Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  I shall have more to say on this later, but for now I should like to ask the rhetorical question of how this woman was able to get from St. Cloud to the Hague, via the Rhine, in one month, during the preparations for a war, without anyone’s having noticed? That she was working as a spy for the Prince of Orange is too obvious to mention; but where did she go, and what is she now telling William in the Binnenhof ?

  Yours in haste, d’Avaux

  Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

  NOVEMBER 1688

  Your majesty will already have understood how fascinated I was by this news from d’Avaux. The letter had reached me after a considerable delay, as, owing to the war, d’Avaux had been forced to show some ingenuity in finding a way to have it delivered to Juvisy. I knew that I could not expect to receive any more, and to attempt to respond in kind would have been a waste of paper. Accordingly, I resolved to travel in person, and incognito, to the Hague. For to be of service to your majesty is my last thought as I go to bed in the night-time and my first upon waking in the morning; and it was plain that where this matter was concerned I was useless so long as I remained at home.

  Of my journey to the Hague, much could be written in a vulgar and sensational vein, if I felt that I could better serve your majesty by producing an entertainment. But it is all beside the point of this report. And as better men than I have sacrificed their lives in your service with no thought of fame, or of reward beyond a small share in the glory of la France, I do not think it is meet for me to relate my tale here; after all, what an Englishman (for example) might fancy to be a stirring and glorious adventure is, to a gentleman of France, altogether routine and unremarkable.

  I arrived in the Hague on the 18th of October and reported to the French embassy, where M. le comte d’Avaux saw to it that what remained of my clothing was burned in the street; that the body of my manservant was given a Christian burial; that my horse was destroyed so that he would not infect the others; and that my pitchfork-wounds and torch-burns were tended to by a French barber-surgeon who dwells in that city. On the following day I began my investigation, which naturally was erected upon the solid foundation that had been laid by d’Avaux during the weeks since his letter to me. As it happened, it was on this very day—the 19th of October, anno domini 1688—that an unfortunate change in the wind made it possible for the Prince of Orange to set sail for England at the head of five hundred Dutch ships. As distressing as this event was for the small colony of French in the Hague, it militated to our advantage in that the heretics who engulfed us were so beside themselves (for to them, invading other countries is a new thing, and a tremendous adventure) that they paid me little heed as I went about my work.

  My first task, as I have suggested, was to familiarize myself with all that d’Avaux had learned of the matter during the previous weeks. The Hofgebied, or diplomatic quarter of the Hague, may not contain as many servants and courtiers as its counterpart in France, but there are more than enough; those who are venal, d’Avaux has bought, and those who are venereal, he has compromised in one way or another, so that he may know practically anything he wishes to of what goes on in that neighborhood, provided only that he has the diligence to interview his sources, and the wit to combine their fragmentary accounts into a coherent story. Your majesty will in no way be surprised to learn that he had done so by the time of my arrival. D’Avaux imparted to me the following:

  First, that the Countess de la Zeur, unlike all of the other refugees on the canal-ship, had not taken it all the way from Heidelberg. Rather, she had embarked at Nijmegen, filthy and exhausted, and accompanied by two young gentlemen, also much the worse for wear, whose accents marked them as men of the Rhineland.

  This in itself told me much. It had already been obvious that on that August day at St. Cloud, Madame had made some arrangement to spirit the Countess aboard a boat on the Seine. By working its way upstream to Paris, such a vessel could take the left fork at Charenton and go up the Marne deep into the northeastern reaches of your majesty’s realm, within a few days’ overland journey of Madame’s homeland. It is not the purpose of this letter to cast aspersions on the loyalty of your sister-in-law; I suspect that the Countess de la Zeur, so notorious for her cunning, had preyed upon Madame’s natural and humane concern for her subjects across the Rhine, and somehow induced her to believe that it would be beneficial to despatch the Countess on a sightseeing expedition to that part of the world. Of course this would take the Countess into just that part of France where preparations for war would be most obvious to a foreign spy.

  Your majesty during his innumerable glorious campaigns has devoted many hours to studying maps, and contemplating all matters of logistics, from grand strategy down to the smallest detail, and will recollect that there is no direct connection by water from the Marne to any of the rivers that flow down into the Low Countries. The Argonne Forest, however, nurses the headwaters, not only of the Marne, but also of the Meuse, which indeed passes to within a few miles of Nijmegen. And so, just as d’Avaux had already done before me, I settled upon the working hypothesis that after taking a boat from St. Cloud up the Marne, the Countess had disembarked in the vicinity of the Argonne—which as your majesty well knows was an active theatre of military operations during these weeks—and made some sort of overland journey that had eventually taken her to the Meuse, and via the Meuse to Nijmegen where we have our first report of her from d’Avaux’s informants.

  Second, all who saw her on the Nijmegen-Hague route agree that she had practically nothing with her. She had no luggage. Her personal effects, such as they were, were stored in the saddlebag of one of her German companions. Everything was soaked through, for in the days before her appearance at Nijmegen the weather had been rainy. During the voyage on the canal-ship, she and the two Germans emptied the saddlebags and spread out their contents on the deck to dry. At no time were any books, papers, or documents of any kind observed, and no quills or ink. In her hands she carried a small bag and an embroidery frame with a piece of crewel-work mounted on it. There was nothing else. All of this is confirmed by d’Avaux’s informants in the Binnenhof. The servants who furnished the Countess’s suite there insist that nothing came off the canal-boat save:

  (Item) The dress on the Countess’s back. Mildewed and creased from (one assumes) a lengthy journey in the bottom of a saddlebag, this was torn up for rags as soon as she peeled it off. Nothing was hidden beneath.

  (Item) A set of boy’s clothing approximately the Countess’s size, badly worn and filthy.

  (Item) The embroidery frame and crewel-work, which had been ruined by repeated soakings and dryings (the colors of the thread had run into the fabric).

  (Item) Her handbag, which turned out to contain nothing but a scrap of soap, a comb, an assortment of rags, a sewing-kit, and a nearly empty coin-purse.

  Of the items mentioned, all were removed or destroyed save the coins, the sewing-kit, and the embroidery project. The Countess showed a curiously strong attachment to the latter, mentioning to the servants that they were not to touch it, be it never so badly damaged, and even keeping it under her pillow when she slept, for fear that it might be taken away by mistake and used as a rag.

  Third, after she had recuperated for a day, and been supplied with presentable clothing, she went to the forest-hut of the Prince of Orange that is out in the wilderness nearby, and met with him and his advisors on three consecutive days. Immediately thereafter the Prince withdrew his regiments from the south and set in motion his invasion of England. It is said that the Countess produced, as if by sorcery, a voluminous report filled with names, facts, figures, maps, and other details difficult to retain in the memory.

  So much for d’Avaux’s work. He had given me all that I could have asked for as a cryptologist. It remained only for me to apply Occam’s Razor to the facts that d’Avaux had amassed. My conclusion was that the Countess had made her notes, not with ink on paper, but with needle and thread on a work of embroidery. The technique, thoug
h extraordinary, had certain advantages. A woman who is forever writing things down on paper makes herself extremely conspicuous, but no one pays any notice to a woman doing needle-work. If a person is suspected of being a spy, and their possessions searched, paper is the first thing an investigator looks for. Crewel-work will be ignored. Finally, paper-and-ink documents fare poorly in damp conditions, but a textile document would have to be unraveled thread by thread before its information was destroyed.

  By the time of my arrival in the Hague, the Countess had vacated her chambers in the Binnenhof and moved across the Plein to the house of the heretic “philosopher” Christiaan Huygens, who is her friend. On the day of my arrival she departed for Amsterdam to pay a call on her business associates there. I paid a cat-burglar, who has done many such jobs for d’Avaux in the past, to enter the house of Huygens, find the embroidery, and bring it to me without disturbing anything else in the room. Three days later, after I had conducted an analysis detailed below, I arranged for the same thief to put the embroidery back just where he had found it. The Countess did not return from her sojourn to Amsterdam until several days afterwards.

  It is a piece of coarsely woven linen, square, one Flemish ell on a side. She has left a margin all round the edges of about a hand’s breadth. The area in the center, then, is a square perhaps eighteen inches on a side: suitable for an opus pulvinarium or cushion-cover. This area has been almost entirely covered in crewel-work. The style is called gros-point, a technique that is popular among English peasants, overseas colonists, and other rustics who amuse themselves sewing naïve designs upon the crude textiles they know how to produce. As it has been superseded, in France, by petit-point, it may be unfamiliar to your majesty, and so I will permit myself the indulgence of a brief description. The fabric or matrix is always of a coarse weave, so that the warp and weft may be seen by the naked eye, forming a regular square grid à la Descartes. Each of the tiny squares in this grid is covered, during the course of the work, by a stitch in the shape of a letter x, forming a square of color that, seen from a distance, becomes one tiny element of the picture being fashioned. Pictures formed in this manner necessarily have a jagged-edged appearance, particularly where an effort has been made to approximate a curve; which explains why such pieces have been all but banished from Versailles and other places where taste and discrimination have vanquished sentimentality. In spite of which your majesty may easily envision the appearance of one of these minute x-shaped stitches when viewed closely: one leg running from northwest to southeast, as it were, and the other southwest to northeast. The two legs cross in the center. One must lie over the other. Which lies on top is a simple matter of the order in which they were laid down. Some embroiderers are creatures of habit, always performing the stitches in the same sequence, so that one of the legs invariably lies atop the other. Others are not so regular. As I examined the Countess’s work through a magnifying lens, I saw that she was one of the latter—which I found noteworthy, as she is in other respects a person of the most regular and disciplined habits. It occurred to me to wonder whether the orientations of the overlying legs might be a hidden vector of information.

  The pitch of the canvas’s weave was about twenty threads per inch. A quick calculation showed that the total number of threads along each side would be around 360, forming nearly 130,000 squares.

  A single square by itself could only convey a scintilla of information, as it can only possess one of two possible states: either the northwest-southeast leg is on top, or the southwest-northeast. This might seem useless; as how can one write a message in an alphabet of only two letters?

  Mirabile dictu, there is a way to do just that, which I had recently heard about because of the loose tongue of a gentleman who has already been mentioned: Fatio de Duilliers. This Fatio fled to England after the Continent became a hostile place for him, and befriended a prominent English Alchemist by the name of Newton. He has become a sort of Ganymede to Newton’s Zeus, and follows him wherever he can; when they are perforce separated, he prates to anyone who will listen about his close relationship to the great man. I know this from Signore Vigani, an Alchemist who is at the same college with Newton and so is often forced to break bread with Fatio. Fatio is prone to irrational jealousy, and he endlessly schemes to damage the reputation of anyone he imagines may be a rival for Newton’s affections. One such is a Dr. Waterhouse, who shared a room with Newton when they were boys, and for all I know buggered him; but the facts do not matter, only Fatio’s imaginings. In the library of the Royal Society, Fatio recently happened upon Dr. Water-house sleeping over some papers on which he had been working out a calculation consisting entirely of ones and zeroes—a mathematical curiosity much studied by Leibniz. Dr. Waterhouse woke up before Fatio could get a closer look at what he had been doing; but as the document in question appeared to be a letter from abroad, he inferred that it might be some sort of cryptographic scheme. Not long after, he went to Cambridge with Newton and let this story drop at High Table so that all could know how clever he was, and that Waterhouse was certainly a dolt and probably a spy.

  From my records of the cabinet noir I knew that the Countess de la Zeur had sent a letter to the Royal Society at the same time, and that she has had business contacts with the brother of Dr. Waterhouse. And I have already mentioned her suspiciously voluminous and inane correspondence with Leibniz. And so once again applying Occam’s Razor I formulated the hypothesis that the Countess uses a cypher, probably invented by Leibniz, based upon binary arithmetic, which is to say consisting of ones and zeroes: an alphabet of two letters, perfectly suited to representation in cross-stitch embroidery, as I have explained.

  I enlisted a clerk from the Embassy, who had keen eyesight, to go over the embroidery stitch by stitch, marking down a numeral 1 for each square in which the northwest-to-southeast leg lay on top, and a 0 otherwise. I then applied myself to the problem of breaking the cypher.

  A series of binary digits can represent a number; for example, 01001 is equal to 9. Five binary digits can represent up to 32 different numbers, sufficient to encypher the entire Roman alphabet. My early efforts assumed that the Countess’s cypher was of that sort; but alas, I found no intelligible message, and no patterns tending to give me hope that my fortunes would ever change.

  Presently I departed from the Hague, taking the transcript of ones and zeroes with me, and bought passage on a small ship down the coast to Dunquerque. Most of the crew on this vessel were Flemish, but there were a few who looked different from the rest and who spoke to one another in a pithy, guttural tongue unlike any I had ever heard. I asked where they were from—for they were redoubtable seamen all—and they answered with no little pride that they were men of Qwghlm. At this moment I knew that Divine Providence had led me to this boat. I asked them many questions concerning their extraordinary language and their way of writing: a system of runes that is as primitive as an alphabet can possibly be and yet be worthy of the name. It contains no vowels, and sixteen consonants, several of which cannot be pronounced by anyone who was not born on that rock.

  As it happens, an alphabet of sixteen letters is perfectly suited to translation into a binary cypher, for only four binary digits—or four stitches of embroidery—are required to represent a single letter. The Qwghlmian language is almost unbelievably pithy—one of these people can say with a few grunts, gags, and stutters what would take a Frenchman several sentences—and little known outside of that God-cursed place. Both of which made it perfectly suited to the purposes of the Countess, who need communicate, in this case, only with herself. In sum, the Qwghlmian language need not be encyphered, for it is already a nearly perfect cypher to begin with.

  I tried the experiment of breaking down the transcribed 1s and 0s into groups of four and translating each group into a number between 1 and 16, and shortly began to see patterns of the sort that give a cryptographer great confidence that he is progressing rapidly to a solution. Upon my return to Paris I was able to find in the B
ibliothèque du Roi a scholarly work about Qwghlmian runes, and thereby to translate the list of numbers into that alphabet—some 30,000 runes in all. A cursory comparison of the results against the word-list in the back of this tome suggested that I was on the correct path to a full solution; but to translate it was beyond my powers. I consulted with Father Édouard de Gex, who has lately taken an interest in Qwghlm, hoping to convert it to the True Faith and make it a thorn in the side of the heretics. He referred me to Father Mxnghr of the Society of Jesus in Dublin, who is a Qwghlmian born and bred, and known to be absolutely loyal to your majesty as he travels frequently to Qwghlm, at great risk, to baptize the people there. I sent him the transcript and he replied, some weeks later, with a translation of the text into Latin that ran to almost forty thousand words; which is to say that it requires more than one word in Latin to convey what is signified by a single rune in Qwghlmian.