudite.”

  “Newton?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “It seems as though Newton just knows things. Finished knowledge appears in his head—no one else can make out how he did it; and no one else has a chance in hell of doing what he did.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a black-and-white distinction, Wise versus Erudite, or shades of gray? If I get lucky on some days, and a good idea pops into my head, am I being Wise?”

  “You are partaking of the quality of Wiseness, or Wizardry, or whatever it is called in English.”

  “How many Wizards are there just now? You, Enoch, that’s two. Possibly Isaac.”

  “I have no idea.” But here Solomon was distracted by a faint noise from the direction of the stairs. He and Daniel looked that way, expecting to see a Cossack bearing more gold; but instead it was Saturn. He stepped toward them quietly. Daniel had no idea how long Saturn had been in the room with them, how much he might have heard. “Are you two quite finished with your sums?” he asked weakly.

  “They are not all that difficult,” Daniel returned. “Why do you ask? Is there some need of us?”