The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "George, my firstborn, my pride, my love. What are you trying to say to us?" Sophie asked indulgently.

  "That the Tsar is approaching the Herrenhausen!"

  "So the Tsar is the comet?"

  "Of course!"

  "We were using ‘comet' to mean this bat."

  The corners of George's mouth now drew back and downwards so far that his lips ceased to exist and the slit between them took on the appearance of a garrotte. He threw a dark look at Leibniz, blaming him for something.

  "Who is the falcon, your royal highness?" Leibniz asked him.

  "Your fawning disciple—and my little sister—Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, Dr. Leibniz."

  "Splendid! So the metaphor of the net was to say that she had ensnared Peter by her charm and wiles."

  "He passed through Berlin like a cannonball—didn't even slow down—she had to hunt him down like a fox at Koppenbrügge—"

  "Do you mean, Sophie Charlotte was like a fox, in that she was so clever to hunt down the cannonball? Or that the Tsar was foxlike in his evasions?" Sophie asked patiently.

  "I mean they are coming right now."

  "Go to your father's bedchamber. Send the embalmers away," Sophie commanded, meaning the physicians. "Get your father to understand that someone very tall, and frightfully important, may swim into his vision, and that he should try to mumble a pleasantry or two if he is feeling up to it."

  "Yes, Mummy," said the obedient son. With a parting bow for his mother, and a momentary eye-narrowing at Leibniz, George Louis took his leave.

  It felt now as if Sophie and the Doctor ought to say something concerning George Louis, but Sophie very deliberately didn't and Leibniz easily decided to follow her lead. There was a brief upwelling of chaos and hilarity as Sophie was brought down to floor level again (she threatened to jump, and probably could have), but word had reached them that the Tsar of All the Russias had entered the building, preceded by Sophie Charlotte, who was essentially dragging him in by the ear. If this had been an official state visit they'd have had plenty of time to get ready. As matters stood, Peter was traveling incognito and so they were going to behave more or less as if he were a country cousin who had decided to drop by for dinner.

  Clanking noises and guttural accents approached, and the avian trilling of Sophie Charlotte's laughter! A couple of ladies-in-waiting darted in on Sophie to tuck in loose hair-strands and yank down on her bodice; she counted to ten and slapped them away. Behind her one servant, moving in a posture of awful dignity, bore the bat-plate out of the room while another replaced it with a clean one. Still others made frenetic repairs to the candelabra and the centerpiece. "Doctor! Your sword!" Sophie exclaimed. She snatched the moist weapon up off the table and, in an absent-minded way, made for Leibniz as if to impale him. Leibniz side-stepped politely, took the weapon by its hilt, and then embarked upon the project of trying to get it back into its scabbard. The tip had to be introduced into an opening that was too small for Leibniz to even see, inasmuch as he had pocketed his spectacles, and he was loath to touch the bat-smeared metal with the fingers of his other hand. So when the Tsar's advance-guard rounded the corner into the room, he was still standing directly before the entrance holding it up in a posture that was ambiguous. The guards, who were not paid to be meditative, could not really discern, at a moment's glance, whether he was yanking the blade out, or shoving it in.

  Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades—quite a bit shinier than his—triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant—possibly because he had gone slack with terror—the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz's arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going wuv, wuv, wuv. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face—clean-shaven except for a dark moustache—still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte's arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. "I would borrow three large wheels!"

  "What for?" Sophie Charlotte inquired, as if she and everyone else in the room did not already know.

  "Merely breaking all of the bones in their bodies does not cause sufficient pain to punish them for this crime. But if they are first tied to a wheel, which is continually rotated, the shifting of their weight causes the broken bone-ends to jar and grind against each other—"

  "We have this form of punishment, too," Sophie Charlotte said. "But," she added diplomatically, "we have not actually employed it recently, and our punishment-wheels are in storage. Mother, may I introduce Mr. Romanov. Mr. Romanov is from Muscovy and is traveling to Holland to visit the ship-yards. He is very very very interested in ships."

  "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Romanov," said Sophie, allowing the giant Tsar to spring forward and kiss her hand. "Did my daughter show you my gardens and greenhouses as you drove in?"

  "She told me of them. You walk in them."

  "I do walk in them, Mr. Romanov, for hours and hours every day—it is how I preserve my health—and I am terribly afraid that if these three wonderful gentlemen were to be mounted on wheels and broken and rotated for days and days screaming with the torments of the damned as they slowly died, that it would quite spoil my recreations."

  Peter looked somewhat baffled. "I am merely trying to—"

  "I know what you are trying to do, Mr. Romanov, and it is so very dear of you."

  "He is worried about Raskolniki," Sophie Charlotte said helpfully.

  "As very well he should be!" Sophie returned without hesitation.

  "They believe that I am the Antichrist," Peter said sheepishly.

  "I can assure you that Doctor Leibniz is in no way offended to have been mistaken for a Raskolniki, are you, Doctor?"

  "In a strange way I am almost honored, your majesty."

  "There, you see?"

  But Peter, upon hearing Leibniz's name, had turned questioningly to Sophie Charlotte and said something no one could quite make out—except Sophie Charlotte. She got a look of joyous surprise on her face, causing every male heart in the room to stop beating for ten seconds. "Why, yes, Mr. Romanov, it is the same fellow! Your memory is quite excellent!" Then, for the benefit of everyone else, she continued, "This is indeed the same Dr. Leibniz who gave me the tooth."

  A ripple of mis-translation and conjecture spread outwards through the carnival of Prussians, Muscovites, Tatars, Cossacks, dwarves, Dutchmen, Orthodox priests, et cetera
, who had piled up behind them. Sophie Charlotte clapped her hands. "Bring out the tooth of the Leviathan! Or whatever it was."

  "Some sort of giant elephant, I rather think, but with plenty of hair on it," Leibniz put in.

  "I have seen such beasts frozen in the ice," said Peter Romanov. "They are bigger than elephants."

  George Louis had returned from his errand and had been skirting the back of the crowd trying to find a way in without getting into a shoving-match with any Cossacks. The crowd parted to admit one of Sophie Charlotte's footmen, who glided in carrying a tray with a velvet pillow on it, and on the pillow, a rock still nestled in torn-up wrapping paper. George Louis followed the lead and took up an appropriate position next to his mother, and got an expression on his face that said, I am ready to be introduced and to have a jolly good time playing along with this incognito business, but everyone else—especially Peter—was gazing at the rock instead. It was pinkish-brown, and about the size of a melon, but sort of Gibraltar-shaped, with a flat, angled grinding-surface on the top and a system of rootlike legs below. There was a lot of rude behavior going on in the outer fringes of Peter's retinue, as diverse furry muscular steppe-dwellers jostled for position. They seemed to have convinced themselves that "Tooth of the Leviathan" was a flowery monicker for some very large diamond. Men who were eager to lay eyes on the treasure collided with others who already had, and were recoiling in dismay. Meanwhile Leibniz had been nudged up to the front by Sophie, who did not believe in breaking her minions on the wheel, but was not above delivering swift jabs to the arse and kidney with her bejewelled knuckles. Leibniz bellied up to the tooth and caught the edge of the underlying tray, which was almost too heavy for the servant to hold up. Sophie Charlotte's heavenly face was beaming at him. Next to it was the Tsar's watch-chain. Leibniz began to tilt his head back, and did not stop until he was gazing at the undersurface of Peter's chin. His wig slipped and Sophie cuffed him in the back of the head to set it aright, and said: "The Doctor is hard at work on a wonderful project in Natural Philosophy, which my son does not understand, but which should produce miraculous results, provided some wise monarch can only supply him with an infinite amount of money."

  At this Leibniz naturally winced, and George Louis chuckled. But Tsar Peter thought about it very gravely, as if an infinite amount of money was a routine sum for him to bandy about in his budget-meetings.

  MAY 1700

  DAPPA EXCHANGED MALABAR-WORDS with three black sailors who had just hauled in the sounding-lead, then turned toward the poop deck and gave van Hoek a certain look. The captain stretched out a mangled hand towards the bow, then let it fall. A pair of Filipino sailors swung mauls, dislodging a pair of chocks, and the head of the ship pitched upward slightly as it was relieved of the weight of the anchors. Their chains rumbled through hawse-holes for a moment, making a sound like Leviathan clearing its throat. Then chains gave way to soft cables of manila that slithered and hissed across the deck for quite a few moments, gathering force, until everyone abovedecks began to doubt if the Malabari sailors with the sounding-lead had really gotten it right. But then the life seemed to go out of those cables. They coasted to a stop, and the Filipinos went to work recovering the slack. The sails had all been struck, but the wind that they had ridden in from the Sea of Japan found purchase on Minerva's hull and nudged her forward into the long shadow of a snow-topped mountain, creating the curious impression that the sun was setting in the east.

  Jack, Vrej Esphahnian, and Padraig Tallow were up around the foremast, stowing the few paltry sails that van Hoek had used to bring Minerva into this cove. Jack and Vrej were up in the ratlines while Padraig, who had lost his left leg during a corsair-attack around Hainan Island, was stomping around on a hand-carved peg-leg of jacaranda wood, humming to himself and pulling on ropes as necessary. These men were all shareholders in the enterprise, and normally did not do sailors' work. But today most of the ship's complement was down on the gundeck. The ship had developed a ponderous side-to-side roll that was obvious to Jack, high up in the ratlines. This told him, without looking, that all of the cannons had been run out as far as they could go, and were protruding from their gunports, giving Minerva the appearance of a hedgehog. The Japanese lurking in the forests that lined this cove would not have to consult their books of rangaku, Dutch Learning, to understand the message.

  Gabriel Goto was standing at the bow in a bright kimono. Gazing down on him from above, Jack saw his shoulders soften and his head bow. The ronin had shaved, cut, greased, and knotted his grizzled hair into a configuration so peculiar that it would have gotten him burnt at the stake, or at best beaten to a pulp, in most jurisdictions; but here it was apparently as de rigueur as wigs at Versailles. Gabriel Goto did not have to worry about looking strange in Western eyes ever again, once he set foot on yonder shore. Because either the whole Transaction was a trap, and he would be crucified on the spot (the customary greeting for Portuguese missionaries), or else it was on the up-and-up, and he would become a Japanese in good standing once again—a Samurai looking after some scrap of mining country in the north, and keeping his religious opinions—if he still had any—to himself.

  "His journey is over," Enoch Root observed, when Jack descended to the upperdeck. "Yours is about halfway along, I should say."

  "Would that it were," Jack said. "Van Hoek tells me that we have another forty degrees to travel eastwards, before we reach the Antipode of London. After all these years I am not even close to halfway."

  "That is only one way to measure it," Enoch said. He had been crouched on the deck, arranging some mysterious instruments and substances in a black chest. Now he stood up and nodded at some particular feature that his eyes had marked on the shore. "You might instead say that no place is less accessible from London, than this."

  "Or that no place is harder to reach from here than London," Jack said. "I take your point."

  They stood and looked at Japan for a while. Jack had not been sure what to expect. Nothing would have surprised him: castles floating in air, two-headed swordsmen, demons enthroned on tops of volcanoes. They'd finally reached one of those places that were not shown on the Doctor's maps in Hanover, save as vague sketchings of shorelines with nothing in back of them. If phantasms existed anywhere on the globe, they'd be here. But Jack saw none. Now that they had been here long enough to begin picking out details, Jack could perceive buildings here and there. They had an Oriental look about them, to be sure. But Minerva had been trading in East Asia for two years, as slow progress was being made towards today's Transaction, and they had seen Chinese roofs in many places: Manila, Macao, Shanghai, even Batavia. These Japanese buildings seemed much the same. Smoke came from their chimneys as it did in every other place where weather was cold. Hilltops had watch-towers on them, coastlines had piers, fishing-boats and fishnets were drawn up on beaches just as they had been at the foot of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. A few Japanese crones were out on a rock with baskets, gathering seaweed, but Jack had seen Japanese Christians doing the same thing near Manila. There were no demons and no phantasms.

  "In truth? I feel as if I've already been round the world," Jack said. "The only thing separating me from London is Mexico, which I have seen on maps, and know to be but a narrow isthmus."

  "Don't forget the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans," Enoch said. He began closing up the several latches and locks of the little chest.

  "'Tis naught but water, and we have a ship," Jack scoffed. Every Filipino within earshot crossed himself, taking Jack's words as a more or less direct request for God to strike Jack, and anyone near him, dead. "In truth, I was considering this very subject the night before we departed Queena-Kootah, when we were all convened, there, at the new Bomb and Grapnel, at the foot of Eliza Peak, enjoying the balmy breezes and drinking toasts to Jeronimo, Yevgeny, Nasr al-Ghuráb, Nyazi, and others who could not be with us."

  "Oh? You did not seem to be in any condition to consider anything."

  "You forget I am no stranger to men
tal impairments, and have learned to get by with them," Jack said. "At any rate. My ruminations—"

  "Rum-inations?"

  "Roominations ran along these general lines: You gave me advice not to name this ship after Eliza, for one day the Vessel might arrive in the same city as the Lady and give rise to whisperings and inferences that he might find embarrassing or even dangerous. Fine. So when we first dropped anchor before Queena-Kootah, a couple of years ago, and Surendranath ventured ashore to trade with the Moorish natives, and learnt that they stood in need of a new Sultan—I say, when we became aware that the place was essentially being given to us—I looked at that beautiful snow-capped mountain and named it Eliza. Because it was warm, fertile, and beautiful below, while being a bit frosty and inaccessible at the top—yet possessing a volcanick profile foretelling explosions—"

  "Yes, you have explained the similitude in great detail on several occasions."

  "Righto. But I reckoned it was safe to use Eliza's name there, as it was so far away from the cities of Christendom. But later—after we had installed Mr. Foot as Sultan, and Surendranath as Grand Wazir, and they had built the Bomb and Grapnel anew—European ships began to drop anchor there, and old sea-captains began coming ashore, and some of them knew Mr. Foot from of old. They resumed conversations that had been interrupted by tavern-fights thirty years earlier at the first Bomb in Dunkirk. And I began to understand that even Queena-Kootah is not so terribly far from London. Standing on a ship in Japan, I am closer to London than ever I was standing on the banks of the Thames as a mud-lark boy."

  "We must needs see to certain matters before you go for a stroll down the Strand," said Dappa, who was perched above them on the fo'c'sle-deck like a raven. "Such as whether we will be suffered to leave Japan alive. You have no idea how illegal this is."