Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  Confin’d in the midden with thou! Confin’d in the midden with thou!

  “…but I shall not,” Boyle concluded, looking suddenly very sorry for himself, “so disfigure you by cropping your ear. It is enough that I must murder you, here, under the shadow of Plato. Plato, who knows the reason.”

  “While I, being a lesser philosopher, do not,” Newton reminded him.

  “Such composure in the face of imminent personal extinction!” Boyle said. “May I, Mr Newton, ask your age?”

  “I shall be twenty next week,” Newton replied. “I must in turn press a question upon you.”

  “About the statues?”

  Newton looked about him. The two men were in a cavernous space: forty foot from floor to shadowy ceiling. High windows emitted bright but wintry light. A walkway ran about the walls a little space beneath these, thirty feet up; and all along the wall were many paintings hung, as paintings are, higgled and piggled. But it was not the paintings that caught the eye; it was the many sculptures. Newton had an eye that could assimilate the exact number of objects in a crowd of objects, and he saw that there were forty two stone figures, from child-sized satyrs blowing on pan-pipes, to Hercules wielding a club the size of a pillar, and trailing behind him a lion-skin large as a barge’s sail. The statues filled the room, as if frozen in mid-bustle as mythological giants crowded about to eavesdrop of the conversation of the two men.

  “No,” Isaac said. “Not about the statues. About the reason you seek to murder me, sir, and so imperil your own immortal soul.”

  “The statues,” said Boyle, pacing along the centre of the room, “are mostly classical. Here, though —” (he reached the far end of the small space available for pacing) “here — Cain slays Abel.” And indeed, behind a row of putti, was the double-figure statue, Abel turning a terrified white face back over his shoulder at his white brother, whose blank expression and cataract-eyes seemed to regard the cudgel he was in the very act of bringing down on his victim’s cranium with a purely disinterested objectivity. “Does this answer your question?”

  “It does not.”

  Boyle gathered his greatcoat about him, and strolled down the space towards the door. He sloped his gun over his shoulder like a sentry. “Here,” he said, pointing to another double-figure statue—this one of Apollo seizing Achilles by the hair. The god, slender and almost womanly beside the dune-bulging muscles of the warrior, held the Achaean back by the left hand. In his right hand was a golden rod. “This,” Boyle said, urgently, “this is a better visual rebus for what I must do. I seize with my hand and hold back the too impetuous onward rush of…” He span about, and aimed the long-barrelled pistol at Newton’s chest.

  “I, an Achilles?”

  “An Achilles of the mind, sir! It is said by many that one cannot kill an idea. And yet I must kill yours!”

  “Is that spear made of gold, actual gold?” Newton asked. For even in extremis, his curiosity could not be quenched.

  “Indeed! Solidi auri. And above, do you see?” There was a platform of some manner behind the first row of statues, upon which the rear row of marble was raised up the better to display them. “Atalanta plucking the golden apple from the dust!” The statue was of a maiden in chaste tunic gazing at her own hand, in which a yellow sphere rested. Behind her, Hippomenes —who had strewn the golden apples on the ground during their footrace, in order to distract her and so win the race himself — could be seen only from behind, leaning forward as if putting on a spurt of speed. He was the only statue in the space not to one degree or another looking down upon the two human actors.

  “I was younger than you are now, sir,” Boyle said, walking back towards the chair in which Newton sat, chained. “When I undertook a grand tour, my travels. These statues —” He gestured with his gun.

  “Collected on your travels?”

  “I did not travel to Europe, though people believed the Continent my destination. I travelled… much further than the Continent.”

  “Cathay?” Newton inquired, drily. “The Americas?”

  Boyle ignored this. “I returned rich in gold and rich in knowledge. Divites in auro et dives in scientia. It has permitted me to indulge a passion for sculpture, bought from merchants who trade in the artefacts of the ancients. Property, such as this. But!” He ran, sprinting suddenly — the suddenness of the motion making Newton’s heart jump — to the door. Beside the entrance, tucked under a colossal sculpture of Triumphant Achilles dragging Hector’s lifeless body in front of the Gates of Troy, was a small cabinet. Boyle put his pistol down, opened the cabinet, and brought forth a stack of books: two folio, two quarto, one octavo. These he ported back over to his prisoner. “Knowledge! How little people are surprised that the son of an Irish escheator whose only boyish passion was alchemy — alchemy — alchemy — should travel to Europe, meet Galileo himself, and return a genius whose insights into the modern world are unsurpassed by any? Would remain unsurpassed, indeed, until you yourself should… but, see.” He held up New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects. Then he tossed the heavy volume to the ground. Newton flinched as its spine split on impact. The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes was treated the same way, and then he let all the books but the smallest fall. “Here! See here —”

  “I am enchained, sir,” said Newton, with dignity, “and therefore unable to peruse the book.”

  Boyle laughed again, his whinnying snigger. He held the volume before Newton’s face, opened it: T Lucretii Cari. Liber Septem.

  “There are but six books of Lucretius, Mr Boyle,” Newton objected.

  “Exactly!” cried Boyle. He began pacing in a circle, reading aloud the Latin hexameters:

  Scientia multae mansiones sunt in domo, atque qui

  habitant in eo quidem variis causis et illuc perduxerit.

  Secundum scientiam prae gaudio per plures

  potentiae intellectivae, quae risum maxime propria

  scientia et experientia satis hendrerit gloriam quaerere:

  multi sunt qui fecerunt opera inventa sunt in domo

  cerebro propter hoc super altare pure utilitatis causa.

  “The versification,” Newton said, “might be smoother.”

  “I have yet to reach the crucial part,” Boyle replied. “Listen,” he said:

  Sequitur ex speciali theoria relativitione

  illius molis et virtutis, sed ambo sunt idem diversis

  manifestationes—aliquanto ignota pro mediocris

  conceptione mentis einsteinii. Praeterea, erit

  E aequalis est mc², in quo vis ponatur massae

  per quadratum velocitatis lucis praebuit illa

  parva mole vertat in longissime vim et contra.

  “I find the reasoning ingermane, the specifics obtuse,” said Isaac. “For what item of nomenclature doth the ‘E’ stand? And the other letters?”

  Grinning, Boyle hurled the book with great force. It bounced off the knee of Athena, and fell to the ground, its pages flapping with a noise like pigeonwings. “We took this text from a New Astronomer, a Swiss, a famous man” he snarled. “In that country to which I travelled. And it was bethought a scheme worthy of our attention to render his words into Latin, print them up as by Lucretius, and deposit copies in libraries such that we, or our fathers, or our grandfathers might encounter them. Only why? Only to prompt the science of our day to develop with more rapidity and purpose! To obviate certain… difficulties in that far place into which I went. And I concurred! Fool that I was, for it seemed to me worthwhile; and why else had they helped me thither? And yet, what became of this scheme? Nothing! Our fathers, and our grandfathers, ignored the wisdom, nonwithstanding the eminent Roman’s name attached to them.”

  Outside one of the windows a pigeon fluttered, scrabbling shadow briefly over the glass and then departing. If one listened carefully, the sounds of an ordinary London day could be heard.

  “Which country did you visit, sir?” Newton a
sked.

  “I have another souvenir of my time there,” Boyle remarked, his face brightening. “I have it about me somewhere.” As he searched his pockets, he added, mumblingly. “E is energia. M, massus. As for the small cursive of the letter ‘c’, in epistula celeritas significat lumen.”

  “No man knows the precise value of such celerity!” Newton exclaimed, crossly. He had managed, without being observed by Boyle, to use his thumbnail to gouge a crescent-moon sliver from the nail of his forefinger. He was attempting, again without being observed, to manipulate this into the keyhole of the lock of his handcuff.

  “Here it is!” Boyle pulled out a small piece of paper, a chit or note of some kind. The paper was green. “A portrait, printed upon paper,” he announced. “Of whom? Guess!”

  “Though I am young, sir,” said Newton, “but yet am I not a child, to play such foolish games.”

  “Why then!” And Boyle danced — actually danced, with ponderous ridiculousness, upon his two clomping booted feet, and waved the piece of paper before Isaac, who caught the merest glimpse of the words ONE POUND — before Boyle tossed the scrap over his shoulder. It fluttered in a long arc down and a little way up, paused, fell back down in a lower arc, rose a little and finally fell all the way to the ground, at the feet of the gigantic statue of Plato.

  “I have never seen so poor a forgery of a pound note, sir,” remarked Isaac.

  “Indeed!” cooed Boyle. “Ah! Ah! And as for the Lucretius, it has altered nothing. Depositing it in a dozen librariae, from thirteenth of centuries to the now? I said to them: Lucretius? Rather let us forge Plato! If Plato had spoken the verbum verum einsteinii the world would have listened! But” (this last, a glumly expressed post scriptum) “I fancy their Greek was not lively enough for the task.”

  “If they are the ones whose Latin you read aloud,” Newton said, “I am surprised not at all. Are these the people who have suborned you to murder, sir? What, then, is their motivation?”

  “They want you dead, sir? No sir! That is the last thing they want! It is I, and I alone, who accept the heavy burden of murdering my fratris in scientia. I alone! And the motivations belong to me, and to none other.” In a moment, Boyle was at his side, and a knife was in his hand. Newton tried to flinch away, but his restraints made it impossible. Boyle had, evidently, taken one of his volatile swings of mood. “My reasons are my reasons.”

  “And they are?”

  “Because,” Boyle replied, his face suddenly glum, “because I am a coward.” And at this he put his face in his hands and began to weep, noisily and copiously. Newton found the spectacle both distasteful and undignified. He looked away.

  Shortly, recovering his composure, Boyle found a chair from somewhere in amongst the jumble of colossal statuary, and placed it six yards before Newton. He lay the pistol in his lap and sat in silence for a while. “Cowardice taketh many forms,” he observed. “And before my — travels — I was an enthusiast for the New Astronomy. And now that New Astronomy itself renders me a coward!”

  “I do not understand,” Newton noted.

  “The country into which I travelled was a place where the New Astronomy was king. They all believed it. Earth is found to move, and is no more the centre of the Universe. Stars are not fixed, but swim in the ethereal spaces. Comets are mounted above the planets! The sun is lost — for it is but a light made of the conjunction of many shining bodies together, no greater and in truth yea smaller than the other stars, yet only closer-by. The sun himself revealeth himself spotty, and subject to the mortality of all decayable things, to grow and eventually to die in a colour of blood and obesity of size? Is this the light God Himself made, the greater light to rule the day, at the beginning of all things? But the Bible saieth, Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun. Thus, I have seen the Sciences by the diverse motions of this globe of the brain of man become mere opinion, yet not error, but truth itself, that leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths! What is all we know compared with what we know not? This, it is, Isaac, that maketh me a coward.”

  “Truth and God are coeval,” Newton insisted, with the stiff ingenuousness of youth. “The one cannot lead a true soul away from the other.”

  “You mean by that,” snarled Boyle, his lachrymous spirit instantly burned up in another of his sudden furies, “that I am no true soul! But I say to you Newton, it is the truth in my soul that pushes me on to your death! I stood in my new land, and learned what I could. I knew already that the universe was immensely larger than what was believed before the German Copernicus wrote his book. Oh, but I knew not the verity of it! Larger is a word that approacheth not even unto adequacy. The cosmos is so much the huger, and la vicissitude et la variété des choses en l’universe surpasses the capacity of the human mind to apprehend. This it is maketh me a coward, Sir. I do confess it. I looked through the optical and other devices of that place, and what I saw of their universe overwhelmed me. The perspective was total, and it produced in my soul a vortex of terror.” His irascibility seemed to have melted back into self-pity. Truly, Isaac thought, and he tried for the seventh time to work his sliver of fingernail around the inner-latch of his handcuff-lock, such that he caught it again between thumb and finger, and made a hoop that might pull the pin free. For the seventh time the end of the tiny nail-strip slipped from his hold.

  “What of it, sir?” replied Newton, with disdain. “Is it not truth?”

  “It is truth! That is what so cowers my spirit. But I discovered something even the inhabitants of this other land did not know. I discovered that Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos was true, also.”

  Newton snorted disdain from his nostril.

  “You dismiss it, Brian?” said Boyle. “I mean, Isaac?”

  “I have read Copernicus, and Kepler, sir. I have read Galileo, and seen the astronomical figures recorded therein. Did you not say you had met Galileo?”

  “Galileo?” repeated Boyle, quizzically.

  “Galileo!”

  “Gallieo?”

  Boyle’s obtuseness was infuriating. “Galileo’s figures.”

  “Oh!” Boyle sang out, as if seeing for the first time. “Magnifico! Fine observational data. But is the data enough? Must not data be interpreted? And how do we interpret? According to the idea. I confess, I am but a poor boy. Nobody loves me — born into a Waterford family. Yet even I can see, the idea governs the figures. In the days before Copernicus, natural philosophers looked to the heavens and saw — Ptolemy’s cosmos. Earth at the centre; the astral bodies in crystal spheres all rotating one about the other, as the skins of an onion do. And in the other layers, the circle of the fixed stars; and outside that the primum mobile, that imparts motion to all the others.”

  Newton had had enough of listening to this nonsense. He shook himself as hard as he could; but his chains remained tight. “Will you let me go?” he demanded.

  “Base miller!” cried Boyle. There was a pause. Then, recovering his self-control, Boyle added quietly. “Cannot let you go.”

  “Your wits have been poisoned by your travels. Ptolemy’s system is an exploded relic of a time before accurate observation and natural philosophy unperverted by the Catholic Church was able to ascertain the true structure of the cosmos. I myself have begun calculations designed to establish…”

  “I know,” Boyle interrupted him. “What you will go on to establish. I have looked through the devices at the cosmos your ideas determine. And the fact is: just that I prefer to live in a smaller cosmos. Not pinchingly so! I would not be bounded in a nutshell and count myself kind of infinite space — oh no! I like grandeur. I like sublimity! Look around,” and he gestured with one outstretched arm at the gigantic statuary with which they were surrounded. “I like to be surrounded by plastic art that dwarfs me! No egoismus, I! I have returned from my travels very rich and I have used my money to buy mansions, and to fill them with gigantic statuary! Every week new pieces
come into my storerooms — this very space, here in Soho. And every month or so I have the pieces that most touch my fancy moved out to one or other of my houses. It gives me an enormous sense of well being, to stand among them. But — and this is my point: but it is one thing to be a human dwarfed by Ptolemy’s cosmos — for that, though immense, is immense on a human scale. It is another to be dwarfed by the cosmos the New Astronomy perceives. That shrinks the human soul to a dot upon a dot, the merest festucam, a speck beneath the threshold of even divine cognizance. That is what makes me a coward.”

  “You would return to live in Ptolemy’s solar system?” Newton mocked. “Why not yearn to live in Thomas More’s Utopic realm? Or in Nephelokokkygia?”

  “Those places were not real!” Boyle insisted. “Where the solar system is.”

  “Ptolemy’s solar system was not real,” Newton retorted. “Thanks to the spyglasses of Copernicus, Kepler and your magnifico Galileo have we come to understood that.”

  “And I say differently. I say — Ptolemy’s cosmos was true; and Copernicus’s cosmos is true. Smell out the difference between the former and the latter?”

  “They cannot both be true,” Newton insisted.

  “Why may they not?”

  “Because the observable data fit not the cosmos as hypothesied by Ptolemy,” Newton insisted, growing heated. This, whatever other nonsense Boyle might indulge in, this matter touched his own intellectual propriety.

  “In what ways do they not fit?” Boyle asked, simpering.

  “Must we rehearse this, sir? In many ways. For example, the retrogression of planetary bodies as they are observed to pass across the sky.”

  “True,” conceded Boyle. “But might there be another explanation for such retrograde motion?”

  “You advert to the theories of Tycho Brahe?”

  “Not I! I have been given access to knowledge Brahe lacked. The seventh book of Lucretius contained all the needful pointers, yet none have pursued them. But I know. Were the Ptolemaic system true, what might its dimensions be?”