Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Err…I see, you are proposing a more subtile approach,” Sir Winston Churchill muttered.

  “Let’s put it on the list!” Wilkins suggested. “It can’t hurt to include as many ‘York’ and ‘James’ names as we can possibly think up.”

  “Hear, hear!” Churchill harrumphed—or possibly he was just clearing his throat—or summoning a barmaid.

  “As you wish—never mind,” Daniel said. “I take it that Mr. Root’s Demonstration was well received—?”

  For some reason this caused eyes to swivel, ever so briefly, toward the Earl of Upnor. “It went well,” Pepys said, drawing closer to Daniel, “until Mr. Root threatened to spank the Earl. Don’t look at him, don’t look at him,” Pepys continued levelly, taking Daniel’s arm and turning him away from the Earl. The timing was unfortunate, because Daniel was certain he had just overhead Upnor mentioning Isaac Newton by name, and wanted to eavesdrop.

  Pepys led him past Wilkins, who was good-naturedly spanking a barmaid. The publican rang a bell and everyone blew out the lights—the tavern went dark except for the freshly invigorated phosphorus. Everyone said “Woo!” and Pepys wrangled Daniel out into the street. “You know that Mr. Root makes the stuff from urine?”

  “So it is rumored,” Daniel said. “Mr. Newton knows more of the Art than I do—he has told me that Enoch the Red was following an ancient recipe to extract the Philosophic Mercury from urine, but happened upon phosphorus instead.”

  “Yes, and he has an entire tale that he tells, of how he found the recipe in Babylonia.” Pepys rolled his eyes. “Enthralled the courtiers. Anyway—for this evening’s Demo’, he’d collected urine from a sewer that drains Whitehall, and boiled it—endlessly—on a barge in the Thames. I’ll spare you the rest of the details—suffice it to say that when it was finished, and they were done applauding, and all of the courtiers were groping for a way to liken the King’s splendor and radiance to that of Phosphorus—”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose that would’ve been obligatory—?”

  Wilkins banged out the tavern door, apparently just to watch the story being related to Daniel.

  “The Earl of Upnor made some comment to the effect that some kingly essence—a royal humour—must suffuse the King’s body, and be excreted in his urine, to account for all of this. And when all of the other courtiers were finished agreeing, and marveling at the Earl’s philosophick acumen, Enoch the Red said, ‘In truth, most of this urine came from the Horse Guards—and their horses.’”

  “Whereat, the Earl was on his feet! His hand reaching for his sword—to defend His Majesty’s honor, of course,” Wilkins said.

  “What was His Majesty’s state of mind?” Daniel asked.

  Wilkins made his hands into scale-pans and bobbled them up and down. “Then Mr. Pepys tipped the scales. He related an anecdote from the Restoration, in 1660, when he had been on the boat with the King, and certain members of his household—including the Earl of Upnor, then no more than twelve years old. Also aboard was the King’s favorite old dog. The dog shit in the boat. The young Earl kicked at the dog, and made to throw it overboard—but was stayed by the King, who laughed at it, and said, ‘You see, in some ways, at least, Kings are like other men!’”

  “Did he really say such a thing!?” Daniel exclaimed, and instantly felt like an idiot—

  “Of course not!” Pepys said, “I merely told the story that way because I thought it would be useful—”

  “And was it?”

  “The King laughed,” Pepys said with finality.

  “And Enoch Root inquired, whether it had then been necessary to give the Earl a spanking, to teach him respect for his elders.”

  “Elders?”

  “The dog was older than the Earl—come on, pay attention!” Pepys said, giving Daniel a tremendous frown.

  “Strikes me as an unwise thing to have said,” Daniel muttered.

  “The King said, ‘No, no, Upnor has always been a civil fellow,’ or some such, and so there was no duel.”

  “Still, Upnor strikes me as a grudge-holder—”

  “Enoch has sent better men than Upnor to Hell—don’t trouble yourself about his future,” Wilkins said. “You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow—excessive sobriety, e.g…”

  “A tendency to fret—” Pepys put in.

  “Undue chastity—let’s back to the tavern!”

  HE WOKE UP SOMETIME THE next day on a hired coach bound for Cambridge—sharing a confined space with Isaac Newton, and a load of gear that Isaac had bought in London: a six-volume set of Theatrum Chemicum,* numerous small crates stuffed with straw, the long snouts of retorts poking out—canisters of stuff that smelled odd. Isaac was saying, “If you throw up again, please aim for this bowl—I’m collecting bile.”

  Daniel was able to satisfy him there.

  “Where Enoch the Red failed, you’re going to succeed—?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Going after the Philosophic Mercury, Isaac?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  “The R.S. adores your telescope,” Daniel said. “Oldenburg wants you to write more on the subject.”

  “Mmm,” Isaac said, lost in thought, comparing passages in three different books to one another. “Could you hold this for a moment, please?” Which was how Daniel came to be a human book-rest for Isaac. Not that he was in any condition to accomplish greater things. In his lap for the next hour was a tome: folio-sized, four inches thick, bound in gold and silver, obviously made centuries before Gutenberg. Daniel was going to blurt, This must have been fantastically expensive, but on closer investigation found a book-plate pasted into it, bearing the arms of Upnor, and a note from the Earl:

  Mr. Newton—

  May this volume become as treasured by you, as the memory of our fortuitous meeting is to me—

  UPNOR

  Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

  NOVEMBER 1713

  WHEN THEY’VE MADE it out of Plymouth and into Cape Cod Bay, van Hoek returns to his cabin and becomes Captain once more. He looks rather put out to find the place so discomposed. Perhaps this is a sign of Daniel’s being a bitter old Atheistical crank, but he nearly laughs out loud. Minerva’s a collection of splinters loosely pulled together by nails, pegs, lashings, and oakum, not even large enough to count as a mote in the eye of the world—more like one of those microscopic eggs that Hooke discovered with his microscope. She floats only because boys mind her pumps all the time, she remains upright and intact only because highly intelligent men never stop watching the sky and seas around her. Every line and sail decays with visible speed, like snow in sunlight, and men must work ceaselessly worming, parceling, serving, tarring, and splicing her infinite network of hempen lines in order to prevent her from falling apart in mid-ocean with what Daniel imagines would be explosive suddenness. Like a snake changing skins, she sloughs away what is worn and broken and replaces it from inner reserves—evoluting as she goes. The only way to sustain this perpetual and necessary evolution is to replenish the stocks that dwindle from her holds as relentlessly as sea-water leaks in. The only way to do that is to trade goods from one port to another, making a bit of money on each leg of the perpetual voyage. Each day assails her with hurricanes and pirate-fleets. To go out on the sea and find a Minerva is like finding, in the desert, a Great Pyramid blanced upside-down on its tip. She’s a baby in a basket—a book in a bonfire. And yet van Hoek has the temerity to appoint his cabin as if it were a gentleman’s drawing-room, with delicate weather-glasses, clocks, optickal devices, a decent library, a painting or two, an enamel cabinet stocked with Chinese crockery, a respectable stock of brandy and port. He’s got mirrors in here, for Christ’s sake. Not only that, but when he enters to discover a bit of broken glass on the deck, and small impact-craters here and there, he becomes so outraged that Dappa doesn’t need to tell Daniel they’d best leave him alone for a while.

  “So the curtain has come down on your performance. Now,
a man in your position might feel like a barnacle—unable to leave the ship—an annoyance to mariners—but on Minerva there is a job for everyone,” says Dappa, leading him down the midships staircase to the gundeck.

  Daniel’s not paying attention. A momentous rearrangement has taken place since Daniel was last here. All of the obstructions that formerly cluttered the space have been moved elsewhere or thrown overboard to create rights-of-way for the cannons. These had been lashed up against the inside of the hull, but now they’ve been swung round ninety degrees and each aimed at its gunport. As they are maneuvering on Cape Cod Bay, miles from the nearest Foe, those gunports are all closed for now. But like stage-hands laboring in the back of a theatre, the seamen are hard at work with diverse arcane tools, viz. lin-stocks, quoins, gunner’s picks, and worming-irons. One man’s got what looks like a large magnifying-glass, except without the glass—it’s an empty circle of iron on a handle. He sits astride a crate of cannonballs, heaving them out one at a time and passing them through the ring to gauge them, sorting them into other crates. Others whittle and file round blocks of wood, called sabots, and strap cannonballs to them. But anyone carrying a steel blade is distinctly unwelcome near the powder-barrels, because steel makes sparks.

  One sailor, an Irishman, is talking to one of the Plymouth whaleboat pirates captured this morning. A cannon is between the two men, and when a cannon is between two men, that is what they talk about. “This is Wapping Wendy, or W.W., or dub-dub as we sometimes dub her in the heat of battle, though you may call her ‘darling’ or ‘love of my life’ but never ‘Wayward Wendy’ as that lot—” glowering at the crew of another gun, “Mr. Foote,” “—like to defame her.”

  “Is she? Wayward?”

  “She’s like any other lass, you must get to know her, and then what might seem inconstant is clearly revealed as a kind of consistency—faithfulness even. And so the first thing you must know about our darling girl is that her bore tends up and to larboard of her centerline. And she’s a tight one, is our virginal Wendy, which is why we on the dub-dub crew must keep a sharp eye for undersized balls and husband ‘em carefully…”

  Someone on the crew of “Manila Surprise” nudges that gun’s port open for a moment, and sun shines in. But Manila Surprise is on the larboard side of the ship. “We are sailing southwards!?” Daniel exclaims.

  “No better way to run before a north wind,” Dappa says.

  “But in that direction, Cape Cod is only a few miles away! What sort of an escape route is that?”

  “As you have reckoned, we shall have to work to windwards eventually in order to escape from Cape Cod Bay,” Dappa says agreeably. “When we do, Teach’s fleet will be tacking along with us. But his ships are fore-and-aft rigged and can sail closer to the wind, and make better headway, than our dear Minerva, a square-rigger. Advantage Teach.”

  “Shouldn’t we head north while we can, then?”

  “He would catch us in a matter of minutes—his entire fleet together, working in concert. We want to fight Teach’s ships one at a time if we can. So southwards it is, for now. Running before the wind in full sail, we are faster than they. So Teach knows that if he pursues us to the south we may lose him. But he also knows that we must wheel about and work northwards before long—so he will spread out a sort of picket-line and wait for us.”

  “But will Teach not anticipate all of this, and take pains to keep his fleet together?”

  “In a well-disciplined fleet, pursuing Victory, that’s how it would go. But that is a pirate-fleet, in pursuit of plunder, and by the rules and account-books of piracy, the lion’s share goes to the ship that takes the prize.”

  “Ah—so the captain of each ship has incentive to split away and attack us individually.”

  “Just so, Dr. Waterhouse.”

  “But would it not be foolhardy for a little sloop to engage a ship with all—this?” Daniel gestures down the length of the gundeck—a bustling bazaar where cannonballs, sabots, and powder-kegs, lies, promises, and witticisms are being exchanged lustily.

  “Not if the ship is undermanned, and the captain a senile poltroon. Now, if you’ll just follow me down into the hold—don’t worry, I’ll get this lantern lit, soon as we are away from the gunpowder—there, that’s it. She’s a tidy ship, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Beg pardon? Tidy? Yes, I suppose, as ships go…” says Dr. Water-house, finding Dappa, sometimes, too subtle—an excess of quicksilver in the constitution.

  “Thank you, sir. But ‘tis a disadvantage, when we have to fight with blunderbusses. The virtue of a blunderbuss, as you may know, is to make a weapon out of whatever nails, pebbles, splinters, and fragments might be lying about—but here on Minerva we make a practice of sweeping that matter up, and throwing it overboard, several times daily. At times like this we do regret that we neglected to hoard it.”

  “I know more than you imagine of blunderbusses. What do you want me to do?”

  “In a little while, one of the men’ll be teaching you how to fuze mortar-bombs—but we’re not quite ready for that just yet—now I would ask you to go down into the hold and—”

  Dr. Waterhouse doesn’t believe, until he’s down there, what Dappa tells him next. He hasn’t seen the hold yet, and reckons it’ll be like the shambolic Repository at the Royal Society—but no. The great casks and bales are stacked, and lashed in place, with admirable neatness, and there is even a Diagram tacked to the staircase bulkhead in which the location of each object is specified, and notes made as to what’s stored there and when it was done. Underneath, under a subheading labelled BILGE, van Hoek himself has scratched “outmoded china—keep handy.”

  Dappa has pulled two sailors away from what they’ve been doing the last half-hour: standing by a gunport carrying on a learned discourse about an approaching pirate-sloop. The sailors considered this to be time well spent, but Dappa felt otherwise. These two spend a minute consulting the Diagram, and Daniel realizes with moderate astonishment that they both know how to read, and interpret figures. They agree that the outmoded china is to be found forward, and so that’s where they go—to the most beautiful part of the ship, where many ribs radiate from the up-curving keel, forming an upside-down vault, so it’s like being a fly exploring the ceiling of a cathedral. The sailors move a few crates out of the way—they never stop talking, each trying to outdo the other in bloodcurdling yarns about the cruelty of certain infamous pirates. They pull up a hatch that gives access to the bilge, and in no time at all two crates of markedly ugly china have been fetched out. The crates themselves are handsome productions of clear-grained red cedar, chosen because it won’t rot in the wet bilge. Into them the china has been thrown with no packing material between items, so part of Daniel’s work is already done. He thanks the two sailors and they look back at him queerly, then return abovedecks. Daniel spreads an old hammock—two yards of sailcloth—on the planking, tips a crate over, and then attacks its spilled contents with a maul.

  What is the optimal size (he wonders) of a shard of pottery for firing out of a blunderbuss? When the King’s guards shot him before his father’s house during the Fire, he was knocked down, bruised, cut, but not really penetrated. Probably the larger the better, which makes his job easier—one would like to see great sharp triangles of gaudily-painted porcelain spinning through the air, plunging into pirate-flesh, severing major vessels. But too large and it won’t pack into the barrels. He decides to aim for a mean diameter of half an inch, and mauls the plates accordingly, sweeping chunks that are the right size off into small canvas bags, raking bigger ones toward him for more punishment. It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva’s hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady su
ck-and-hiss that’s like the systole and diastole of a beating heart.

  Gresham’s College, Bishopsgate, London

  1672

  The Inquisitive Jesuit RICCIOLI has taken great pains by 77 Arguments to overthrow the Copernican Hypothesis…I believe this one Discovery will answer them, and 77 more, if so many can be thought of and produced against it.

  —ROBERT HOOKE

  DANIEL SPENT A GOOD PART of two months on the roof of Gresham’s College, working on a hole—making, not mending, one. Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.

  For a man who claimed to hate the appearance of sharp things when viewed under a microscope, Hooke spent a great deal of time honing jabs at Inquisitive Jesuits. While Daniel was up on the roof making the hole, and a rain-hatch to cover it, Hooke was safe at ground level, running up and down a gallery. Strapped into his groin was a narrow hard saddle, and projecting from the saddle a strut with a wheel on the end, geared to a clock-work dial: a pedometer of his own design, which enabled him to calculate how much distance he had covered going nowhere. The purpose—as he explained to Daniel and diverse other aghast Fellows of the R.S.—was not to get from point A to point B, but to sweat. In some way, sweating would purge his body of whatever caused his headaches, nausea, and vertigo. From time to time, he would stop and refresh himself by drinking a glass of elemental mercury. He had set up a table at one end of the gallery where he stockpiled that and several of Mons. LeFebure’s fashionable medicines. There were various sorts of quills, too. Some of them he used to tickle the back of his throat and induce vomiting, others he sharpened, dipped in ink, and used to note down data from his pedometer, or to vent his spleen at Jesuits who refused to admit that the Earth revolved around the Sun, or to sketch out plans for Bedlam, or to write diatribes against Oldenburg, or simply to transact the routine business of the City Surveyor.