Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  On the twentieth day of his imprisonment, which Daniel reckoned to be August 17th, 1688, the perceptions coming in through his embrasures were of furious argument and wholesale change. The soldiers he’d been glimpsing out in the yard were gone, replaced by others, in different uniforms. They looked like the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, but that couldn’t be, for they were a household regiment, stationed at Whitehall Palace, and Daniel couldn’t imagine why they would be uprooted from their quarters there and moved miles down-river to the Tower of London.

  Unfamiliar men came to empty his chamber-pot and bring him food—better food than he’d become accustomed to. Daniel asked them questions. Speaking in Dorsetshire accents, they said that they were indeed the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and that the food they were bringing him had been piling up for quite some time in a porter’s lodge. Daniel’s friends had been bringing it. But the men who’d been running the Tower until yesterday—a distinctly inferior foot regiment—had not been delivering it.

  Daniel then moved on to questions of a more challenging nature and the men stopped supplying answers, even after he shared a few oysters with them. When he became insistent, they allowed as how they would relay his questions to their sergeant, who (as they warned him) was very busy just now, taking an inventory of the prisoners and of the Tower’s defenses.

  It was two days before the sergeant came to call on Daniel. They were trying days. For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper, for a disembodied consciousness. Either his theory was wrong, or the seductions of the world were more powerful than he’d remembered. When Tess had got the smallpox she’d got it bad, and the pustules had all joined together and her whole skin had fallen off, and her guts had shot out of her anus into a bloody pile on the bed. After that she had somehow remained alive for a full ten and a half hours. Considering the carnal pleasures she had brought him during the years she’d been his mistress, Daniel had taken this the same way Drake would’ve: as a cautionary parable about fleshly delights. Better to perceive the world as Tess had during those ten and a half hours than as Daniel had while he’d been fucking her. But the oysters were extraordinarily good, their flavor intense and vaguely dangerous, their consistency clearly sexual.

  Daniel shared some with the sergeant, who agreed that they were extraordinary but had little else to say—most of Daniel’s questions caused him to go shifty-eyed, and some even made him cringe. Finally he agreed to take the matter up with his sergeant, giving Daniel a nightmare vision of some endless regression of sergeants, each more senior and harder to reach than the last.

  Robert Hooke showed up with a firkin of ale. Daniel assaulted it in much the same way as the murderers would him. “I was apprehensive that you would spurn my gift, and pour it into the Thames,” Hooke said irritably, “but I see that the privations of the Tower have turned you into a veritable satyr.”

  “I am developing a new theory of bodily perceptions, and their intercourse with the soul, and this is research,” said Daniel, quaffing vigorously. He huffed ale-foam out of his whiskers (he’d not shaved in weeks) and tried to adopt a searching look. “Being condemned to die is a mighty stimulus to philosophick ratiocination, all of which is however wasted at the instant the sentence is carried out—fortunately I’ve been spared—”

  “So that you may pass on your insights to me,” Hooke finished dourly. Then, with ponderous tact: “My memory has become faulty, pray just write it all down.”

  “They won’t allow me pen and paper.”

  “Have you asked again recently? They would not allow me, or anyone, to visit you until today. But with the new regiment, a new regimen.”

  “I’ve been scratching on yonder wall instead,” Daniel announced, waving at the beginnings of a geometric diagram.

  Hooke’s gray eyes regarded it bleakly. “I spied it when I came in,” he confessed, “and supposed ‘twas something very ancient and time-worn. Very recent and in progress would never have crossed my mind.”

  Daniel was flummoxed for a few moments—just long enough for his pulse to rouse, his face to flush, and his vocal cords to constrict. “It is difficult not to take that as a rebuke,” he said. “I am merely trying to see if I can reconstruct one of Newton’s proofs from memory.”

  Hooke looked away. The sun had gone down a few minutes ago. A westerly embrasure reflected in his eyes as an identical pair of vertical red slits. “It is a perfectly defensible practice,” he admitted. “If I’d spent more of my youth learning geometers’ tricks and less of it looking at things, and learning how to see, perhaps I’d have written the Principia instead of him.”

  This was an appalling thing to say. Envy was common as pipe-smoke at Royal Society meetings, but to voice it so baldly was rare. But then Hooke had never cared, or even noticed, what people thought of him.

  It took a few moments for Daniel to collect himself, and to give Hooke’s utterance the ceremonial silence it demanded. Then he said, “Leibniz has much to say on the subject of perceptions which I have but little understood until recently. And you may love Leibniz or not. But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well—what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert—by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have. Newton makes his discoveries in geometrickal realms where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you, Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ‘tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”

  Hooke was silent for a time. The room had gone darker, and he’d faded to a gray ghost, that vivid pair of red sparks still marking his eyes. After a while, he sighed, and the sparks winked out for a few moments.

  “I shall have to fetch you quill and paper, if this is to be the nature of your discourse, sir,” he said finally.

  “I am certain that in the fullness of time, the opinion I have just voiced will be wide spread among learned persons,” Daniel said. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. There is no reason why I should conceal my opinions. But I warn you that I may express them all I like without bringing you fame or fortune.”

  “It is enough you’ve expressed them to me in the aweful privacy of this chamber, sir,” Hooke returned. “I declare that I am indebted to you, and will repay that debt one day, by giving you something of incalculable value when you least expect it. A pearl of great price.”

  LOOKING AT THE MASTER SERGANT made Daniel feel old. From the way that lower ranks had alluded to this man, Daniel had expected some sort of graybearded multiple amputee. But under the scars and weathering was a man probably no more than thirty years of age. He entered Daniel’s chamber without knocking or introd
ucing himself, and inspected it as if he owned the place, taking particular care to learn the field of fire commanded by each of its embrasures. Moving sideways past each of those slits, he seemed to envision a fan-shaped territory of dead enemies spread across the ground beyond.

  “Are you expecting to fight a war, sergeant?” said Daniel, who’d been scratching at some paper with a quill and casting only furtive dart-like glances at the sergeant.

  “Are you expecting to start one?” the sergeant answered a minute later, as if in no especial hurry to respond.

  “Why do you ask me such an odd question?”

  “I am trying to conjure up some understanding of how a Puritan gets himself clapped in Tower just now, at a time when the only friends the King has are Puritans.”

  “You have forgotten the Catholics.”

  “No, sir, the King has forgotten ‘em. Much has changed since you were locked up. First he locked up the Anglican bishops for refusing to preach toleration of Catholics and Dissenters.”

  “I know that much—I was a free man at the time,” Daniel said.

  “But the whole country was like to rise up in rebellion, Catholic churches were being put to the torch just for sport, and so he let ‘em go, just to quiet things down.”

  “But that is very different from forgetting the Catholics, sergeant.”

  “Ah but since—since you’ve been immured here—why, the King has begun to fall apart.”

  “So far I’ve learned nothing remarkable, sergeant, other than that there is a sergeant in the King’s service who actually knows how to use the word ‘immured.’ ”

  “You see, no one believes his son is really his son—that’s what has him resting so uneasy.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Why, the story’s gotten out that the Queen was never pregnant at all—just parading around with pillows stuffed under her dress—and that the so-called Prince is just a common babe snatched from an orphanage somewhere, and smuggled into the birth-chamber inside a warming-pan.”

  Daniel contemplated this, dumbfounded. “I saw the baby emerge from the Queen’s vagina with my own eyes,” he said.

  “Hold on to that memory, Professor, for it may keep you alive. No one in England thinks the child is anything but a base smuggled-in changeling. And so the King is retreating on every front now. Consequently the Anglicans no longer fear him, while the Papists cry that he has abandoned the only true faith.”

  Daniel pondered. “The King wanted Cambridge to grant a degree to a Benedictine monk named Father Francis, who was viewed, around Cambridge, as a sort of stalking-horse for the Pope of Rome,” he said. “Any news of him?”

  “The King tried to insinuate Jesuits and such-like everywhere,” said the sergeant, “but has withdrawn a good many of ‘em in the last fortnight. I’d wager Cambridge can stand down, for the King’s power is ebbing—ebbing halfway to France.”

  Daniel now went silent for a while. Finally the sergeant resumed speaking, in a lower, more sociable tone: “I am not learned, but I’ve been to many plays, which is where I picked up words like ‘immured,’ and it oftimes happens—especially in your newer plays—that a player will forget his next line, and you’ll hear a spear-carrier or lutenist muttering ‘im a prompt. And in that spirit, I’ll now supply you with your next line, sir: something like ‘My word, these are disastrous tidings, my King, a true friend to all Nonconformists, is in trouble, what shall become of us, how can I be of service to his Majesty?’”

  Daniel said nothing. The sergeant seemed to have become provoked, and could not now contain himself from prowling and pacing around the room, as if Daniel were a specimen about whom more could be learned by peering at it from diverse angles. “On the other hand, perhaps you are not a run-of-the-mill Nonconformist, for you are in the Tower, sir.”

  “As are you, sergeant.”

  “I have a key.”

  “Poh! Do you have permission to leave?”

  This shut him up for a while. “Our commander is John Churchill,” he said finally, trying a new tack. “The King no longer entirely trusts him.”

  “I was wondering when the King would begin to doubt Churchill’s loyalty.”

  “He needs us close, as we are his best men—yet not so close as the Horse Guards, hard by Whitehall Palace, within musket-shot of his apartments.”

  “And so you have been moved to the Tower for safe-keeping.”

  “You’ve got mail,” said the sergeant, and flung a letter onto the table in front of Daniel. It bore the address: GRUBENDOL LONDON.

  It was from Leibniz.

  “It is for you, isn’t it? Don’t bother denying it, I can see it from the look on your face,” the sergeant continued. “We had a devil of a time working out who it was supposed to be given to.”

  “It is intended for whichever officer of the Royal Society is currently charged with handling foreign correspondence,” Daniel said indignantly, “and at the moment, that is my honor.”

  “You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who conveyed certain letters to William of Orange.”

  “There is no incentive for me to supply an answer to that question,” said Daniel after a brief interval of being too appalled to speak.

  “Answer this then: do you have friends named Bob Carver and Dick Gripp?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “That’s funny, for we have come upon a page of written instructions, left with the warder, saying that you’re to be allowed no visitors at all, except for Bob Carver and Dick Gripp, who may show up at the oddest hours.”

  “I do not know them,” Daniel insisted, “and I beg you not to let them into this chamber under any circumstances.”

  “That’s begging a lot, Professor, for the instructions are written out in my lord Jeffreys’s own hand, and signed by the same.”

  “Then you must know as well as I do that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp are just murderers.”

  “What I know is that my lord Jeffreys is Lord Chancellor, and to disobey his command is an act of rebellion.”

  “Then I ask you to rebel.”

  “You first,” said the sergeant.

  Hanover, August 1688

  Dear Daniel,

  I haven’t the faintest idea where you are, so I will send this to good old GRUBENDOL and pray that it finds you in good health.

  Soon I depart on a long journey to Italy, where I expect to gather evidence that will sweep away any remaining cobwebs of doubt that may cling to Sophie’s family tree. You must think me a fool to devote so much effort to genealogy, but be patient and you’ll see there are good reasons for it. I’ll pass through Vienna along the way, and, God willing, obtain an audience with the Emperor and tell him of my plans for the Universal Library (the silver-mining project in the Harz has failed—not because there was anything wrong with my inventions, but because the miners feared that they would be thrown out of work, and resisted me in every imaginable way—and so if the Library is to be funded, it will not be from silver mines, but from the coffers of some great Prince).

  There is danger in any journey and so I wanted to write down some things and send them to you before leaving Hanover. These are fresh ideas—green apples that would give a stomach-ache to any erudite person who consumed them. On my journey I shall have many hours to recast them in phrasings more pious (to placate the Jesuits), pompous (to impress the scholastics), or simple (to flatter the salons), but I trust you will forgive me for writing in a way that is informal and plain-spoken. If I should meet with some misfortune along the way, perhaps you or some future Fellow of the Royal Society may pick up the thread where I’ve dropped it.

  Looking about us we can easily perceive diverse Truths, viz. that the sky is blue, the moon round, that humans walk on two legs and dogs on four, and so on. Some of those truths are brute and geometrickal in nature, there is no imaginable way to avoid them, for example that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. Until Descartes, everyone suppos
ed that such truths were few in number, and that Euclid and the other ancients had found almost all of them. But when Descartes began his project, we all got into the habit of mapping things into a space that could be described by numbers. We now cross two of Descartes’ number-lines at right angles to define a coordinate plane, to which we have given the name Cartesian coordinates, and this conceit appears to be catching on, for one can hardly step into a lecture-room anywhere without seeing some professor drawing a great + on the slate. At any rate, when we all got into the habit of describing the size and position and speed of everything in the world using numbers, lines, curves, and other constructions that are familiar, to erudite men, from Euclid, I say, then it became a sort of vogue to try to explain all of the truths in the universe by geometry. I myself can remember the very moment that I was seduced by this way of thinking: I was fourteen years old, and was wandering around in the Rosenthal outside of Leipzig, ostensibly to smell the blooms but really to prosecute a sort of internal debate in my own mind, between the old ways of the Scholastics and the Mechanical Philosophy of Descartes. As you know I decided in favor of the latter! And I have not ceased to study mathematics since.

  Descartes himself studied the way balls move and collide, how they gather speed as they go down ramps, et cetera, and tried to explain all of his data in terms of a theory that was purely geometrical in nature. The result of his lucubrations was classically French in that it did not square with reality but it was very beautiful, and logically coherent. Since then our friends Huygens and Wren have expended more toil towards the same end. But I need hardly tell you that it is Newton, far beyond all others, who has vastly expanded the realm of truths that are geometrickal in nature. I truly believe that if Euclid and Eratosthenes could be brought back to life they would prostrate themselves at his feet and (pagans that they were) worship him as a god. For their geometry treated mostly simple abstract shapes, lines in the sand, while Newton’s lays down the laws that govern the very planets.