Newton's Cannon

by J. Gregory Keyes

  Though lately she wondered if she even cared about them anymore, as they seemed to no longer care for her.

  Fatio probably wished to thank her for her intercession on his behalf with the king. He owed her more than he knew; she had unfortunately attracted the attentions of Louis when he had doubtless forgotten her. The king had heroic appetites in all things, and the Persian elixir had clearly revived many of the king's vital juices. Yet with Maintenon alive, Louis had always been gentlemanly, fatherly even, to Adrienne.

  In their last meeting, she had sensed less paternal sentiments. What attracted him to her she could not imagine. The meaning of beauty was still a mystery to her. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw tresses a single remove from black, skin that bore the dark tint of her Spanish grandmother, eyes like ripe olives. She saw a figure that—even at the age of twenty-two— still retained a sort of adolescent awkwardness. It seemed to her that her nose was too big.

  Nevertheless, the king found her attractive, and though she hated to admit it, a part of her was flattered. After all, he was the king. There had been very short, very guilty moments when she had daydreamed of being his mistress. But being his mistress, she had come to understand, could be more a curse than a blessing.

  This time, there came a knock at her door, and with a sigh, she returned to it. She knew that Fatio was also attracted to her, but she had even less interest in him as a suitor.

  “Yes?” she inquired.

  “Excuse me, Mademoiselle,” Marie d'Alambert, the matron of women at the academy, replied. “Monsieur Fatio de Duillier wishes to speak with you.”

  “Thank you, Madame,” Adrienne answered, and opened her door. “I would be delighted to receive the gentleman.”

  Fatio sipped his coffee with enjoyment. “Dear lady, you have been of incalculable service to me. The king not only received me, but he has provided me with a staff and a budget to pursue my project.”

  “I am delighted to hear that,” Adrienne answered. De Duillier was not a bad sort—somewhat lacking in social graces, perhaps, but a fine mathematician. Her investigations into his work showed that he had been a student of the great Isaac Newton in his youth. And de Duillier seemed untroubled by using her skills with books to his advantage. This allowed her to use the king's library without suspicion. In fact, de Duillier called on her services so frequently, she was virtually his personal secretary. This permitted her to observe lectures from distinguished scholars, even to attend meetings, all without raising the hackles of those around her. She had only to pretend to find it all so dreary …

  Of course, it also meant keeping de Duillier's hopes up, something it rankled her to do but which, fortunately, was not so very difficult.

  “Though I do not understand your work, it seems fascinating,” she told him.

  “You could come to understand it, my dear, if you wished,” Fatio assured her. “You are not an unintelligent woman. In fact, you have more intelligence than many members of the academy.”

  Adrienne raised her hand to her mouth. “Please, sir, do not say such things,” she gasped. For Madame d'Alambert sat no more than twenty paces away and she could transmit gossip like a plague.

  “Ah, I have embarrassed you, and I did not mean to,” Fatio apologized. “But I have not come here merely to thank you and to flatter you. Rather, I have come to offer you a position.”

  “Monsieur?”

  “I have been furnished with funds to hire a staff. I need someone to correspond with my colleagues through the aetherschreibers. Have you ever worked with such devices?”

  “Yes,” Adrienne said, blinking. “I was Madame de Main-tenon's amanuensis.”

  “And you have some facility with English?”

  “English? Why, yes, some.”

  “I offer you the post. Will you join my staff?”

  “This seems very odd,” Adrienne told him. “Won't my lack of knowledge concerning your project prevent me from performing satisfactorily?”

  Fatio shook his head. “You need not understand what you send—in fact, in some ways it is better that you do not.”

  “Well, then.” She sighed, trying to sound reluctant. “I will try to accede to your expectations. But the instant I fail to give satisfaction …”

  Fatio stood, taking her hand. “Mademoiselle, I feel certain that you will never fail to give satisfaction. If you would come by my laboratory in the morning—perhaps at ten o'clock? We can begin this business.”

  “Very good,” she replied. She ached to ask exactly what that business was, for she did not know what project he had presented to the king.

  “Tomorrow then,” Adrienne said politely, but inside she was crowing. For a woman of noble birth there were only two options in life: marriage or the Church. And yet, in Adrienne's mind was a faint idea of a third path, a narrow, strange course that had beckoned to her since childhood. Now, finally, she saw how she might at last set her feet on it.

  She could not let her triumph show, however. The instant Fatio was gone, she caused her face to fall, and she sighed heavily.

  From where she sat, Madame d'Alambert chuckled. “You should have seen that coming, dear. The one thing they did not teach you at Saint Cyr was the nature of men.”

  The next day Adrienne made her way to Fatio's workrooms. She found him bustling among two desks layered in papers and books and a worktable scattered with beakers, crucibles, and piping. Fatio greeted her warmly and escorted her toward a pale young man of about twenty whose body was lean and attractive, but whose eyes glittered like blue ice. She did not care for those eyes; they seemed to see nothing when they looked at her.

  He favored her—or perhaps Fatio—with a narrow, passionless grin when they approached.

  “Monsieur,” Fatio said to the other man, “I would like you to meet the lady de Montchevreuil, of the school of Saint Cyr. She was instrumental in our acquisition of the king's favor.”

  “Enchanted, Mademoiselle,” the young man replied. His voice was soft and melodious. Though she could not identify his accent, she felt certain that it was Teutonic—perhaps Swedish.

  “And, Mademoiselle, this is my assistant, Gustavus von Trecht.”

  Adrienne curtsied. “Guten Tag, Herr Trecht,” she said.

  Gustavus merely smiled and shook his head. “I am actually a Livonian and speak only rudimentary German, Mademoiselle.”

  Adrienne was trying to remember where Livonia was—north, she remembered, either a Swedish or a Russian possession. She wondered what business this strange, exotic man had in Paris. She would learn, but she would do so without asking.

  “Mademoiselle will be assisting us,” Fatio explained. “She is well acquainted with the library and with the operation of the aetherschreiber.”

  “I am confident she will prove invaluable,” Gustavus remarked, and Adrienne was almost certain she detected skepticism in his tone.

  “And what is your area of expertise, sir?” she asked Gustavus.

  “Calculus is my principal interest,” Gustavus answered, “especially its applications in altering the affines of ferments. I am also greatly interested in the motions of the heavenly bodies.”

  “Monsieur, you already have me quite at a loss,” Adrienne replied, but what actually struck her was how closely that paralleled her own interests. “Perhaps some day you could explain— in the simplest terms, of course—precisely what that means.”

  “Of course, Mademoiselle,” he replied, but his tone held out little hope.

  “It is to do with changing things, my dear,” Fatio gallantly supplied. “And with bringing them together or pushing them apart.”

  “Oh. Like the aetherschreiber?”

  Fatio's eyes danced with admiration. “Yes, yes, how astute. You are certain you have not read upon this subject?”

  “Oh, no,” Adrienne lied. “I only meant—well, the aetherschreiber brings words from one machine to the next, does it not?”

  Fatio nodded. “Yes. I will show you.”

/>   He led her across the room to an uncluttered table on which three aetherschreibers sat. At first glance they were a confusing melange of gears and wires. But most of the apparent complexity was in the clockwork mechanism that drove the writing arm that protruded over the small surface on which the paper was placed. When the schreiber was receiving correspondence, the gears whirred and wire tightened and loosened, as the arm wrote whatever the machine was being sent.

  “This is the heart of it, here,” Fatio said, jabbing his finger past the mechanical devices to the center of the machine, where a torus of silvery metal surrounded a crystal plate. The metal was faintly luminescent. “Are you familiar with music, Adrienne?”

  “Yes,” she replied, noticing that he had suddenly used her Christian name. “I play the harpsichord and the flute passably, and I was taught to read music.”

  “Then perhaps I can explain by analogy,” Fatio said. “That crystal there is the chime. In a sense, it can be made to vibrate like the string of a harpsichord—the vibrations are aetheric rather than in the air—but don't let me confuse you. Just think of it vibrating like a harpsichord string.”

  “Very well.”

  “Now imagine that the note is, say, middle C. If you had a harp nearby, which also has a string tuned to middle C, what might you observe when you play that note on your harpsichord?”

  “The C string on the harp would sound,” she said promptly. That was the most elementary aspect of musical theory, one that a well-educated lady could be expected to know.

  “Yes, yes!” Fatio exclaimed. “And so it is with the aetherschreiber. The mate to this machine has a crystal tuned in precisely the same way as this one, so that when this one vibrates, its mate does, too. That is why we must have three schreibers here—we are corresponding with three other scholars.”

  “But, Monsieur,” Adrienne said, “a string can be tuned to different notes. Why not these devices?”

  “Ah, well, there the analogy breaks down, Mademoiselle. Just rest assured that aetherschreibers work only in pairs and cannot be ‘retuned,’ as you put it.”

  “What a pity. Then we would only need one of them.”

  “Yes, but think of this: Since no machine other than its mate can receive what is written on this one, it is a perfect device for relaying secret information. The letters cannot fail to arrive at their destination; they cannot be intercepted or read by the enemies of France.” He lowered his voice. “The mates of two of these, you see, are in England. We pass messages with no chance of discovery.”

  “I see,” Adrienne said, nodding. “Then it is better this way.”

  “Oh, indeed. At least for our purposes.”

  “Well,” Adrienne replied, “if it suits your purposes, my dear Fatio, I am quite content.”

  Fatio beamed and then shrugged. “It is the wonderful fact about science that we can make the world as we will it.”

  Adrienne nodded, and from the corner of her eye she caught the expression on the face of Gustavus. For an instant, the polite, slightly bored façade had slipped aside and behind was a ferocious scowl of contempt—even hatred. It was gone so quickly that she was uncertain she had even seen it.

  4.

  An Ingenious Device

  “I'm not certain what this has to do with aetherschreibers,” John Collins said, dubiously eyeing the odd apparatus that Ben was tinkering with.

  “Perhaps nothing,” Ben murmured, checking the thing he had just finished for flaws. “Though I used part of an old one to make this.”

  “What is it?”

  “If God is kind, it is a philosopher's stone.”

  “If God is kind, perhaps he will cure you from having been struck too many times on the skull.”

  Looking back at his device, he certainly had to admit that it did not resemble a philosopher's stone. What he had built looked more like a cross between a fishing rod and a coffee grinder, with a set of crystal goblets thrown in for good measure.

  John sighed. “I'm a degree or two better than you at mathematics, but I have to admit, I don't see any connection between what we proved out on paper and this thing.”

  “Let's see if it will work,” Ben replied. “Then we can sort out later why it did. If it doesn't—”

  “Then the same,” John said. “Though it might be easier to explain to your brother why what he wants simply cannot be done.”

  “Explain to the storm why it cannot cross the harbor, and you would enjoy greater success,” Ben replied. “And yet, it is often the obstacle that invents the circumvention.”

  “What?”

  “I mean that James might be right. He forced me to consider the impossible, and I may now admit that what he asks might be done.”

  “Oh, not you, too!” John exclaimed.

  Ben shrugged. “Forty years ago no one would have believed in flameless lamps or adamantium armor or blood-boiling guns— and then Newton invented the philosopher's mercury. Let's just see.”

  John held up his palms in surrender. “Start it going, then.”

  “Help me carry it over there by the water.”

  The two boys were at the edge of the millpond, facing the leaden expanse of the Charles River. The air was tinged with a brackish smell and the tang of the copper works' furnaces some quarter of a mile to their left. Hammers and hoarse men's voices carried from the nearby shipyard. They carried the machine to the pond. Ben then tilted down the long copper tube until it was just in contact with the surface of the water. He wet his fingers.

  “Turn the crank,” he told John.

  “Oh, of course, I turn the crank,” his friend muttered.

  The crank moved a shaft, on which were mounted eight glass hemispheres of varying sizes. Ben touched his wet finger to one, and a clear tone sounded—the same sort of sound one got from a crystal goblet by stroking its rim.

  Ben watched the water expectantly, counting to one hundred and twenty. Then he touched a different hemisphere, and a higher note sounded. He held it for the same length of time.

  “I'm impressed,” John said, sarcastically.

  Ben pursed his lips and tried a third note. He had been holding the third note for one minute when he heard John gasp. Looking at the water, he laughed excitedly. John cranked with a will now, and the note sang out. When John tired of cranking they switched places. They finally stopped, both breathing heavily, to admire their work.

  “I don't believe it, Ben,” John said, wiping tears of laughter and triumph from his eyes.

  Around the copper rod, for a space of nearly three feet, the millpond had frozen solid.

  * * *

  “I still wonder how your experiment can be applied to changing an aetherschreiber's mate,” John said, after the glow of their victory had begun to dim. Having left the device in the millpond, they now sat nearby on a small jetty, legs dangling over the water. Ben absently watched a boat cross the river, sail burnished copper by sunset.

  “To be honest, I'm not sure,” Ben answered, “but I feel that this is progress in the right direction.”

  “What you built is a miniature fervefactum, but reversed. It turned water into ice.”

  “I didn't finish the experiment,” Ben said. “Let's try it again.”

  The two of them almost ran back to Ben's device. The mass of ice had begun to thaw, but a fair-sized chunk still clung around the rod. Once again, John cranked the handle as Ben sounded the notes. The fourth did nothing, but the fifth caused the rod to glow an eerie pink color. When he sounded the sixth note, the result was spectacular: The ice hissed and exploded, stinging them with minute shards. John cried out and let go of the crank. They both stared at the unmistakable plumes of steam rising from the end of the rod.

  “I call it a harmonicum,” Ben stated.

  John wiped his face and then turned to Ben angrily. “What if our blood had boiled, Ben Franklin, you blockhead? If one of us had been near the end of the rod, the water in our bodies would have gone straight to steam, just as the ice did. What if th
e area affected had been greater?”

  “But it wasn't,” Ben pointed out reasonably.

  “But it could have been,” John retorted, though Ben could tell he was already trying to sort out particulars of what had just happened. “So now it is a fervefactum,” he went on in calmer tones. “But I've never heard of one that also freezes water.”

  Ben nodded. “I must admit that this experiment turned out somewhat different—better—than I expected. But let's sort it out.”

  John quirked his mouth a bit, then, almost shyly, said, “You are something of a scientific man—more so than me.”

  “But your skill in mathematics is greater,” Ben pointed out. “Without your help, I wouldn't have guessed this could be done.” He paused a bit awkwardly and then said softly, “I need your help, John.”

  John's face retained a dubious cast. “Explain it then,” he sighed, “until I see what my figuring did.”

  Ben shrugged. “We know that matter is composed of four elements, do we not?”

  “Damnatum, lux, phlegm, and gas,” John agreed. “I didn't say to treat me as an imbecile.”

  Ben nodded. “I'm sorry. Tell me what you do understand about matter.”

  “I have read the Principia, and Optics, and Robert Boyle's book on the foundations of alchemy,” John said, somewhat pompously. “I know that all substances are formed by combinations of the four elements in various proportions and configurations.”

  “And ferments?”

  John nodded. “Ferments are the patterns or molds in the aether that matter resides in.”

  “A simplistic accounting, but true.”

  “Don't tell me you understand all there is to know of aetherics,” John retorted.

  “No, you're right, I don't,” Ben admitted. “And I didn't mean to slight your explanation. It is aether that gives matter form, and the analogy of a mold isn't a bad one. But these ‘molds’ are built of affinities, like gravity, electromagnetism, sociability.”