The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  Isaac had not failed to notice him. He was seated in a garden-chaise with his feet up, and he was wrapped in blankets, which did not prevent him from shivering all the time, though the day was only beginning to turn cool. He looked near death: even gaunter than usual, and sunk in on himself, and so devoid of color that one might suppose the blood had been drawn out of his veins and replaced with quicksilver.

  "Daniel, it is well that your friend and mine Mr. John Locke foretold your coming, or I should take it the wrong way."

  "How so, Isaac?"

  "I have got into an odd turn of mind of late. The world seemeth benign enough, as I sit here in a bright garden among friends. But when night falls, as it does earlier and earlier, darkness stretches over my mind, and I phant'sy long menacing shadows cast by everyone and everything I saw during the day-time, which shades are interconnected in plots and conspiracies."

  "Everyone, save mad-men in Bedlam, has a Plot. Everyone belongs to a conspiracy or two. What is the Royal Society, besides a conspiracy? I shall not claim I am innocent. But the conspiracy I represent wants only good things for you."

  "I shall be the judge of that! How could you possibly know what is good for me?"

  "If you could see yourself as I see you, Isaac, you would confess in an instant that I know much more of it than you do. How long has it been since you have slept?"

  "Five nights I have sat up by the fire, tending a work."

  "The Great Work?"

  "You have known me almost as long as I have known myself, Daniel, why do you waste breath asking? For you know that I will not answer you straight out. And you already know the answer. So your question is idle twice over."

  "Five nights…then I have come haply on this day, as I may be a match for you, Isaac, if you have gone a week without sleep beforehand."

  "In what wise do you seek to be my match, Daniel?"

  Behind him Masham started to say something and was quickly shushed. Daniel turned halfway round and discovered that Fatio had followed him as far as Locke's study; having now been discovered, he emerged into the garden, moving in an odd diagonal gait like a startled dog, acknowledging Daniel with a little bow. But he would not look Daniel in the eye.

  "In what wise? Not as Fatio would be—this was settled between you and me on Whitsunday of the year 1662, unless I read the signs wrong." A slow assenting blink of Newton's bloodshot eyes told him he hadn't. "And certainly not as Leibniz seeks to be."

  Fatio scoffed. "We have read Mr. Leibniz's letter—which is nothing more than a butcherous attack on my theory of gravitation!"

  "If Leibniz cuts down your theory of gravitation, Monsieur Fatio, it only means he has the courage and forthrightness to set down in ink what Huygens and Halley and Hooke and Wren have all said amongst themselves ever since you presented it to the Royal Society. And I mean to emulate Leibniz now. Stay, Fatio, no show of indignation, please, I cannot abide it. I see three faces in this garden: Fatio, who has just been attacked, and is ready to respond very hotly; Newton, who is strangely ambivalent, as if he agrees with me in secret; Locke, who perhaps wishes I had never come to disturb your colloquium. But disturb it I have, and now I shall disturb it some more. For as I reflect on my career I believe I could have accomplished more if I had not cared so much what people thought of me. Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors. I have been a mediocre Natural Philosopher not because I was stupid but because I was, after a fashion, cowardly. Today I shall try boldness for once, and be a better Natural Philosopher for it, and probably get you all hating me by the time I am done. Then it's off to Boston on the next boat. Therefore, Fatio, do not defend your theory or attack that of Leibniz with some tedious outburst, but, prithee, shut up and hate me instead. Isaac, this is what I mean when I say that I shall try to be a match for you today. If you hate me when I leave, then let that be a measure of my success."

  "This is a harsh method," Isaac reflected, shivering even more violently now. "But I cannot deny that in my career scientific disputes have always been coupled with the most intense personal enmity. And I am not of a mood to be tender and conciliatory just now. So, have at it. I may understand you better as an enemy than as a friend."

  "When I saw you here in this rain of dead petals I was put in mind of the spring of 1666 when I came up to Woolsthorpe and saw you in a flurry of apple-blossoms. Do you recollect that day?"

  "Of course."

  "I had just ridden up from Epsom where Hooke and Wilkins and I had been holding a colloquium much like this one. The overriding subject of it could be called ‘Life: what it is, and is not.' Now I come here and find you studying what I will summarize as ‘God: what god-head is and is not.' Have I said it well?"

  "This way of saying it is very easily misunderstood," Locke demurred.

  "Stay, John," Newton commanded, "Daniel misunderstands nothing."

  "Thank you, Isaac," Daniel said. "If what you say is true, 'tis so only in that I have strived for so many years to follow your tortuous windings through these matters. It has been no easy task. Bible-stuff has always been intermingled with your philosophical work, and I could never understand why, in our chambers, star-catalogs were so promiscuously thrown together with Hebraic scriptures, occult treatises on the philosophic mercury interleaved with diagrams of new telescopes, et cetera. But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book."

  "Why is it, Daniel, that you understand all of these matters with such clarity, and yet will not join with us? It seems to me as if some friend of Galileo had looked through his telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter making their circuits and yet refused to believe his own eyes, and taken the dead view of the Papists instead."

  "Isaac, I have done nothing but ask myself that for sixteen years."

  "You refer to what happened in 1677."

  "What did happen in 1677, anyway?" Fatio inquired. "Everyone wants to know."

  "Leibniz made his second visit to England. He went incognito to Cambridge, for no purpose other than to have a conversation with Isaac. Which did occur. But as they punted down the Cam, discoursing, I came upon papers in our chambers proving that Isaac had fallen into Arianism, which I saw as an unspeakable heresy. I burned those papers, and with them many of Isaac's alchemical notes and books—for to me they were all of a piece. To which crime I now confess freely, and offer my repentance, and ask for forgiveness."

  "You speak as if you never expect to see me again!" Newton exclaimed, with tears in his eyes. "I perceived your shame, and knew your heart, and forgave you long ago, Daniel."

  "I know it."

  "Most of what you burned anyway was twaddle. You'll see none of it here. Yet here I am infinitely closer to the Grand Magisterium."

  "I know you have torn Alchemy down to its foundations, and built it back up, and are recording it in a book called Praxis, which will be to Alchemy what Principia Mathematica was to physics. And perhaps 'tis hoped that in combination with some new reading of scriptures from Fatio, here, and new philosophy from Locke, there, and a reworking of Christianity on Arian principles from your disciples scattered round England, it shall all come together in some grand unifying discourse, a kind of scientific apocalypse in which the whole universe, and all history, shall be made clear as distilled water."

  "You mock us, by making it simple."

  "It is not simple, then? 'Twill not all happen at once, in a flash?"

  "It is not for us to say in advance the manner of how it might happen."

  "Yet you have been awake five nights tending some work that you'll not entrust to any assistant. You suffer obvious ill effects of quicksilver poisoning. You will not admit it is the Great Work, but what else could it be? And I c
annot read your mind, Isaac, or ask you to divulge secrets, but I can see plainly enough that it failed. And if it was meant to combine with Fatio's theory of gravity, then that has failed as well."

  "Before you mock our work, sir, prithee tell us in what way Leibniz's has succeeded," Fatio demanded.

  "His differs from yours in that it does not need to succeed—only not to fail. And I take that to be a more sound way of doing science than your approach, which is all-or-nothing. For as I grow older and see new men coming into the Royal Society I perceive that though Natural Philosophy may have begun with our generation, it need not end with us. Nor am I alone in thinking so." Daniel now lifted up a sheet he had taken from Locke's study, and read: "It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him."

  "What sniveling fool penned that nonsense?" Fatio demanded.

  "Mr. John Locke. And the ink is still damp on it," Daniel replied.

  "I am quite sure he did not mean it to apply to Isaac Newton!" Fatio returned, jarred, but recovering quickly.

  "I believe what you really mean to say is, ‘Newton and Fatio,' " Daniel said.

  Newton and Fatio looked at each other, and Daniel looked at them. Fatio had a kind of tender, insinuating look on his face, and Daniel got the idea it was very far from the first time he had shown that sort of face to Newton, and that Fatio was used to seeing a tender and loving face looking back his way. But not today. Newton was staring at Fatio not with love, but with avid curiosity, as if suddenly perceiving what had escaped his notice before. Daniel had no love for Fatio, but this made him so uneasy that he lost the courage he'd maintained up until now.

  "I wish to tell you a story about Robert Hooke," he announced.

  This was one of the few things that could get Isaac's attention away from his minute, penetrating study of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. He turned his eyes toward Daniel, who went on: "Before I came up to Woolsthorpe, Isaac, I did an experiment with him. We set up a scale above a well, and weighed the same object at the level of the ground, and again three hundred feet below it, to see if there was a difference. For you see, Hooke had an inkling of the inverse-square law."

  Isaac did a little calculation in his head and said, "There was no observable difference."

  "Just so. Hooke was let down, of course, but as we drove home he conceived a refinement of the experiment, which has never been carried out. But the point of the story is that our colloquium at Epsom succeeded at much, but failed in that, its most ambitious effort. Did it mean the end of Natural Philosophy? No. The end of Hooke's career, or Wilkins's, or mine? By no means. On the contrary, it led straight on to a flourishing of all those things. Which has led me to mistrust apocalyptic readings of Science or of Society. I have not been quick to learn that lesson, either. For example, I phant'sied that the Glorious Revolution would change all, but now I see that Cavaliers and Roundheads have only been replaced by Tories and Whigs, and the war goes on."

  "Am I to gather that you intend to draw some parallel between the failures of Hooke, and the prospects for our collaboration?" Fatio said, with forced hilarity. "I supposed you were here as a cat's paw for Leibniz! He at least is a worthy opponent! He came out with calculus after Isaac and I did so, but at least he knows what it is! Hooke is nothing more than a sooty, bloody empiricist!"

  "I am here as a cat's paw for Isaac Newton, my friend of thirty years. I fear for him because I perceive that he has an idea of what Natural Philosophy is, and of what he is, that is false. He is so far above all of the rest of us that he has come to believe that he carries the burden of some millennial destiny, and that he must bring Natural Philosophy to some ultimate omega-point or be a failure. He has been encouraged to believe this by certain sycophantic admirers."

  "You want him back! You want Isaac to revoke the decision he made on Whitsunday of 1662!"

  "No. I want him to repeat the same decision in respect of you, Fatio. He withdrew from me in '62. From Leibniz in '77. Now it is '93, and your card has been dealt."

  "I know all about what happened in '62 and '77. Isaac told me. But with us it is a different case. With us there is a real, lasting, mutual affection."

  "Nicolas, that much is true," Isaac said. "But you misunderstand. Daniel is working his way round towards another matter."

  "What could Mr. Waterhouse possibly say that would be of interest? He is an amanuensis, a secretary."

  "Do not make any more such offending statements about Daniel," Isaac commanded. "He has done us the favor, Nicolas, of thinking about our future. Which is a matter we did not consider at all, so confident were we. But Daniel is right. We have failed. Our line was not long enough to fathom the depths on which we had ventured. It will be necessary to regroup, to start over again. We shall require time and money and leisure."

  "Isaac," Daniel said, "two or three years ago, before you set out on the Great Work that has just come to an end, you made inquiries, with Pepys and Roger Comstock and others, concerning the possibility of a position in London. Since then Trinity College has only become more impoverished—your need of a reliable income cannot have been met from that quarter. Now I have come to offer you the Mint."

  Everyone now observed a prayerful silence for a minute or two as Isaac Newton considered it.

  "In normal circumstances the position would be without interest," he said, "but Comstock has sent adumbrations my way concerning a great Recoinage."

  "It is intended that Recoinage would be your Great Work. Which I do not say in jest. For perhaps that is indeed the only way that the Philosophic Mercury could ever be recovered."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Hooke could not find the inverse-square law in a well because there was too little of what he was looking for, for his equipment to find it. You could not extract the Philosophic Mercury from gold, perhaps for a like reason."

  "You hypothesize that my methods are sound but that there is too little of it in my sample. I disprove your hypothesis by reminding you that my methods are those of the ancients, who, as I believe, did not fail to get what they sought."

  "Would you number King Solomon among them?"

  "You know as well as I do that he is regarded as the father of Alchemists."

  "If King Solomon had been in command of the Grand Magisterium, he would have used it. His wealth was fabled. He must have gathered together a moiety of the world's supply of gold, and extracted the Philosophic Mercury from it."

  "Many adepts believe that he did just that."

  "It would follow that ordinary gold, such as you employ in your Great Work, was depleted, while King Solomon's gold was enriched, in the quintessence."

  "Again, this supposition is commonplace."

  "Comes now word that King Solomon's Gold was found by a Viceroy of Mexico who then lost it to the King of the Vagabonds—who absconded with it to India, and there dispersed it, commingling it with the ordinary gold that circulates all over the world as money."

  "That is what we are told."

  "Short of conquering the whole Orient and collecting all its riches by tyrannical confiscations, there is then no way to recover what the Vagabond King has pissed away—unless you could, by some magical incantation, cause the gold to come from every corner of the earth to London, and pass through the crucibles of the Tower."

  Fatio stepped forward, almost blocking the sight-line between Daniel and Isaac. "Now that you have got down to business, you offer up a most reasonable and attractive proposition," he proclaimed. "Prithee explain what you meant earlier."

  "I shall explain it, Nicolas," Isaac said. "Daniel has done all the explaining we may justly require of him. He means—but is unwilling to say—that your theory of gravity is nonsense and that it has weakened my position vis-à-vis Leibniz. He probably refers also to your claim
to be a co-inventor of the calculus, which is, I am sorry to say, perfectly false. Perhaps he has also in mind your pretensions of becoming a medical doctor and curing thousands with a new patent-medicine, and your fanciful interpretations of the Bible, and strange prophecies drawn therefrom."

  "But he knows nothing of these!"

  "But I do, Fatio."

  "What are you saying? I confess the Bible is easier to interpret than you, Isaac."

  "On the contrary, I feel that I am all too transparent, for Daniel, and God only knows how many others, have seen through me."

  "Not that many—yet," Daniel said quietly.

  "The nub of it is this: I have let my affection for you cloud my judgment," Isaac said. "I have given much greater credit to your work, Nicolas, than I ever should have, and it has led me down a cul-de-sac and caused me to waste years, and ruin my health. Thank you, Daniel, for telling me this forthrightly. Mr. Locke, you have worked in a gentle way to bring about this epiphany, and I apologize for thinking poorly of you and accusing you of plotting against me. Nicolas, come to London and share lodgings with me and be my help-meet as I move forward in the Great Work."

  "I am not willing to be less than your equal partner."

  "But you cannot ever be my equal partner. Only Leibniz—"

  "Then go and make love to Leibniz!" Fatio cried. He stood poised where he was for a few moments as if he could not believe he'd said it—waiting, Daniel thought, for Newton to retract everything he'd said. But Isaac Newton was long past being able to change his mind. Fatio was left with only one thing he could possibly do: He ran away.

  Once Fatio had passed out of view, Daniel began to hear a distant moaning or wailing. He assumed that he was hearing Fatio crying out in grief. But it grew louder. He feared for a moment that Fatio might be coming back toward him with a weapon drawn.

  "Daniel!" said Locke sharply.

  Locke had gotten to his feet and was standing over Newton, blocking Daniel's view. Locke had begun his career as a physician and seemed to have reverted to his old form now; with one hand he was throwing off the mass of blankets in which Newton had been wrapped up this whole while, with the other, he was reaching for Newton's throat to check his pulse. Daniel rushed toward them, fearing that Isaac had suffered a stroke, or an apoplectic fit. But Newton knocked Locke's hand away from his neck with a shout of "Murder! Murder!"