Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  DANIEL PUSHED HIS HAND-CART westwards down Cheapside. He held his breath as he hurried around the reeking tumulus that surrounded St. Paul’s, and did not breathe easy again until he’d passed out of Ludgate. The passage over Fleet Ditch was even worse, because it was strewn with bodies of rats, cats, and dogs, as well as quite a few plague-corpses that had simply been rolled out of wagons, and not even dignified with a bit of dirt. He kept a rag clamped over his face, and did not take it off until he had passed out through Temple Bar and gone by the little Watch-house that stood in the middle of the Strand in front of Somerset House. From there he could glimpse green fields and open country between certain of the buildings, and smell whiffs of manure on the breeze, which smelled delightful compared to London.

  He had worried that the wheels of his cart would bog down in Charing Cross, which was a perpetual morass, but summer heat, and want of traffic, had quite dried the place up. A pack of five stray dogs watched him make his way across the expanse of rutted and baked dirt. He was worried that they would come after him until he noticed that they were uncommonly fat, for stray dogs.

  Oldenburg lived in a town-house on Pall Mall. Except for a heroic physician or two, he was the only member of the R.S. who’d stayed in town during the Plague. Daniel took out the GRUBEN-DOL packet and put it on the doorstep—letters from Vienna, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow.

  He knocked thrice on the door, and backed away to see a round face peering down at him through obscuring layers of green window-glass, like a curtain of tears. Oldenburg’s wife had lately died—not of Plague—and some supposed that he stayed in London hoping that the Black Death would carry him off to wherever she was.

  On his long walk out of town, Daniel had plenty of time to work out that GRUBENDOL was an anagram for Oldenburg.

  Epsom

  1665–1666

  By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

  —HOBBES, Leviathan

  JOHN COMSTOCK’S SEAT was at Epsom, a short journey from London. It was large. That largeness came in handy during the Plague, because it enabled his Lordship to stable a few Fellows of the Royal Society (which would enhance his already tremendous prestige) without having to be very close to them (which would disturb his household, and place his domestic animals in extreme peril). All of this was obvious enough to Daniel as one of Comstock’s servants met him at the gate and steered him well clear of the manor house and across a sort of defensive buffer zone of gardens and pastures to a remote cottage with an oddly dingy and crowded look to it.

  To one side lay a spacious bone-yard, chalky with skulls of dogs, cats, rats, pigs, and horses. To the other, a pond cluttered with the wrecks of model ships, curiously rigged. Above the well, some sort of pulley arrangement, and a rope extending from the pulley, across a pasture, to a half-assembled chariot. On the roof of the cottage, diverse small windmills of outlandish design—one of them mounted over the mouth of the cottage’s chimney and turned by the rising of its smoke. Every high tree-limb in the vicinity had been exploited as a support for pendulums, and the pendulum-strings had all gotten twisted round each other by winds, and merged into a tattered philosophickal cobweb. The green space in front was a mechanical phant’sy of wheels and gears, broken or never finished. There was a giant wheel, apparently built so that a man could roll across the countryside by climbing inside it and driving it forward with his feet.

  Ladders had been leaned against any wall or tree with the least ability to push back. Halfway up one of the ladders was a stout, fair-haired man who was not far from the end of his natural life span—though he apparently did not entertain any ambitions of actually reaching it. He was climbing the ladder one-handed in hard-soled leather shoes that were perfectly frictionless on the rungs, and as he swayed back and forth, planting one foot and then the next, the ladder’s feet, down below him, tiptoed backwards. Daniel rushed over and braced the ladder, then forced himself to look upwards at the shuddering battle-gammoned form of the Rev. Wilkins. The Rev. was carrying, in his free hand, some sort of winged object.

  And speaking of winged objects, Daniel now felt himself being tickled, and glanced down to find half a dozen honeybees had alighted on each one of his hands. As Daniel watched in empirical horror, one of them drove its stinger into the fleshy place between his thumb and index finger. He bit his lip and looked up to see whether letting go the ladder would lead to the immediate death of Wilkins. The answer: yes. Bees were now swarming all round—nuzzling the fringes of Daniel’s hair, playing crack-the-whip through the ladder’s rungs, and orbiting round Wilkins’s body in a humming cloud.

  Reaching the highest possible altitude—flagrantly tempting the LORD to strike him dead—Wilkins released the toy in his hand. Whirring and clicking noises indicated that some sort of spring-driven clockwork had gone into action—there was fluttering, and skidding through the air—some sort of interaction with the atmosphere, anyway, that went beyond mere falling—but fall it did, veering into the cottage’s stone wall and spraying parts over the yard.

  “Never going to fly to the moon that way,” Wilkins grumbled.

  “I thought you wanted to be shot out of a cannon to the Moon.”

  Wilkins whacked himself on the stomach. “As you can see, I have far too much vis inertiae to be shot out of anything to anywhere. Before I come down there, are you feeling well, young man? No sweats, chills, swellings?”

  “I anticipated your curiosity on that subject, Dr. Wilkins, and so the frogs and I lodged at an inn in Epsom for two nights. I have never felt healthier.”

  “Splendid! Mr. Hooke has denuded the countryside of small animals—if you hadn’t brought him anything, he’d have cut you up.” Wilkins was coming down the ladder, the sureness of each footfall very much in doubt, massy buttocks approaching Daniel as a spectre of doom. Finally on terra firma, he waved a hundred bees off with an intrepid sweep of the arm. They wiped bees away from their palms, then exchanged a long, warm handshake. The bees were collectively losing interest and seeping away in the direction of a large glinting glass box. “It is Wren’s design, come and see!” Wilkins said, bumbling after them.

  The glass structure was a model of a building, complete with a blown dome, and pillars carved of crystal. It was of a Gothickal design, and had the general look of some Government office in London, or a University college. The doors and windows were open to let bees fly in and out. They had built a hive inside—a cathedral of honeycombs.

  “With all respect to Mr. Wren, I see a clash of architectural styles here—”

  “What! Where?” Wilkins exclaimed, searching the roofline for aesthetic contaminants. “I shall cane the boy!”

  “It’s not the builder, but the tenants who’re responsible. All those little waxy hexagons—doesn’t fit with Mr. Wren’s scheme, does it?”

  “Which style do you prefer?” Wilkins asked, wickedly.

  “Err—”

  “Before you answer, know that Mr. Hooke approaches,” the Rev. whispered, glancing sidelong. Daniel looked over toward the house to see Hooke coming their way, bent and gray and transparent, like one of those curious figments that occasionally floats across one’s eyeball.

  “Is he all right?” Daniel asked.

  “The usual bouts of melancholy—a certain peevishness over the scarcity of adventuresome females—”

  “I meant is he sick.”

  Hooke had stopped near Daniel’s luggage, attracted by the croaking of frogs. He stepped in and seized the basket.

  “Oh, he ever looks as if he’s been bleeding to death for several hours—fear for the frogs, not for Hooke!” Wilkins said. He had a perpetual knowing, am
used look that enabled him to get away with saying almost anything. This, combined with the occasional tactical master-stroke (e.g., marrying Cromwell’s sister during the Interregnum), probably accounted for his ability to ride out civil wars and revolutions as if they were mere theatrical performances. He bent down in front of the glass apiary, pantomiming a bad back; reached underneath; and, after some dramatic rummaging, drew out a glass jar with an inch or so of cloudy brown honey in the bottom. “Mr. Wren provided sewerage, as you can see,” he said, giving the jar to Daniel. It was blood-warm. The Rev. now headed in the direction of the house, and Daniel followed.

  “You say you quarantined yourself at Epsom town—you must have paid for lodgings there—that means you have pocket-money. Drake must’ve given it you. What on earth did you tell him you were coming here to do? I need to know,” Wilkins added apologetically, “only so that I can write him the occasional letter claiming that you are doing it.”

  “Keeping abreast of the very latest, from the Continent or whatever. I’m to provide him with advance warning of any events that are plainly part of the Apocalypse.”

  Wilkins stroked an invisible beard and nodded profoundly, standing back so that Daniel could dart forward and haul open the cottage door. They went into the front room, where a fire was decaying in a vast hearth. Two or three rooms away, Hooke was crucifying a frog on a plank, occasionally swearing as he struck his thumb. “Perhaps you can help me with my book…”

  “A new edition of the Cryptonomicon?”

  “Perish the thought! Damn me, I’d almost forgotten about that old thing. Wrote it a quarter-century ago. Consider the times! The King was losing his mind—his Ministers being lynched in Parliament—his own drawbridge-keepers locking him out of his own arsenals. His foes intercepting letters abroad, written by that French Papist wife of his, begging foreign powers to invade us. Hugh Peters had come back from Salem to whip those Puritans into a frenzy—no great difficulty, given that the King, simply out—out—of money, had seized all of the merchants’ gold in the Tower. Scottish Covenanters down as far as Newcastle, Catholics rebelling in Ulster, sudden panics in London—gentlemen on the street whipping out their rapiers for little or no reason. Things no better elsewhere—Europe twenty-five years into the Thirty Years’ War, wolves eating children along the road in Besançon, for Christ’s sake—Spain and Portugal dividing into two separate kingdoms, the Dutch taking advantage of it to steal Malacca from the Portuguese—of course I wrote the Cryptonomicon! And of course people bought it! But if it was the Omega—a way of hiding information, of making the light into darkness—then the Universal Character is the Alpha—an opening. A dawn. A candle in the darkness. Am I being disgusting?”

  “Is this anything like Comenius’s project?”

  Wilkins leaned across and made as if to box Daniel’s ears. “It is his project! This was what he and I, and that whole gang of odd Germans—Hartlib, Haak, Kinner, Oldenburg—wanted to do when we conceived the Invisible College* back in the Dark Ages. But Mr. Comenius’s work was burned up in a fire, back in Moravia, you know.”

  “Accidental, or—”

  “Excellent question, young man—in Moravia, one never knows. Now, if Comenius had listened to my advice and accepted the invitation to be Master of Harvard College back in ’41, it might’ve been different—”

  “The colonists would be twenty-five years ahead of us!”

  “Just so. Instead, Natural Philosophy flourishes at Oxford—less so at Cambridge—and Harvard is a pitiable backwater.”

  “Why didn’t he take your advice, I wonder—?”

  “The tragedy of these middle-European savants is that they are always trying to apply their philosophick acumen in the political realm.”

  “Whereas the Royal Society is—?”

  “Ever so strictly apolitical,” Wilkins said, and then favored Daniel with a stage-actor’s hugely exaggerated wink. “If we stayed away from politics, we could be flying winged chariots to the Moon within a few generations. All that’s needed is to pull down certain barriers to progress—”

  “Such as?”

  “Latin.”

  “Latin!? But Latin is—”

  “I know, the universal language of scholars and divines, et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds so lovely, doesn’t it. You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”

  “Mmm…I’d go so far as to say that if a proper philosophical language existed, it would be impossible to express any false concept in it without violating its rules of grammar,” Daniel hazarded.

  “You have just uttered the most succinct possible definition of it—I say, you’re not competing with me, are you?” Wilkins said jovially.

  “No,” Daniel said, too intimidated to catch the humor. “I was merely reasoning by analogy to Cartesian analysis, where false statements cannot legally be written down, as long as the terms are understood.”

  “The terms! That’s the difficult part,” Wilkins said. “As a way to write down the terms, I am developing the Philosophical Language and the Universal Character—which learned men of all races and nations will use to signify ideas.”

  “I am at your service, sir,” Daniel said. “When may I begin?”

  “Immediately! Before Hooke’s done with those frogs—if he comes in here and finds you idle, he’ll enslave you—you’ll be shovelling guts or, worse, trying the precision of his clocks by standing before a pendulum and counting…its…alternations…all…day…long.”

  Hooke came in. His spine was all awry: not only stooped, but bent to one side. His long brown hair hung unkempt around his face. He straightened up a bit and tilted his head back so that the hair fell away to either side, like a curtain opening up to reveal a pale face. Stubble on the cheeks made him look even gaunter than he actually was, and made his gray eyes look even more huge. He said: “Frogs, too.”

  “Nothing surprises me now, Mr. Hooke.”

  “I put it to you that all living creatures are made out of them.”

  “Have you considered writing any of this down? Mr. Hooke? Mr. Hooke?” But Hooke was already gone out into the stable-yard, off on some other experiment.

  “Made out of what??” Daniel asked.

  “Lately, every time Mr. Hooke peers at something with his Microscope he finds that it is divided up into small compartments, each one just like its neighbors, like bricks in a wall,” Wilkins confided.

  “What do these bricks look like?”

  “He doesn’t call them bricks. Remember, they are hollow. He has taken to calling them ‘cells’…but you don’t want to get caught up in all that nonsense. Follow me, my dear Daniel. Put thoughts of cells out of your mind. To understand the Philosophical Language you must know that all things in Earth and Heaven can be classified into forty different genera…within each of those, there are, of course, further subclasses.”

  Wilkins showed him into a servant’s room where a writing desk had been set up, and papers and books mounded up with as little concern for order as the bees had shown in building their honeycomb. Wilkins moved a lot of air, and so leaves of paper flew off of stacks as he passed through the room. Daniel picked one up and read it: “Mule fern, panic-grass, hartstongue, adderstongue, moon-wort, sea novelwort, wrack, Job’s-tears, broomrope, toothwort, scurvy-grass, sowbread, golden saxifrage, lily of the valley, bastard madder, stinking ground-pine, endive, dandelion, sowthistle, Spanish picktooth, purple loose-strife, bitter vetch.”

  Wilkins was nodding impatiently. “The capsulate herbs, not campanulate, and the bacciferous sempervirent shrubs,” he said. “Somehow it must have gotten mixed up with the glandiferous and the nuciferous trees.”

  “So, the Philosophical
Language is some sort of botanical—”

  “Look at me, I’m shuddering. Shuddering at the thought. Botany! Please, Daniel, try to collect your wits. In this stack we have all of the animals, from the belly-worm to the tyger. Here, the terms of Euclidean geometry, relating to time, space, and juxtaposition. There, a classification of diseases: pustules, boils, wens, and scabs on up to splenetic hypochondriacal vapours, iliac passion, and suffocation.”

  “Is suffocation a disease?”

  “Excellent question—get to work and answer it!” Wilkins thundered.

  Daniel, meanwhile, had rescued another sheet from the floor: “Yard, Johnson, dick…”

  “Synonyms for ‘penis,’” Wilkins said impatiently.

  “Rogue, mendicant, shake-rag…”

  “Synonyms for ‘beggar.’ In the Philosophical Language there will only be one word for penises, one for beggars. Quick, Daniel, is there a distinction between groaning and grumbling?”

  “I should say so, but—”

  “On the other hand—may we lump genuflection together with curtseying, and give them one name?”

  “I—I cannot say, Doctor!”

  “Then, I say, there is work to be done! At the moment, I am bogged down in an endless digression on the Ark.”

  “Of the Covenant? Or—”

  “The other one.”

  “How does that enter into the Philosophical Language?”

  “Obviously the P.L. must contain one and only one word for every type of animal. Each animal’s word must reflect its classification—that is, the words for perch and bream should be noticeably similar, as should the words for robin and thrush. But bird-words should be quite different from fish-words.”

  “It strikes me as, er, ambitious…”

  “Half of Oxford is sending me tedious lists. My—our—task is to organize them—to draw up a table of every type of bird and beast in the world. I have entabulated the animals troublesome to other animals—the louse, the flea. Those designed for further transmutation—the caterpillar, the maggot. One-horned sheathed winged insects. Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—and before you ask, I have subdivided them into those with, and without, spiral convolutions. Squamous river fish, phytivorous birds of long wings, rapacious beasts of the cat-kind—anyway, as I drew up all of these lists and tables, it occurred to me that (going back to Genesis, sixth chapter, verses fifteen through twenty-two) Noah must have found a way to fit all of these creatures into one gopher-wood tub three hundred cubits long! I became concerned that certain Continental savants, of an atheistical bent, might misuse my list to suggest that the events related in Genesis could not have happened—”