Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  This accounted, anyway, for much that was peculiar about the part of London Bridge called the Square. Persons who went east and west on watermen’s boats on the Thames tended to be richer and more important than those who went north and south across the Bridge, and the ones who actually cared enough about their lives, limbs, and estates to bother with climbing out and hiking over the starling tended to be richer and more important yet, and so the buildings that stood atop the Bridge to either side of the Square constituted location! location! location! to the better sort of retailers and publicans.

  Daniel Waterhouse spent a couple of hours loitering in the vicinity of the Square one morning, waiting for a certain man on a certain boat. However, the boat he waited for would be coming the other direction: working its way upstream from the sea.

  He took a seat in a coffee-house and amused himself watching flushed and sweaty ferry-passengers appear at the head of the stairs, as if they’d been spontaneously generated from the fœtid waters of the Thames. They’d crawl into the nearby tavern for a pint, fortifying themselves for the traversal of the Bridge’s twelve-foot-wide roadway, where passengers were crushed between carts a few times a week. If they survived that, then they’d pop into the glover’s or the haberdasher’s for a bit of recreational shopping, and then perhaps dart into this coffee-house for a quick mug of java. The remainder of London Bridge was getting down at the heels, because much more fashionable shops were being put up in other parts of the city by the likes of Sterling, but the Square was prosperous and, because of the continual threat of boat-wrack and drowning, the merriest part of town.

  And in these days it tended to be crowded, especially when ships came across the Channel, and dropped anchor in the Pool, and their Continental passengers were ferried hither in watermen’s boats.

  As one such boat drew near the Bridge, Daniel finished his coffee, settled his bill, and ventured out onto the street. Cartage and drayage had been baffled by a crowd of pedestrians. They all wanted to descend to the starling on the downstream side, and had formed a sort of bung that stopped not only the stairs but the street as well. Seeing that they were by and large City men, intent on some serious purpose, and not Vagabonds intent on his purse, Daniel insinuated himself into this crowd and was presently drawn in to the top of the stairs and flushed down to the top of the starling along with the rest. He supposed at first that all of these well-dressed men had come to greet specific passengers. But as the boat drew within earshot, they began to shout, not friendly greetings, but questions, in several languages, about the war.

  “As a fellow Protestant—albeit Lutheran—it is my hoping that England and Holland shall become reconciled and that the war you speak of will no more exist.”

  The young German was standing up in a boat, wearing French fashions. But as the boat drew closer to the turbulence downstream of the Bridge, he came to his senses, and sat down.

  “So much for hopes—now what of your observations, sir?” someone fired back—one of a few dozen who had by now crowded onto the starling, trying to get as close to the incoming boats and ferries as they could without falling into the deadly chute. Others were perched up on the edge of the Square, like gargoyles, still others were out on the river in boats plotting intercept courses, like bocaneers in the Caribbean. None of them was having any of this Lutheran diplomacy. None even knew who the young German was—just a passenger on a boat from abroad who was willing to talk. There were several other travelers on the same boat, but all of them ignored the shouting Londoners. If these had information, they would take it to the ’Change, and tell the tale with silver, and propagate it through the chthonic channels of the Market.

  “What ship were you on, sir?” someone bellowed.

  “Ste-Catherine, sir.”

  “Where did that ship come from, sir?”

  “Calais.”

  “Had you any conversation with Naval persons?”

  “A little, perhaps.”

  “Any news, or rumor, of cannons bursting on English ships?”

  “Oh, sometimes it happens. By everyone in the ships of the melee, it is seen, for the whole side of the hull is out-blown, and out the bodies fly, or so they say. To all of the sailors, friend and enemy, it is a lesson of mortality, perhaps. Consequently they all talk about it. But in the present war it happens no more than usual, I think.”

  “Were they Comstock cannons?”

  The German took a moment to understand that, without even having set foot on English soil yet, he had talked himself into deep trouble. “Sir! The cannons of my lord Epsom are reckoned the finest in the world.”

  But no one wanted to hear that kind of talk. The topic had changed.

  “Whence came you to Calais?”

  “Paris.”

  “Did you see troops moving on your journey across France?”

  “A few ones, exhausted, south-going.”

  The gentlemen on the starling hummed and vibrated for a few moments, assimilating this. One broke away from the crowd, toiling back towards the stairs, and was engulfed in barefoot boys jumping up and down. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and handed it to the one who jumped highest. This one spun, forced a path through the others, took the stairs four at a time, broke loose onto the Square, vaulted over a wagon, spun a fishwife, and then began to build speed up the bridge. From here to the London shore was a hundred and some yards, from there to the ’Change was six hundred—he’d be there in three minutes. Meanwhile the interrogation continued: “Did you see Ships of Force in the Channel, mein Herr? English, French, Dutch?”

  “There was—” and here the man’s English gave way. He made a helpless, encompassing gesture.

  “Fog!”

  “Fog,” he repeated.

  “Did you hear guns?”

  “A few—but very likely they were only signals. Coded data speeding through the fog, so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound—” and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins’s Cryptonomicon but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.

  Leibniz set foot on England. He was closely followed by a couple of other German gentlemen, somewhat older, much less talkative, and (Daniel could only suppose) more important. They in turn were pursued by a senior servant who headed up a short column of porters lugging boxes and bags. But Leibniz had burdened himself with a wooden box he would not let go of. Daniel stepped forward to greet them, but was cut off by some brusque fellow who shouldered in to hand a sealed letter to one of the older gentlemen, and whispered to him for a moment in Low-Dutch.

  Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It could have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn’t, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them—incredibly—just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham’s College an hour ago. Not so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he’d noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.

  Leibniz and the others discussed matters in High-Dutch. The interloper turned round to glance at Daniel. It was one of the Dutch Ambassador’s errand-boys-cum-spies. The Germans formed some sort of a plan, and it seemed to involve splitting up. Daniel stepped in and introduced himself.

  The other Germans were introduced by their names but w
hat mattered was their ancestry: one of them was the nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg, who was the same Archbishop’s Minister. In other words very important people in Mainz, hence rather important ones in the Holy Roman Empire, which was more or less neutral in the French/English/Dutch broil. It had all the signs of being some sort of peace-brokering mission, i.e.

  Leibniz knew who he was, and asked, “Is Wilkins still alive?”

  “Yes…”

  “Thank God!”

  “Though very ill. If you would like to visit him I would suggest doing it now. I’ll escort you gladly, Dr. Leibniz…may I have the honor of assisting you with that box?”

  “You are very civil,” Leibniz said, “but I’ll hold it.”

  “If it contains gold or jewelry, you’d best hold it tight.”

  “Are the streets of London not safe?”

  “Let us say that the Justices of the Peace are mostly concerned with Dissenters and Dutchmen, and our cutpurses have not been slow to adapt.”

  “What this contains is infinitely more valuable than gold,” Leibniz said, beginning to mount the stairs, “and yet it cannot be stolen.”

  Daniel lunged forward in an effort to keep step. Leibniz was slender, of average height, and tended to bend forward when he walked, the head anticipating the feet. Once he had reached the level of the roadway he turned sharply and strode towards the City of London, ignoring the various taverns and shops.

  He did not look like a monster.

  According to Oldenburg, the Parisians who frequented the Salon at the Hotel Montmor—the closest French equivalent to the Royal Society of London—had begun using the Latin word monstro to denote Leibniz. This from men who’d personally known Descartes and Fermat and who considered exaggeration an unspeakably vulgar habit. It had led to some etymological researches among some members of the R.S. Did they mean Leibniz was grotesquely misshapen? An unnatural hybrid of a man and something else? A divine warning?

  “He lives up this way, does he not?”

  “The Bishop has had to move because of his illness—he’s at his stepdaughter’s house in Chancery Lane.”

  “Then still we go this way—then left.”

  “You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?”

  “I have been studying London-paintings.”

  “I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire—like street-plans of Atlantis.”

  “And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,” Leibniz said. “Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle—all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

  Daniel decided to step back and let Leibniz’s words reverberate, as organ-chords must do in Lutheran churches. Meanwhile they reached the north end of the Bridge, where the racket of the water-wheels, confined and focused in the stone vault of the gatehouse, made conversation impossible. Not until they’d made it out onto dry land, and begun to ascend the Fish Street hill, did Daniel ask, “I note you’ve already been in communication with the Dutch Ambassador. May I assume that your mission is not entirely natural-philosophick in nature?”

  “A rational question—in a way,” Leibniz grumbled. “We are about the same age, you and I?” he asked, giving Daniel a quick inspection. His eyes were unsettling. Depending on what kind of monster he was, either beady, or penetrating.

  “I am twenty-six.”

  “So am I. We were born about sixteen forty-six. The Swedes took Prague that year, and invaded Bavaria. The Inquisition was burning Jews in Mexico. Similar terrible things were happening in England, I assume?”

  “Cromwell crushed the King’s army at Newark—chased him out of the country—John Comstock was wounded—”

  “And we are speaking only of kings and noblemen. Imagine the sufferings of common people and Vagabonds, who possess equal stature in God’s eyes. And yet you ask me whether my mission is philosophick or diplomatic, as if those two things can neatly be separated.”

  “Rude and stupid I know, but it is my duty to make conversation. You are saying that it should be the goal of all natural philosophers to restore peace and harmony to the world of men. This I cannot dispute.”

  Leibniz now softened. “Our goal is to prevent the Dutch war from growing into a general conflagration. Please do not be offended by my frankness now: the Archbishop and the Baron are followers of the Royal Society—as am I. They are Alchemists—which I am not, except when it is politic. They hope that through pursuit of Natural Philosophy I may make contacts with important figures in this country, whom it would normally be difficult to reach through diplomatic channels.”

  “Ten years ago I might have been offended,” Daniel said. “Now, there’s nothing I’ll not believe.”

  “But my interest in meeting the Lord Bishop of Chester is as pure as any human motive can be.”

  “He will sense that, and be cheered by it,” Daniel said. “The last few years of Wilkins’s life have been sacrified entirely to politics—he has been working to dismantle the framework of theocracy, to prevent its resurgence, in the event a Papist ascends to the throne—”

  “Or already has done so,” Leibniz said immediately.

  The offhanded way in which Leibniz suggested that King Charles II might be a crypto-Catholic hinted to Daniel that it was common knowledge on the Continent. This made him feel hopelessly dull, naïve, and provincial. He had suspected the King of many crimes and deceptions, but never of baldly lying about his religion to the entire Realm.

  He had plenty of time to conceal his annoyance as they were passing through the heart of the city, which had turned into a single vast and eternal building-site even as the normal business of the ‘Change and the goldsmiths’ shops continued. Paving-stones were whizzing between Daniel and the Doctor like cannonballs, shovels slicing the air around their heads like cutlasses, barrows laden with gold and silver and bricks and mud trundling like munition-carts over temporary walk-ways of planks and stomped dirt.

  Perhaps reading anxiety on Daniel’s face, Leibniz said, “Just like the Rue Vivienne in Paris,” with a casual hand-wave. “I go there frequently to read certain manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roi.”

  “I’ve been told that a copy of every book printed in France must be sent to that place.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it was established in the same year that we had our Fire—so I ween that it must be very small yet, as it’s had only a few years to grow.”

  “A few very good years in mathematics, sir. And it also contains certain unpublished manuscripts of Descartes and Pascal.”

  “But none of the classics?”

  “I had the good fortune to be raised, or to raise myself, in my father’s library, which contained all of them.”

  “Your father was mathematickally inclined?”

  “Difficult to say. As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”

  “I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliothèque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.”

  “And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”

  “But with all due respect, Doctor, I do not understand how this street could be anything less like the Rue Vivienne—we have no such Bibliothèque in England.”

  “The Bibliothèque du Roi is just a house, you see, a house Colbert happened to buy on the Rue Vivienne—probably as an investment, because that street is the center of gold
smiths. Every ten days, from ten in the morning until noon, all of the merchants of Paris send their money to the Rue Vivienne to be counted. I sit there in Colbert’s house trying to understand Descartes, working the mathematical proofs that Huygens, my tutor, gives me, and looking out the windows as the street fills up with porters staggering under their back-loads of gold and silver, converging on a few doorways. Are you beginning to understand my riddle now?”

  “Which riddle was that?”

  “This box! I said it contained something infinitely more valuable than gold, and yet it could not be stolen. Which way do we turn here?”

  For they’d come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided. Message-boys were flying across that intersection like quarrels from crossbows—or (Daniel suspected) like broad Hints that he was failing to Get.

  LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS, bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter’s home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers—not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.* They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely outmoded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.

  “You see—despite the purity of your motives, you’re immersed in politics already,” Daniel said. “The lady of the house is Cromwell’s niece.”