Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
“Or foreclose on’t?” Too hilarious.
“I have heard of his Institute, but know little of it,” Enoch Root says. He looks over at Ben, who has gone red in the neck and ears, and turned his back on all to nuzzle the horse.
“Many learned scholars are in the same state of ignorance—be not ashamed.”
“Since he came to America, Dr. Waterhouse has been infected with the local influenza, whose chief symptom is causing men to found new projects and endeavours, rather than going to the trouble of remedying the old ones.”
“He’s not entirely satisfied with Harvard College then!?” Enoch says wonderingly.
“Oh, no! He has founded—”
“—and personally endowed—”
“—and laid the cornerstone—”
“—corner-log, if truth be told—”
“—of—what does he call it?”
“The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts.”
“Where might I find Dr. Waterhouse’s Institute?” Enoch inquires.
“Midway from Charlestown to Harvard. Follow the sound of grinding gears ‘til you come to America’s smallest and smokiest dwelling—”
“Sir, you are a learned and clear-minded gentleman,” says the Don. “If your errand has aught to do with Philosophy, then is not Harvard College a more fitting destination?”
“Mr. Root is a Natural Philosopher of note, sir!” blurts Ben, only as a way to prevent himself bursting into tears. The way he says it makes it clear he thinks the Harvard men are of the Unnatural type. “He is a Fellow of the Royal Society!”
Oh, dear.
The Don steps forward and hunches his shoulders like a conspirator. “I beg your pardon, sir, I did not know.”
“It is quite all right, really.”
“Dr. Waterhouse, you must be warned, has fallen quite under the spell of Herr Leibniz—”
“—him that stole the calculus from Sir Isaac—” someone footnotes.
“—yes, and, like Leibniz, is infected with Metaphysickal thinking—”
“—a throwback to the Scholastics, sir—notwithstanding Sir Isaac’s having exploded the old ways through very clear demonstrations—”
“—and labors now, like a possessed man, on a Mill—designed after Leibniz’s principles—that he imagines will discover new truths through computation!”
“Perhaps our visitor has come to exorcise him of Leibniz’s daemons!” some very drunk fellow hypothesizes.
Enoch clears his throat irritably, hacking loose a small accumulation of yellow bile—the humour of anger and ill-temper. He says, “It does Dr. Leibniz an injustice to call him a mere metaphysician.”
This challenge produces momentary silence, followed by tremendous excitement and gaiety. The Don smiles thinly and squares off. “I know of a small tavern on Harvard Square, a suitable venue in which I could disabuse the gentleman of any misconceptions—”
The offer to sit down in front of a crock of beer and edify these wags is dangerously tempting. But the Charlestown waterfront is drawing near, the slaves already shortening their strokes; Minerva is fairly straining at her hawsers in eagerness to catch the tide, and he must have results. He’d rather get this done discreetly. But that is hopeless now that Ben has unmasked him. More important is to get it done quickly.
Besides, Enoch has lost his temper.
He draws a folded and sealed Letter from his breast pocket and, for lack of a better term, brandishes it.
The Letter is borrowed, scrutinized—one side is inscribed “Doktor Waterhouse—Newtowne—Massachusetts”—and flipped over. Monocles are quarried from velvet-lined pockets for the Examination of the Seal: a lump of red wax the size of Ben’s fist. Lips move and strange mutterings occur as parched throats attempt German.
All of the Professors seem to realize it at once. They jump back as if the letter were a specimen of white phosphorus that had suddenly burst into flame. The Don is left holding it. He extends it towards Enoch the Red with a certain desperate pleading look. Enoch punishes him by being slow to accept the burden.
“Bitte, mein herr…”
“English is perfectly sufficient,” Enoch says. “Preferable, in fact.”
At the fringes of the robed and hooded mob, certain nearsighted faculty members are frantic with indignation over not having been able to read the seal. Their colleagues are muttering to them words like “Hanover” and “Ansbach.”
A man removes his hat and bows to Enoch. Then another.
They have not even set foot in Charlestown before the dons have begun to make a commotion. Porters and would-be passengers stare quizzically at the approaching ferry as they are assailed with shouts of “Make way!” and broad waving motions. The ferry’s become a floating stage packed with bad actors. Enoch wonders whether any of these men really supposes that word of their diligence will actually make its way back to court in Hanover, and be heard by their future Queen. It is ghoulish—they are behaving as if Queen Anne were already dead and buried, and the Hanovers on the throne.
“Sir, if you’d only told me ‘twas Daniel Waterhouse you sought, I’d have taken you to him without delay—and without all of this bother.”
“I erred by not confiding in you, Ben,” Enoch says.
Indeed. In retrospect, it’s obvious that in such a small town, Daniel would have noticed a lad like Ben, or Ben would have been drawn to Daniel, or both. “Do you know the way?”
“Of course!”
“Mount up,” Enoch commands, and nods at the horse. Ben needn’t be asked twice. He’s up like a spider. Enoch follows as soon as dignity and inertia will allow. They share the saddle, Ben on Enoch’s lap with his legs thrust back and wedged between Enoch’s knees and the horse’s rib-cage. The horse has, overall, taken a dim view of the Ferry and the Faculty, and bangs across the plank as soon as it has been thrown down. They’re pursued through the streets of Charlestown by some of the more nimble Doctors. But Charlestown doesn’t have that many streets and so the chase is brief. Then they break out into the mephitic bog on its western flank. It puts Enoch strongly in mind of another swampy, dirty, miasma-ridden burg full of savants: Cambridge, England.
“INTO YONDER COPPICE, then ford the creek,” Ben suggests. “We shall lose the Professors, and perhaps find Godfrey. When we were on the ferry, I spied him going thither with a pail.”
“Is Godfrey the son of Dr. Waterhouse?”
“Indeed, sir. Two years younger than I.”
“Would his middle name, perchance, be William?”
“How’d you know that, Mr. Root?”
“He is very likely named after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
“A friend of yours and Sir Isaac’s?”
“Of mine, yes. Of Sir Isaac’s, no—and therein lies a tale too long to tell now.”
“Would it fill a book?”
“In truth, ‘twould fill several—and it is not even finished yet.”
“When shall it be finished?”
“At times, I fear never. But you and I shall hurry it to its final act to-day, Ben. How much farther to the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
Ben shrugs. “It is halfway between Charlestown and Harvard. But close to the river. More than a mile. Perhaps less than two.”
The horse is disinclined to enter the coppice, so Ben tumbles off and goes in there afoot to flush out little Godfrey. Enoch finds a place to ford the creek that runs through it, and works his way round to the other side of the little wood to find Ben engaged in an apple-fight with a smaller, paler lad.
Enoch dismounts and brokers a peace, then hurries the boys on by offering them a ride on the horse. Enoch walks ahead, leading it; but soon enough the horse divines that they are bound for a timber building in the distance. For it is the only building, and a faint path leads to it. Thenceforth Enoch need only walk alongside, and feed him the odd apple.
“The sight of you two lads scuffling over apples in this bleak gusty pla
“Where?” asks Godfrey.
“Grantham, Lincolnshire. Which is part of England.”
“How long ago, to be exact?” Ben demands, taking the empiricist bit in his teeth.
“That is a harder question than it sounds, for the way I remember such things is most disorderly.”
“Why were you journeying to that bleak place?” asks Godfrey.
“To stop being pestered. In Grantham lived an apothecary, name of Clarke, an indefatigable pesterer.”
“Then why’d you go to him?”
“He’d been pestering me with letters, wanting me to deliver certain necessaries of his trade. He’d been doing it for years—ever since sending letters had become possible again.”
“What made it possible?”
“In my neck of the woods—for I was living in a town in Saxony, called Leipzig—the peace of Westphalia did.”
“1648!” Ben says donnishly to the younger boy. “The end of the Thirty Years’ War.”
“At his end,” Enoch continues, “it was the removal of the King’s head from the rest of the King, which settled the Civil War and brought a kind of peace to England.”
“1649,” Godfrey murmurs before Ben can get it out. Enoch wonders whether Daniel has been so indiscreet as to regale his son with decapitation yarns.
“If Mr. Clarke had been pestering you for years, then you must have gone to Grantham in the middle of the 1650s,” Ben says.
“How can you be that old?” Godfrey asks.
“Ask your father,” Enoch returns. “I am still endeavouring to answer the question of when exactly. Ben is correct. I couldn’t have been so rash as to make the attempt before, let us say, 1652; for, regicide notwithstanding, the Civil War did not really wind up for another couple of years. Cromwell smashed the Royalists for the umpteenth and final time at Worcester. Charles the Second ran off to Paris with as many of his noble supporters as had not been slain yet. Come to think of it, I saw him, and them, at Paris.”
“Why Paris? That were a dreadful way to get from Leipzig to Lincolnshire!” says Ben.
“Your geography is stronger than your history. What do you phant’sy would be a good way to make that journey?”
“Through the Dutch Republic, of course.”
“And indeed I did stop there, to look in on a Mr. Huygens in the Hague. But I did not sail from any Dutch port.”
“Why not? The Dutch are ever so much better at sailing than the French!”
“But what was the first thing that Cromwell did after winning the Civil War?”
“Granted all men, even Jews, the right to worship wheresoever they pleased,” says Godfrey, as if reciting a catechism.
“Well, naturally—that was the whole point, wasn’t it? But other than that—?”
“Killed a great many Irishmen,” Ben tries.
“True, too true—but it’s not the answer I was looking for. The answer is: the Navigation Act. And a sea-war against the Dutch. So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it was infinitely safer. Besides, people in Paris had been pestering me, too, and they had more money than Mr. Clarke. So Mr. Clarke had to get in line, as they say in New York.”
“Why were so many pestering you?” asks Godfrey.
“Rich Tories, no less!” adds Ben.
“We did not begin calling such people Tories until a good bit later,” Enoch corrects him. “But your question is apt: what did I have in Leipzig that was wanted so badly, alike by an apothecary in Grantham and a lot of Cavalier courtiers sitting in Paris waiting for Cromwell to grow old and die of natural causes?”
“Something to do with the Royal Society?” guesses Ben.
“Shrewd try. Very close to the mark. But this was in the days before the Royal Society, indeed before Natural Philosophy as we know it. Oh, there were a few—Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes—who’d seen the light, and had done all that they could to get everyone else to attend to it. But in those days, most of the chaps who were curious about how the world worked were captivated by a rather different approach called Alchemy.”
“My daddy hates Alchemists!” Godfrey announces—very proud of his daddy.
“I believe I know why. But this is 1713. Rather a lot has changed. In the æra I am speaking of, it was Alchemy, or nothing. I knew a lot of Alchemists. I peddled them the stuff they needed. Some of those English cavaliers had dabbled in the Art. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. Even the King-in-Exile had a laboratory. After Cromwell had beaten them like kettledrums and sent them packing to France, they found themselves with nothing to pass the years except—” and here, if he’d been telling the story to adults, Enoch would’ve listed a few of the ways they had spent their time.
“Except what, Mr. Root?”
“Studying the hidden laws of God’s creation. Some of them—in particular John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey—fell in with Monsieur LeFebure, who was the apothecary to the French Court. They spent rather a lot of time on Alchemy.”
“But wasn’t it all stupid nonsense, rot, gibberish, and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?”
“Godfrey, you are living proof that the apple does not fall far from the tree. Who am I to dispute such matters with your father? Yes. ‘Twas all rubbish.”
“Then why’d you go to Paris?”
“Partly, if truth be told, I wished to see the coronation of the French King.”
“Which one?” asks Godfrey.
“The same one as now!” says Ben, outraged that they are having to waste their time on such questions.
“The big one,” Enoch says, “the King. Louis the Fourteenth. His formal coronation was in 1654. They anointed him with angel-balm, a thousand years old.”
“Eeeyew, it must have stunk to high heaven!”
“Hard to say, in France.”
“Where would they’ve gotten such a thing?”
“Never mind. I am drawing closer to answering the question of when. But that was not my whole reason. Really it was that something was happening. Huygens—a brilliant youth, of a great family in the Hague—was at work on a pendulum-clock there that was astonishing. Of course, pendulums were an old idea—but he did something simple and beautiful that fixed them so that they would actually tell time! I saw a prototype, ticking away there in that magnificent house, where the afternoon light streamed in off the Plein—that’s a sort of square hard by the palace of the Dutch Court. Then down to Paris, where Comstock and Anglesey were toiling away on—you’re correct—stupid nonsense. They truly wanted to learn. But they wanted the brilliance of a Huygens, the audacity to invent a whole new discipline. Alchemy was the only way they knew of.”
“How’d you cross over to England if there was a sea-war on?”
“French salt-smugglers,” says Enoch, as if this were self-evident. “Now, many an English gentleman had made up his mind that staying in London and dabbling with Alchemy was safer than riding ‘round the island making war against Cromwell and his New Model Army. So I’d no difficulty lightening my load, and stuffing my purse, in London. Then I nipped up to Oxford, meaning only to pay a call on John Wilkins and pick up some copies of Cryptonomicon.”
“What is that?” Ben wants to know.
“A very queer old book, dreadfully thick, and full of nonsense,” says Godfrey. “Papa uses it to keep the door from blowing shut.”
“It is a compendium of secret codes and cyphers that this chap Wilkins had written some years earlier,” says Enoch. “In those days, he was Warden of Wadham College, which is part of the University of Oxford. When I arrived, he was steeling himself to make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of Natural Philosophy.”
“He was beheaded?” Ben asks
Godfrey: “Tortured?”
Ben: “Mutilated, like?”
“No: he married Cromwell’s sister.”
“But I thought you said there was no Natural Philosophy in those d
“There was—once a week, in John Wilkins’s chambers at Wad-ham College,” says Enoch. “For that is where the Experimental Philosophical Clubb met. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and others you ought to have heard of. By the time I got there, they’d run out of space and moved to an apothecary’s shop—a less flammable environment. It was that apothecary, come to think of it, who exhorted me to make the journey north and pay a call on Mr. Clarke in Grantham.”
“Have we settled on a year yet?”
“I’ll settle on one now, Ben. By the time I reached Oxford, that pendulum-clock I’d seen on the table of Huygens’s house in the Hague had been perfected, and set into motion. The first clock worthy of the name. Galileo had timed his experiments by counting his pulse or listening to musicians; but after Huygens we used clocks, which—according to some—told absolute time, fixed and invariant. God’s time. Huygens published a book about it later; but the clock first began to tick, and the Time of Natural Philosophy began, in the year of Our Lord—”
1655
For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle.
—HOBBES, Leviathan
IN EVERY KINGDOM, empire, principality, archbishopric, duchy, and electorate Enoch had ever visited, the penalty for transmuting base metals into gold—or trying to—or, in some places, even thinking about it—was death. This did not worry him especially. It was only one of a thousand excuses that rulers kept handy to kill inconvenient persons, and to carry it off in a way that made them look good. For example, if you were in Frankfurt-on-Main, where the Archbishop-Elector von Schönborn and his minister and sidekick Boyneburg were both avid practitioners of the Art, you were probably safe.
Cromwell’s England was another matter. Since the Puritans had killed the king and taken the place over, Enoch didn’t go around that Commonwealth (as they styled it now) in a pointy hat with stars and moons. Not that Enoch the Red had ever been that kind of alchemist anyway. The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one’s own ability to turn lead into gold.