Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “They are blue!”

  “It is another clue about the nature of light,” Isaac said. “Gold is yellow—it reflects the part of light that is yellow, that is, but allows the remnant to pass through—which being deprived of its yellow part, appears blue.”

  Daniel was peering out at a dim vision of blue-blossomed apple trees before a blue stone house—a blue Isaac Newton sitting with his back to a blue sun, one blue hand covering his eyes.

  “Forgive me their rude construction—I made them in the dark.”

  “Is there something the matter with your eyes, Isaac?”

  “Nothing that cannot heal, God willing. I have been staring into the sun too much.”

  “Oh.” Daniel was semi-dumbstruck by Puritan guilt for having left Isaac alone for so long. It was fortunate he hadn’t killed himself.

  “I can still work in a dark room, with the spectra that are cast through the prism by the Sun. But the spectra of Venus are too faint.”

  “Of Venus?!”

  “I have made observations concerning the nature of Light that contradict the theories of Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens,” Isaac said. “I have divided the white light of the Sun into colors, and then recombined these rays to make white light again. I have done the experiment many times, changing the apparatus to rule out possible sources of error. But there is one I have yet to eliminate: the Sun is not a point source of light. Its face subtends a considerable arc in the heavens. Those who will seek to find fault with my work, and to attack me, will claim that this—the fact that the light entering my prism, from different parts of the Sun’s disk, strikes it from slightly different angles—renders my conclusions suspect, and therefore worthless. In order to defeat these objections I must repeat the experiments using light, not from the Sun, but from Venus—an almost infinitely narrow point of light. But the light from Venus is so faint that my burned eyes cannot see it. I need you to make the observations with your good eyes, Daniel. We begin tonight. Perhaps you’d care to take a nap?”

  The house was divided in half, north/south: the northern part, which had windows but no sunlight, was the domain of Newton’s mother—a parlor on the ground floor and a bedchamber above it, both furnished in the few-but-enormous style then mandatory. The southern half—with just a few tiny apertures to admit the plentiful sunlight—was Isaac’s: on the ground floor, a kitchen with a vast walk-in fireplace, suitable for alchemical work, and above it a bedchamber.

  Isaac persuaded Daniel to lie down in, or at least on, his mother’s bed for a bit of a nap—then made the mistake of mentioning that it was the same bed in which Isaac had been born, several weeks premature, twenty-four years earlier. So after half an hour of lying in that bed, as rigid as a tetanus victim, looking out between his feet at the first thing Isaac had ever laid eyes on (the window and the orchard), Daniel got up and went outside again. Isaac was still sitting on the bench with a book in his lap, but his gold spectacles were aimed at the horizon. “Defeated them soundly, I should say.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “When it started it was close to shore—but it has steadily moved away.”

  “What on earth can you you talking about, Isaac?”

  “The naval battle—we are fighting the Dutch in the Narrow Seas. Can you not hear the sound of the cannons?”

  “I’ve been lying quietly in bed and heard nothing.”

  “Out here, it is very distinct.” Isaac reached out and caught a fluttering petal. “The winds favor our Navy. The Dutch chose the wrong time to attack.”

  A fit of dizziness came over Daniel just then. Partly it was the thought that James, Duke of York, who a couple of weeks ago had been standing arm’s length from Daniel discoursing of syphilis, at this moment stood on the deck of a flagship, firing on, and taking fire from, the Dutch fleet; and the booms rolled across the sea and were gathered in by the great auricle of the Wash, the Boston and the Lynn Deeps, the Long Sand and the Brancaster Roads perhaps serving as the greased convolutions of an ear, and propagated up the channel of the Welland, fanned out along its tributary rivers and rills into the swales and hills of Lincolnshire and into the ears of Isaac. It was partly that, and partly the vision that filled his eyes: thousands of white petals were coming off the apple trees and following the same diagonal path to the ground, their descent skewed by a breeze that was blowing out toward the sea.

  “Do you remember when Cromwell died, and Satan’s Wind came along to carry his soul to Hell?” Isaac asked.

  “Yes. I was marching in his funeral procession, watching old Puritans getting blown flat.”

  “I was in the schoolyard. We happened to be having a broad-jumping competition. I won the prize, even though I was small and frail. In fact, perhaps I won because I was so—I knew that I should have to use my brains. I situated myself so that Satan’s Wind was at my back, and then timed my leap so that I left the ground during an especially powerful gust. The wind carried my little body through space like one of these petals. For a moment I was gripped by an emotion—part thrill and part terror—as I imagined that the wind might carry me away—that my feet might never touch the earth again—that I would continue to skim along, just above the ground, until I had circumnavigated the globe. Of course I was just a boy. I didn’t know that projectiles rise and fall in parabolic curves. Be those curves ever so flat, they always tend to earth again. But suppose a cannonball, or a boy caught up in a supernatural wind, flew so fast that the centrifugal force (as Huygens has named it) of his motion around the earth just counteracted his tendency to fall?”

  “Er—depends on what you assume about the nature of falling,” Daniel said. “Why do we fall? In what direction?”

  “We fall towards the center of the earth. The same center on which the centrifugal force pivots—like a rock whirled on the end of a string.”

  “I suppose that if, somehow, you could get the forces to balance just so, you’d keep going round and round, and never fall or fly away. But it seems terrifically improbable—God would have to set it up just so—as He set the planets in their orbits.”

  “If you make certain assumptions about the force of gravity, and how the weight of an object diminishes as it gets farther away, it’s not improbable at all,” Isaac said. “It just happens. You would keep going round and round forever.”

  “In a circle?”

  “An ellipse.”

  “An ellipse…” and here the bomb finally went off in his head, and Daniel had to sit down on the ground, the moisture of last year’s fallen apples soaking through his breeches. “Like a planet.”

  “Just so—if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”

  It was so pure and obviously Right that it did not occur to Daniel to question Isaac about the details for several hours, as the Sun was going down, and they were preparing for Venus to wheel round into the southern sky. “I have developed a method of fluxions that renders it all perfectly obvious,” Isaac said.

  Daniel’s first thought had been I have to tell Wilkins because Wilkins, who had written a novel in which men flew to the moon, would be delighted with Isaac’s phrase: We could all be planets. But that put him in mind of Hooke, and the experiment at the deep well. Some premonition told him that he had best keep Newton and Hooke in separate cells for now.

  Isaac’s bedroom might have been designed specifically for doing prism experiments, because one wanted an opening just big enough to admit a ray of light in which to center the prism, but otherwise the room needed to be dark so that the spectrum could be clearly viewed where it struck the wall. The only drawback for Daniel was stumbling over debris. This was the room where Isaac had lived in the years before going to Cambridge. Daniel inferred that they had been lonely years. The floor was cluttered with stuff Isaac had made but been too busy to throw away, and the white plaster walls were covered with graffiti he had sketched with charcoal or scratched with nails: designs for windmills, depictions of birds, ge
ometrickal proofs. Daniel shuffled through the darkness, never lifting a foot off the floor lest it come down on an old piece of doll-furniture or jagged remains of a lens-grinding experiment, the delicate works of a water-clock or the papery skull of a small animal, or a foamy crucible crowned with frozen drips of metal.

  Isaac had worked out during which hours of the night Venus would be shining her perfectly unidirectional light on Wools-thorpe Manor’s south wall, and he’d done it not only for tonight but for every night in the next several weeks. All of those hours were spoken for: he had planned out a whole program of experiments. It was clear to Daniel that Isaac had been arguing his case against a whole court full of imaginary Jesuits hurling Latin barbs at him from every quarter, objecting to his methods in ways that were often ridiculous—that Isaac fancied himself as a combination of Galileo and St. Anne, but that unlike Galileo he had no intention of knuckling under, and unlike St. Anne he would not end up riddled with his tormentors’ arrows—he was getting ready to catch the arrows, and fling them back.

  It was the sort of thing that Hooke never bothered with—because for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.

  When Isaac had got his prisms situated in the window and blown out the candle, Daniel was blind, and painfully embarrassed, for several minutes—he was anxious that, lacking Isaac’s acute senses, he would not be able to see the spectrum cast against the wall by the light shining from Venus. “Have due patience,” Isaac said with a tenderness Daniel hadn’t heard from him in years. The thought stole upon Daniel, as he sat there in the dark with Isaac, that Isaac might have more than one reason for wearing those golden spectacles all the time. They shielded his burnt eyes from the light, yes. But as well, might they hide his burnt heart from the sight of Daniel?

  Then Daniel noticed a multicolored blur on the wall—a sliver, red on one end and violet on the other. He said, “I have it.”

  He was startled by a heavy rustling directly above them, in the attic, a scrabbling of claws.

  “What was that?”

  “There is a tiny window up there—an invitation for owls to build nests in the attic,” Isaac said. “So vermin don’t eat the grain stored up there.”

  Daniel laughed at it. For a moment he and Isaac were boys up past bedtime playing with their toys, the complications of their past forgotten and the perils of the future unthought of.

  A deep hooing noise, like the resonant tone of an organ pipe. Then the rustle of feathers as the bird squeezed through the opening, and the rhythm of powerful wings, like the beating of a heart, receding into the sky. The spectrum of Venus flashed off, then on, as the owl momentarily eclipsed the planet. When Daniel looked, he realized that he could now see not only the spectrum from Venus, but tiny, ghostly streaks of color all over the wall: the spectra cast by the stars that surrounded Venus in the southern sky. But spectra were all he could see. The earth spun and the ribbons of color migrated across the invisible wall, an inch a minute, pouring across the rough plaster like shining puddles of quicksilver driven before a steady wind, revealing, in gorgeous colors, tiny strips of the pictures that Isaac had drawn and scratched on those walls. Each of the little rainbows showed only a fragment of a picture, and each picture in turn was only part of Isaac’s tapestry of sketchings and scratchings, but Daniel supposed that if he stood there through a sufficient number of long cold nights and concentrated very hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case.

  But I did believe, and do still, that the end of our City will be with fire and brimstone from above, and therefore I have made mine escape.

  —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  CAMBRIDGE TRIED TO RESUME that spring, but Daniel and Isaac had only just settled back into their chamber when someone died of the Plague and they had to move out again—Isaac back to Wools-thorpe, Daniel back to a wandering life. He spent some weeks with Isaac working on the colors experiment, others with Wilkins (now back in London, running regular meetings of the Royal Society again) working on the Universal Character manuscript, others with Drake or with his older half-siblings, who’d returned to London at Drake’s command, to await the Apocalypse. The Year of the Beast, 1666, was halfway through, then two-thirds. Plague had gone away. War continued, and it was more than just an Anglo-Dutch war now, for the French had made a league with the Dutch against the English. But whatever plans the Duke of York had hatched with his Admirals on that chilly day at Epsom must not have been altogether worthless, because it was going well for them. Drake must be torn between patriotic ardor, and a feeling of disappointment that it showed no sign whatever of developing into an Armageddon sort of war. It was merely a string of naval engagements, and the gist of it was that the English fleet was driving the Dutch and French from the Channel. All in all, there was a failure of events to match up with the program laid out in the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, which forced Drake to re-read them almost every day, working out interpretations new and ever more strained. For Daniel’s part, he sometimes went for days without thinking about the End of the World at all.

  One evening early in September he was riding back toward London from the north. He’d been up in Woolsthorpe helping Isaac run the numbers on his planetary orbit theory, but with inconclusive results, because they did not know exactly how far from the center of the Earth they were when they stood on the ground and weighed things. He had stopped in at that plague-ridden town of Cambridge to fetch a new book that claimed to specify the crucial figure: how big around was the Earth? and now he was going down to visit his father, who’d sent him an alarming letter, claiming that he had just calculated a different crucial figure: the exact date (early in September, as it happened) that the world would end.

  Daniel was still twenty miles outside of the city, riding along in the late afternoon, when a messenger came galloping up the road toward him and shouted, “London has been burning for a day and is burning still!” as he hurtled past.

  Daniel knew this, in a way, but he had been denying it. The air had had a burnt smell about it all day long, and a haze of smoke had clung about the trees and the sheltered hollows in the fields. The sun had been a glaring patch that seemed to fill half the southern sky. Now, as the day went on and it sank toward the horizon, it turned orange and then red, and began to limn vast billows and towers of smoke—portents and omens that seemed incomparably vaster than the (still unknown) radius of the Earth. Daniel rode into the night, but not into darkness. A vault of orange light had been thrown about a mile high up into the sky above London. Thuds propagated through the earth—at first he supposed they must be the impacts of buildings falling down, but then they began coming in slow premeditated onslaughts and he reckoned that they must be blowing up whole buildings with powder-kegs, trying to gouge fire-breaks through the city.

  At first he’d thought it was impossible for any fire to reach as far as Drake’s house outside of town on Holborn, but the number of explosions, the diameter of the arch of light, told him nothing was safe. He was working upstream against a heavy traffic of soot-faced wretches now. It made for slow going, but there was nothing to do about it. The folds of his clothing, and even the porches of his ears, were collecting black grit, nodules and splinters and flakes of charcoal that rained down tickingly on everything.

  “Cor, look, it’s snowing!” exclaimed a boy with his face turned upwards to catch reflected light. Daniel—not wanting to see it, really—raised his eyes slowly, and found the sky filled with some kind of loose chaff, swirling in slow vortices here and there but heading generally downwards. He grabbed a piece of it from the air: it was page 798 of a Bible, all charred round the margins. He reached again and snared a hand-written leaf from a goldsmith’s account-book, still glowing at one corner. Then a handbill—a libel attacking Free Coinage. A personal letter from one Lady to another. They accumulated on his shoulders like falli
ng leaves and he stopped reading them after a while.

  It took so long to get there that when he actually saw a house burning by the roadside, he was shocked. Solid beams of flame protruded from the windows, silhouetting people with leather buckets, jewels of water spinning off their rims. Refugees had flooded the fields along Gray’s Inn Road and, tired of watching the fire, had begun throwing up shelters out of whatever stuff they could find.

  Not far from Holborn, the road was nearly blocked by a rampart of shattered masonry that had spilled across it when buildings to either side had been blown up—even above the smell of burning London, Daniel could detect the brimstone-tang of the gunpowder. Then a building just to his right exploded—to Daniel, an instant’s warning, a yellow flare in the corner of his eye, and then gravel embedded in one side of his face (but it felt like that side of his head had simply been sheared off) and deafness. His horse bolted and instantly broke a leg in the rubble-pile, then threw Daniel off—he came down hard on stones and splinters, and got up after lying there for he had no idea how long. There had been more explosions, coming faster now as the main front of the fire drew closer, its heat drawing curtains of steam and smoke out of walls, rooves, and the clothing on the living and dead persons in the street. Daniel took advantage of the fire’s light to stumble over the rubble-wall and into a stretch of the road that was still clear, but doomed to burn.

  Reaching Holborn, he turned his back to the fire and ran toward the sound of the explosions. Some part of his mind had been doing geometry through all of this, plotting the points of the explosions and extrapolating them, and he was more and more certain that the curve was destined to pass near Drake’s house.