Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  A month later, when Isaac was out of the room, Daniel opened up the note-book and turned to the page headed Since Whitsunday 1662. It was still blank.

  He checked it again two months later. Nothing.

  At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin.

  This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments.

  Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony

  OCTOBER 12, 1713

  Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  LIKE A GOOD CARTESIAN who measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings. At an arbitrary place on a featureless plain, some would argue, but now the Origin of all his considerations. Sir Isaac would have it that all matter is a sort of permanent ongoing miracle, that planets are held in their orbits, and atoms in their places, by the immanent will of God, and looking at his own son, Daniel can hardly bear to think otherwise. The boy’s a coiled spring, the potential for generations of American Waterhouses, though it’s just as likely he’ll catch a fever and die tomorrow.

  In most other Boston houses, a slave woman would be looking after the boy, leaving the parents free to discourse with their visitor. Daniel Waterhouse does not own slaves. The reasons are several. Some of them are even altruistic. So little Godfrey sits on the lap, not of some Angolan negress, but of their neighbor: the daft but harmless Mrs. Goose, who comes into their home occasionally to do the one thing that she apparently can do: to entertain children by spouting all manner of nonsensical stories and doggerel that she has collected or invented. Meanwhile Enoch is off trying to make arrangements with Captain van Hoek of the Minerva. This has freed Daniel and Faith and the young Rev. Wait Still Water-house* to discuss what is the best way to respond to the startling invitation from Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Many words are said, but they make no more impact on Daniel than Mrs. Goose’s incoherent narratives about cutlery leaping over cœlestial bodies and sluttish hags living in discarded footwear.

  Wait Still Waterhouse says something like, “You’re sixty-seven, it’s true, but you have your health—many have lived much longer.”

  “If you avoid large crowds, sleep well, nourish yourself—” Faith says.

  “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down…,” sings Mrs. Goose.

  “My mind has never felt quite so much like an arrangement of cranks and gears,” Daniel says. “I decided what I was going to do quite some time ago.”

  “But people have been known to change their minds—” says the reverend.

  “Am I to infer, from what you just said, that you are a Free Will man?” Daniel inquires. “I really am shocked to find that in a Water-house. What are they teaching at Harvard these days? Don’t you realize that this Colony was founded by people fleeing from those who backed the concept of Free Will?”

  “I don’t fancy that the Free Will question really had very much to do with the founding of this Colony. It was more a rebellion against the entire notion of an Established church—be it Papist or Anglican. It is true that many of those Independents—such as our ancestor John Waterhouse—got their doctrine from the Calvinists in Geneva, and scorned the notion, so cherished by the Papists and the Anglicans, of Free Will. But this alone would not have sufficed to send them into exile.”

  “I get it not from Calvin but from Natural Philosophy,” Daniel says. “The mind is a machine, a Logic Mill. That’s what I believe.”

  “Like the one you have been building across the river?”

  “A good deal more effective than that one, fortunately.”

  “You think that if you made yours better, it could do what the human mind does? That it could have a soul?”

  “When you speak of a soul, you phant’sy something above and beyond the cranks and gears, the dead matter, of which the machine—be it a Logic Mill or a brain—is constructed. I do not believe in this.”

  “Why not?”

  Like many simple questions, this one is difficult for Daniel to answer. “Why not? I suppose because it puts me in mind of Alchemy. This soul, this extra thing added to the brain, reminds me of the Quintessence that the Alchemists are forever seeking: a mysterious supernatural presence that is supposed to suffuse the world. But they can never seem to find any. Sir Isaac Newton has devoted his life to the project and has nothing to show for it.”

  “If your sympathies do not run in that direction, then I know better than to change your mind, at least where Free Will versus Predestination is concerned,” says Wait Still. “But I know that when you were a boy you had the privilege of sitting at the knee of men such as John Wilkins, Gregory Bolstrood, Drake Waterhouse, and many others of Independent sympathies—men who preached freedom of conscience. Who advocated Gathered, as opposed to Established, churches. The flourishing of small congregations. Abolition of central dogma.”

  Daniel, still not quite believing it: “Yes…”

  Wait Still, brightly: “So what’s to stop me from preaching Free Will to my flock?”

  Daniel laughs. “And, as you are not merely glib, but young, handsome, and personable, converting many to the same creed—including, I take it, my own wife?”

  Faith blushes, then stands up and turns around to hide it. In the candlelight, a bit of silver glints in her hair: a hair-pin shaped like a caduceus. She has gotten up on the pretext of going to check on little Godfrey, even though Mrs. Goose has him well in hand.

  In a small town like Boston, you’d think it would be impossible to have a conversation about anything without being eavesdropped on. Indeed, the whole place was set up to make it so—they deliver the mail, not to your house, but to the nearest tavern, and if you don’t come round and pick it up after a few days the publican will open it up and read it aloud to whomever is in attendance. So Daniel had assumed that Mrs. Goose would be listening in on the whole conversation. But instead she is completely absorbed in her work, as if telling yarns to a boy were more important than this great Decision that Daniel is wrestling with, here at damn near the end of his long life.

  “It’s quite all right, my dear,” Daniel says to the back of Faith’s bodice. “Having been raised by a man who believed in Predestination, I’d much rather that my boy was raised by a Free Will woman.” But Faith leaves the room.

  Wait Still says, “So…you believe God has predestined you to sail for England tonight?”

  “No—I’m not a Calvinist. Now, you’re baffled, Reverend, because you spent too much time at Harvard reading old books about the likes of Calvin and Archbishop Laud, and are still caught up in the disputes of Arminians versus Puritans.”

  “What should I have been reading, Doctor?” said Wait Still, making a bit too much of a show of flexibility.

  “Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz.”

  “The syllabus of your Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t know that you touched on matters of theology.”

  “That was a bit of a jab—no, no, quite all right! I rather liked it. I’m pleased by the display of backbone. I can see clearly enough that you’ll end up raising my son.” Daniel means this in a completely nonsexual way—he had in mind that Wait Still would act in some avuncular role—but from the blush on Wait Still’s face he can see that the role of stepfather is more likely.

  This, then, would be a good time to change the subject
to abstract technical matters: “It all comes from first principles. Everything can be measured. Everything acts according to physical laws. Our minds included. My mind, that’s doing the deciding, is already set in its course, like a ball rolling down a trough.”

  “Uncle! Surely you are not denying the existence of souls—of a Supreme Soul.”

  Daniel says nothing to this.

  “Neither Newton nor Leibniz would agree with you,” Wait Still continues.

  “They’re afraid to agree with me, because they are important men, and they would be destroyed if they came out and said it. But no one will bother to destroy me.”

  “Can we not influence your mental machine by arguments?” asks Faith, who has returned to stand in the doorway.

  Daniel wants to say that Wait Still’s best arguments would be about as influential as boogers flicked against the planking of a Ship of the Line in full sail, but sees no reason to be acrimonious—the whole point of the exercise is to be remembered well by those who’ll stay in the New World, on the theory that as the sun rises on the eastern fringe of America, small things cast long shadows westwards. “The future is as set as the past,” he says, “and the future is that I’ll climb on board the Minerva within the hour. You can argue that I should stay in Boston to raise my son. Of course, I should like nothing better. I should, God willing, have the satisfaction of watching him grow up for as many years as I have left. Godfrey would have a flesh-and-blood father with many conspicuous weaknesses and failings. He’d hold me in awe for a short while, as all boys do their fathers. It would not last. But if I sail away on Minerva, then in place of a flesh-and-blood Dad—a fixed, known quantity—he’ll have a phant’sy of one, infinitely ductile in his mind. I can go away and imagine generations of Waterhouses yet unborn, and Godfrey can imagine a hero-father better than I can really be.”

  Wait Still Waterhouse, an intelligent and decent man, can see so many holes in this argument that he is paralyzed by choices. Faith, a better mother than wife, who has a better son than a husband, encompasses a vast sweep of compromises with a pert nod of the head. Daniel gathers up his son from Mrs. Goose’s lap—Enoch calls in a hired coach—they go to the waterfront.

  So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it began to cry after him to return: but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, “Life, life, eternal life.” So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain.

  —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  Minerva has already weighed anchor, using the high tide to widen the distance between her keel and certain obstructions near the Harbor’s entrance. Daniel is to be rowed out to join her in a pilot’s boat. Godfrey, who is half asleep, kisses his old Dad dutifully and watches his departure like a dream—that’s good, as he can tailor the memory later to suit his changing demands—like a suit of clothes modified every six months to fit a growing frame. Wait Still stands by Faith’s side, and Daniel can’t help thinking they make a lovely couple. Enoch, that home-wrecker, remains on the end of the wharf, guiltily apart, his silver hair glowing like white fire in the full moonlight.

  A dozen slaves pull mightily at the oars, forcing Daniel to sit down, lest the boat shoot out from under his feet and leave him floundering in the Harbor. Actually he does not sit as much as sprawl and get lucky. From shore it probably looks like a pratfall, but he knows that this ungainly moment will be edited from The Story that will one day live in the memories of the American Water-houses. The Story is in excellent hands. Mrs. Goose has come along to watch and memorize, and she has a creepy knack for that kind of thing, and Enoch is staying, too, partly to look after the physical residue of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, but also partly to look after The Story and see that it’s shaped and told to Daniel’s advantage.

  Daniel weeps.

  The sounds of his sniffling and heaving drown out nearly everything else, but he becomes aware of some low, strange music: the slaves have begun to sing. A rowing-song? No, that would have a lumbering, yo-ho-ho sort of rhythm, and this is much more complicated, with beats in the wrong places. It must be an Africk tune, because they have meddled with some of the notes, made them flatter than they should be. And yet it’s weirdly Irish at the same time. There is no shortage of Irish slaves in the West Indies, where these men first fell under the whip, so that might explain it. It is (musicological speculations aside) an entirely sad song, and Daniel knows why: by climbing aboard this boat and breaking down in sobs, he has reminded each one of these Africans of the day when he was taken, in chains, off the coast of Guinea, and loaded aboard a tall ship.

  Within a few minutes they are out of view of the Boston wharves, but still surrounded by land: the many islets, rocks, and bony tentacles of Boston Harbor. Their progress is watched by dead men hanging in rusty gibbets. When pirates are put to death, it is because they have been out on the high seas violating Admiralty law, whose jurisdiction extends only to the hightide mark. The implacable logic of the Law dictates that pirate-gallows must, therefore, be erected in the intertidal zone, and that pirate-corpses must be washed three times by the tide before they are cut down. Of course mere death is too good for pirates, and so the sentence normally calls for their corpses to be gibbeted in locked iron cages so that they can never be cut down and given a Christian burial.

  New England seems to have at least as many pirates as honest seamen. But here, as in so many other matters, Providence has smiled upon Massachusetts, for Boston Harbor is choked with small islands that are washed by high tides, providing vast resources of pirate hanging and gibbeting real estate. Nearly all of it has been put to use. During the daytime, the gibbets are obscured by clouds of hungry birds. But it’s the middle of the night, the birds are in Boston and Charlestown, slumbering in their nests of plaited pirate hair. The tide is high, the tops of the reefs submerged, the supports rising directly out of the waves. And so as the singing slaves row Daniel out on what he assumes will be his last voyage, scores of dessicated and skeletonized pirates, suspended in midair above the moonlit sea, watch him go by, as a ceremonial honor-guard.

  It takes better than an hour to catch Minerva, just clearing the Spectacle Island shallows. Her hull is barrel shaped and curves out above them. A pilot’s ladder is deployed. The ascent isn’t easy. Universal gravitation is not his only opponent. Rising waves, sneaking in from the North Atlantic, bounce him off the hull. Infuriatingly, the climb brings back all manner of Puritanical dogma he’s done his best to forget—the ladder becomes Jacob’s, the boat of sweaty black slaves Earth, the Ship Heaven, the sailors in the moonlit rigging Angels, the captain none other than Drake himself, ascended these many years, exhorting him to climb faster.

  Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories—the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asafœtida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment—they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves, Minerva moves with the silence of a well trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body—it’s like lying on a mother’s bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars—white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

  College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge


  1663

  An Ideot may be taught by Custom to Write and Read, yet no Man can be taught Genius.

  —Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

  DANIEL HAD GONE OUT for a time in the evening, and met with Roger Comstock at a tavern, and witnessed to him, and tried to bring him to Jesus. This had failed. Daniel returned to his chamber to find the cat up on the table with its face planted in Isaac’s dinner. Isaac was seated a few inches away. He had shoved a darning needle several inches into his eyeball.

  Daniel screamed from deep down in his gut. The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. Isaac did not flinch, which was probably a good thing. Daniel’s scream had no other effects on business as usual at Trinity College—those who weren’t too impaired to hear it probably assumed it was a wench playing hard-to-get.

  “In my dissections of animals’ eyes at Grantham, I often marveled at their perfect sphericity, which, in bodies that were otherwise irregular grab-bags of bones, tubes, skeins and guts, seemed to mark them out as apart from all the other organs. As if the Creator had made those orbs in the very image of the heavenly spheres, signifying that one should receive light from the other,” Isaac mused aloud. “Naturally, I wondered whether an eye that was not spherical would work as well. There are practical as well as theologic reasons for spherical eyes: one, so that they can swivel in their sockets.” There was some tension in his voice—the discomfort must have been appalling. Tears streamed down and spattered on the table like the exhaust from a water-clock—the only time Daniel ever saw Isaac weep. “Another practical reason is simply that the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour.”