The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  There was a silence as Mr. Marsh’s singular narration was considered. Then Newton spoke: “Your horse is slain. But what became of your wagon?”

  “It is still in Surrey, guv’nor.”

  “Then let us go and fetch it, and bring it to the Court of Technologickal Arts—assuming that Dr. Waterhouse gives his consent—for some repairs, and some alterations,” Isaac said. “I have an idea.”

  Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

  MORNING OF 13 AUGUST 1714

  DANIEL ARRIVED EARLIER THAN most, and sat on a bale of Bridewell oakum. It was not a bad place to await the other members of the Clubb. The day was perfect. Later he would be hot, but for the nonce his suit was perfectly matched to the warmth of the sun and the temperate breeze off the river. Before him, three great greased skids declined into the Thames. They had exhausted their burdens—the Tsar’s warships—and lay open to new projects. One of Orney’s shipwrights stood at the head of the middle way. When he did not move for some minutes, Daniel guessed that something must be wrong. But then the man shifted his weight, cocked his head minutely, froze for a few seconds, then hunched his shoulders and let his chin drop almost to his breast-bone. Daniel perceived, then, that the man was thinking. And it was no aimless woolgathering, but a sort of work. As some built ships in bottles, this man was building one inside of his skull; and if Daniel had the fortitude to remain on this perch for some weeks or months, why, he would see the vision in the shipwright’s mind take material form. A year hence, men would be sailing around on it! This Daniel found wondrous. He envied the shipwright. Not simply because he was a younger man but because he was being left alone in a quiet place to create something new, and, in sum, seemed, by grace or by craft, to have ensconced himself in a simpler and sweeter Story than the one Daniel was doomed to act out.

  So much did he enjoy this interlude on the oakum, that he had to master a distinct flash of annoyance when the tick, tick, tick of a certain approaching wagon obtruded. The shipwright—lucky man—was free to ignore it. Daniel must attend.

  The wagon was a great rank barrel mounted in a shallow wheeled box. Hunched on a plank bench at the front was a man, manipulating the reins of a single listless nag. He drove the rig down in to the middle of Orney’s yard, then leaned back and let his head loll. Members of the Clubb were converging from diverse places round the Establishment where they had been smoking pipes, bowling, chatting, or tending to their very important correspondence.

  When Mr. Marsh—for it was he—recovered from his exhaustion sufficiently to open his eyes and have a look round, he found himself surrounded by most of the would-be Prosecutors he had met nine days earlier at the Kit-Cat Clubb. The only one missing was Kikin. But Kikin’s bodyguard was there, and so was Saturn. These two squatted down beneath the wagon and went to work with prybars. Another man in his position might have raised objections to having his wagon dismantled while was still sitting on it, but Mr. Marsh seemed past caring. Planks were removed from the vehicle’s flat underbelly; Saturn stood and tossed them into the bed of the wagon while the big Russian carefully extracted a smuggled burden from a hidden cavity. This looked, for a moment, like a bale of clothing; but presently it sprouted extremities, and began to stretch, writhe, and complain. The bodyguard stood it upright next to the wagon. The head of Mr. Kikin could now be seen, wigless, hatless, hairless, red-eyed, blinking, and emitting swear-words that would make Cossacks clap their hands over their ears and run home to their mothers. A wig was produced and jammed over Kikin’s pate. He was disgorging all manner of stuff from his pockets: paper scraps, pencil stubs, a compass, a watch.

  “I ween we shall now hear a long disquisition from Mr. Kikin,” said Mr. Threader. “Once, that is, he has remembered his manners. Let us hear first, and briefly, the report of Mr. Marsh.”

  “Oh, from that I am here, and alive, you must know that it came off as planned, sirs,” said Mr. Marsh.

  “You met the mysterious personage in the night-time? You were blindfolded and conveyed to the place where the urine is collected? You emptied your load, and were returned to the lonely crossroads, and were paid, and were sent on your way?” Threader inquired. Marsh answered with a stately procession of nods.

  “Very well, then,” said Daniel Waterhouse, “as we agreed, the horse is yours, and you are free to go forth and ply your trade. We ask only that you speak of this to no one.”

  “Right, guv’nor,” answered Marsh, with a slight roll of the eyes: his way of pointing out that it would be suicidal for him to relate the story anywhere in Christendom. Then, exhausted though he was, he drove out of Orney’s Ship-yard and began putting distance between him and the mad Clubb as fast as his new cart-horse could manage.

  Mr. Orney had spread out a large-scale map of Surrey on an open-air table normally used for unfurling ship-plans. Kikin, moving in a stiff tottering gait, brought his paper-scraps and began to arrange them according to some inscrutable scheme while quaffing beer from a sort of earthenware tureen. Breezes discomposed the scraps; rocks were procured. Kikin placed his pocket-compass on the map. The three Natural Philosophers all noted that Orney—as always, a master of detail—had so oriented the map that its north-arrow was aligned with the compass’s needle.

  When Mr. Kikin felt himself capable of human speech, he announced, with no greetings, complaints, or other preliminaries: “We commenced from here.” And he deposited a pebble on a Surrey crossroads not far off the high road from London Bridge. “To the southeast we proceeded, on a good road—”

  “You were able to perceive the compass in the dark, then?” Orney asked.

  “The phosphorus paint compounded by Freiherr von Leibniz, and daubed upon its card by Mr. Hoxton, performed as expected. It was right in my face, as bright as a full moon. I say we were going southeast on a good road—almost certainly this one,” insisted Kikin, streaking his finger across the map. “I counted, er…” and here he consulted his notes. “Seventy-eight revolutions of the wheel.” For Newton had proposed, and Saturn had constructed, a little device that produced a click every time the wheel went round.

  “One thousand and thirty feet, then,” said Newton, having worked out the product in his head. For all of them knew by heart the circumference of the wheel in question.

  But here Orney had anticipated, and prepared: he produced a ribbon of paper, marked with regularly spaced pen-lines, each neatly indexed with a number: 50, 100, 200, and so on. It was a scale that he had drawn up, demarcated not in feet, furlongs, or miles, but in revolutions of the wheel of Mr. Marsh’s vault-wagon. By snaking it down the road drawn on the map (for the road was not perfectly straight) he was able to show that, at a place near the eighty mark, there was an intersection with a smaller road. “That must be it,” Kikin said, and reviewed a spate of Cyrillic notations. “Yes, west-southwest for fifty ticks—then an elbow in the road, bringing us round to almost due south—three hundred and thirty ticks later we went up and over a stone bridge.”

  This led to some back-tracking and head-scratching, for it was not clear which of several possible roads the wagon might have taken; but presently Leibniz noticed a bridge whose position was found to be consistent with all of Kikin’s data, and so they went on reckoning from there.

  All in all, Kikin had marked down a couple of dozen changes in direction, three bridges, diverse segments of noticeably good or bad road, and the odd hill, village, obstreperous canine, or swampy bit. It became obvious, as they plotted his trajectory as a line of pebbles on the map, that the route was circuitous by design. But eventually it had come to an end in some place described by Kikin as reeking of sal ammoniac. There the wagon had been emptied. A different winding and looping course had then been traced to bring Mr. Marsh (and his hidden stowaway) back to the starting-place. Getting the outbound and the inbound data to agree with each other, so that they started and ended in the same places, while not blatantly contradicting the map’s assertions as to the locations of bridges, hills, &c., took twice as long as had
been required for the wagon to actually cover the ground, and devolved into a lengthy progress of disputes about applied Euclidean geometry and the nature of absolute space: arguments that Newton and Leibniz were perhaps a bit too eager to engage in, so that Daniel had to intervene from time to time and ban Metaphysics. The accuracy of Mr. Kikin’s observations was called into question; he defended himself with less and less vehemence as the morning wore on, and in early afternoon could be seen dozing on a piled cargo-net. Factions developed, fissures opened within factions, alliances were forged and betrayed, outrage was manifested against the turncoats, who professed dedication only to higher principles of Truth.

  But at some point it all fell into place and they came up with an answer—Daniel’s gold ring, set down at a particular location on the map—that was obviously right, and made them wonder why they had not seen it right away. Mr. Kikin, who only minutes earlier had been characterized as an innumerate poltroon, under suspicion of having fallen asleep between observations, was now hailed as the best chap ever; toasted; and likened to Vasco da Gama.

  It was Daniel who ruined the celebratory mood by asking the question: “Now what?”

  “If the map is to be trusted,” said Newton, “Jack’s urine-boiling operation is situated on a large estate, high in the North Downs.”

  “As it would have to be,” Orney put in, “or the neighbors would complain of the stink.”

  “Taking into consideration the size of the estate, the openness of the countryside, and the notorious and vicious character of Jack’s gang, I say ’twere foolhardy to approach the place without a company or more of armed men.”

  “Then it is fortunate that you are a member of the Clubb, Sir Isaac,” Saturn said, “for I have seen you summon up just such a force when you were in need.” He was referring to the raid on the boozing-ken in St. Bride’s.

  “The men you saw—and escaped from—on that occasion were Queen’s Messengers,” Newton said, “though of course they are called King’s Messengers as of two weeks ago. They are under the command of Mr. Charles White, who is a loyal minion of Bolingbroke. He aided me then, only as part of leading me into a trap. I do not phant’sy Mr. White will be disposed to aid us now.”

  “But the power of Bolingbroke is destroyed,” said Kikin, “or so people are saying.”

  “Not destroyed, sir,” Newton corrected him, “as long as his man guards the Mint, and the Pyx.”

  “Is the Queen’s—pardon me, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard not garrisoned at the Tower, and charged with guarding the coinage?” Orney inquired.

  “Yes, but they are also under the command of Charles White,” said Newton.

  “After Jack compromised the Pyx in April,” Daniel explained in an aside to Leibniz, “Bolingbroke made hay of it in Parliament, and said that this shewed the Whigs could not be trusted with the Mint. Thus did he gain authority over such matters.”

  “Which he then delegated to White?”

  “Indeed. Now, he is bound to be stripped of that authority when the Hanovers come in and the Whigs take power; but for now he commands both the King’s Messengers and the Black Torrent Guards; and he controls the Mint, and the Pyx.”

  All faces had turned their way. Daniel’s sidebar with Leibniz had become the center of attention. Newton, in particular, was gazing into Daniel’s eyes, and had an expectant look about him.

  “Since the events of a fortnight ago,” Daniel volunteered, “tensions between Whig and Tory, Hanover and Jacobite, have ebbed, but not altogether vanished. The troops of the Whig Association are still bivouacked all round the capital, ready to be called out in the event Bolingbroke attempts to seize power. Perhaps a company of such troops could be detailed to assist us in this matter. I shall make inquiries among men who have a say in such matters.”

  The meeting went on for some little while after that, but in truth Daniel’s utterance had been the end of it. Isaac soon thought up a pretext for leaving. Kikin was gone a few minutes after that, and he took Leibniz with him so that they could transact unspecified Tsar-business en route. Threader and Orney were left to bait each other, as was their practice; though neither of them would dream of admitting to it, they had developed a kind of friendship.

  Daniel and Saturn shared a water-taxi. Long before it reached London, Saturn had cause to regret this, for Daniel—who had been so content at the beginning of the day, sitting on his bale and watching the river flow by—had now become gloomy and brooding even by Saturnine standards. “Isaac will bring this to a head,” Daniel predicted. “Not for him the dodge, the accommodation, the quiet understanding. The armistice we made with Jack in the Black Dogg is forgotten. He must slay the bête noire. Ha! I wonder what he has in mind for me.”

  Saturn had been squinting at some inconsequential thing on the river’s bank, hoping that his fellow-passenger would shut up if ignored long enough. This last remark, however, caused him to turn his head and fix his gaze on Daniel. “Why should he have anything in mind for you?”

  “I am all that stands between him and the Solomonic Gold, or so he imagines.”

  “Is it true?”

  “The Tsar, and various of his minions, such as Monsieurs Kohan and Kikin, would have something to say about it, if Isaac confiscated the stuff,” Daniel allowed, “but they are far away, and not really part of Newton’s world. He will not take such persons into consideration. Me he will hate for having done the wrong thing.”

  “What are the practical consequences of being so hated?” Saturn wondered.

  Daniel thought of Hooke, and how Hooke’s legacy had disappeared. But if that happened after one was dead, did it really matter?

  Saturn went on, “He is civil to you when the Clubb is together—”

  “And I had wondered why, until today,” Daniel said. “Isaac no longer has the King’s Messengers and the Black Torrent Guard at his disposal. Bolingbroke has stripped him of the temporal power he had, or phant’sied he had, a few months ago. To act against Jack the Coiner, Isaac requires that sort of power—and I have got such power, at least indirectly, through Roger.”

  “But why on earth,” asked Saturn, “should you consent to any such thing, if you hold it to be the case that Sir Isaac counts you as a foe, and would sweep you out of his way?”

  “A perfectly sensible question,” said Daniel. “I think it is simple for him, complicated for me, snared as I am in a mare’s nest of compromises and accommodations, which to him would seem like one of those hair-balls we used to pull from cows’ bellies—a nasty mess that ought to be swept away. He’ll not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of Bolingbroke, Charles White, Jack Shaftoe, Leibniz, and—if I’ve been so foolish as to get tangled up with ’em—me. Peter, I cannot summon anything like the fury of Newton, hot as a refiner’s fire. Perhaps I and the others really are nothing more than schlock to be raked off the top of his crucible and dumped on the ground to harden and blacken.”

  Surrey

  BEFORE DAWN, 15 AUGUST 1714

  And armes shal stand on his parte, and thei shal pollute the Sanctuarie of strength, & shal take away the dailie sacrifice, & they shal set up the abominable desolation.

  —DANIEL 11:31

  When ye therefore shal se the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holie place (let him that readeth consider it). Then let them which be in Iudea, flee into the mountaines. Let him who is on the house top, not come downe to fetch anie thing out of his house. And he that is in the field, let not him returne back to fetch his clothes.

  —MATTHEW 24:15–18

  HE HATED TO BE LEADING troops across English soil. Ireland, Belgium, Holland, and France were the natural champs de Mars; armies roamed across and fed off them like sheep on English downs. But to lead a company of armed troopers across an English field made him reconsider his choice of profession.

  That was, as he knew, confused and stupid thinking, for armies were no more natural and no more welcome in Belgium than th
ey were here; but anyway it was how he felt. As always, he would be keeping those feelings to himself.

  They had crossed over to Lambeth on the horse ferry two hours after midnight and marched, or rather walked, south on the Clapham road. The beating tromp of a proper march would be heard for miles across this drowsy landscape, and they did not want alarms to race across the countryside. So they had broken stride, separated into platoons, and made their way southwards, dividing and merging around the odd settlement. Watchmen, insomniacs, and busybodies who came out on to the road to pose troublesome questions, were told to mind their own business, and then asked for directions to Epsom. The strategy was to march faster than Rumor, but if some eager messenger were to get out ahead of them on horseback, they hoped he would spread the lie that they were going generally southwest. Which was just what they did, for some hours; but then, having gathered together in a dell off to the side of the way to eat their rations of biscuit, they executed a sharp change in direction, double-timed four miles eastwards along a road, then took to the fields. Scouts led them up and down gentle slopes that they could feel but not yet see. He thought there was rather more of up, than of down, but then it always felt thus to a tired infantryman. His ears were bad, and so he could not hear the rustling of leaves, but he sensed the presence of trees by their auras of stillness and of scent. These developed into copses that had to be circumvented, lest in walking through them the soldiers disperse, rustle leaves, and pop branches.

  The light sifted down out of the sky like motes and flakes of ash from a burning city. At some point there was suddenly enough of it that he could make sense of the blobs and vestiges that, for the last hour or so, had marred the darkness. He stopped to look round. He had imagined, until now, that they had been marching across open ground, diverting around the occasional wood. But it was not like that. Trees grew more or less densely everywhere, and made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, except where a hill rolled up in the distance. Through the mottled shadow of the wood meandered a pale river: a way paved with grass that was becoming prickly and tinder-like in the summer heat. This chalky soil was as powerless to retain moisture as the fingers of a skeleton to hold money. It set off a hue and cry in his mind: he had marched a company into a high place where ponds and streams would not exist! In a few hours they would be out of water! He silenced these alarms by means of elaborate thinking and exhausting mental effort; ten paces later they started back up again, and reigned over his mind for an age. The thoughts became dry and worn-out, like straw that has been slept on too many times, and finally disintegrated in the first clear light of the morning.