Newton's Cannon

by J. Gregory Keyes

  That nagged something in Ben's head, but he could not remember what.

  “It's the object's dimensions,” Stirling offered.

  “Possible.” Maclaurin shrugged. “Though how can something ha' a dimension of zero? In any event, I'm goin' up t' the observatory. I want t' ken if that thing is really out there or if this is all some part of Sir Isaac's illness. Heath, would you assist?”

  “Of course. Stirling?”

  The astronomer shook his head. “I need to consider this. Perhaps if we tell Halley—”

  “Halley? Are you daft?”

  “No one knows more about comets and their kin,” Stirling replied stubbornly.

  “James, I do' na' ha' the power to forbid you, but I beg you not to tell Halley of this until we ha' better proof and can substantiate that Sir Isaac made the discovery. One thing we do' na' need in the present climate is another priority dispute.”

  “Halley would never—”

  “I know that, but Sir Isaac must na' get it into his head that even the possibility exists.”

  “Consider, also,” Voltaire inserted, “that since this discovery represents a potential danger to the Crown, this information may actually aid Halley and his cronies in impounding the orrery—and perhaps the affinascope, too.”

  “Pardon me,” Vasilisa said, her voice rising from the back of the room, “but isn't it more important that Earth is soon to be bombarded by a comet? I for one would like to contact my embassy and warn them.”

  “Warn them?” Heath said. “Warn them of what? Such bodies strike the Earth every day.”

  “This one appears considerably larger than most, Heath.”

  “But of course the simulacrum is exaggerated in size.”

  “Yes, still, it must be quite large. Suppose it were a few hundred thousand feet in diameter? Such a mass, with the velocity it has—”

  “I know that. But we know that only the tiniest part of our planet is inhabited. The odds that this comet will strike anyplace of import are passing small.”

  “That may be,” Maclaurin interceded, “and the orrery is too crude a device to show us where it will strike. But a few hours with the affinascope, and a bit of time calculating, and I'm sure I can discover where it will fall to within a gross region, anyway. Shouldn't you wait at least for that, Vasilisa, to avoid alarming your people?”

  Vasilisa, for the first time since Ben had met her, looked somewhat dour. “I will wait a day, no longer. Colin, this comet will fall in less than a week!”

  “I ken that. Heath is probably right, however. This is likely t' be an event of stupendous scientific consequence, but of little danger, save to perhaps some unlucky savages in South America or the Islands of Solomon.”

  Vasilisa seemed unconvinced, though she finally nodded. “Very well,” she replied. “I'm going for a walk.”

  “Vasilisa, please—”

  “Ben will accompany me,” she snapped, “to assure that I do not act the spy.”

  Maclaurin sighed. “Do' na' be absurd, Vasilisa. Of course we trust you.”

  “Of course. Nevertheless, Benjamin, if you would not mind?”

  To Ben's relief, Vasilisa didn't walk even generally west—toward the foreign embassies—but turned pointedly east and south into the city.

  For five minutes or so, neither of them said anything.

  “Take my arm, Ben,” Vasilisa requested softly. He offered it, though it felt stiff, tightened by the knotted muscles in his chest and stomach.

  “Do you have any questions about last night, Ben?” Vasilisa asked him.

  “Why did it happen, Mrs. Karevna?” he asked.

  “I think you can safely call me Vasilisa, now,” she said. “It happened, Ben, because I like you, and because we had been drinking, and because I like that sort of thing.”

  “Why me, then? Why not Voltaire or some other, some older—”

  “Is that your worry, your age? Ben, in my country men younger than you fight in the army. In yours, too, I think.” Ahead, through the lane, the blue expanse of the Thames winked a million sunglitter eyes at them. “That wasn't fair, was it?” Vasilisa sighed. “The fact is you are young, though not so much younger than me as you might think. Voltaire is considerably schooled in the ways of love. That is attractive at times, but it also makes him … um, perfunctory. You weren't perfunctory, Ben.”

  “Or very skilled, either. You're saying you made love to me because I am a novice?”

  “Look at it this way, dear. You must learn from someone. And I enjoy teaching sometimes. Also—” He felt her stiffen a bit. “Let's just say that I am choosy. I have had very bad luck with men in the past, Ben.”

  “Your scars—”

  “I will not speak of that,” she said, and for an instant she seemed icy cold.

  “So you thought I was harmless, too,” Ben murmured.

  “Harmless? No. No man is harmless. Gentle, caring—yes. And if I can teach you to make love in that way—teach you to love women without hurting them—then both of our sexes gain. And when you find your true love—” But then she must have felt him tremble. She stopped walking. They had reached the Grand Terrace on the river. Below them the Thames extended, at least a hundred small craft bobbing on its surface.

  “No, I am not she,” she said softly to his unspoken thought, and kissed him on the lips. He knew his face showed his anguish. He wanted to beg her to love him.

  “You take it all too seriously,” she said. “One day you will look back and remember how much fun it was.”

  “Actually, that's part of my concern,” Ben replied, trying on a little smile. “I remember too little of it.”

  She gave his arm a playful squeeze. “Well, if you can adopt a more casual attitude, perhaps we can see what we can do about that. But if I find that I'm making you more unhappy …

  “Come, let's walk up the terrace,” she said.

  They had come onto the terrace near the mouth of the Fleet Canal. Facing the river, the walls and towers of the Temple college rose on their left, a little city all its own. To their right, along the curve of the river stood the ancient sentinel of the Tower, where Ben had first set foot in London. The terrace was a broad quay that ran more than a mile, punctuated by stairs descending to the water where boats might dock. The stone-paved terrace itself was crowded with the gaily dressed well-to-do on outings, with fishermen and gypsies, with beggars and hawkers. A single breath tasted salt from the distant sea, fish spoiling in the afternoon sun, tobacco, pastries, shellfish, and the underlying stench of sewage.

  They strolled toward the Tower, though Ben guessed they had no destination.

  “That was clever of you, deciphering Newton's riddle.”

  “It was simple enough. Any one of you would have figured it out if I hadn't.”

  “That's entirely beside the point. You have many talents, Ben. Have you thought of attending college?”

  Ben grinned wryly. “There is only the matter of money,” he said. “My father wished that I should attend a college back in America, but that was never to be, I think.”

  “You don't talk much about your family in America.”

  Ben heaved a sigh. “I try not to think of them.”

  “Were they so bad?”

  “No, I love them very much. But I betrayed them, abandoned them.”

  “It seems to me you had good reason.”

  “I can put any face on it I want, but when my life was threatened, I fled.”

  “It must be more complicated than you paint it. Before this man threatened your life—before your brother was killed— didn't you already wish your liberty?”

  When he didn't respond she continued. “It was that way with me. I was born in a place where no woman could ever be more than a wife and mother. I always wanted more—to see the world, to learn things. But it was impossible.”

  “Impossible? But here you are.”

  “Yes, here I am,” she mused. “And yet it was impossible. I had to die before my life cou
ld begin.”

  “Die? What does that mean, Vasilisa?”

  “It isn't important—a story for another time. I, too, left much behind me to be here, but this is where people like you and I must be. We are not like ordinary people, any more than Newton is, or Maclaurin.” She chuckled. “Oh, I don't mean to say that I'm a genius like they are—”

  “I do know what you mean. I would have never found what I wanted in Boston.”

  “Have you found it here?”

  “Yes. Yes, but still …”

  “Still what?”

  “I put them out of my mind. It's as if the ship that brought me from America was taking me across the river of the dead. That's how I tried to think of it—as an irrevocable decision. Onboard ship when I stood looking at the sea, I only looked east. I begged the captain to let me look at his charts, and I explored all the world on them, from India to Cathay—but the maps of America I left furled.” He shook his head. “Mostly I looked at the charts of the coastline of England, at—” He stopped abruptly.

  “What is it?” Vasilisa asked. “Are you faint?”

  “Not faint,” he croaked, “but I have to sit down.”

  “Why?”

  He shook free of her and found an empty bench, sank onto it. He looked up at the sky, which suddenly seemed too close, more menacing than the sword of Damocles.

  “Those other numbers,” he said. “I know what they are.”

  “What?”

  “London. In the new system, the latitude and the longitude.” He looked around him, as if in a dream. A dandy swaggered by, sword wagging like a tail. At the base of the steps, a little boy in a blue coat and tricorn exhorted his toy boat to fire its cannon.

  “What are you saying? Are you saying that the comet will strike London?”

  “That's what Newton was trying to tell us. Oh, God, that's why he went on about Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “How can it be?”

  “It can't be. It's just numbers, just an equation, just philosophical nonsense.” He closed his eyes, trying to think, trying to find some other answer.

  When he opened them, Vasilisa was gone, vanished into the crowd. Of course she had gone, to warn her countrymen. That was where her real allegiance was. Newton's words came back to him then, and he understood two things with perfect clarity. The first was that the old man really was mad, mad beyond anyone's worst nightmares. The second was that he could trust none of the Newtonians—not Maclaurin, not Vasilisa, no one. He was alone.

  18.

  The Elixir of Life

  Summer marched into October undeterred by the usual logic of the seasons as Adrienne studied the notebook, such a Mediterranean heat settling upon the land as normally confined itself to August and the south. When she went out, she was accosted by sunlight that crushed her as if it had weight.

  Her rooms were hot but not intolerable, a dark cave where she pored over the notebook Torcy had given her. When reading it, she took no notice of the heat, so cold and passionless was its tale of horror. It was the story of a young servant named Martin. She read it with a sick fascination; a year before she would not have been able to read it at all. As all reading should, it brought questions to mind.

  “What can you tell me of Mehemet Mira Bey?” Adrienne asked Crecy one day. They sat beneath an awning on the roof of the chateau, each holding a cup of orange sherbet that melted much faster than they could finish it.

  “I saw him,” Crecy remarked, “several times, in fact. He called upon my mistress La Sery at least once. She was intrigued by his foreignness, at first. She found him disappointing, ultimately.”

  “What was he like?”

  Crecy shrugged. “APersian. He spoke little French and dressed abominably. He was a fraud, you know.”

  “What do you mean? The king received him as an ambassador.”

  Crecy tipped her sherbet bowl and chased a dollop with her spoon. “The king was dying,” she explained. “I heard it told that his ministers—especially Pontchartrain—wished to give their dying king one last chance to play the grand monarch.”

  “You were there?”

  “It was the most incredible thing I ever saw. Of course, I was eighteen and easily impressed. The whole court was resplendent, but the king had every diamond in the treasury sewn onto his coat. He could barely walk in it.”

  “All that for a fraud?”

  “All of that for the king. That was when France still loved him.”

  Adrienne recalled Torcy's tortured face when he spoke of the king's earlier brush with death. Yes, it would have been better if he had died then.

  “Who was Monsieur Bey really, then?”

  “He really was a Persian, if that's what you mean. Why are you interested in events five years gone?”

  “This Persian gave the king an elixir of life.”

  Crecy smiled. “I remember. That and a lot of worthless baubles. Pontchartrain and the others might have done a better job of making him seem like the real representative of an Oriental potentate, I think. But the elixir worked, I suppose, so clearly the Persian was more than what he seemed.”

  “Clearly. What became of him?”

  “He stayed around the court, taking every scrap of food, wine, and courtesy he could get. He remained for the most part of a year before he was finally deported.” She grinned. “Clearly the hospitality here was better than what he was used to at home. The best part was the souvenir he took with him.”

  “That being?”

  “When his things were loaded upon his ship, the inspectors found one rather large chest he would not allow them to open. He screeched and caterwauled that it contained books sacred to his prophet, Mohammed, and that infidels might not lay eyes upon them.”

  Adrienne leaned forward with interest. “What manner of books?”

  Crecy's eyes sparkled devilishly.

  “It was but a single tome entitled, the duchess d'Espinay.”

  “What?” Adrienne asked.

  “It was a duchess. It seems she had become pregnant by the ambassador and inclined toward life in a more Oriental clime. Really! Madame de Maintenon slighted your education if she never told you that story!” She laughed, but stopped when she saw that Adrienne was not amused. “What is it?”

  “The man sounds as if he was nothing but a swindler, a charlatan, a kidnapper. And yet he brought the elixir of life.”

  “Have some imagination, Adrienne. If he could steal a duchess, he could steal an elixir from some great Egyptian magus, could he not?”

  “I suppose.”

  Crecy shrugged. “Perhaps the elixir itself was fraudulent. Perhaps the king recovered on his own.”

  “No, the elixir was real,” Adrienne answered. “Some of the philosophers tried it on someone else before they tried it on the king.”

  “Naturally. It might have been poison.”

  “Yes. They gave it to a young man who was dying of consumption. It saved him.”

  “I see.” Crecy's eyes narrowed a bit.

  “Not only that, but as it turned out, it conferred other lasting benefits. When he was kicked by a horse onto a sharp stake, it impaled him, but he did not die.”

  “This is more fascinating than my story. Go on.”

  “This young man was of mean birth. The physicians gave it out that he had died, and they took him to the laboratories of the Academy of Sciences. There they tried to kill him in every way imaginable. Though many of their methods reduced him to a wretched state, he never died.”

  “What became of him?”

  “I suppose he is there yet. He went mad, and the physicians lost interest in him.”

  “How do you know this?” Crecy asked, wide-eyed.

  Adrienne lifted the notebook from her skirt and handed it across the table.

  “Torcy gave me this,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “The notes of one of the physicians I just spoke of, and of an alchemist who worked with him. Notes of their experimentation upon ‘Mar
tin.’ ”

  “Why in the name of God did Torcy give you that?”

  “Because I am to kill the king for him,” Adrienne said simply. “No, do not act surprised, Crecy, please.”

  “I won't. I wasn't sure he had yet approached you.”

  “So Torcy told the truth. It was the Korai who engineered the attack upon the barge.”

  “It was. I was there to see to it that you survived, Adrienne.”

  “And to cause the explosion.”

  “That, too. You amaze me.”

  “Why? Because I can see what even a child can see?”

  Crecy shook her head. “No. Everyone else believed that it was the Englishman and his magic musket. Even the Englishman believed it.”

  “Yes, until Nicolas killed him.”

  Crecy actually gasped and touched her hand to her breast. “Incredible,” she murmured.

  “Ridiculous. That was the easiest part. Once I suspected that the Englishman was a ruse, I asked discreet questions of the stablemaster. Torcy had told me that the murderer was killed by a guard of the Hundred Swiss: Nicolas knew where the Englishman would go because he was part of the plot. Admit it.”

  “I am sworn not to speak of that, and yet the theory seems quite logical.”

  “I am sure it does. How long has Nicolas been one of the Korai?”

  “He is not one of us. Only a woman can be one of us. But his mother …”

  “No, don't tell me. Castries?”

  “Yes. He is a bastard; she went to Florence to have him. Few know. His father, d'Artagnan, raised him.”

  “Well, then, I wonder if his mother knows he is also a spy for Torcy?”

  Crecy frowned and was silent for a moment, and then she said, “He is, isn't he? But I didn't see it either. I doubt that Castries knows.”

  “Never fear,” Adrienne remarked, “I shall ask him.”

  * * *

  Nicolas made no attempt to deny the accusation. Instead, he bowed his head, removed his hat, and lowered himself onto the bench. A faint wind lisped through the high leaves of the trees, but here, among their straight boles, it was still.

  “You must understand,” he said very quietly, “that I did what I had to do.”