Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Daniel really knew of no way to regulate his actions other than to be rational. Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not. Daniel had liked to tell himself that rational thought led to better actions than brute force of will; yet here was the Duke of York all but rolling his eyes at them and their experiment, seeing naught that was new.

  “A friend of mine brought back something nasty from France,” his royal highness announced.

  It took Daniel a long time to decrypt this. He tried to understand it in any number of different ways, but suddenly the knowledge rumbled through his mind like a peal of thunder through a coppice. The Duke had said: I have syphilis.

  “Shame, that,” Daniel said. For he was not sure, yet, that he had translated it correctly. He must be ever so careful and vague lest this conversation degenerate into a comedy of errors ending with his death by rapier-thrust.

  “Some are of the opinion that mercury cures it.”

  “It is also a poison, though,” Daniel said.

  Which was common knowledge; but it seemed to confirm, in the mind of James Stuart, Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, that he was talking to just the right chap. “Surely with so many clever Doctors in the Royal Society, working on artificial breath and such, there must be some thought of how to cure a man such as my friend.”

  And his wife and his children, Daniel thought, for James must have either gotten it from, or passed it on to, Anne Hyde, who had therefore probably given it to the daughters, Mary and Anne. To date, James’s older brother the King had not been able to produce any legitimate children. There were plenty of bastards like Monmouth. But none eligible to inherit the throne. And so this nasty thing that James had brought back from France was really a matter of whether the Stuart dynasty was to survive.

  This raised a fascinating side question. With a whole cottage full of Royal Society Fellows to choose from, why had James carefully chosen to speak with the one who happened to be the son of a Phanatique?

  “It is a sensitive matter,” the Duke remarked, “the sort of thing that stains a man’s honor, if it is bandied about.”

  Daniel readily translated this as follows: If you tell anyone, I’ll send someone round to engage you in a duel. Not that anyone would pay any notice, anyway, if the son of Drake were to level an accusation of moral turpitude against the Duke of York. Drake had been doing such things without letup for fifty years. And so the Duke’s strategy was now plain to Daniel: he had chosen Daniel to hear about his syphilis because if Daniel were so foolish as to spread rumors, no one would hear them above the roar of obloquy produced at all times by Drake. In any case, Daniel would not be able to keep it up for very long before he was found in a field outside of London with a lot of rapier wounds in his body.

  “You will let me know, won’t you, if the Royal Society learns anything on this front?” said James, making to leave.

  “So that you can pass the information on to your friend? Of course,” Daniel said. Which was the end of that conversation. He returned to the kitchen to get an idea of how much longer the experiment was going to go on.

  The answer: longer than any of them really wanted. By the time they were finished, dawn-light was beginning to come in the windows, giving them a premonition of just how ghastly the kitchen was going to look when the sun actually rose. Hooke was sitting crookedly in a chair, shocked and morose, appalled by himself, and Wilkins was hunched forward supporting his head on a smeared fist.

  They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance—they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

  Daniel gathered the dog’s remains up in his arms—messy, but it scarcely mattered—all their clothes would have to be burned anyway—and walked out to the bone-yard on the east side of the cottage, where the remains of all Hooke’s and Wilkins’s investigations were burned, buried, or used to study the spontaneous generation of flies. Notwithstanding which, the air was relatively clean and fresh out here. Having set the remains down, Daniel found that he was walking directly towards a blazing planet, a few degrees above the western horizon, which could only be Venus. He walked and walked, letting the dew on the grass cleanse the blood from his shoes. The dawn was making the fields shimmer pink and green.

  Isaac had sent him a letter: “Require asst. w/obs. of Venus pls. come if you can.” He had wondered at the time if this might be something veiled. But standing there in that dew-silvered field with his back to the house of carnage and nothing before him but the Dawn Star, Daniel remembered what Isaac had said years ago about the natural harmony between the heavenly orbs and the orbs we view them with. Four hours later he was riding north on a borrowed horse.

  Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

  NOVEMBER 1713

  DANIEL WAKES UP WORRIED. The stiffness in his masseter muscles, the aching in his frontalis and temporalis, tells him he’s been worrying about something in his sleep. Still, being worried is preferable to being terrified, which he was until yesterday, when Captain van Hoek finally gave up on the idea of trying to sail Minerva into the throat of a gale and turned back to calmer waters along the Massachusetts coast.

  Captain van Hoek would probably have called it “a bit of chop” or some other nautical euphemism, but Daniel had gone to his cabin with a pail to catch his vomit, and an empty bottle to receive the notes he’d been scratching out in the last few days. If the weather had gotten any worse, he’d have tossed these down the head. Perhaps some Moor or Hottentot would have found them in a century or two and read about Dr. Waterhouse’s early memories of Newton and Leibniz.

  The planks of the poop deck are only a few inches above Daniel’s face as he lies on his sack of straw. He’s learned to recognize the tread of van Hoek’s boots on those boards. On a ship it is bad manners to approach within a fathom of the captain, so even when the poop deck is crowded, van Hoek’s footsteps are always surrounded by a large empty space. As Minerva’s quest for a steady west wind has stretched out to a week and then two, Daniel has learned to read the state of the captain’s mind from the figure and rhythm of his movements—each pattern like the steps of a courtly dance. A steady long stride means that all is well, and van Hoek is merely touring the precincts. When he’s watching the weather he walks about in small eddies, and when he’s shooting the sun with his back-staff he stands still, grinding the balls of his feet against the planks to keep his balance. But this morning (Daniel supposes it is early in the morning, though the sun hasn’t come up yet) van Hoek is doing something Daniel’s never observed before: flitting back and forth across the poop deck with brisk angry steps, pausing at one rail or another for a few seconds at a time. The sailors, he senses, are mostly awake, but they are all belowdecks shushing one another and tending to small, intense, quiet jobs.

  Yesterday they had sailed into Cape Cod Bay—the shallow lake held in the crook of Cape Cod’s arm—to ride out the tail end of that northeast gale, and to make certain repairs, and get the ship more winter-ready than it had been. But then the wind shifted round to the north and threatened to drive them against the sandbanks at the southern fringe of said Bay, and so they sailed toward the sunset, and maneuvered the big ship with exquisite care between rocks to starboa
rd and sunken islands to port, and thus entered Plymouth Bay. As night fell they dropped anchor in an inlet, well sheltered from the weather, and (as Daniel supposed) prepared to tarry there for a few days and await more auspicious weather. But van Hoek was obviously nervous—he doubled the watch, and put men to work cleaning and oiling the ship’s surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of small firearms.

  A distant boom rattles the panes in Daniel’s cabin window. He rolls out of bed like a fourteen-year-old and scurries to the exit, flailing one hand over his head in the dark so he won’t brain himself on the overhead beam. When he emerges onto the quarter-deck he seems to hear answering fire from all the isles and hillside around them—then he understands that they are merely echoes of the first explosion. With a good pocket-watch he could map their surroundings by the timing of those echoes—

  Dappa, the first mate, sits crosslegged on the deck near the wheel, reviewing charts by candle-light. This is an odd place for such work. Diverse feathers and colored ribbons dangle from a string above his head—Daniel supposes it to be a tribal fetish (Dappa is an African) until a fleck of goose-down crawls in a breath of cold air, and he understands that Dappa is trying to guess what the wind will do as the sun rises. He holds up one hand to silence Daniel before Daniel’s had a chance to speak. There is shouting on the water, but it is all distant—Minerva is silent as a ghost ship. Stepping farther out onto the quarter-deck, Daniel can see yellow stars widely scattered across the water, blinking as they are eclipsed by rolling seas.

  “You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Dappa observes.

  “I’ll rise to that bait—what have I gotten myself into?”

  “You’re on a ship whose captain refuses to have anything to do with pirates,” Dappa says. “Hates ’em. He nailed his colors to the mast twenty years ago, van Hoek did—he would burn this ship to the waterline before handing over a single penny.”

  “Those lights on the water—”

  “Whaleboats mostly,” Dappa says. “Possibly a barge or two. When the sun comes up we may expect to see sails—but before we concern ourselves with those, we shall have to contend with the whaleboats. Did you hear the shouting, an hour ago?”

  “I must have slept through it.”

  “A whaleboat stole up towards us with muffled oars. We let her suppose that we were asleep—waited until she was alongside, then dropped a comet into her.”

  “Comet?”

  “A small cannonball, wrapped in oil-soaked rags and set aflame. Once it lands in such a boat, it’s difficult to throw overboard. Gave us a good look, while it lasted: there were a dozen Englishmen in that boat, and one of ’em was already swinging a grappling-hook.”

  “Do you mean that they were English colonists, or—”

  “That’s one of the things we aim to find out. After we chased that lot off, we sent some men out in our own whaler.”

  “The explosion—?”

  “‘Twas a grenade. We have a few retired grenadiers in our number—”

  “You threw a bomb into someone else’s boat?”

  “Aye, and then—if all went according to plan—our Filipinos—former pearl divers, excellent swimmers—climbed over the gunwales with daggers in their teeth and cut a few throats—”

  “But that’s mad! This is Massachusetts!”

  Dappa chuckles. “Aye. That it is.”

  An hour later the sun rises gorgeously over Cape Cod Bay. Daniel is pacing around the ship, trying to find a place where he won’t have to listen to the screams of the pirates. Two open boats are now thudding against Minerva’s hull: the ship’s own longboat, freshly caulked and painted, and the pirate whaler, which was evidently in poor condition even before this morning’s action. Splinters of fresh blond wood show where a bench was snapped by the grenade, and an inch or two of blood sloshes back and forth in the bottom as the empty boat is tossed around by a rising wind. Five pirates survived, and were towed back to Minerva by the raiding party. Now (judging from the sounds) they are all down in the bilge, where two of Minerva’s largest sailors are holding their heads beneath the filthy water. When they are hauled out, they scream for air, and Daniel thinks about Hooke and Wilkins with their poor dogs.

  Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire

  SPRING 1666

  He discovereth the depe & secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkenes, and the light dwelleth with him.

  —DANIEL 2:22

  FROM ISAAC’S INSTRUCTIONS (“Turn left at Grimethorpe Ruin”) he’d been expecting a few hovels gripping the rim of a wind-burned scarp, but Woolsthorpe was as pleasant a specimen of English countryside as he’d ever seen. North of Cambridge it was appallingly flat, a plain scratched with drainage ditches. But beyond Peterborough the coastal fens fell away and were replaced by pastures of radiant greenness, like stained-glass windows infested with sheep. There were a few tall pine trees that made the place seem farther north than it really was. Another day north, the country began to roll, and the earth turned brown as coffee, with cream-colored stone rising out of the soil here and there: once-irregular croppings rationalized to squared-off block-heaps by the efforts of quarrymen. Woolsthorpe gave an impression of being high up in the world, close to the sky, and the trees that lined the lane from the village all had the same telltale skewage, suggesting that the place might not be as pleasant all year round as it was on the morning Daniel arrived.

  Woolsthorpe Manor was a very simple house, shaped like a fat T with its crossbar fronting on the lane, made of the soft pale stone that was used for everything around here—its roof a solid mass of lichens. It was built sideways to a long slope that rose as it went northwards, and so, on its southern end, the land fell away from it, giving it a clear sunny exposure. But this opportunity had been wasted by the builders, who had put almost no windows there—just a couple of them, scarcely larger than gun-slits, and one tiny portal up in the attic that made no sense to Daniel at first. As Daniel noted while his horse toiled up the hill through the grasping spring mud, Isaac had already taken advantage of this south-facing wall by carving diverse sundials into it. Sprawling away from there, down the hill and away from the lane, were long stables and barns that marked the place as an active farmstead, and that Daniel didn’t have to concern himself with.

  He turned off the lane. The house was set back from it not more than twenty feet. Set above the door was a coat of arms carved into the stone: on a blank shield, a pair of human thigh-bones crossed. A Jolly Roger, minus skull. Daniel sat on his horse and contemplated its sheer awfulness for a while and savored the dull, throbbing embarrassment of being English. He was waiting for a servant to notice his arrival.

  Isaac had mentioned in his letter that his mother was away for a few weeks, and this was perfectly acceptable to Daniel—all he knew of the mother was that she had abandoned Isaac when he’d been three years old, and gone to live with a rich new husband several miles away, leaving the toddler to be raised in this house by his grandmother. Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up—like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata. Having dinner or even polite conversation with them was like sitting around the table participating in Hooke’s dog experiment—everything you did or said was another squeeze of the bellows, and you could stare right in through the vacancies in the rib cage and see the organs helplessly responding, the heart twitching with its own macabre internal power of perpetual motion. Daniel suspected that the Newtons were one of those families, and he was glad Mother was absent. Their coat of arms was a proof, of Euclidean certainty, that he was right about this.

  “Is that you, Daniel?” said the voice of Isaac
Newton, not very loud. A little bubble of euphoria percolated into Daniel’s bloodstream: to re-encounter anyone, after so long, during the Plague Years, and find them still alive, was a miracle. He looked uphill. The northern end of the house looked into, and was sheltered by, rising terrain. A small orchard of apple trees had been established on that side. Seated on a bench, with his back to Daniel and to the sun, was a man or woman with long colorless hair spilling down over a blanket that had been drawn round the shoulders like a shawl.

  “Isaac?”

  The head turned slightly. “It is I.”

  Daniel rode up out of the mud and into the apple-garden, then dismounted and tethered the horse to the low branch of an apple tree—a garland of white flowers. The petals were coming down from the apple-blossoms like snow. Daniel swung round Isaac in a wide Copernican arc, peering at him through the fragrant blizzard. Isaac’s hair had always been pale, and prematurely streaked with gray, but in the year since Daniel had seen him, he’d gone almost entirely silver. The hair fell about him like a hood—as Daniel came around to the front, he was expecting to see Isaac’s protruding eyes, but instead he saw two disks of gold looking back at him, as if Isaac’s eyes had been replaced by five-guinea coins. Daniel must have shouted, because Isaac said, “Don’t be alarmed. I fashioned these spectacles myself. I’m sure you know that gold is almost infinitely malleable—but did you know that if you pound it thin enough, you can see through it? Try them.” He took the spectacles off with one hand while clamping the other over his eyes. Daniel bobbled them because they were lighter than he’d expected—they had no lenses, just membranes of gold stretched like drum-heads over wire frames. As he raised them towards his face, their color changed.