Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “One could also imagine certain Jesuits turning it against you—holding it up as proof that you harbored atheistical notions of your own, Dr. Wilkins.”

  “Just so! Daniel! Which makes it imperative that I include, in a separate chapter, a complete plan of Noah’s Ark—demonstrating not only where each of the beasts was berthed, but also the fodder for the herbivorous beasts, and live cattle for the carnivorous ones, and more fodder yet to keep the cattle alive, long enough to be eaten by the carnivores—where, I say, ’twas all stowed.”

  “Fresh water must have been wanted, too,” Daniel reflected.

  Wilkins—who tended to draw closer and closer to people when he was talking to them, until they had to edge backwards—grabbed a sheaf of paper off a stack and bopped Daniel on the head with it. “Tend to your Bible, foolish young man! It rained the entire time!”

  “Of course, of course—they could’ve drunk rainwater,” Daniel said, profoundly mortified.

  “I have had to take some liberties with the definition of ‘cubit,’” Wilkins said, as if betraying a secret, “but I think he could have done it with eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep. To feed the carnivores, I mean.”

  “The sheep must’ve taken up a whole deck!?”

  “It’s not the space they take up, it’s all the manure, and the labor of throwing it overboard,” Wilkins said. “At any rate—as you can well imagine—this Ark business has stopped all progress cold on the P.L. front. I need you to get on with the Terms of Abuse.”

  “Sir!”

  “Have you felt, Daniel, a certain annoyance, when one of your semi-educated Londoners speaks of ‘a vile rascal’ or ‘a miserable caitiff’ or ‘crafty knave,’ ‘idle truant,’ or ‘flattering parasite’?”

  “Depends upon who is calling whom what…”

  “No, no, no! Let’s try an easy one: ‘fornicating whore.’ ”

  “It is redundant. Hence, annoying to the cultivated listener.”

  “‘Senseless fop.’ ”

  “Again, redundant—as are ‘flattering parasite’ and the others.”

  “So, clearly, in the Philosophical Language, we needn’t have separate adjectives and nouns in such cases.”

  “How about ’filthy sloven?”

  “Excellent! Write it down, Daniel!”

  “‘Licentious blade’…‘facetious wag’…‘perfidious traitor’…” As Daniel continued in this vein, Wilkins bustled over to the writing-desk, withdrew a quill from an inkwell, shook off redundant ink, and then came over to Daniel; wrapped his fingers around the pen; and guided him over to the desk.

  And so to work. Daniel exhausted the Terms of Abuse in a few short hours, then moved on to Virtues (intellectual, moral, and homiletical), Colors, Sounds, Tastes and Smells, Professions, Operations (viz. carpentry, sewing, alchemy), and so on. Days began passing. Wilkins became fretful if Daniel, or anyone, worked too hard, and so there were frequent “seminars” and “symposia” in the kitchen—they used honey from Christopher Wren’s Gothic apiary to make flip. Frequently Charles Comstock, the fifteen-year-old son of their noble host, came to visit, and to hear Wilkins or Hooke talk. Charles tended to bring with him letters addressed to the Royal Society from Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Spinoza. Frequently these turned out to contain new concepts that Daniel had to fit into the Philosophical Language’s tables.

  Daniel was hard at work compiling a list of all the things in the world that a person could own (aquæducts, axle-trees, palaces, hinges) when Wilkins called him down urgently. Daniel came down to find the Rev. holding a grand-looking Letter, and Charles Comstock clearing the decks for action: rolling up large diagrams of the Ark, and feeding-schedules for the eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep, and stowing them out of the way to make room for more important affairs. Charles II, by the Grace of God of England King, had sent them this letter: His Majesty had noticed that ant eggs were bigger than ants, and demanded to know how that was possible.

  Daniel ran out and sacked an ant-nest. He returned in triumph carrying the nucleus of an anthill on the flat of a shovel. In the front room Wilkins had begun dictating, and Charles Comstock scribbling, a letter back to the King—not the substantive part (as they didn’t have an answer yet), but the lengthy paragraphs of apologies and profuse flattery that had to open it: “With your brilliance you illuminate the places that have long, er, languished in, er—”

  “Sounds more like a Sun King allusion, Reverend,” Charles warned him.

  “Strike it, then! Sharp lad. Read the entire mess back to me.”

  Daniel slowed before the door to Hooke’s laboratory, gathering his courage to knock. But Hooke had heard him approaching, and opened it for him. With an outstretched hand he beckoned Daniel in, and aimed him at a profoundly stained table, cleared for action. Daniel entered the room, upended the ant-nest, set the shovel down, and only then worked up the courage to inhale. Hooke’s laboratory didn’t smell as bad as he’d always assumed it would.

  Hooke ran his hands back through his hair, pulling it away from his face, and tied it back behind his neck with a wisp of twine. Daniel was perpetually surprised that Hooke was only ten years older than he. Hooke just turned thirty a few weeks ago, in June, at about the same time that Daniel and Isaac had fled plaguey Cambridge for their respective homes.

  Hooke was now staring at the mound of living dirt on his table-top. His eyes were always focused on a narrow target, as if he peered out at the world through a hollow reed. When he was out in the broad world, or even in the house’s front room, that seemed strange, but it made sense when he was looking at a small world on a tabletop—ants scurrying this way and that, carrying egg-cases out of the wreckage, establishing a defensive perimeter. Daniel stood opposite and looked at, but apparently did not see, the same things.

  Within a few minutes Daniel had seen most of what he was going to see among the ants, within five minutes he was bored, within ten he had given up all pretenses and begun wandering round Hooke’s laboratory, looking at the remnants of everything that had passed beneath the microscope: shards of porous stone, bits of moldy shoe-leather, a small glass jar labelled WILKINS URINE, splinters of petrified wood, countless tiny envelopes of seeds, insects in jars, scraps of various fabrics, tiny pots labelled SNAILS TEETH and VIPERS FANGS. Shoved back into a corner, a heap of dusty, rusty sharp things: knife-blades, needles, razors. There was probably a cruel witticism to be made here: given a razor, Hooke would sooner put it under his microscope than shave with it.

  As the wait went on, and on, and on, Daniel decided that he might as well be improving himself. So with care he reached into the sharp-things pile, drew out a needle, and carried it over to a table where sun was pouring in (Hooke had grabbed all of the south-facing rooms in the cottage, to own the light). There, mounted to a little stand, was a tube, about the dimensions of a piece of writing-paper rolled up, with a lens at the top for looking through, and a much smaller one—hardly bigger than a chick’s eye—at the bottom, aimed at a little stand that was strongly illuminated by the sunlight. Daniel put the needle on the stand and peered through the Microscope.

  He expected to see a gleaming, mirrorlike shaft, but it was a gnawed stick instead. The needle’s sharp point turned out to be a rounded and pitted slag-heap.

  “Mr. Waterhouse,” Hooke said, “when you are finished with whatever you are doing, I will consult my faithful Mercury.”

  Daniel stood up and turned around. He thought for a moment that Hooke was asking him to fetch some quicksilver (Hooke drank it from time to time, as a remedy for headaches, vertigo, and other complaints). But Hooke’s giant eyes were focused on the Microscope instead.

  “Of course!” Daniel said. Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods—bringer of information.

  “What think you now of needles?” Hooke asked.

  Daniel plucked the needle away and held it up before the window, viewing it in a new light. “Its appearance is almost physically disgusting,” he said.

  “A
razor looks worse. It is all kinds of shapes, except what it should be,” Hooke said. “That is why I never use the Microscope any more to look at things that were made by men—the rudeness and bungling of Art is painful to view. And yet things that one would expect to look disgusting become beautiful when magnified—you may look at my drawings while I satisfy the King’s curiosity.” Hooke gestured to a stack of papers, then carried a sample ant-egg over to the microscope as Daniel began to page through them.

  “Sir. I did not know that you were an artist,” Daniel said.

  “When my father died, I was apprenticed to a portrait-painter,” Hooke said.

  “Your master taught you well—”

  “The ass taught me nothing,” Hooke said. “Anyone who is not a half-wit can learn all there is to know of painting, by standing in front of paintings and looking at them. What was the use, then, of being an apprentice?”

  “This flea is a magnificent piece of—”

  “It is not art but a higher form of bungling,” Hooke demurred. “When I viewed that flea under the microscope, I could see, in its eye, a complete and perfect reflection of John Comstock’s gardens and manor-house—the blossoms on his flowers, the curtains billowing in his windows.”

  “It’s magnificent to me,” Daniel said. He was sincere—not trying to be a Flattering Parasite or Crafty Knave.

  But Hooke only became irritated. “I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”

  Wilkins had asked Daniel which he preferred: Wren’s glass apiary, or the bees’ honeycomb inside of it. Then he had warned Daniel that Hooke was coming into earshot. Now Daniel understood why: for Hooke there could only be one answer.

  “I defer to you, sir.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But without seeming to be a Cavilling Jesuit, I should like to know whether Wilkins’s urine is a product of Art or Nature.”

  “You saw the jar.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you take the Rev.’s urine and pour off the fluid and examine what remains under the Microscope, you will see a hoard of jewels that would make the Great Mogul swoon. At lower magnification it seems nothing more than a heap of gravel, but with a better lens, and brighter light, it is revealed as a mountain of crystals—plates, rhomboids, rectangles, squares—white and yellow and red ones, gleaming like the diamonds in a courtier’s ring.”

  “Is that true of everyone’s urine?”

  “It is more true of his than of most people’s,” Hooke said. “Wilkins has the stone.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “It is not so bad now, but it grows within him, and will certainly kill him in a few years,” Hooke said.

  “And the stone in his bladder is made of the same stuff as these crystals that you see in his urine?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Is there some way to—”

  “To dissolve it? Oil of vitriol works—but I don’t suppose that our Reverend wants to have that introduced into his bladder. You are welcome to make investigations of your own. I have tried all of the obvious things.”

  WORD ARRIVED THAT FERMAT had died, leaving behind a theorem or two that still needed proving. King Philip of Spain died, too, and his son succeeded him; but the new King Carlos II was sickly, and not expected to live to the end of the year. Portugal was independent. Someone named Lubomirski was staging a rebellion in Poland.

  John Wilkins was trying to make horse-drawn vehicles more efficient; to test them, he had rigged up a weight on a rope, above a well, so that when the weight fell down into the well, it would drag his chariots across the ground. Their progress could then be timed using one of Hooke’s watches. That duty fell to Charles Comstock, who spent many days standing out in the field making trials or fixing broken wheels. His father’s servants needed the well to draw water for livestock, and so Charles was frequently called out to move the contraption out of the way. Daniel enjoyed watching all of this, out the window, while he worked on Punishments:

  PUNISHMENTS CAPITAL

  ARE THE VARIOUS MANNERS OF PUTTING MEN TO DEATH IN A JUDICIAL WAY, WHICH IN SEVERAL NATIONS ARE, OR HAVE BEEN, EITHER SIMPLE; BY

  Separation of the parts;

  Head from Body: BEHEADING, strike of one’s head

  Member from Member: QUARTERING, Dissecting.

  Wound

  At distance, whether

  from hand: STONING, Pelting

  from Instrument, as Gun, Bow, &c.: SHOOTING.

  At hand, either by

  Weight;

  of something else: PRESSING.

  of one’s own: PRECIPITATING, Defenestration, casting headlong.

  Weapon;

  any way: STABBING

  direct upwards: EMPALING

  Taking away necessary Diet: or giving that which is noxious

  STARVING, famishing

  POISONING, Venom, envenom, virulent

  Interception of the air

  at the Mouth

  in the air: stifling, smother, suffocate.

  in the Earth: BURYING ALIVE

  in water: DROWNING

  in fire: BURNING ALIVE

  at the Throat

  by weight of a man’s own body: HANGING

  by the strength of others: STRANGLING, throttle, choke, suffocate

  MIXED OF WOUNDING AND STARVING; THE BODY BEING

  Erect: CRUCIFYING

  Lying on a Wheel: BREAKING ON THE WHEEL

  PUNISHMENTS NOT CAPITAL

  ARE DISTINGUISHED BY THE THINGS OR SUBJECTS RECEIVING DETRIMENT BY THEM, AS BEING EITHER OF THE BODY;

  according to the General name; signifying great pain: TORTURE

  according to special kinds:

  by Striking;

  with a limber instrument: WHIPPING, lashing, scourging, leashing, rod, slash, switch, stripe, Beadle

  with a stiff instrument: CUDGELLING, bastinado, baste, swinge, swaddle, shrubb, slapp, thwack;

  by Stretching of the limbs violently;

  the body being laid along: RACK

  the body lifted up into the Air: STRAPPADO

  LIBERTY; OF WHICH ONE IS DEPRIVED, BY RESTRAINT

  into

  a place: IMPRISONMENT, Incarceration, Durance, Custody, Ward, clap up, commit, confine, mure, Pound, Pinfold, Gaol, Cage, Set fast an Instrument: BONDS, fetters, gyves, shackles, manicles, pinion, chains.

  Out of a place or country, whether

  with allowance of any other: EXILE, banishment

  confinement to one other: RELEGATION

  REPUTE, WHETHER

  more gently: INFAMIZATION, Ignominy, Pillory

  more severely by burning marks in one’s flesh: STIGMATIZATION, Branding, Cauterizing

  ESTATE; WHETHER

  in part: MULCT, fine, sconce

  in whole: CONFISCATION, forfeiture

  DIGNITY AND POWER; BY DEPRIVING ONE OF

  his degree: DEGRADING, deposing, depriving

  his capacity to bear office: INCAPACITATING, cashier, disable, discard, depose, disfranchize.

  As Daniel scourged, bastinadoed, racked, and strappadoed his mind, trying to think of punishments that he and Wilkins had missed, he heard Hooke striking sparks with flint and steel, and went down to investigate.

  Hooke was aiming the sparks at a blank sheet of paper. “Mark where they strike,” he said to Daniel. Daniel hovered with a pen, and whenever an especially large spark hit the paper, he drew a tight circle around it. They examined the paper under the Microscope, and found, in the center of each circle, a remnant: a more or less complete hollow sphere of what was obviously steel. “You see that the Alchemists’ conception of heat is ludicrous,” Hooke said. “There is no Element of Fire. Heat is really nothing more than a brisk agitation of the parts of a body—hit a piece of steel with a rock hard enough, and a bit of steel is torn away—�
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  “And that is the spark?”

  “That is the spark.”

  “But why does the spark emit light?”

  “The force of the impact agitates its parts so vehemently that it becomes hot enough to melt.”

  “Yes, but if your hypothesis is correct—if there is no Element of Fire, only a jostling of internal parts—then why should hot things emit light?”

  “I believe that light consists of vibrations. If the parts move violently enough, they emit light—just as a struck bell vibrates to produce sound.”

  Daniel supposed that was all there was to that, until he went with Hooke to collect samples of river insects one day, and they squatted in a place where a brook tumbled over the brink of a rock into a little pool. Bubbles of water, forced beneath the pool by the falling water, rose to the surface: millions of tiny spheres. Hooke noticed it, pondered for a few moments, and said: “Planets and stars are spheres, for the same reason that bubbles and sparks are.”

  “What!?”

  “A body of fluid, surrounded by some different fluid, forms into a sphere. Thus: air surrounded by water makes a sphere, which we call a bubble. A tiny bit of molten steel surrounded by air makes a sphere, which we call a spark. Molten earth surrounded by the Cœlestial Æther makes a sphere, which we call a planet.”