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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice,” grumbled Newton.

  “If I may say so, your own conception of Space is by no means as straightforward as it seems at first,” Leibniz said, very much in the style of one who was firing the opening salvo of another long argument. But before this could get going, the door of the room opened, and Johann von Hacklheber could be seen standing there, holding, in a very significant way, a Letter. Behind him Eliza was pacing back and forth with a fist balled up in front of her lips.

  Princess Caroline stared into Johann’s eyes, and cocked her head. She did not say aloud I told you not to bother me, but it came through so distinctly that all heads turned back toward Johann, expecting from him an immediate apology. Instead he raised his eyebrows and stood his ground.

  Caroline closed her eyes and sighed. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse stepped back to clear her path out of the room. For they had all understood at the same moment that there was only one person who had this authority: Caroline’s father-in-law, the as-yet-uncrowned King of England.

  “Dr. Waterhouse, pray accept the rôle of my knight-errant, and put this thing to rest,” she said, and swept out.

  “Well! That’s a bit of a tall order,” Daniel reflected, after the door had been closed behind her.

  “Not so,” said Newton, “if you’ll only release the Solomonic Gold.”

  “That Jew who works for the Tsar,” said Daniel—not wishing to utter the name Solomon, for fear it would send Isaac into chiliastic transports—“has detected that the trial batch of plates were made of heavier-than-normal gold, and the decree has gone forth from the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg that all succeeding plates be made of the same stuff. If we disobey, punishment will ensue, in the Russian style. Were it not for this, I’d swop the gold without hesitation. For I believe it has no special properties whatsoever.”

  “Then how do you explain your personal resurrection, at the hands of Enoch Root, in 1689?”

  “Say what!?” asked Leibniz.

  “Or,” said Isaac, “is that the one thing Hooke wrote, in all his life, that you’ll not believe?”

  “Hooke’s account states that Enoch gave me some medicine, which helped.”

  “Helped!? You have a marvelous gift for understatement, Daniel.”

  “It could have been anything…or nothing. It has been known to occur that seemingly dead men will revive after a few minutes.”

  “I hated Hooke,” Isaac admitted, “but even I will admit that he was the most acute observer who ever lived. Do you really expect me to believe that he, of all people, could not distinguish between a living patient and a dead?”

  “I see that your mind is quite made up. What point is there in debating it?”

  Both Newton and Leibniz laughed out loud.

  “What is funny?” Daniel demanded.

  “You have made us debate for hours!” Leibniz exclaimed. “Now that you are challenged on a troublesome question, you claim to see no point in it.”

  “I need only a small sample, Daniel,” said Newton. “Do not forget that for many years I have sought evanescent traces of this in samples of gold that had been infinitely diluted and debased. My techniques are now highly developed. I do not need a brick of the stuff. Just an ounce, or less—a scrap.”

  “I tell you that Peter’s assayer weighed every ounce of it. There are no ounces to spare. I could ask him for permission to take a small sample, but…”

  “No,” said Isaac, “I do not think it would be wise for you to tip your hand.”

  At this remark Daniel was suddenly conscious of the ring on his finger: the one that Solomon had given him, made of con-fused bits punched from the plates at Bridewell. A tingle ran up his arm to his scalp; but he froze there, and said nothing, and hoped that Isaac would not take note of his horripilation.

  “Isaac,” said a voice. Daniel had to look up to verify that it was that of Leibniz: a bit shocking, only in that the German had addressed Newton by his Christian name, without the “Sir.”

  “Gottfried,” said Newton, not to be gainsaid.

  “Thirty-seven years ago I came incognito to these shores to propose an alliance between myself and you. It was about two years after I’d developed the calculus, only to realize I was only following in your footsteps. It had occurred to me that we might share other interests as well, and that by joining forces we might achieve more, sooner. Daniel had encouraged me in this.”

  “I well remember the match, and the matchmaker,” said Isaac, “and his weakness for playing with matches.”

  This witticism, because it was such a rare thing from Isaac, cut all the more deeply. Daniel’s right arm had begun to feel terribly heavy, as if the ring were weighing it down—or as if the strain of the day had caused him to suffer a stroke. He put the heavy hand in the pocket of his breeches, and hung his head.

  “Then you remember as well as I that the match flared, only to fail,” said Gottfried. “Now I am back, certainly for the last time. Will you not reconsider, Isaac? Will you not obey your Princess—my Princess—and work with me, and lay a strong foundation beneath the System of the World?”

  “I am and have been working on just that,” said Isaac. “Should I not ask you, Gottfried, if you would work with me? It might entail giving up on monads, by the way. Ah, I see by your look that you have no thought of doing so.”

  “The answer then is no.”

  “The answer is yes. But it is a question of timing, sir. It is not for you, or me, or our Princess, to dictate how long it shall take, and when it shall be accomplished! She would have it settled now—today! You are likewise in a great hurry. For you are an old man—we are all old men—and fearful of running out of time. But this is neither here nor there. Nature will reveal her secrets at times of her own choosing, and has no thought of our convenience. Principia Mathematica might never have come about had Nature not sent a spate of comets our way in the 1680s, and so arranged their trajectories that we could make telling observations. It might be ten years, a hundred, or a thousand before she sends us the clew that will enable us to solve the riddles we have been speaking of today. Though the Gold of Solomon might be might be just that clew—I don’t know until I can inspect some of it.”

  Daniel smiled. “You are infinitely patient, it seems, save where the Solomonic Gold is concerned. It is amusing. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who is convinced he is really going to die soon—both of you, Isaac and Gottfried, are believers in life æternal. Why don’t you have the courage of your convictions, and agree to re-convene the discussion a few centuries from now, or whenever there are sufficient data to resolve these issues philosophically?”

  Which was a little bit of a cheap trick—forcing their hands thus, by challenging the sincerity of their religious convictions. But Daniel was exhausted, and could see that the thing was doomed, and wanted only to wind it up.

  “I accept!” said Leibniz. “It is a sort of duel—a philosophick duel, to be settled, not with weapons, but with ideas, at a time and on a field yet to be chosen. I accept.” And he held out his hand toward Isaac.

  “Then I’ll look for you on that field, sir,” said Newton. “Though our philosophies are so different that I do not really expect both of us can possibly be there; for one of us must be wrong.” He shook Leibniz’s hand.

  “Every duellist needs a second,” said Leibniz. “Perhaps Daniel shall act in that capacity for both of us.”

  Daniel snorted. “Isaac may believe I was resurrected, but I did not think you would hold with such beliefs, Gottfried. No, if you require seconds, it now seems that there are any number of immortal personages who shall be willing to show up on the appointed date, and hold your coats: for you, Gottfried, there is Enoch Root, and for you, Isaac, that ancient Jew who works for the Tsar and calls himself Solomon.” And so he did not take his right hand from his pocket to shake hands with them, for the ring felt terribly heavy and obvious, and he had a sort of lurid phant
’sy that Gottfried and Isaac would suddenly recognize it for what it was, and fall to scuffling over it.

  “BRR, MY FATHER-IN-LAW is frightfully cross with me,” Caroline announced, “at least, if I have made sense of his letter correctly.” She had read through it three times as Johann and Eliza watched. Leicester House resounded with booming and dragging noises: the sound of Royal baggage being packed and positioned.

  “So much time has passed, and so many things have occurred, since I claimed I was going away to that Schloß to recover from June’s traumas, that I had quite forgotten that his majesty was expecting me back. But now he seems to have figured out where I am.”

  “Probably some intelligence reached him after our little adventure on the Thames,” Johann suggested. His discourse had been clipped and gloomy, and he’d been supporting his head on his fingertips—or perhaps that was self-administered massage. To Caroline, being bawled out by the King of England and Elector of Hanover might have been a trivial family dust-up, but for him it was a different matter.

  “Very well,” said Caroline, “it’s back to Hanover I go, then.”

  “Right!” said Johann, and got up and strode out. If anyone had had the temerity to stop him and ask him why, he’d have said he was off to do something ever so practical and important. But as both Caroline and Eliza understood perfectly well, the fact of the matter was that he had become so agitated that he’d go mad if he spent any more time sitting and talking.

  “Off to Hanover,” Caroline repeated, “only to return in a few weeks! It says here that his majesty intends to reach England late in September. Supposing that the Prince of Wales and I are to accompany him, that means that as soon as I reach Hanover I shall have to turn round and come right back.”

  “Geographically, yes, you shall return to the same latitude and longitude,” said Eliza, after thinking about this one for a moment. “But you will no longer be incognito. And so socially you shall be coming to a city you have never before visited, and to a different life altogether.”

  “I suppose that shall be quite true, as long as we dwell in places like St. James’s Palace, with all the courtiers and the ambassadors, and the Duke of Marlborough right next door,” said Caroline. “But if there’s one thing I learned from Sophie, it’s that there are very practical reasons for a Princess to have more than one Palace. For her, the Leine Schloß served as St. James’s shall for me and George Augustus. But at every chance she got, she removed herself to Herrenhausen, where she could live as she pleased, and walk in the garden. That’s why I have been so keen on this place. It’s going to be my Herrenhausen,” Caroline announced, “and you are going to be its doyenne.”

  “Thank God,” said Eliza, “I was afraid you were about to say, ‘dowager.’ ”

  “Lady of the Bedchamber or Mistress of the Stole or something,” Caroline said, a bit absently. “We shall have to choose the right English title for you. Whatever you’re called, the point is that I’d like you to live here, at least part of the time, and walk in the garden with me, and talk to me.”

  “That doesn’t sound too onerous,” said Eliza with a smile. “But know that any place where I live is liable to have a flux of odd persons running through it, connected with the work that I pursue on the abolition of Slavery, and so on.”

  “So much the better! It’ll remind me that much more of the Charlottenburg back when Sophie Charlotte was still alive.”

  “Some of my lot may be odder and rougher yet…”

  “You have a faraway look in your eye when you say that…are you thinking of your long-lost beau?”

  At this Eliza sighed and threw Caroline a mean look.

  “I have not forgotten our fascinating chat in Hanover,” Caroline said.

  “Let’s speak of a different fascinating chat!” said Eliza. “What tidings from the Library?”

  “When I left, they were still having at each other. They are both very proud men. Newton, especially, is not of a mind to back down. The court is coming here, and leaving poor Leibniz behind in Hanover. Advantage Newton. Newton has won the calculus dispute, or so it is believed by the savants of the Royal Society. And the recent controversies surrounding the Mint have cleared up, or so it would seem.”

  “Is that what he told you? Now that would be some kind of a miracle, if true,” Eliza said.

  “Why do you say so?”

  “Is it not the case that the Pyx is still under the control of Charles White? And is Newton not still answerable to a Trial of the Pyx?”

  “That is what they tell me,” said Caroline, “but Newton seems to believe he has now got the upper hand where that is concerned, by arresting the arch-villain known as Jack the Coiner. The fiend is now utterly in Sir Isaac’s power, and doomed to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Cross…Johann? Johann! Bring the smelling salts, the Duchess has got the vapors!”

  Johann banged into the room only a few moments later, but by then his mother had got her color back, and prevented a slide to the floor by getting a white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair. “It is nothing,” she said, swiveling her eyes at her first-born. “Carry on, please, as you were.”

  Johann departed, seething and quizzical.

  “It is just a sort of catalepsis that comes over me sometimes, when suddenly I have got rather a lot to think about all at once. Shortly it passes. I am fine. Thank you for your expression of concern, highness. Moving on—”

  “We shall not move on!” announced the Princess of Wales. “We shall stick right here, on this, the most fascinating topic of conversation in the history of the world! You are in love with the most infamous Black-guard ever!”

  “Stop that! It’s not like that at all,” said Eliza. “He happens to be in love with me, that is all.”

  “Oh, well, that’s different altogether.”

  “There is no call for sarcasm.”

  “How did you meet? I love to hear stories of how true lovers met.”

  “We are not true lovers,” said Eliza, “and as to how we met—well—it’s none of your business.”

  Another door whacked open and in came Leibniz. He bowed to the ladies, looking very solemn. “I take it that a departure for Hanover is planned, and soon,” he said. “If your royal highness will have me, I will accompany you.” He turned toward Eliza. “My lady. The friendship that began in Leipzig thirty years ago, when our paths crossed at the Fair, and I shared a little adventure with you and your Vagabond beau—”

  “Aha!” shouted Caroline.

  “Draws now to a close. The Princess’s noble and splendid attempt to effect a philosophical reconciliation—so ably and patiently assisted by Dr. Waterhouse—has, I am sorry to say—”

  “Failed?” said Caroline.

  “Adjourned,” Leibniz said.

  “For how long?”

  “Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.”

  “Hmm,” said Caroline, “that will be of little practical utility to the House of Hanover, when it comes time to select a new Privy Council.”

  “I am sorry,” said Leibniz, “but there is no rushing certain things. While other matters, such as my departure from London, happen entirely too soon.”

  “Where are Sir Isaac, and Dr. Waterhouse?” the Princess inquired.

  “Sir Isaac has taken his leave, and forwards apologies for not having said good-bye in person,” said Leibniz, “but one gets the idea he had terribly important things to do. Dr. Waterhouse said he would await you in the garden, just in case you might be of a mind to behead him for failing in his mission.”

  “By no means! I shall go and thank him for his good offices—and I’ll see you on the boat tomorrow!” said Caroline, and swept out of the place.

  “Eliza,” said the savant.

  “Gottfried,” said the Duchess.

  London Bridge

  THE NEXT DAY

  “IT WAS NOT HALF so blubbery as it might have been,” said Leibniz, “when one considers how long the Duchess and I have known each other,
and all we have been through, and whatnot. We shall keep in touch, of course, through letters.”

  He was describing his leave-taking from Eliza at Leicester House the day before; but he might as well have been talking of the one that was happening now, on London Bridge, between him and Daniel.

  “Forty-one years,” Daniel said.

  “I was thinking the same thing!” Leibniz said, practically before Daniel had got the words out. “It was forty-one years ago when you and I first met, right here, on this very what-do-you-call-it.”

  “Starling,” Daniel said. They were standing on the one beneath the Square, near the mid-point of the Bridge, and not awfully far from the Main-Topp where the Clubb had of late conducted its Stake-out. But Daniel’s memory of that, though only a few weeks old, was already quite washed-out and indistinct compared to what Leibniz was speaking of: the day in 1673 when a young Leibniz (no Baron in those days) with an Arithmetickal Engine tucked under his arm had disembarked from a ship that had brought him over from Calais, and been conveyed to this starling—to this very spot—by a lighter, and first made the acquaintance of young Daniel Waterhouse of the Royal Society.

  Leibniz’s memory was no less distinct. “I believe it was—here!” (tapping a flat rock at starling’s edge with his toe) “where I first touched down.”

  “That is how I remember it.”

  “Of course we are both wrong, if Absolute Space is correct,” Leibniz went on. “For during those forty-one years the Earth has rotated, and revolved about the Sun, and the Sun, for all we know, has careered for some vast distance. So I did not really touch down here but in some other place that is now far out in the interstellar vacuum.”

  Daniel did not rise to this bait. He was fearful that Leibniz was about to burst out into some bitter declamation against Newton and Newton’s philosophy. But Leibniz drew back from that brink, even as he was drawing back from the stony rim of the starling. A longboat was working up towards them. It was the lighter that would take Leibniz out to the Hanoverian sloop Sophia, where Princess Caroline had already settled into her cabin.