by David Walton
"Don't you want to understand how the bones and muscles interact?"
Sinclair shrugged. "I'll leave that to your expertise. I want to study the quintessence itself."
"You knew we would find quintessence. Even before we left England. How did you know what it was? How did you even know it existed?"
Sinclair tore apart another skull with a splintering of bone. "It's been known for centuries. Aristotle identified the four elementary essences, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, and theorized the existence of Quintessence, the fifth essence, as the aether in which the sun, moon, and stars moved. The medieval alchemists went on to describe what they thought were the three essential ingredients of quintessence— salt, sulfur, and mercury. But I don't think quintessence has any ingredients. I don't think it can be made. It's the prima materia, the original clay of Creation, as old as God himself."
"But what is it? Is it material? Spiritual?"
"That may not be a meaningful distinction."
Parris thought about the debates with Gibbs and Kecilpenny over atomism. "What if everything quintessence can do could be explained as a rearrangement of the smallest, most basic pieces of matter?"
Sinclair raised an eyebrow. "Been listening to John Gibbs lately?"
"I'm theorizing," Parris said. "Consider how the beetle and the tamarins pass through walls. If atoms could be made to move around each other through the void"— he passed the fingers of one hand between the fingers of the other, demonstrating—"then two objects could pass through each other unharmed."
"Why don't the objects fall apart into little pieces, then?"
Parris shrugged. "We don't know what holds them together in the first place. Perhaps instead of being physically connected, they're simply attracted to each other, like a lodestone to iron. Once they pass through, they snap back into place.
"Transmutation can be explained with atoms, too. If the nature of a material is determined by the arrangement of its atoms, like Democritus said, then by rearranging them, you could transmute one material into another."
"It's a theory," Sinclair said. "Untested, but interesting. What about invisibility?"
Parris shrugged. "I don't see how moving atoms around could explain that."
"And what about sharing thoughts between two creatures? Light and thought aren't made of matter, and yet quintessence affects them. But we'll keep your theory in mind."
Sinclair scooped up the pile of pearls he had collected and stood up. "I'll be in the distillery," he said, and strode away, leaving Parris to continue his more careful dissections alone.
Parris had to admit he wasn't learning a whole lot. The ironfish were, for the most part, just fish, with gills, heart, liver, kidney, and intestines just where he would expect to find them. The skull was the only unique part, particularly the thin, forking spiral of bone that held the pearl.
For comparison, he cut up a salted fish head from the galley. The main difference, besides the spiral skull, was the location and manner in which the muscles connected it to the hinge of the jaw. Parris moved the jaw up and down, marveling at how the skeleton transmuted to gray metal and back again. Obviously the fish didn't need to be alive, or even recently dead, for the quintessence to work its magic.
He was getting used to thinking like Sinclair did— always looking for a reason to explain what happened in the world instead of calling it a miracle. Kecilpenny seemed to think that such reasoning left God out of the world, and indeed, Sinclair seemed to have little regard for God. He saw God, if anything, as a rival from whom power had to be wrested. But Parris didn't agree. Perhaps God had made the world as an intricate machine, but that didn't mean he wasn't involved in it. Parris believed that by trying to solve the riddle of sickness and death, he was doing God's work. Had not Christ risen from the dead? Then surely, by trying to preserve life, he was helping to fight that same battle.
A shadow across the sailcloth made him realize he had a visitor. Catherine stood watching him. "May I help?" she said.
Parris held out his notebook. "Definitely. If you make the drawings, you could save me a lot of time."
"No, I mean I want to cut."
He hesitated. Something in him recoiled at the thought of his daughter elbow- deep in fish remains, like when Sinclair had asked him to cut open Chelsey's mistress. She was a woman. It wasn't decent. But he recognized that the feeling had no place out here, thousands of miles from London society.
"Good," he said. "I'll show you how."
SINCLAIR put the tiniest bead of mercury he could extract onto a circle of glass and used tongs to drop a quintessence pearl into it. As before, the mercury erupted in black foam. Unlike before, the pearl didn't glow any brighter. In fact, its light faded to a dull white. Perhaps it had to be removed from the mercury before it would work.
He pulled it out and watched it, giving it time to react, but it lay on the brick furnace, cold and inert. He tried another bead of mercury, but this time only a small amount of foam bubbled up from the contact. A third bead had no effect at all.
What was wrong? The first pearl had blazed like the evening sun and burned Parris's hand. But had it been that bright at first, or not until later? He tried to recall, but the moment was lost in the panic of the heaving ship and shattering glassware. The pearl had been thrown to the deck like everything else, where Parris had spotted its glow and plucked it out of the wash of broken glass and fish guts.
Salt. Of course. They had not yet reached the fresh water then, and the seawater on the deck was salty. The pearl had been lying in the salt water, and the pouch Parris had put it in had been soaked in brine along with everything else. It was the salt that had caused the change.
Sinclair filled a small vial with water, poured in some salt, and stirred. He dropped the pearl inside. Its glow returned and steadily grew brighter, and the vial felt warm. After a count of fifty, he could barely look at it anymore. After a count of one hundred, the water began to boil.
Sinclair plucked out the pearl and doused it with mercury, which again reduced its glow. He let the water cool, sniffed it, and then took a tentative drink. Fresh, or nearly so. The reaction that caused the pearl to glow had used up the salt.
Sinclair dumped it out and rinsed the vial. He had to be careful— he had no desire to attract another leviathan— but he repeated the experi ment, just to make sure he could. Salt increased the glow, while mercury shut it off . Which made sense, considering how mercury had severed the connection between Catherine and the tamarin, while the glowing salt water healed wounds. Salt and mercury. The one increased the effect of quintessence and the other reduced it.
It also explained how the seawater around them now was so fresh and full of quintessence. Somewhere deep in the water there must be a tremendous source of quintessence, or thousands of sources, enough to use all the salt in this part of the ocean. It had apparently reached some sort of equilibrium. New salt water would flow into the area from the east, and fresh water must flow out of the system somewhere to their west— presumably over the edge of the world. The new salt would fuel what ever quintessential reactions were going on deep underwater.
Salt and mercury. That left only one of the three essential alchemical ingredients not yet understood: sulfur. Sinclair spooned a few grains of sublimated sulfur into a vial. The yellow powder dissolved in neither water nor alcohol, so he stirred it into some terebinth, a strong-smelling resin. When he dropped a new pearl into the resulting liquid, there was no obvious change. Perhaps the sulfuric content wasn't strong enough. He sorted through his containers and found some oil of vitriol, a powerful dissolving agent made from sulfur and saltpeter. He'd lost most of his supply in the destruction when the ironfish died, and it would be a laborious process to make more, but this experiment was worth it. Careful not to spill, he measured a tiny amount into a dish and dropped in one of the pearls.
The light vanished. It didn't just fade, like with the mercury. Where the pearl had been before was just . . . a void. A tiny sphere
of black nothingness, as if the pearl had been cut out of the world. So the void Gibbs always talked about existed after all. As Sinclair watched, transfixed, the void began to grow.
It grew to the size of his eye, then his fist. He was fascinated at first, and prodded it with a glass mixing rod. The end of the rod went into the void easily, but it didn't appear again on the other side, just as if he were pushing the rod into a hole. But a hole in what? The universe? He held the rod above the void and dropped it. It fell inside and never returned.
The void grew larger still, until it was the size of his head. He had to sweep things off the worktable to prevent them being swallowed up. He could sense a tremendous depth to it, like looking up at the night sky: an abyss of infinite, empty space. He felt dizzy, as if he might fall into it and keep falling and falling forever. And still it kept growing.
He couldn't stop it. He poured mercury on it, then salt, with no effect. He couldn't push it, move it, cover it, or contain it. Frantic, he started attacking it with what ever he could find: lead, copper, lime, alcohol, quartz, phosphorus, gold. It swallowed all of them without a trace. It grew larger, forcing him back. In moments, he would have to abandon the distillery. And then what? Would it swallow the whole ship? The world?
In a desperate last effort, he grabbed a horn of gunpowder and ran a short fuse. It was enough powder to demolish the distillery. The void was the size of the ship's wheel now, a perfect empty sphere, and the blackness seemed to call to him. He'd spent his whole life running from this. Nonexistence. The end of thought and reason that crouched waiting at the end of every man's life. It was the opposite of quintessence. This was the stuff of death.
Terror gripped him, and he struck at his flint again and again, unable to make a spark. The edges of the void stretched toward him. He pressed himself flat against the brick wall, unable to light the fuse, unable to flee. Frantically feeling around for something else to throw at it, Sinclair found the pale wooden box in his pocket, the beetle's home. It was precious, irreplaceable, but he threw it at the void anyway, desperate to survive.
The box flew into the center of the void, pulling the material world with it like a splash of spilled paint. The void stretched and deformed, rippling like the surface of a pond. It gave a final, violent swell and collapsed with a deafening pop that must been heard all over the ship. The beetle box, unharmed and still closed, landed on the deck.
It was gone. The flint tumbled from Sinclair's hand. He fell to the boards, his heart hammering, the vision of that bottomless void still fixed in his mind. In alchemical philosophy, the three substances symbolized aspects of the nature of man. Salt corresponded to the physical body, mercury to the spirit or will, and sulfur to the soul. Ever since, as a child, he'd watched his father die, he'd understood that his soul— that spark of being and personality that was uniquely Christopher Sinclair— was destined, at his death, for the void. Now he had actually seen it— nonexistence made visible— and it rattled him.
When Parris burst in, Sinclair was still huddled on the floor, shaking. The gunpowder horn, fuse, and flint lay where he'd dropped them. His worktable was split in two pieces, with instruments scattered everywhere. The brick furnace that dominated the room, however, was the most striking casualty. A large piece of it was carved away in a semispherical curve, the brick sheared off as smoothly as polished wood, with no sign of the missing portion. It was simply gone.
Seeing the expression of astonishment on Parris's face, Sinclair started to laugh, and once he started, it was hard to stop.
PARRIS found Gibbs and Kecilpenny in a corner of the orlop deck, soaking hardtack in their beer and then knocking it against the sides of their cups to dislodge the inevitable weevil larvae. Kecilpenny's wife Mary sat nearby with their six- year- old daughter Elizabeth, combing the tangles out of her hair. The little girl was thin and pale. As usual, Gibbs and Kecilpenny were locked in heated debate. Parris traded a glance with Mary, who rolled her eyes.
This time the debate was over whether God had first provided salvation for everyone and then chosen who would believe, or if he had first chosen who would believe and then provided salvation only for those few. Parris waited for them to finish and acknowledge him, but after listening to several volleys, he concluded that they might never finish.
"You were right," he said to Gibbs. As he suspected, this halted the conversation. Gibbs said, "Of course," just as Kecilpenny said, "Not likely."
"About what?" Gibbs said.
"About the atoms and the void. Well, at least about the void." Parris explained what had happened in the distillery, as thoroughly as a shaken Sinclair had been able to recount it to him. "So salt magnifies quintessence, mercury diminishes it, and sulfur seems to, I don't know, reverse it. Turn it inside out. The point is, it's possible for matter to be pushed out of the way and leave a void behind. It confirms Democritus."
"Hardly a rigorous experiment," Kecilpenny said. "Sinclair mixes some liquids and produces a black cloud, which expands and damages his equipment. A slim basis on which to rest a model of the universe, don't you think?"
"There's a solution for that," Gibbs said. "We have more ironfish and we have vitriol. We could reproduce it."
Parris remembered the neatly sculpted brick, the terror in Sinclair's eyes, and the tremor in his voice as he recalled the expanding void. Had the wood of the beetle's box stopped the void's growth? Could they be sure it would do so again?
"Maybe that's not such a good idea," Parris said.
CATHERINE was still dissecting ironfish on the quarterdeck when Matthew found her. His knife wound had completely healed, thanks to the miraculous water. She had to admit it was brave of him to leap to the soldier's defense like he had, but it was also monumentally stupid. If not for the water, Matthew would be dead. It wasn't an instinct she would have expected of Matthew, though. He wasn't a fighter; he was a soft- spoken intellectual. Yet, faced with murder, he had jumped toward danger without a thought. All she had done was scream.
She made another cut in her latest attempt at ironfish dissection. She wasn't very good at it. The fish lay in front of her in a mess of slime and scales, and she couldn't tell one part from the next. She pushed the mess aside and reached for another fish.
"What are you doing?" Matthew said.
"Learning," she said. "Want to help?"
He sat down several paces away, wrinkling his nose. "They smell awful."
"That's why I need to do it now. They won't last much longer."
She cut open the belly, sawing to get through the tough bits. Father's cuts were always straight and precise, but hers were ragged. At least she hadn't sliced through any organs this time.
She pulled the skin back and fixed the corners to the planking with pins. She lifted out one piece at a time, trying to note the shape of each and how it connected to the larger systems.
"How's Chichirico?" Matthew asked. He always wanted to know about her meetings with the tamarin.
"Frustrating," she said. "I can say dozens of his words now, and I can even wave my hands a little to approximate some of the motions that go with them. And he can speak a little English, too— actually better than I can manage his language. But we can't say anything. We can just point to things and name them. Half of the words I know are for kinds of food."
"It's a start."
"It's maddening, because both of us know there's a better way. I know so much about him and his life and his home from when—"
"You're not thinking of trying to bond with him again, are you?"
"Of course not. Though it wouldn't be so bad. We know how to break the bond now."
"We know how to break it once. There's no guarantee it would work again, and if it didn't, you'd be trapped. You'd die."
He was preaching at her. "I know what would happen, Matthew."
"All right. I just worry about you, alone with that thing."
"Well, don't."
Catherine removed most of the organs intact this time, leaving only
the skeleton and the head. She cut through the face, exposing the intricate skull, and showed Matthew where the spark of quintessence was.
"It still works," she said. "Watch."
She closed the jawbone, and the skeleton transformed. The sudden increase in weight yanked it out of her hand and dropped it to the boards with a clunk. She lifted it with difficulty and pried open the jaw, making it light again. Matthew leaned closer to look, his curiosity overcoming his reticence.
"It's this muscle right here that controls it," she said. With her knife, she peeled the muscle away from where it attached to the skull, but the knife slipped, and she snapped off a piece of bone.
She grunted in disgust. "I always make a mistake. I should have cut when it was closed, like this." She slapped the jaw shut, and the skull transformed into metal again.
Matthew's mouth dropped open. "I don't believe it."
"Don't believe what? I just showed you a moment ago."
