Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Jack and Eliza had kept moving out of an unvoiced fear that if they stopped they’d appear just as lost and stupid as they in fact were. Within a few minutes they’d entered into the town square, and drawn up near a scaffold with the usual selection of dead men hanging from it: a place of comforting familiarity to Jack, even if Eliza did make shrewish comments about the thrumming clouds of flies. Notwithstanding the odd dangling corpse, Leipzig didn’t even smell that bad: there was the sewage and smoke of any big town, but it was amazing what a few tons of saffron, cardamom, star anise, and black pepper, distributed round in sacks and bales, would do to freshen a place up.
The town hall ran along one side of the square, and sported Dutch-looking gables above and an arcade of vaulted brown stone at ground level, where well-dressed men were working quietly and intensely. Narrow ditches were incised across the square to channel sewage, and planks had been thrown over them so carts could roll across, or ladies, and fat or lame men, pass over without having to make spectacles of themselves. Jack turned around a couple of times. It was plain that buildings were limited by law to four stories because none (save church towers) had more than that. But clearly the law said nothing about roofs and so these were all extremely high and steep—frequently as high as the four-story buildings that supported them—so seen from the street each roof looked like a mountain ridge seen from the valley: a vast terrain densely settled and built up with dormers, towers, gables, cupolas, balconies, and even miniature castles; vegetation (in window-boxes) and statues—not of Jesus or some saint but of Mercury in his winged slippers and hat. Sometimes he was paired against Minerva with her snaky shield, but most of the time Mercury appeared alone and it didn’t take a Doctor of Letters to understand that he, and not some dolorous martyr, had been chosen as Patron of Leipzig.
Looking up at vast rooves had been Jack’s way to relieve his eyes and mind from the strain of following the action on the ground. There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts—the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realized with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp—he was amused but, actually, embarrassed and irritated that others had had the same idea. A hookah-smoking area where Turkish boys in pointy-toed slippers scurried from one small table to the next carrying smouldering braziers of ornately wrought silver from which they selected individual coals with silver tongs and placed them carefully atop the hookahs’ tobacco-bowls to keep them burning. Everywhere, goods: but here in the square they were in casks, or wrapped up in square bales held together by rope-nets, all marked with curious initials and monograms: trade-marks of diverse merchants.
They’d found a place to stable Turk, then gone down a street, worked up their courage, and entered into one of those broad vaulted portals—wide and high enough for three or four horsemen to ride abreast—and entered the courtyard of one of those buildings. This yard was only some ten by twenty paces, and hemmed in on all sides by the four-story-high walls of the building, which were painted a merry yellow so that what sun did enter the yard cast a symbolic golden radiance on all. The court itself was stuffed with people displaying spices, metal goods, jewels, books, fabric, wine, wax, dried fish, hats, boots, gloves, weapons, and porcelain, frequently standing cheek-to-cheek and talking directly into each other’s ears. One whole side of the courtyard, then, gave way to a line of open-sided vaults: an arcade a couple of steps above courtyard level, separated from the courtyard only by a row of stout pillars, and tucked in underneath the actual house. In each vault a grave man in good clothes sat at a mighty desk, or banca, with several immense Books, strapped, buckled, and padlocked shut when not in use; an inkwell; quills; and on the floor next to him, a black chest all wrapped about with bronze or iron straps, hinges, chains, and locks of a weight and quality normally seen on arsenal-gates. Sometimes bales and casks of goods were mounded up next to him. More often, the stuff was piled out in the courtyard. Sixty or eighty feet above, stout beams projected from the tops of dormers, thrusting pulleys out over the yard, and by means of ropes through those pulleys, laborers hoisted the goods up for storage in the cavernous attics.
“They are betting prices will rise,” Eliza said, observing this, and this was the first inkling Jack received that this was more than a country swap-meet, and that there were layers of cleverness at work here that went far beyond simply knowing how many thalers should buy a tub of butter.
Jack saw so much that was strange in Leipzig, and saw it so fast, that he had to put most of it out of his mind immediately to make room for new material, and didn’t remember it until later, when taking a piss or trying to go to sleep, and when he did remember it, it seemed so strange to him that he couldn’t be sure whether it was a dream, or something that had really happened, or proof that the mines that the French Pox had (he suspected) been patiently excavating under his brain for the last several years, had finally begun to detonate.
There had been, for example, a trip inside one of the factories* to exchange some odd coins that Jack had picked up along his travels and been unable to spend, as no one recognized them. In this room, men sat behind desks with books in whose pages were circular cut-outs made to hold coins—two of each coin, so both heads and tails could be viewed in the same glance, and each coin labeled with various cryptic numbers and symbols in different colors of ink. The money-changer paged steadily through this book until he found a page holding coins just like Jack’s, though crisper and shinier. He took out a færy-sized scale made out of gold, whose pans, no larger than dollars, were suspended from its fragile crossbar by blue silken cords. He put Jack’s coins on one pan and then, using tweezers, piled featherweight scraps of marked gold foil on the other pan until they balanced. Then he put the scale back into its wooden carrying-case, which was smaller than Eliza’s hand; did some calculations; and offered Jack a couple of Leipziger Rats-marken (Leipzig minted its own coins). Eliza insisted they visit a couple of other money-changers and repeat the ceremony, but the results were always the same. So finally they accepted the Leipziger coins and then watched the money-changer fling Jack’s old coins into a box in the corner, half full of assorted coins and fragments of jewelry, mostly black from tarnish. “We’ll melt it down,” he explained when he saw the look on Jack’s face. Eliza, meanwhile, was staring at a wall-chart of exchange rates, reading the names of the coins that had been chalked up there: “Louis d’or, Maximilian d’or, souverain d’or, rand, ducat, Louis franc, Breslau ducat, Schildgroschen, Hohlheller, Schwertgroschen, Oberwehr groschen, Hellengroschen, pfennig, Goldgulden, hal-berspitzgroschen, Engelsgroschen, Real, Ratswertmark, 2/3 thaler, English shilling, ruble, abassid, rupiah…”
“Just goes to prove we have to get into the money-making business,” Jack said when they left.
“To me it proves that the business is crowded and hard-fought,” Eliza said. “Better to get into silver-mining. All the coiners must buy from miners.”
“But Herr Geidel would rather have burning splints under his nails than own another silver mine,” Jack reminded her.
“It would seem to me better to buy into something when it is cheap, and wait for it to become dear,” Eliza said. “Think of those trading-houses with their attics.”
“We don’t have an attic.”
“I meant it as a figure of speech.”
“So did I. We have no way to purchase a silver mine and sew it into your skirts and carry it round until the price goes up.” This sounded to Jack like a s
Consequently they found themselves at the Bourse, a small tidy rectangular building of white stone packed with well-dressed men screaming at each other in all the languages of Christendom but bound together by some Pentecostal faith in the Holy Spirit of the Messe that made all tongues one. There were no goods in evidence, only bits of paper, which was so odd that Jack would’ve stayed up all night wondering over it if he hadn’t forgotten immediately in light of later developments. After a brief conversation with a trader who was taking a breather on the edge of the floor, smoking a clay-pipe and quaffing some of that fine golden beer from Pilsen, Eliza returned to Jack with a triumphant and determined look about her that boded ill. “The word is Kuxen,” she said, “we wish to buy Kuxen in a silver mine.”
“We do?”
“Isn’t that what we just decided?” She was joking, perhaps.
“First tell me what Kuxen are.”
“Shares. The mine is divided in half. Each half into quarters. Each quarter into eighths, and so on—until the number of shares is something like sixty-four or one twenty-eight—that number of shares is then sold. Each share is called a kux.”
“And by share, I suppose you mean—?”
“Same as when thieves divvy up their swag.”
“I was going to liken it to how sailors partake of a voyage’s proceeds, but you stooped lower, faster.”
“That man nearly shot beer from his nostrils when I said I wished to invest in a silver mine,” Eliza said proudly.
“Always a positive omen.”
“He said only one man’s even trying to sell them at this fair—the Doctor. We need to talk to the Doctor.”
Through involved and tedious investigations that little improved the balance of Jack’s humours, they tracked the Doctor down in the general quarter of the Jahrmarkt, which (never mind what the German words literally meant) was a fun fair—a sideshow to the Messe. “Eeeyuh, I hate these things—loathsome people exhibiting all manner of freakish behaviors—like a morality play depicting my own life.”
“The Doctor is in there,” Eliza said grimly.
“Why not let’s wait until we actually have money to buy kuxen with?” Jack pleaded.
“Jack, it is all the same—if we want kuxen, why pass through the intermediate step of exchanging silk or ostrich-plumes for coin, and then coin for kuxen, when we could simply exchange silk or plumes for kuxen?”
“Ow, that one was like a stave to the bridge of the nose. You’re saying—”
“I’m saying that at Leipzig all goods—silk, coins, shares in mines—lose their hard dull gross forms and liquefy, and give up their true nature, as ores in an alchemist’s furnace sweat mercury—and all mercury is mercury and can be freely swapped for mercury of like weight—indeed cannot be distinguished from it.”
“That’s lovely, but DO WE REALLY WANT TO OWN SHARES IN A MINE?”
“Oh, who knows?” Eliza said with an airy tossing movement of the hand. “I just like to shop for things.”
“And I’m doomed to follow you, carrying your purse,” Jack muttered, shifting the burden of silk-bolts from one shoulder to the other.
SO TO THE FUN FAIR—indistinguishable (to Jack) from a hospital for the possessed and deformed and profoundly lost: contortionists, rope-walkers, fire-eaters, foreigners, and mystical personalities, a few of whom Jack recognized from Vagabond-camps here and there. They knew the Doctor from his clothing and his wig, about which they’d been warned. He was trying to initiate a philosophickal dispute with a Chinese fortune-teller, the subject of the debate being a diagram on a book-page consisting of a stack of six short horizontal lines, some of which were continuous (—) and others interrupted (– –) The Doctor was trying various languages out on the Chinese man, who only looked more aggrieved and dignified by the moment. Dignity was a clever weapon to use against the Doctor, who did not have very much of it at the moment. On his head was the largest wig Jack had ever seen, a thunderhead of black curls enveloping and dwarfing his head and making him look, from behind, as if a yearling bear-cub had dropped from a tree onto his shoulders and was trying to wrench his head off. His attire was no less formidable. Now, during the long winter, Jack had learned that a dress had more parts, technical zargon, and operating procedures associated with it than a flintlock. The Doctor’s outfit mocked any dress: between Leipzig and his skin there had to be two dozen layers of fabric belonging to Christ knew how many separate garments: shirts, waistcoats, vests, and things of which Jack did not know the names. Rank upon rank of heavy, close-spaced buttons, containing, in the aggregate, enough brass to cast a swivel-gun. Straps and draw-strings, lace gushing from the openings around throat and wrists. But the lace needed washing, the wig needed professional maintenance, and the Doctor himself was not, at root, a good-looking man. And despite the attire, Jack ended up suspecting he was not a vain one; he was dressed that way to a purpose. In particular, perhaps, to make himself seem older—when he turned around at the sound of Eliza’s voice, it was evident he was no more than about forty years old.
He was up on his three-inch platform heels right away, favoring Eliza with a deep, courtly bow and shortly moving on to hand-kissing. For a minute all was in French that Jack couldn’t quite follow, and so he went by appearances: Eliza looked uncharacteristically nervous (though she was trying to be plucky), and the Doctor, a lively and quick sort, was observing with polite curiosity. But there was no drooling or leering. Jack reckoned him for a eunuch or sodomite.
Suddenly the Doctor broke into English—making him the first person, other than Eliza, whom Jack had heard speaking in the tongue of that remote Isle in a couple of years. “I assumed, from your attire, that you were a fashionable Parisian lady. But I judged too hastily, for I perceive, on closer enjoyment, that you have something that such women typically lack: genuine taste.”
Eliza was speechless—flattered by the words, but flustered by the choice of language. The Doctor splayed a hand across his breast and looked apologetic. “Have I made the wrong guess? I thought I detected that the lady’s superb French was enlivened and invigorated by the firm sure tread of an Anglo-Saxon cadence.”
“Bullseye,” Jack said, drawing a raised eyebrow from the Doctor and a glare from Eliza. Now that he knew the Doctor spoke English, it was all Jack could do to limit himself to that one word—he wanted to talk, talk, talk—to make jests* and to voice his opinions on diverse subjects, relate certain anecdotes, et cetera. He said “Bullseye” because he was afraid Eliza might try to brazen it out by claiming to be from some odd corner of France, and Jack, who had much experience in brazening, and attempting to sustain elaborate lies, sensed that this would be a losing bet with the annoyingly perceptive Doctor.
“When you have resolved your differences with the Oriental gentleman, I should like to take you up on the subject of Kuxen,” said Eliza.
A double eye-brow raise greeted this news, causing the topheavy wig to pitch alarmingly. “Oh, I’m free immediately,” he said, “this Mandarin seems to have no desire to refine his philosophickal position—to disentangle the worthy science of number theory from the base superstition of numerology—most unfortunate for him and the rest of his race.”
“I am not well versed in any of those subjects,” Eliza began, obviously (to Jack) making an heroic bid to change the subject, and obviously (to the Doctor) begging to be given an advanced course of instruction.
“Fortune-tellers frequently make use of a random element, such as cards or tea-leaves,” the Doctor began. “This fellow tosses sticks on the ground and reads them, never mind exactly how—all I’m interested in is the end result—a set of half a dozen lines, each of which is either solid or broken. We could do the same thing by flipping six coins—videlicet…” and here he went into a performance of slapping himself all over, like a man who has a mouse in his clothing, and whenever he detected a coin in one of the manifold pockets of his many
“Yes—the clothes, the coins…”
“All fakeable.”
“How do you know him to be rich, then?”
“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”
“Very well, then,” said the Doctor, bending to peer at the fallen coins. “We have heads, tails, tails, tails, heads, and tails.” He straightened up. “To the Chinese mystic this pattern has some great significance which he will, for a small fee, look up in a book, jammed with heathen claptrap, and read to you.” The Doctor had forgotten about the coins, and about the circle of fun-fair habitués closing in on it like a noose, each making his best guess (as they lacked scales and books) as to which of them was most valuable. Jack stepped in, using his thumb to nudge his sword a hand’s breadth out of its scabbard. Their reaction made it plain they were all keeping one eye on him. He picked up the coins, which he would return to the Doctor in a tremendously impressive display of honesty and sound moral character whenever he snapped out of his rant. “To me, on the other hand, this pattern means: seventeen.”
“Seventeen?” Jack and Eliza said in unison—both of them had to step lively, now, to keep pace with the Doctor as he stomped out of the Jahrmarkt making good time on those high heels. He wasn’t a big man but he had a fine set of calves on him, which his stockings showed off nicely.