Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “The same? You mean exactly the same?”

  “It is a geometrical proof,” Isaac merely said. “That the particles are spread out into a sphere doesn’t make any difference because the geometry of the sphere is what it is. The gravity is the same.”

  Daniel now had to locate a chair; all the blood in his legs seemed to be rushing into his brain.

  “If that is true,” he said, “then everything you proved before about point objects—for example that they move along conic section trajectories—”

  “Applies without alteration to spherical bodies.”

  “To real things.” Daniel had a queer vision just then of a shattered Temple reconstituting itself: fallen columns rising up from the rubble, and the rubble re-aggregating itself into cherubim and seraphim, a fire sparking on the central altar. “You’ve done it then…created the System of the World.”

  “God created it. I have only found it. Rediscovered what was forgot. Look at this diagram, Daniel. It is all here, it is Truth made manifest, epiphanes.”

  “Now you said before that you were looking for God where Geometry failed.”

  “Of course. There is no choice in this,” Isaac said, patting his diagram with a dry hand. “Not even God could have made the world otherwise. The only God here—” Isaac slammed the page hard “—is the God of Spinoza, a God that is everything and therefore nothing.”

  “But it seems as if you’ve explained everything.”

  “I’ve not explained the inverse square law.”

  “You’ve a proof right there saying that if gravity follows an inverse square law, satellites move on conic sections.”

  “And Flamsteed says that they do,” Isaac said, yanking the sheaf of notes out of Daniel’s hip pocket. Ignoring the cover letter, he tore the ribbon from the bundle and began to scan the pages. “Therefore gravity does indeed follow an inverse square law. But we may only say so because it is consistent with Flamsteed’s observations. If tonight Flamsteed notices a comet moving in a spiral, it shows that all my work is wrong.”

  “You’re saying, why do we need Flamsteed at all?”

  “I’m saying that the fact that we do need him proves that God is making choices.”

  “Or has made them.”

  This caused a sort of queasy sneer to come across Isaac’s face. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I am not one of those who believes that God made the world and walked away from it, that He has no further choices to make, no ongoing presence in the world. I believe that He is everywhere, making choices all the time.”

  “But only because there are certain things you have not explained yet with geometric proofs.”

  “As I told you, I seek God where Geometry fails.”

  “But perhaps there is an undiscovered proof for the inverse square law. Perhaps it has something to do with vortices in the æther.”

  “No one has been able to make sense of vortices.”

  “Some interaction of microscopic particles, then?”

  “Particles traversing the distance from the Sun to Saturn and back, at infinite speed, without being hindered by the æther?”

  “You’re right, it is impossible to take seriously. What is your hypothesis, Isaac?”

  “Hypothesis non fingo.”

  “But that’s not really true. You begin with a hypothesis—I saw several of them scratched in the gravel out there. Then you come up with one of these diagrams. I cannot explain how you do that part, unless God is using you as a conduit. When you are finished, it is no longer a hypothesis but a demonstrated truth.”

  “Geometry can never explain gravity.”

  “Calculus then?”

  “The calculus is just a convenience, a short-hand way of doing geometry.”

  “So what is beyond geometry is also beyond calculus.”

  “Of course, by definition.”

  “The inner workings of gravity, you seem to be saying, are beyond the grasp, or even the reach, of Natural Philosophy. To whom should we appeal, then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?”

  “They are all the same to me,” Isaac said, “and I am one.”

  Beach North of Scheveningen

  OCTOBER 1685

  IT WAS AS IF WILLIAM of Orange had searched the world over to find the place most different from Versailles, and had told Eliza to meet him there. At Versailles, everything had been designed and made by men. But here was nothing to see but ocean and sand. Every grain of sand had been put where it was by waves that formed up in the ocean according to occult laws that might have been understood by the Doctor, but not by Eliza.

  She had dismounted and was leading her horse northwards up the beach. The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar. They made a welcome contrast against the extreme flatness and sameness of beach, water, and misty sky, and exerted a hypnotic effect on her. She forced herself to look up from time to time. But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves.

  Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own run up onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start. But each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of gray foam, and got buried under the next. The end result of all their noisy, pounding, repetitious efforts was the beach. Seen through a lens, the particular arrangement of sand-grains that made up the beach presumably was complicated, and reflected the individual contributions of every single wave that had ended its life here; but seen from the level of Eliza’s head it was unspeakably flat, an “abomination of desolation in a dark place,” as the Bible would put it.

  She heard a ripping noise behind her and turned around to look to the south, toward the dent in the beach, several miles distant, that formed the harbor of Scheveningen. The last time she’d looked back, a few minutes ago, there had been nothing between her and the anchorage but a few clam-diggers. But now there was a sail on the sand: a triangle of canvas, stretched drum-tight by the wet wind off the sea. Below it hovered a spidery rig of timbers with spoked wagon-wheels at their ends. One wheel was suspended in the air by the heeling of the vehicle. Taken together with the speed of its progress up the beach, this created the impression that it was flying. The wheel spun slowly in the air, dripping clots of wet sand from its rim, which was very wide so that it rolled over, instead of cutting into, the sand and its gay mosaic of cockle shells. The opposite wheel was scribing a long fat track down the beach, slaloming between the dark hunched forms of the diggers; though, a hundred yards in its wake, this trace had already been erased by the waves.

  A fishing-boat had eased in to shore as the tide ebbed, pulled up her sideboards, and allowed herself to be stranded there. The fishermen had chocked her upright with baulks of wood, brought their catch up out of the hold, and laid it out on the sand, creating a little fish-market that would last until the tide flowed in again, chased away the customers, and floated the boat. People had carried baskets out from town, or driven out in carriages, to carry out disputes with the fishermen over the value of what they’d brought back from the deep.

  Some of them turned to look at the sand-sailer. It rushed past Eliza, moving faster than any horse could gallop. She recognized the man operating the tiller and manipulating the lines. Some of the fish-buyers did, too, and a few of those bothered to doff their hats and bow. Eliza mounted her horse and rode in pursuit.

  The view inland was blocked by dunes. Not dunes such as Eliza had once seen in the Sahara, but hybrids of dunes and hedges. For these were covered by, and anchored in, vegetation that was light green in the lower slopes, but in other places deepened to a bluish cast, and formed up into great furry dark eyebrows frowning at the sea.

  A mile or so north of where the fishing-boat had been beached, the sight-line from t
he town was severed by a gradual bend in the coastline, and a low spur flung seawards by a dune. From here, the only sign that Holland was a settled country was a tall watchtower with a conical roof, built atop a dune, perhaps half a mile distant. The sand-sailer had come to rest, its sheets loosened so that the sail reached and weathercocked.

  “I am probably meant to ask, ‘Where is your Court, O Prince, your entourage, your bodyguards, your train of painters, poets, and historians?’ Whereupon you’d give me a stern talking-to about the decadence of France.”

  “Possibly,” said William, Prince of Orange and Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. He had extricated himself from the canvas seat of the sailer and was standing on the beach facing out to sea, layers of sand-spattered leather and spray-soaked wool giving his body more bulk than it really had. “Or perhaps I like to go sand-sailing by myself, and your reading so much into it is proof you’ve been too long at Versailles.”

  “Why is this dune here, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow it may not be. Why do you mention it?”

  “I look at all these waves, spending so much effort to accomplish so little, and wonder that from time to time they can raise something as interesting as a dune. Why, this hill of sand is equivalent to Versailles—a marvel of ingenuity. Waves from the Indian Ocean, encountering waves of Araby off the Malabar Coast, must gossip about this dune, and ask for the latest tidings from Scheveningen.”

  “It is normal for women, at certain times of the month, and in certain seasons of the year, to descend into moods such as this one,” the prince mused.

  “A fair guess, but wrong,” Eliza said. “There are Christian slaves in Barbary, you know, who expend vast efforts to accomplish tiny goals, such as getting a new piece of furniture in their banyolar…”

  “Banyolar?”

  “Slave-quarters.”

  “What a pathetic story.”

  “Yes, but it is all right for them to achieve meager results because they are in a completely hopeless and desperate situation,” Eliza said. “In a way, a slave is fortunate, because she has more head-room for her dreams and phant’sies, which can soar to dizzying heights without bumping up ’gainst the ceiling. But the ones who live at Versailles are as high as humans can get, they practically have to go about stooped over because their wigs and head-dresses are scraping the vault of heaven—which consequently seems low and mean to them. When they look up, they see, not a vast beckoning space above, but rather—”

  “The gaudy-painted ceiling.”

  “Just so. You see? There is no head-room. And so, for one who has just come from Versailles, it is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little, and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we’re really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.”

  “Right. And if we’re really brilliant, we can cast up a little dune or hummock that will be considered the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

  “Just so!”

  “Lass, it’s very poetic, albeit in a bleak Gothic sort of way, but, begging your pardon, I look up and I don’t see the ceiling. All I see is a lot of damned Frenchmen looking down their noses at me from a mile high. I must pull them all down to my level, or draw myself up to theirs, before I can judge whether I have succeeded in making a dune, or what-have-you. So let us turn our attentions thither.”

  “Very well. There is little to hold our attention here.”

  “What do you imagine was the point of the King’s admonition, at the end of your most recent letter?”

  “What—you mean, what he said to me after his operation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fear me inasmuch as you are my foe, be proud inasmuch as my friend? That one?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Seems self-explanatory to me.”

  “But why on earth would the King feel the need to deliver such a warning to d’Avaux?”

  “Perhaps he has doubts as to the count’s loyalty.”

  “That is inconceivable. No man could be more his King’s creature than d’Avaux.”

  “Perhaps the King is losing his grip, and perceiving enemies where none exist.”

  “Very doubtful. He has too many real enemies to indulge himself so—and besides, he is very far from losing his grip!”

  “Hmph. None of my explanations is satisfactory, it seems.”

  “Now that you are out of France you must shed the habit of pouting, my Duchess. You do it exquisitely, but if you try it on a Dutchman he’ll only want to slap you.”

  “Will you share your explanation with me, if I promise not to pout?”

  “Obviously the King’s admonition was intended for someone other than the comte d’Avaux.”

  This left Eliza baffled for a minute. William of Orange fussed with the rigging of his sand-sailer while she turned it over in her head. “You are saying then that the King knows my letters to d’Avaux are being decyphered and read by Dutch agents…and that his warning was intended for you. Have I got it right?”

  “You are only starting to get it right…and this is becoming tedious. So let me explain it, for until you understand this, you will be useless to me. Every letter posted abroad from Versailles, whether it originates from you, or Liselotte, or the Maintenon, or some chambermaid, is opened by the Postmaster and sent to the cabinet noir to be read.”

  “Heavens! Who is in the cabinet noir?”

  “Never mind. The point is that they have read all of your letters to d’Avaux and conveyed anything important to the King. When they are finished they give the letters back to the Postmaster, who artfully re-seals them and sends them north…my Postmaster then re-opens them, reads them, re-seals them, and sends them on to d’Avaux. So the King’s admonition could have been intended for anyone in that chain: d’Avaux (though probably not), me, my advisors, the members of his own cabinet noir…or you.”

  “Me? Why would he want to admonish a little nothing like me?”

  “I simply mention you for the sake of completeness.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The Prince of Orange laughed. “Very well. Louis’ entire system is built on keeping the nobility poor and helpless. Some of them enjoy it, others don’t. The latter sort look for ways of making money. To whatever degree they succeed, they threaten the King. Why do you think the French East India Company fails time and again? Because Frenchmen are stupid? They are not stupid. Or rather, the stupid ones get despatched to India, because Louis wants that company to fail. A port-city filled with wealthy commerçants—a London or an Amsterdam—is a nightmare to him.”

  “Now, some of those nobles who desire money have turned their attentions toward Amsterdam and begun to engage the services of Dutch brokers. This was how your former business associate, Mr. Sluys, made his fortune. The King is pleased that you ruined Sluys, because he took some French counts down with him, and they serve as object lessons to any French nobles who try to build fortunes in the market of Amsterdam. But now you are being approached, yes? Your ‘Spanish Uncle’ is the talk of the town.”

  “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that the King of France views me as a threat.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You, William of Orange, the Protestant Defender, are a threat.”

  “I, William, whatever titles you wish to hang on me, am an enemy, but not a threat. I may make war on him, but I will never imperil him, or his reign. The only people who can do that are all living at Versailles.”

  “Those dreadful dukes and princes and so on.”

  “And duchesses and princesses. Yes. And insofar as you might help these do mischief, you are to be watched. Why do you imagine d’Avaux put you there? As a favor? No, he put you there to be watched. But insofar as you may help Louis maintain his grip, you are a tool. One of many tools in his toolbox—but a strange one, and strange tools are commonly the most useful.”

  “If I am so useful to Louis—your enemy—then what
am I to you?”

  “To date, a rather slow and unreliable pupil,” William answered.

  Eliza heaved a sigh, trying to sound bored and impatient. But she could not help shuddering a bit as the air came out of her—a premonition of sobs.

  “Though not without promise,” William allowed.

  Eliza felt better, and hated herself for being so like one of William’s hounds.

  “None of what I have written in any of my letters to d’Avaux has been of any use to you at all.”

  “You have only been learning the ropes, so far,” William said, plucking like a harp-player at various lines and sheets in the rigging of his sand-sailer. He climbed aboard and settled himself into the seat. Then he drew on certain of those ropes while paying out others, and the vehicle sprang forward, rolling down the slope of the dune, and building speed back towards Scheveningen.

  ELIZA MOUNTED HER HORSE and turned around. The wind off the sea was in her face now, like a fine mixture of ice and rock salt fired out of blunderbusses. She decided to cut inland to get out of the weather. Riding up over the crest of the dune was something of a project, for it had grown to a considerable height here.

  In the scrubby plants of the beach—shrubs as tall as a man, with wine-colored leaves and red berries—spiders had spun their webs. But the mist had covered them with strings of gleaming pearls so that she could see them from a hundred feet away. So much for being stealthy. Though a stealthy human, crouching among those same shrubs to look down on the beach, would be perfectly invisible. Farther up the slopes grew wind-raked trees inhabited by raucous, irritable birds, who made it a point to announce, to all the world, that Eliza was passing through.

  Finally she reached the crest. Not far away was an open sea of grass that would take her to the polders surrounding the Hague. To reach it, she’d have to pass through a forest of scrubby gnarled trees with silvery gray foliage, growing on the lee side of the dune. She stopped for a moment there to get her bearings. From here she could see the steeples of the Hague, Leiden, and Wassenaar, and dimly make out the etched rectangles of formal gardens in private compounds built in the countryside along the coast.