Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Yes.”

  “I have heard that this is the practice in China,” Isaac said sagely. “But here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”

  “No matter how little it weighs!?”

  “Yes. In principle, yes.”

  “So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”

  “You exaggerate,” Daniel said. “I have here a fine Queen Elizabeth shilling, for example—which I carry around, mind you, as a souvenir of Gloriana’s reign, since it is far too fine a specimen to actually spend. But as you can see, it is just as bright and shiny as the day it was minted—”

  “Especially where it’s recently been clipped there along the side,” the lens-grinder said.

  “Normal, pleasing irregularity of the hand-hammered currency, nothing more.”

  Isaac said, “My friend’s shilling, though magnificent, and arguably worth two or even three shillings in the market, is no anomaly. Here I have a shilling from the reign of Edward VI, which I obtained after an inebriated son of a Duke, who happened to have borrowed a shilling from me some time earlier, fell unconscious on a floor—the purse in which he carried his finest coins fell open and this rolled out of it—I construed this as repayment of the debt, and the exquisite condition of the coin as interest.”

  “How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.

  “A trick of the light.”

  “The problem with that Edward VI coinage is that for all I knew it might’ve been issued during the Great Debasement, when, before Sir Thomas Gresham could get matters in hand, prices doubled.”

  “The inflation was not because the coins were debased, as some believe,” Daniel said, “it was because the wealth confiscated from the Papist monasteries, and cheap silver from the mines of New Spain, were flooding the country.”

  “If you would allow me to approach within ten feet of these coins, it would help me to appreciate their numismatic excellence,” the lens-grinder said. “I could even use some of my magnifying-lenses to…”

  “I’m afraid I would be offended,” Isaac said.

  “You could inspect this one as closely as you wanted,” Daniel said, “and find no evidence of criminal tampering—I got it from a blind innkeeper who had suffered frostbite in the fingertips—had no idea what he was giving me.”

  “Didn’t he think to bite down on it? Like so?” said the Judaic individual, taking the shilling and crushing it between his rear molars.

  “What would he have learned by doing that, sir?”

  “That whatever counterfeit-artist stamped it out, had used reasonably good metal—not above fifty percent lead.”

  “We’ll choose to interpret that as a wry jest,” Daniel said, “the likes of which you could never direct against this shilling, which my half brother found lying on the ground at the Battle of Naseby, not far from fragments of a Royalist captain who’d been blown to pieces by a bursting cannon—the dead man was, you see, a captain who’d once stood guard at the Tower of London where new coins are minted.”

  The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”

  “Very well, then—” said Isaac, reaching for the prisms.

  “Avid collectors such as you two must also have pennies—?”

  “My father hands out shiny new ones as Christmas presents,” Daniel began. “Three years ago—” but he suspended the anecdote when he noticed that the lens-grinder was paying attention, not to him, but to a commotion behind them.

  Daniel turned around and saw that it was a man, reasonably well-heeled, having trouble walking even though a friend and a servant were supporting him. He had a powerful desire to lie down, it seemed, which was most awkward, as he happened to be wading through ankle-deep mud. The servant slipped a hand between the man’s upper arm and his ribs to bear him up, but the man shrieked like a cat who’s been mangled under a cartwheel and convulsed backwards and landed full-length on his back, hurling up a coffin-shaped wave of mud that spattered things yards away.

  “Take your prisms,” said the merchant, practically stuffing them into Isaac’s pocket. He began folding up his display-case. If he felt the way Daniel did, then it wasn’t the sight of a man feeling ill, or falling down, that made him pack up and leave, so much as the sound of that scream.

  Isaac was walking toward the sick man with the cautious but direct gait of a tightrope-walker.

  “Shall we back to Cambridge, then?” Daniel suggested.

  “I have some knowledge of the arts of the apothecary.” Isaac said, “Perhaps I could help him.”

  A circle of people had gathered to observe the sick man, but it was a very broad circle, empty except for Isaac and Daniel. The victim appeared, now, to be trying to get his breeches off. But his arms were rigid, so he was trying to do it by writhing free of his clothes. His servant and his friend were tugging at the cuffs, but the breeches seemed to’ve shrunk onto his legs. Finally the friend drew his dagger, slashed through the cuffs left and right, and then ripped the pant-legs open from bottom to top—or perhaps the force of the swelling thighs burst them. They came off, anyway. Friend and servant backed away, affording Isaac and Daniel a clear vantage point that would have enabled them to see all the way up to the man’s groin, if the view hadn’t been blocked by black globes of taut flesh stacked like cannonballs up his inner thighs.

  The man had stopped writhing and screaming now because he was dead. Daniel had taken Isaac’s arm and was rather firmly pulling him back, but Isaac continued to approach the specimen. Daniel looked round and saw that suddenly there was no one within musket range—horses and tents had been abandoned, back-loads of goods spilled on the ground by porters now halfway to Ely.

  “I can see the buboes expanding even though the body is dead,” Isaac said. “The generative spirit lives on—transmuting dead flesh into something else—just as maggots are generated out of meat, and silver grows beneath mountains—why does it bring death sometimes and life others?”

  That they lived was evidence that Daniel eventually pulled Isaac away and got him pointed back up the river toward Cambridge. But Isaac’s mind was still on those Satanic miracles that had appeared in the dead man’s groin. “I admire Monsieur Descartes’ analysis, but there is something missing in his supposition that the world is just bits of matter jostling one another like coins shaken in a bag. How could that account for the ability of matter to organize itself into eyes and leaves and salamanders, to transmute itself into alternate forms? And yet it’s not simply that matter comes together in good ways—not some ongoing miraculous Creation—for the same process by which our bodies turn meat and milk into flesh and blood can also cause a man’s body to convert itself into a mass of buboes in a few hours’ time. It might seem aimless, but it cannot be. That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.”

  “Unless the message was set down long ago and is there in the Bible for all men to read plainly,” Daniel said.

  Fifty years later, he hates to remember that he ever talked this way, but he can’t stop himself.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The year 1665 is halfway over—you know what year comes next. I must to London, Isaac. Plague has come to England. What we have seen today is a harbinger of the Apocalypse.”

  Aboard Minerva, off the Coast of New England

  NOVEMBER 1713

  DANIEL IS ROUSED by a rooster on the forecastledeck* that is growing certain it’s not just imagining that light in the eastern sky. Unfortunately, the eastern sky is off to port
this morning. Yesterday it was to starboard. Minerva has been sailing up and down the New England coast for the better part of a fortnight, trying to catch a wind that will decisively take her out into the deep water, or “off soundings,” as they say. They are probably not more than fifty miles away from Boston.

  He goes below to the gun deck, a dim slab of sharp-smelling air. When his eyes have adjusted he can see the cannons, all swung around on their low carriages so they are parallel to the hull planking, aimed forwards, lashed in place, and the heavy hatches closed over the gun ports. Now that he cannot see the horizon, he must use the soles of his feet to sense the ship’s rolling and pitching—if he waits for his balance-sense to tell him he’s falling, it’ll be too late. He makes his way aft in very short, carefully planned steps, trailing fingertips along the ceiling, jostling the long ramrods and brushes racked up there for tending the guns. This takes him to a door and thence into a cabin at the stern that’s as wide as the entire ship and fitted with a sweep of windows, gathering what light they can from the western sky and the setting moon.

  Half a dozen men are in here working and talking, all of them relatively old and sophisticated compared to ordinary seamen—this is where great chests full of good tools are stored, and sheets of potent diagrams nested. A tiller the dimensions of a battering-ram runs straight down the middle of the ceiling and out through a hole in the stern to the rudder, which it controls; the forward end of the tiller is pulled to and fro by a couple of cables that pass up through openings in the decks to the wheel. The air smells of coffee, wood-shavings, and pipe-smoke. Grudging hellos are scattered about. Daniel goes back and sits by one of the windows—these are undershot so that he can look straight down and see Minerva’s wake being born in a foamy collision down around the rudder. He opens a small hatch below a window and drops out a Fahrenheit thermometer on a string. It is the very latest in temperature measurement technology from Europe—Enoch presented it to him as a sort of party favor. He lets it bounce through the surf for a few minutes, then hauls it in and takes a reading.

  He’s been trying to perform this ritual every four hours—the objective being to see if there’s anything to the rumor that the North Atlantic is striped with currents of warm water. He can present the data to the Royal Society if-God-willing-he-reaches-London. At first he did it from the upperdeck, but he didn’t like the way the instrument got battered against the hull, and he was wearied by the looks of incomprehension on the sailors’ faces. The old gaffers back here don’t necessarily think he’s any less crazy but they don’t think less of him for it.

  So like a sojourner in a foreign city who eventually finds a coffeehouse where he feels at home, Daniel has settled on this place, and been accepted here. The regulars are mostly in their thirties and forties: a Filipino; a Lascar; a half-African, half-white from the Portuguese city of Goa; a Huguenot; a Cornish man with surprisingly poor English; an Irishman. They’re all perfectly at home here, as if Minerva were a thousand-year-old ship on which their ancestors had always lived. If she ever sinks, Daniel suspects they’ll happily go down with her, for lack of any other place to live. Joined with one another and with Minerva, they have the power to travel anywhere on earth, fighting their way past pirates if need be, eating well, sleeping in their own beds. But if Minerva were lost, it almost wouldn’t make any difference whether it spilled them into the North Atlantic in a January gale, or let them off gently into some port town—either way, it’d be a short, sad life for them after that. Daniel wishes there were a comforting analogy to the Royal Society to be made here, but as that lot are currently trying to throw one of their own number (Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz) overboard, it doesn’t really work.

  A brick-lined cabin is wedged between the upperdeck and the forecastledeck, always full of smoke because fires burn there—food comes out of it from time to time. A full meal is brought to Daniel once a day, and he takes it, usually by himself, sometimes with Captain van Hoek, in the common room. He’s the only passenger. Here it’s evident that Minerva’s an old ship, because the crockery and flatware are motley, chipped, and worn. Those parts of the ship that matter have been maintained or replaced as part of what Daniel’s increasingly certain must be a subtle, understated, but fanatical program of maintenance decreed by van Hoek and ramrodded by one of his mates. The crockery and other clues suggest that the ship’s a good three decades old, but unless you go down into the hold and view the keel and the ribs, you don’t see any pieces that are older than perhaps five years.

  None of the plates match, and so it’s always a bit of a game for Daniel to eat his way down through the meal (normally something stewlike with expensive spices) until he can see the pattern on the plate. It is kind of an idiotic game for a Fellow of the Royal Society to indulge in, but he doesn’t introspect about it until one evening when he’s staring into his plate, watching the gravy slosh with the ship’s heaving (a microcosm of the Atlantic?), and all of a sudden it’s—

  The Plague Year

  SUMMER 1665

  Th’earths face is but thy Table; there are set Plants, cattell, men, dishes for Death to eate. In a rude hunger now hee millions drawes Into his bloody, or plaguy, or sterv’d jawes.

  —JOHN DONNE, “Elegie on M Boulstred”

  DANIEL WAS EATING POTATOES and herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day. As he was doing it in his father’s house, he was expected loudly to thank God for the privilege before and after the meal. His prayers of gratitude were becoming less sincere by the day.

  To one side of the house, cattle voiced their eternal confusion—to the other, men trudged down the street ringing hand-bells (for those who could hear) and carrying long red sticks (for those who could see), peering into court-yards and doorways, and poking their snouts over garden-walls, scanning for bubonic corpses. Everyone else who had enough money to leave London was absent. That included Daniel’s half brothers Raleigh and Sterling and their families, as well as his half-sister Mayflower, who along with her children had gone to ground in Buckinghamshire. Only Mayflower’s husband, Thomas Ham, and Drake Waterhouse, Patriarch, had refused to leave. Mr. Ham wanted to leave, but he had a cellar in the City to look after.

  The idea of leaving, just because of a spot of the old Black Death, hadn’t even occurred to Drake yet. Both of his wives had died quite a while ago, his elder children had fled, there was no one left to talk sense into him except Daniel. Cambridge had been shut down for the duration of the Plague. Daniel had ventured down here for what he had envisioned as a quick, daring raid on an empty house, and had found Drake seated before a virginal playing old hymns from the Civil War. Having spent most of his good coins, first of all helping Newton buy prisms, and secondly bribing a reluctant coachman to bring him down within walking distance of this pest-hole, Daniel was stuck until he could get money out of Dad—a subject he was afraid to even broach. Since God had predestined all events anyway, there was no way for them to avoid the Plague, if that was their doom—and if it wasn’t, why, no harm in staying there on the edge of the city and setting an example for the fleeing and/or dying populace.

  Owing to those modifications that had been made to his head at the behest of Archbishop Laud, Drake Waterhouse made curious percolating and whistling noises when he chewed and swallowed his potatoes and herring.

  In 1629, Drake and some friends had been arrested for distributing freshly printed libels in the streets of London. These particular libels inveighed against Ship Money, a new tax imposed by Charles I. But the topic did not matter; if this had happened in 1628, the libels would have been about something else, and no less offensive to the King and the Archbishop.

  An indiscreet remark made by one of Drake’s comrades after burning sticks had been rammed under his nails led to the discovery of the printing-press that Drake had used to print the libels—he kept it in a wagon hidden under a pile of hay. So as he had now been exposed as the master-mind of the conspiracy, Bishop Laud had him, and a few other supremely annoying Ca
lvinists, pilloried, branded, and mutilated. These were essentially practical techniques more than punishments. The intent was not to reform the criminals, who were clearly un-reformable. The pillory fixed them in one position for a while so that all London could come by and get a good look at their faces and thereafter recognize them. The branding and mutilation marked them permanently so that the rest of the world would know them.

  As all of this had happened years before Daniel had even been born, it didn’t matter to him—this was just how Dad had always looked—and of course it had never mattered to Drake. Within a few weeks, Drake had been back on the highways of England, buying cloth that he’d later smuggle to the Netherlands. In a country inn, on the way to St. Ives, he encountered a saturnine, beetle-browed chap name of Oliver Cromwell who had recently lost his faith, and seen his life ruined—or so he imagined, until he got a look at Drake, and found God. But that was another story.

  The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge. There was no other furniture in the room, although the eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side to the other like a drunk out for a brisk walk, and the palpable grinding of its gear-train, and the wild clamorous bonging that exploded from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with each other in panic and veer into new courses. The fur of dust beginning to overhang its Gothick battlements; its internal supply of mouse-turds; the Roman numerals carven into the back by its maker; and its complete inability to tell time, all marked it as pre-Huygens technology. Its bonging would have tried Daniel’s patience even if it had occurred precisely on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, et cetera, for it never failed to make him jump out of his skin. That it conveyed no information whatever as to what the time actually was, drove Daniel into such transports of annoyance that he had begun to entertain a phant’sy of standing at the intersection of two corridors and handing Drake, every time he passed by, a libel denouncing the ancient Clock, and demanding its wayward pendulum be stilled, and that it be replaced with a new Huygens model. But Drake had already told him to shut up about the clock, and so there was nothing he could do.