Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “They are a very significant two inches, Mr. Pepys.”

  “Obviously.”

  “During the Plague Year, when we lodged at Epsom, I held candles for Mr. Hooke while he dissected the bodies of diverse creatures—humans included. By then I had enough skill that I could dissect most parts of most creatures. But I was always baffled by necks, and by those few inches around the bladder. Those parts had to be left to the superior skill of Mr. Hooke. All those orifices, sphincters, glands, frightfully important bits of plumbing—”

  At the mention of Hooke’s name, Pepys brightened as if he had been put in mind of something to say; but as Daniel’s anatomy lesson drew on, his expression faded and soured.

  “I of course know this,” Pepys finally said, cutting him off.

  “Of course.”

  “I know it of my own knowledge, and I have had occasion to review and refresh my mastery of the subject whenever some dear friend of mine has died of the Stone—John Wilkins comes to mind—”

  “That is low, a very low blow, for you to mention him now!”

  “He is gazing down on you from Heaven saying, ‘Can’t wait to see you up here Daniel, but I don’t mind waiting another quarter-century or so, by all means take your time, have that Stone out, and finish your work.’”

  “I really think you cannot possibly be any more disgraceful now, Mr. Pepys, and I beg you to leave a sick man alone.”

  “All right…let’s to the pub then!”

  “I am unwell, thank you.”

  “When’s the last time you ate solid food?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Liquid food, then?”

  “I’ve no incentive to take on liquids, lacking as I do the means of getting rid of ’em.”

  “Come to the pub anyway, we are having a going-away party for you.”

  “Call it off, Mr. Pepys. The equinoctial gales have begun. To sail for America now were foolish. I have entered into an arrangement with a Mr. Edmund Palling, an old man of my long acquaintance, who has for many years longed to migrate to Massachusetts with his family. It has been settled that in April of next year we shall board the Torbay, a newly built ship, at Southend-on-Sea; and after a voyage of approximately—”

  “You’ll be dead a week from now.”

  “I know it.”

  “Perfect time for a going-away party then.” Pepys clapped his hands twice. Somehow this caused loud thumping noises to erupt in the hall outside.

  “I cannot walk to your carriage, sir.”

  “No need,” Pepys said, opening the door to reveal two porters carrying a sedan-chair—one of the smallest type, little more than a sarcophagus on sticks, made so that its occupant could be brought from the street all the way into a house before having to climb out, and therefore popular among shy persons, such as prostitutes.

  “Ugh, what will people think?”

  “That the Fellows of the Royal Society are entertaining someone extremely mysterious—business as usual!” Pepys answered. “Do not think of our reputations, Daniel, they cannot sink any lower; and we shall have plenty of time, after you are gone, to sort that out.”

  Under a flood of mostly non-constructive criticism from Mr. Pepys, the two porters lifted Daniel up out of his bed, turning gray-green as they worked. Daniel remembered the odor that had filled Wilkins’s bedchamber during his final weeks, and supposed that he must smell the same way now. His body was as light and stiff as a fish that has been dried on a rack in the sun. They put him into that black box and latched the door on him, and Daniel’s nostrils filled with the scent of perfumes and powders left behind by the usual clientele. Or maybe that was what ordinary London air smelt like compared to his bed. His Reference Frame began to tilt and sway as they maneuvered him down-stairs.

  They took him north beyond the Roman wall, which was the wrong way. But inasmuch as Daniel was facing his own death, it seemed illogical to fret over something as inconsequential as being kidnapped by a couple of sedan-chair carriers. When he wrenched his rigid neck around to peer out through the screened aperture in the back of the box, he saw Pepys’s coach stealing along behind.

  As they maneuvered through streets and alleys, diverse views, prospects, and more or less pathetic spectacles presented themselves. But one large, newly-completed, stone building with a cupola kept presenting itself square in their path, closer and closer. It was Bedlam.

  Now at this point any other man in London would have commenced screaming and trying to kick his way out, as he’d have realized that he was about to be sent into that place for a stay of unknown duration. But Daniel was nearly unique among Londoners in that he thought of Bedlam not solely as a dumping-ground for lunatics but also as the haunt of his friend and colleague Mr. Robert Hooke. Calmly he allowed himself to be carried in through its front door.

  That said, he was a bit relieved when the porters turned away from the locked rooms and conveyed him towards Hooke’s office under the cupola. The howls and screams of the inmates faded to a sort of dim background babble, then were drowned out by more cheerful voices coming through a polished door. Pepys scurried round in front of the sedan chair and flung that door open to reveal everyone: not only Hooke, but Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Isaac’s little shadow Fatio, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Roger Comstock, Christopher Wren, and twenty others—mostly Royal Society regulars, but a few odd men out such as Edmund Palling and Sterling Waterhouse.

  They took him out of his sedan chair like a rare specimen being unpacked from its shipping-crate and held him up to accept several waves of cheers and toasts. Roger Comstock (who, since England’s Adult Supervision had all run away to France, was becoming more terribly important every day) stood up on Hooke’s lens-grinding table (Hooke became irate, and had to be restrained by Wren) and commanded silence. Then he held up a beaker of some fluid that was more transparent than water.

  “We all know of Mr. Daniel Waterhouse’s high regard and admiration for Alchemy,” Roger began. This was made twice as funny by the exaggerated pomposity of his voice and manner; he was using his speaking-to-Parliament voice. After the laughter and Parliamentary barking noises had died down, he continued, just as gravely: “Alchemy has created many a miracle in our time, and I am assured, by some of its foremost practitioners, that within a few years they will have accomplished what has, for millennia, been the paramount goal of every Alchemist: namely, to bring us immorality!”

  Roger Comstock now affected a look of extreme astonishment as the room erupted into true Bedlam. Daniel could not help glancing over at Isaac, who was the last man in the world to find anything amusing in a joke about Alchemy or immorality. But Isaac smiled and exchanged a look with Fatio.

  Roger cupped a hand to his ear and listened carefully, then appeared taken aback. “What!? You say, instead, immortality?” Now he waxed indignant, and pointed a finger at Boyle. “Sirrah, my solicitor will call upon you in the morning to see about getting my money back!”

  The audience had now been rendered completely helpless, which was the way Roger liked his audiences. They could only wait for him to continue, which he was only too happy to do: “The Chymists have accomplished smaller miracles along their way. Among those who frequent drinking establishments—or so I am told—it is known, empirically, that spiritous liquors are frequently contaminated by unwanted and unwholesome by-products. Of these, the most offensive by far is water, which gorges the bladder and obliges the drinker to step outside, where he is subject to cold, rain, wind, and the disapproving glares of neighbors and passers-by until such time as the bladder has become empty—which in the case of our Guest of Honor may be as long as a fortnight!”

  “I can only say in my defense that I have time to sober up during those fortnights,” Daniel returned, “and when I go back inside I find that you have left all the glasses empty, my lord.”

  Roger Comstock answered, “It is true. I give the contents of those glasses to our Alchemical brethren, who use them in their lucubrations. They hav
e learnt how to remove water from wine and produce the pure spirit. But this is beginning to sound like a theologickal discourse, and so let me turn to practical matters.” Roger hoisted the beaker up above his head. “Pray, gentlemen, extinguish all smoking materials! We do not wish to set fire to Mr. Hooke’s edifice. The inmates will be so terrified that they will be driven sane, to a man. I hold in my hand the pure spirit I spoke of, and it could burn the place down like Greek fire. It will remain a grave hazard until our Guest of Honor has been so prudent as to sequester it in his belly. Cheers to you, Daniel; and rest assured that this libation will surely go to your head, but not a drop of it will trouble your kidneys!”

  Under the center of the cupola they had set up a very stout oaken chair on a platform like a throne, which Daniel thought extremely considerate, as it put his head at or above the level of everyone else’s. It was the first time in ages he’d been able to talk to anyone without feeling as if he were being peered down at. Once he was mounted in that chair, and wedged more or less upright by a few pillows, he did not have to move anything save his jaw and his drinking-arm. The others came round in ones and twos to pay court to him.

  Wren spoke of the progress building the great Dome of St. Paul’s. Edmund Palling related details of the voyage to Massachusetts planned for April. Hooke, when not arguing with Huygens about clocks (and fending off bawdy puns on “horology” from Roger Comstock), discoursed of his work on artificial muscles. He did not say that they were for use in flying machines, but Daniel already knew it. Isaac Newton was living in London now, sharing lodgings with Fatio, and had become Member of Parliament for Cambridge. Roger was bursting with scandalous gossip. Sterling was devising some sort of plot with Sir Richard Apthorp, some colossal scheme for financing the eternal follies of Government. Spain might have mines in America and France might have an infinite supply of taxable peasants, but Sterling and Sir Richard seemed to think that England could overcome her lack of both with some metaphysical sleight-of-hand. Huygens came over and told him the melancholy news that the Countess de la Zeur had got pregnant out of wedlock, then lost her baby. In a way, though, Daniel was pleased to hear that she was getting on with her life. He had dreamed once of proposing marriage to her. Looking at his condition now, it was hard to imagine a worse idea.

  But thinking about her put him into a sort of reverie from which he did not return. He did not lose consciousness at any one certain point; consciousness slowly leaked out of him, rather, over the course of the evening. Every friend who came to greet him raised his glass, and Daniel raised his beaker in return. The liquor did not trickle down his throat but raced like panic across his mucous membranes, burning his eye-sockets and his eustachian tubes, and seeping direct from there into his brain. His vision faded. The babble and roar of the party put him gently to sleep.

  The quiet woke him up. The quiet, and the light. He phant’sied for a moment that they had carried him out to face the Sun. But there were several suns ranged about him in a constellation. He tried to raise first one arm, then the other, to shield his eyes from the glare, but neither limb would move. His legs, too, were frozen in place.

  “Perhaps you imagine you are having a cerebral anomaly, a near-death, or even a post-death, experience,” said a voice quietly. It emanated from down low, between Daniel’s knees. “And that several arch-angels are arrayed before you, burning your eyes with their radiance. In that case I would be a shade, a poor gray ghost, and the screams and moans you hear from far off would be the complaints of other departed souls being taken off to Hell.”

  Hooke was indeed too dim to see clearly, for the lights were behind him. He was sorting through some instruments and tools on a table that had been set in front of the chair.

  Now that Daniel had stopped looking into the bright lights, his eyes had adjusted well enough to see what was restraining him: white linen cord, miles of it, spiraled around his arms and legs, and cunningly interwoven into a sort of custom-built web or net. This was clearly the work of the meticulous Hooke, for even Daniel’s fingers and thumbs had been individually laced down, knuckle by knuckle, to the arms of this chair, which were as massive as the timbers of a gun-carriage.

  His mind went back to Epsom during the Plague Year, when Hooke would sit in the sun for an hour watching through a lens as a spider bound up a horse-fly with whorls of gossamer.

  The other detail that caught his eye was the gleaming of the small devices that Hooke was sorting out on the table. In addition to the various magnifiers that Hooke always had with him, there was the crooked probe that would be inserted up the length of the patient’s urethra to find and hold the stone. Next to it was the lancet for making the incision through the scrotum and up into the bladder. Then a hook for reaching up through that opening and pulling the stone down and out between the testicles, and an assortment of variously sized and shaped rakes for scraping the inside of the bladder and probing up into the ureters to find and withdraw any smaller stones that might be a-building in the crannies. There was the silver pipe that would be left in his urethra so that the uproar of urine, blood, lymph, and pus would not be dammed up by the inevitable swelling, and there was the fine sheep-gut for sewing him back together, and the curved needles and pliers for drawing it through his flesh. But for some reason none of these sights perturbed him so much as the scale standing by at the end of the table, its polished brass pans flashing inscrutable signals to him as they oscillated on the ends of their gleaming chains. Hooke, ever the empiricist, would of course weigh the stone when it came out.

  “In truth you are still alive and will be for many years—more years than I have remaining. There are some who die of shock, it is true, and perhaps that is why all of your friends wished to come and pass time time with you before I started. But, as I recollect, you were shot with a blunderbuss once, and got up and walked away from it. So I am not afraid on that ’count. The bright lights you see are sticks of burning phosphorus. And I am Robert Hooke, than whom no man was ever better suited to perform this work.”

  “No, Robert.”

  Hooke took advantage of Daniel’s plea to jam a leather strap into his mouth. “You may bite down on that if you wish, or you may spit it out and scream all you like—this is Bedlam, and no one will object. Neither will anyone take heed, or show mercy. Least of all Robert Hooke. For as you know, Daniel, I am utterly lacking in the quality of mercy. Which is well, as it would render me perfectly incompetent to carry out this operation. I told you a year ago, in the Tower, that I would one day repay your friendship by giving you something—a pearl of great price. Now the time has come for me to make good on that promise. The only question left to answer is how much will that pearl weigh, when I have washed your blood off it and let it clatter onto the pan of yonder scale. I am sorry you woke up. I shall not insult you by suggesting that you relax. Please do not go insane. I will see you on the other side of the Styx.”

  When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Year, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going on in their minds. He’d decided, in the end, that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thought of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that this made it worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows.

  Hooke took up his blade and reached for Daniel.

  Dramatis Personae

  MEMBERS OF THE NOBILITY went by more than one name: their family surnames and Christian names, but also their titles. For example, the younger brother of King Charles II had the family name Stuart and was baptized James, and so might be called James Stuart; but for most of his life he was the Duke of York, and so might also be referred to, in the third person anyway, as “York” (but in the second person as “Your Royal Highness”). Titles frequently changed during a person’s lifetime, as it was common during this period for commoners to be ennobled, and nobles of lower rank to be promot
ed. And so not only might a person have several names at any one moment, but certain of those names might change as he acquired new titles through ennoblement, promotion, conquest, or (what might be considered a combination of all three) marriage.

  This multiplicity of names will be familiar to many readers who dwell on the east side of the Atlantic, or who read a lot of books like this. To others it may be confusing or even maddening. The following Dramatis Personae may be of help in resolving ambiguities.

  If consulted too early and often, it may let cats out of bags by letting the reader know who is about to die, and who isn’t.

  The compiler of such a table faces a problem similar to the one that bedeviled Leibniz when trying to organize his patron’s library. The entries (books in Leibniz’s case, personages here) must be arranged in a linear fashion according to some predictable scheme. Below, they are alphabetized by name. But since more than one name applies to many of the characters, it is not always obvious where the entry should be situated. Here I have sacrificed consistency for ease of use by placing each entry under the name that is most commonly used in the book. So, for example, Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, is under “A” rather than “L” because he is almost always called simply the duc d’Arcachon in the story. But Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone, is under “B” because he is usually called Bolstrood. Cross-references to the main entries are spotted under “L” and “P,” respectively.

  Entries that are relatively reliable, according to scholarly sources, are in Roman type. Entries in italics contain information that is more likely to produce confusion, misunderstanding, severe injury, and death if relied upon by time travelers visiting the time and place in question.