The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  Then he glanced up, expecting to see the hem of the sixty-seven-year-old queen's ball gown hovering just above the tabletop. Instead, the garment—miles of gathered silk, made dangerous by an underlying framework of bone and steel—whacked him in the face, and stripped off his spectacles, as the Electress of Hanover made a smart about-face.

  "It took me a week to grind these lenses." Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leaned sideways to rake his spectacles up off the floor. He had to keep his head upright to prevent his biggest and best wig from sliding off his bald, sweaty scalp. This gave him a crick in the neck, however enabled him to get a charming view of muscular white calves pumping in and out as his patroness stormed down the mid-line of the banquet-table.

  "This is news," she complained, "I could get it from any of my Privy Councillors. From you I expect better: gossip, or philosophy."

  Leibniz got to his feet, and took part of his chair with him; his vacant scabbard had got locked up in a bit of Barock wood-carving. The sound of a blade whipping through the air made him cringe and duck. "Almost got it!" Sophie exclaimed, fascinatedly.

  "Gossip…I am trying to think of some gossip. Er, your daughter's palace in Berlin continues to shape up splendidly. The courtiers there are all in an uproar."

  "The same uproar as last week, or a different one?"

  "With every day that passes, with every new statue and fresco that is added to the Charlottenburg, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the awkward—the embarrassing—the monstrous fact that Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg and probable future King of Prussia, is in love with your daughter."

  "Why should that be the cause of an uproar?"

  "Because they are married to each other. It is viewed as bestial—perverse."

  "Really it is because of what the courtiers all believe about me."

  "That you planted Sophie Charlotte there to control Frederick?"

  "Mmmm."

  "Well, did you?"

  "If I did, it obviously worked, and that is what the courtiers cannot abide," Sophie answered vaguely. She now whirled again, her formidable Hem shredding a few centerpiece snapdragons, and ran down the table with silk ribbons trailing behind her like battle-streamers. She made another vicious cut with the sword. Candle-tops scattered and came to rest in splashes of their own wax, spinning out threads of smoke. "I could finish this in an instant if this verdammt burning bush were not in my way," she said meditatively, pointing the sword at a candelabra that had been hammered together out of several hundred pounds of Harz silver by artisans with a lot of time on their hands.

  A few servants, who had to this point kept as far as they could from the Electress, peeled their backs off the wall of the dining-hall and scuttled inwards toward the offending fixture, knees flexed and hands raised. Sophie ignored them and tilted the rapier this way and that, letting the light of the surviving candles trickle up and down the blade. "No wonder you could not wrest it out of its scabbard," she said, "it was rusted in place, wasn't it?"

  "…"

  "What if I had to call upon you to defend my realms, Doctor?"

  "Swordsmen are gettable. I could fashion a hell of a siege-engine, or make myself useful in some other wise."

  "Make yourself useful now! I do not need to hear gossip from Berlin. My daughter sends me more than I need, and little Princess Caroline has been posting me the most excellent letters—your doing?"

  "I have taken some interest in her education since the untimely death of her mother. Sophie Charlotte has become the next best thing, however, and I sense I am needed less and less."

  "Ach, now I can move, but I cannot see," complained Sophie, squinting up towards a fresco shrouded by poor light and ancient congealed smoke. "I can't tell the painted-on Furies from the living bat."

  "I believe those would be harpies, your majesty."

  "I will show you what a harpy is, if you do not begin doing your job!"

  "Right…well, Louis XIV has a mickle abscess on his neck. That's not very good, is it? Right, then…the French will now recognize William as King of England, and all of the titles he has bestowed. So, to mention a few examples, John Churchill is now Earl of Marlborough, the Duchess d'Arcachon is now also the Duchess of Qwghlm."

  "Arcachon-Qwghlm…yes…we have heard of her," Sophie announced, making a momentous decision.

  "She'll be overjoyed, your Electoral Highness, that you recognize her existence. For she respects no monarch in this world more than your Electoral Highness."

  "What about her own liege-lords, Louis and William? Does she not respect them?" inquired her Electoral Highness.

  "Er…protocol, I'm sure, forbids the Duchess from preferring one over the other…besides which, both of them are, sorry to say, men."

  "I see what you mean. Does this double Duchess have a Christian name?"

  "Eliza."

  "Children? Other than—unless I'm mistaken—that energetic little bastard who is always following my banker around."

  "Two surviving children thus far: Adelaide, four, and Louis, going on two; the latter is the personal unification of the Houses of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and, if he survives his father, will become lord of a hyphenated Duchy, like Orange-Nassau or Brandenburg-Prussia."

  "Arcachon-Qwghlm doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I'm afraid. What are her pastimes?"

  "Natural Philosophy, amazingly complex financial machinations, and the abolition of slavery."

  "White, or all of it?"

  "I believe she means to begin with white, and then leverage legal precedents thus obtained to extend it to all."

  "Scarcely matters to us," muttered Sophie, "we have no blackamoors hereabouts, and no fleet with which to go and get them. But it seems a bit, I don't know, quixotic."

  Leibniz said nothing.

  "Quixotic is fine!" Sophie allowed, "we enjoy a dash of quixotic, as long as it is not boring. She is never boring about it, is she?"

  "If you take her aside and really press her on it, she can go on at some length about the evils of slavery," Leibniz conceded, "but otherwise she is the very soul of discretion, and never heard to utter more than a few words on the topic in polite company."

  "Where is she?"

  "She spends most of her time in London lately, looking after an unfathomably lengthy and tedious Judicial Proceeding involving one Abigail Frome, a white slave, but maintains residences in St. Malo, Versailles, Leipzig, Paris, and of course the Castle on Outer Qwghlm."

  "We would meet her. We are grateful that she took Princess Caroline under her wing when the poor child was forgotten and alone. We share her passion for Natural Philosophy. We may require someone of her talents to assist us in the management of our ship Minerva and to ensure that the profits are not illicitly diverted to the coffers of our partner, Kottakkal, the Pirate-Queen of Malabar."

  "I am afraid you quite lost me there, your Electoral Highness!"

  "Do try harder to keep up, Doctor Leibniz, I hired you because people said you were clever."

  "It shan't happen again, your Electoral Highness…er…you were on to something about a ship?"

  "Never mind the ship! The most important thing is that this Eliza shall bring us the most excellent gossip from London; gossip that it is our duty to hear, as we or our heirs are likely one day to be crowned monarchs of England. And so if Eliza comes to this part of the world to pay a call on her bastard…"

  "I'll see to it that she puts in an appearance here, your Electoral Highness."

  "Done! What is next on the list?"

  "Whitehall Palace burnt down."

  "The whole thing? I was led to believe it was quite…rambling."

  "According to the few people remaining in London who will still write to me, it is all smoking ruins."

  "Ve must speak Englisch ven ve speak of Englant!" the Electress decreed. "I never get to practice othervise."

  "Right. In English, then: As soon as the war ended, the Whigs were cast out—"

  "The Yuncto?"

 
; "Very good, your majesty, you have it right, the Yuncto is cast into the outer darkness, the Tories are ascendant."

  "How fortunate for William," Sophie said drily. "Just when he needs a new palace built, the king-loving party gets its hands on the treasury."

  "Which happens to be completely empty at the moment, but that problem is being worked on by clever fellows, fear not."

  "Now the conversation really is about to become very boring indeed," Sophie reflected, "as we are on to revenue and taxes. The bat will go to sleep up there, snuggled up next to a naiad or a dryad, and not come awake until the middle of dinner."

  "Everything said of the Tsar would suggest he'll not be troubled by a bat. You could have wolves and bears in here and he would not look twice."

  "I am not trying to make Peter feel at home," Sophie said frostily, "but to show him that, somewhere between Berlin and here, he at last crossed the frontier of civilization. And one lovely thing about civilization is philosophers capable of making interesting conversation."

  "Right. So we are finished with gossip, then, and—"

  "—and on to the latest developments in philosophy—Natural, or Unnatural, as you prefer. Stand and deliver, Doctor Leibniz! Whatever's the matter? Bat got your tongue?"

  "The English savants are all busy toiling at practical matters—Mints, Banks, Cathedrals, Annuities. The French are all under the shadow, if not the actual boot, of the Inquisition. Nothing of interest has been heard out of Spain since they kicked out the Jews and the Moors two hundred years ago. So when you inquire after Philosophy, Majesty, you inquire—and I do not wish to seem self-important when I say this—after me."

  "Am I not allowed to inquire after my friend in my house?"

  "Of course, I just…well…never mind. I have been corresponding with those Bernoulli brothers rather a lot. Nothing important. You know I have always been fascinated with symbols and characters. The calculus has brought us new ideas for which we want new symbols. For differentiation, I like a small letter d, and for integration, a sort of elongated S. That's how the Bernoullis have been doing it, and it suits them well. But there is another Swiss mathematician, a fellow who was once viewed as quite a promising young savant-in-the-making, by the name of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier."

  "That one who saved William of Orange from a kidnap-plot?" asked Sophie, planting the tip of Leibniz's rapier in the tabletop and flexing it absent-mindedly.

  "The same. He and the Bernoullis have been corresponding."

  "But you said, very meaningfully, that this fellow was once viewed as promising."

  "His work the last few years has been laughable. He is not right in his head, or so it would seem."

  "I thought it was Newton who had gone out of his mind."

  "I am coming to Newton. He—Fatio, that is—and the Bernoullis have, 'twould seem, been carrying on one of these slow-smoldering disputes. They send him a letter using the little d and the stretched-out S, and, tit-for-tat, he sends them one back using a little dot for differentiation and some sort of abominable "Q"-notation for integration. This is how Newton writes calculus. It is a sort of shin-kicking contest that has been going on for years. Well, a few months ago it blew up. Fatio published an article saying some very uncomplimentary things about your humble and obedient servant right here, and attributing the calculus to Newton. Then the Bernoullis cooked up a mathematicks problem and began sending it round to the Continental mathematicians to see if any of them could solve it. None of them could—"

  "Not even you!?"

  "Of course I could solve it, it was just a calculus problem and it had only one purpose, which was to separate the men—which is to say, those who understood the calculus—from the boys. They then sent the damned thing to Newton, who worked it out in a few hours."

  "Oh! So he is not out of his mind!"

  "For all I know, Majesty, he may be entirely out of his mind—the point is, he is still without rival, when it comes to mathematicks. And now, thanks to those mischievous Bernoullis, he believes that I and all the other Continental mathematicians do conspire against him."

  "I thought you were going to talk philosophy now, not gossip."

  Leibniz inhaled to say something, stopped, and sighed it all out. Then he did it again. Then a third time. Fortuitously, the bat chose this moment to come out of hiding. Sophie was not slow to jerk the rapier free from the tabletop and return to the hunt. After a bit of random flitting here and there—for the bat seemed to phant'sy that the keening tip of the rapier was some sort of blindingly fast insect—it settled into a hunting pattern, swinging around the long perimeter of the dining room, but judiciously avoiding the corners, plotting therefore a roughly elliptical orbit. The table was planted across one end of the room and so the bat flew across it twice on each revolution. Sophie's strategy, then, was to plant herself on the table just where she predicted the bat would over-fly it as it came in from its long patrol of the room. Missing it there, she could then rush down to the other end to take another hack at it when it rebounded from the near wall and passed over again, outward-bound.

  "Your majesty's situation vis-à-vis the bat is very like that of a terrestrial astronomer when the earth's orbit—a segment of which is here represented by the table—is intersected by that of a comet, crossing over twice, once inbound towards Sol, and once outbound." Leibniz nodded significantly at the dazzling blaze of the candelabra, which had been set down on the floor between the table and the wall.

  "Less sarcasm, more philosophy."

  "As you know, the library is being moved here—"

  "I just thought, what's the use of having a library if I must journey to Wolfenbüttel to use it? My husband never cared much for books, but now that he spends all his time in bed—"

  "I do not criticize, Majesty. On the contrary, it has been good to withdraw from day-to-day management of the collection, and turn my attention to the library's true purpose."

  "Now you really have got me confused."

  "The mind cannot work with things themselves. I see the bat over yonder, my mind is aware of it, but my mind does not manipulate the bat directly. Instead my mind is (I suppose) working with a symbolic representation of the bat that exists inside my head. I can do things to that symbol—such as imagining the bat dead—without affecting the real bat itself."

  "All right, so thinking is manipulation of symbols in the head, I have heard this from you before."

  "A library is a sort of catalog or warehouse of all that men think about—so by cataloging a library I can make a more or less orderly and comprehensive list of all the symbols that sapient beings carry around in their heads. But rather than trying to dissect brains and ransack the actual gray matter for those symbols—rather than use the same sorts of symbolic representations that the brain manipulates—I simply assign a prime number to each. Numbers have the advantage that they may be manipulated and processed with the aid of machines—"

  "Oh, it's that project again. Why don't you stick to monads? Monads are a perfectly lovely subject and you don't need machines to process them."

  "I am sticking to monads, Majesty, I work on the monadology every day. But I am also working on this other thing—"

  "You used to call it something else, didn't you? This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money' project," said Sophie distractedly, and made a rush down the table.

  Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. "The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money," he said with great dignity, "is that it requires some money every year, and I hope it shall go on forever. Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn't work because of sabotage, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises.
They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines."

  "Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England. First William, and then Princess Anne (who would be Queen Anne by that point) and then that little Duke of Gloucester, and any other children she might have in the meantime. I am sixty-seven years old. You need to seek support elsewhere—eeeYAHH! There you are! Invade my dining room, will you! Doctor Leibniz, how do you like my cooking?"

  The sword was no longer moving. Leibniz ventured closer, keeping his eyes fixed on Sophie's powdered face, then traced a line from her soft, plump white shoulder, down the sleeve of her dress, across a rubble of jewelry encrusting her wrist and fingers, down the rusty rapier-blade, to a Dresden china plate where a deceased bat lay, wings arranged artfully as if it had been put there as a garnish by a French chef. "The comet has come to earth!" she proclaimed.

  "Oh, how very poetickal you are, Mummy!" exclaimed a voice from behind Leibniz.

  Leibniz turned around to face the door and discovered a large bloke, nearing forty, but with the face and manner of a somewhat younger man. George Louis, or Georg Ludwig as he was called in the vernacular, seemed to have only just realized that his mother was standing on a table. He blinked slowly a few times, froglike.

  "The comet is approaching, er, the tree," he said uncomfortably.

  "The tree!? Comets don't approach trees!"

  "He has been ensnared, as it were, by the net cast by the falcon."

  "Falcons don't cast nets," Leibniz blurted, unable to stop himself. The look he got in return from George Louis made him wish that he hadn't handed his only means of self-defense to Sophie.

  "What does it matter, since it's all nonsense to begin with!? Once you've made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all consistent?"