Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Flamsteed’s temporary quarters, for the first couple of years, were in the Tower of London, atop the round turret of the White Tower. He made his first observations there while a permanent facility was being constructed on a patch of disused royal property at Greenwich.

  Henry VIII, not satisfied with six wives, had maintained any number of mistresses, storing them, when not in use, in a sort of bolt-hole on the top of a hill above Greenwich Palace. His successors had not shared his appetites, and so the royal fuck-house had largely fallen into ruin. The foundations, however, were still sound. Atop them, Wren and Hooke, working in a hurry, and on a tiny budget, had built some apartments, which served as plinth for an octagonal salt-box. Atop that was a turret, an allusion in miniature to the Norman turrets of the Tower of London. The apartments were for Flamsteed to live in. The octagon above was constructed essentially so that the court-fop contingent of the Royal Society would have a place to go and peer learnedly through telescopes. But because it had been built on the foundations of Henry VIII’s hilltop love shack, the whole building was oriented the wrong way. To make real observations, it had been necessary to construct an alienated limestone wall in the garden out back, oriented north–south. This was partly sheltered by a sort of roofless shack. Bolted to it were a pair of Hooke-designed quadrants, one looking north and the other looking south, each equipped with a sighting-tube. Flamsteed’s life, thereafter, consisted of sleeping all day, then going out at night, leaning against this wall, peering through the sighting-tubes at stars swinging past, and noting their positions. Every few years, the work was enlivened by the appearance of a comet.

  “What was Newton doing one year ago, Daniel?”

  “Sources tell me he was calculating the precise date and hour of the Apocalypse, based upon occult shreds of data from the Bible.”

  “We must have the same sources,” Roger said agreeably. “How much do you pay them?”

  “I say things to them in return. It is called having conversations, and for some it is payment enough.”

  “You must be right, Daniel. For, several months ago, Halley shows up and has a conversation with Newton: ‘Say, old chap, what about comets?’ And Newton drops the Apocalypse and turns to Euclid. Within a few months he’s got De Motu out.”

  “He worked out most of it in ’79, during his last feud with Hooke,” Daniel said, “and mislaid it, and had to work it out a second time.”

  “What—Doctor Waterhouse—do alchemy, the Apocalypse, and the elliptical orbits of heavenly bodies have in common? Other than that Newton is obsessed with all of them.”

  Daniel said nothing.

  “Anything? Everything? Nothing?” Roger demanded, and slapped the edge of the table. “Is Newton a billiard ball or a comet?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, come here, Daniel,” Roger clucked, going into sudden motion. Rather than standing up first, then walking, he lowered his wig, raised his hindquarters, and lunged off into the crowd like a bull, and in spite of bulk, middle age, gout, and drink, forged a path through the coffee-house faster than Daniel could follow. When Daniel next caught sight of Roger, the Marquis was shouldering his way past a fop. The fop was gripping a wooden implement shaped vaguely like a long-handled flour-scoop, and taking aim at a painted wooden sphere at rest on a green baize firmament. “Behold!” Roger exclaimed, and shoved at the ball with his bare hand. It rolled into another ball and stopped; the second ball rolled away. The fop was gripping his stick with both hands and winding up to break it over Roger’s head, when Roger adroitly turned his back on the table, giving the fop a clear view of his face. The stick fell from the fop’s hands. “Excellent shot, m’Lord,” he began, “though not wholly in line with the spirit or the letter of the rules…”

  “I am a Natural Philosopher, and my Rules are the God-given Rules of the Universe, not the arbitrary ones of your insipid sport!” Roger thundered. “The ball transfers its vis viva into another ball, the quantity of motion is conserved, all is more or less orderly.” Roger now opened one hand to reveal that he had snatched another ball. “Or, I may toss it into the air thus—” he did so “—and it describes a Galilean trajectory, a parabola.” The ball plonked down squarely into a mug of chocolate, halfway across the room; its owner recovered quickly, raising the mug to Roger’s health. “But comets adhere to no laws, they come from God only knows where, at unpredictable times, and streak through the cosmos on their own unfathomable trajectories. So, I ask you, Daniel: Is Newton like a comet? Or, like a billiard ball, is he following some rational trajectory I have not the wit to understand?”

  “I understand your question now,” Daniel said. “Astronomers used to explain the seeming retrograde movements of the planets by imagining a phantastic heavenly axle-tree fitted out with crystalline spheres. Now we know that in fact the planets move in smooth ellipses and that retrograde motion is an illusion created by the fact that we are making our observations from a moving platform.”

  “Viz. the Earth.”

  “If we could see the planets from some fixed frame of reference, the retrograde motion would disappear. And you, Roger, observing Newton’s wandering trajectory—one year devising new receipts for the Philosophic Mercury, the next hard at work on Conic Sections—are trying to figure out whether there might be some Reference Frame within which all of Isaac’s moves make some kind of damned sense.”

  “Spoken like Newton himself,” Roger said.

  “You want to know whether his recent work on gravitation is a change of subject, or merely a new point of view—a new way of perceiving the same old Topic.”

  “Now you are talking like Leibniz,” Roger said grumpily.

  “And with good reason, for Newton and Leibniz are both working on the same problem, and have been since at least ’77,” Daniel said. “It is the problem that Descartes could not solve. It comes down to whether the collisions of those billiard balls can be explained by geometry and arithmetic—or do we need to go beyond pure thought and into Empirical and/or Metaphysical realms?”

  “Shut up,” Roger said, “I’m working on a murderous headache as it is. I do not want to hear of metaphysics.” He seemed partly sincere—but he was keeping one eye on someone who was coming up behind Daniel. Daniel turned around and came face to face with—

  “Mr. Hooke!” Roger said.

  “M’lord.

  “You, sir, taught this fellow to make thermometers!”

  “So I did, m’lord.”

  “I was just explaining to him that I wanted him to go up to Cambridge and gauge the heat of that town.”

  “The entire country seems warm to me, m’lord,” said Hooke gravely, “in particular the eastern limb.”

  “I hear that the warmth is spreading to the West country.”

  “Here is a pretext,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, stuffing a sheaf of papers into Daniel’s right hip pocket, “and here is something for you to peruse on your journey—the latest from Leipzig.” He shoved something rather heavier into the left pocket. “Good night, fellow Philosophers!”

  “Let us go and walk in the streets of London,” Hooke said to Daniel. He did not need to add: Most of which I laid out personally.

  “RAVENSCAR HATED HIS COUSIN John Comstock, ruined him, bought his house, and tore it down,” Hooke said, as if he’d been backed into a corner and forced to admit it, “but learned from him all the same! Why did John Comstock back the Royal Society in its early days? Because he was curious as to Natural Philosophy? Perhaps. Because Wilkins talked him into it? In part. But it cannot have escaped your notice that most of our experiments in those days—”

  “Had something to do with gunpowder. Obviously.” “Roger Comstock owns no gunpowder-factories. But his interest in the doings of our Society is no less pragmatic. Make no mistake. The French and the Papists are running the country now—are they running Newton?”

  Daniel said nothing. After years of sparring with Hooke over gravitation, Isaac had soared far beyond Hooke�
��s reach since Halley’s visit.

  “I see,” Daniel said finally. “Well, I must go north anyway, to play at being the Puritan Moses.”

  “It would be worth an excursion to Cambridge, then, in order to—”

  “In order to clear Newton’s name of any scurrilous accusations that might be made against him by jealous rivals,” Daniel said.

  “I was going to say, in order to disentangle him from the foreign supporters of a doomed King,” Hooke said. “Good night, Daniel.” And with a few dragging steps he was swallowed up in the sulfurous fog.

  THE ENTIRE COUNTRY SEEMS WARM to me…in particular the eastern limb. Hooke might throw accusations carelessly, but not words. Among men who peered through telescopes, “limb” meant the edge of a heavenly body’s disk, such as the moon’s crescent when it was illumined from the side. Setting out to the northeast the next day, Daniel glanced at a map of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk and noticed that they formed a semicircular limb, bounded by the Thames on the south and the Wash on the north, and in between them, bulging eastwards into the North Sea. A bright light kindled above the Hague would shine a hundred nautical miles across the sea and light up that entire sweep of coastline, setting it aglow like a crescent moon, like the alchemist’s symbol for silver. Silver was the element of the Moon, the complement and counterpart of the Sun, whose element was gold. And as the Sun King was now pouring much gold into England, the possible existence of a silvery lunar crescent just to the north of London had import. Roger had no patience with alchemical suppositions and superstitions, but politics he knew well.

  The fifty-second parallel ran directly from Ipswich to the Hague, so any half-wit with a back-staff and an ephemeris could sail unerringly from one to the other and back. Daniel knew the territory well—the North Sea infiltrated the Suffolk coast with so many spreading rays of brackish water that when you gazed east at sunrise the terrain seemed to be crazed with rivers of light. It was impossible to travel up the coast proper. The road from London was situated ten to twenty miles inland, running more or less straight from Chelmsford to Colchester to Ipswich, and everything to the right side—between it and the sea—was hopeless, from the point of view of a King or anyone else who wanted to rule it: a long strip of fens diced up by estuaries and therefore equally impassable to horses and boats, easier to reach from Holland than from London. Staying there wasn’t so bad, and staying out was even better, but movement was rarely worth the trouble. Objects would not move in a resistive medium unless impelled by a powerful force—ergo, any travelers in that coastal strip had to be smugglers, drawn by profit and repulsed by laws, shipping England’s rude goods to Holland and importing Holland’s finished ones. So Daniel, like his brothers Sterling and Oliver and Raleigh before him, had spent much time in this territory as a youth, loading and unloading flat-bottomed Dutch boats lurking beneath weeping willows in dark river-courses.

  The first part of the journey was like being nailed, with several other people, into a coffin borne through a coal-mine by epileptic pallbearers. But at Chelmsford some passengers got out of the carriage and thereafter the way became straight and level enough that Daniel could attempt to read. He took out the printed document that Roger had given him in the coffee-house. It was a copy of Acta Eruditorum, the scholarly rag that Leibniz had founded in his home town of Leipzig.

  Leibniz had been trying for a long time to organize the smart Germans. The smart Britons tended to see this as a shabby mockery of the Royal Society, and the smart Frenchmen viewed it as a mawkish effort by the Doctor (who’d been living in Hanover since ’77) to hold up a flawed and tarnished mirror to the radiant intellectual life of Paris. While Daniel (reluctantly) saw some justice in these opinions, he suspected that Leibniz was mostly doing it simply because it was a good idea. At any rate Acta Eruditorum was Leibniz’s (hence Germany’s) answer to Journal des Savants, and it tended to convey the latest and best ideas coming from Germany—i.e., whatever Leibniz had been thinking about lately.

  This particular issue had been printed several months earlier and contained an article by Leibniz on mathematics. Daniel began skimming it and right away saw distinctly familiar terms—the likes of which he had not glimpsed since ’77—

  “Stab me in the vitals,” Daniel muttered, “he’s finally done it!”

  “Done what!?” demanded Exaltation Gather, who was sitting across from Daniel hugging a large box full of money.

  “Published the calculus!”

  “And what, pray tell, is that, Brother Daniel? Other than something that grows on one’s teeth.” The hoard of coins in Exaltation Gather’s strong-box made dim muffled chinking noises as the carriage rocked from side to side on its Suspension—one of those annoyingly good French ideas.

  “New mathematics, based upon the analysis of quantities that are infinitesimal and evanescent.”

  “It sounds very metaphysical,” said the Reverend Gather. Daniel looked up at him. No one and nothing had ever been less metaphysical than he. Daniel had grown up in the company of men like this and for a while had actually considered them to be normal-looking. But several years spent in London coffee-houses, theatres, and royal palaces had insensibly altered his tastes. Now when he gazed upon a member of a Puritan sect he always cringed inside. Which was just the effect that the Puritans were aiming for. If the Rev. Gather’s Christian name had been Exultation his garb would have been wildly inappropriate. But Exaltation it was, and for these people exaltation was a grim business.

  Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty’s claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell’s skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II’s quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they’d forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice. Daniel’s request, James’s ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as “Oliver,” the joke being that many of them—being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed—looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him.

  “Newton seems to agree with you,” Daniel said, “or else he’s afraid that some Jesuit will say so, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “One need not be a Jesuit to be skeptical of vain imaginings—” began the now miffed Gather.

  “Something must be there,” Daniel said. “Look out the window, yonder. That fen is divided into countless small plots by watercourses—some natural, some carved out by industrious farmers. Each rectangle of land could be made into two smaller ones—just drag a stick across the muck and the water will fill up the scratch in the ground, like the æther filling the void between particles of matter. Is that metaphysical yet?”

  “Why no, it is a good similitude, earthy, concrete, like something from the Geneva Bible. Have you looked into the Geneva Bible recently, or—”

  “What happens then if we continue subdividing?” Daniel asked. “Is it the same all the way down? Or is it the case that something happens eventually, that we reach a place where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental properties of Creation are brought into play?”

  “Er—I have no idea, Brother Daniel.”

  “Is it vanity for us to consider the question? Or did God give us brains for a reason?”

  “No religion, with the possible exception of Judaism, has ever been more favorably disposed towards education than ours,” said Brother Exaltation, “so that question is answered before ’twas as
ked. But we must consider these, er, infinitesimals and evanes-cents in a way that is rigorous, pure, free from heathenish idolatry or French vanity or the metaphysical infatuations of the Papists.”

  “Leibniz agrees—and the result of applying just the approach you have prescribed, in the mathematical realm, is here, and it is called the calculus,” said Daniel, patting the document on his knee.

  “Does Brother Isaac agree?”

  “He did twenty years ago, when he invented all of this,” Daniel said. “Now I have no idea.”

  “I have heard from one of our brethren in Cambridge that Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.”

  “Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren out—shall we?”