The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson

  “I hope that is not true,” said Daniel, “as it seems to me now that my journey here from Boston, which I confess I undertook with a certain kind of foolish and thrilling hope in my heart, has concluded in tragedy—and not even grand tragedy but something much more futile and ignominious.”

  “After we visited Wilkins on his death-bed,” said Leibniz, “we went to a coffee-house, did we not, and talked. We spoke of Mr. Hooke’s observations of snowflakes—their remarkable property, which is that each of the six arms grows outwards from a common center, and each grows independently, of its own internal rules. One arm cannot affect the others. And yet the arms are all alike. To me this is an embodiment of the pre-established harmony. Now, Daniel, in like manner, there grows out of the core of Natural Philosophy more than one system for understanding the Universe. They grow according to their own internal principles, and one does not affect another—as Newton and I demonstrated yesterday by utterly failing to agree on anything! But if it’s true—as I believe—that they are rooted in a common seed, then in the fullness of time they must adopt a like form, and become reflections of one another, as a snowflake’s arms.”

  “I hope the poor snowflake does not melt before it reaches that perfection,” said Daniel, “in the heat of those fires that Caroline dreams of.”

  “That is beyond our ability to predict or prevent. We can only do all in our power to move the work forward,” said Leibniz.

  “Speaking of which,” said Daniel, “here is something for you.” During Leibniz’s remarks he had from time to time glanced up at the traffic coming out of London on the Bridge. Now he raised a hand and waved to someone up in the Square. Leibniz followed his eye-line up to behold William Ham, the banker, waving back from atop a cart that had just drawn to a halt at the head of the stairs. It was populated by a conspicuously large number of beefier-than-average porters, some of whom remained where they were, engaging all and sundry passersby in stare-downs. Others hopped off and went to work carrying several small crates down the stairs and piling them at Leibniz’s feet. At about the same time, the lighter from Sophia drew close enough to pelt them with rope-ends, and several watermen who loitered on the starling caught them out of the air and made the boat fast. A Hanoverian servant vaulted over the gunwale and bent to take and move the first of the crates; but Leibniz asked him in German if he would terribly mind waiting for a moment. “If these are what I think they are—” he said to Daniel.

  “Indeed.”

  “Then later they shall be counted by men who are ever so sharp when it comes to weights and measures; and I would that all of the numbers add up!”

  So the crates accumulated until the wagon up above was empty. Each had been sealed with a medallion of wax bearing the imprint of the Bank of England—for that is where they had been stored until a few minutes ago, and one could still smell the damp of the Bank’s cellars escaping from the pores in the wood. William Ham came down with a great wallet of musty paperwork, on which was traced the provenance of what was in the crates, beginning with Solomon Kohan’s accompt of the gold taken from Minerva, and passing through all of the intermediate stages of rolling and cutting at the Court of Technologickal Arts and punching at Bridewell. Leibniz examined it all, and finally counted the crates (7) and counted them again (7) and asked Daniel to verify the count (7). Finally he signed the papers GOTTFRIED FREIHERR VON LEIBNIZ in diverse places, and Daniel counter-signed as Witness. At last Leibniz gave leave for the crates to be moved aboard the lighter; but he counted them as they were moved (7).

  “It is a start,” Daniel said. “There are many more yet to come, as you know. But as long as you were making a journey to Hanover anyway, I thought I might as well give you all that we have managed to bang out so far.”

  “It adds a most pleasing coda to what might otherwise be a melancholy parting,” said Leibniz, and squared off before Daniel, forcing his features into a simulacrum of a smile. “And it really ought to put to rest any mistaken thoughts that might have been troubling your sleep as to whether you have done right by Wilkins. You have, sir, done him proud.”

  Daniel was now helpless to say anything and so he stepped forward and embraced Leibniz hard. Leibniz returned the embrace, giving as good as he got, then broke away and turned his back on Daniel before Daniel could see his face and vaulted into the boat almost in the same motion. He counted the crates, or pretended to, one last time as lines were cast off and the boat fell away and yawed in the turbulent gulf of the lock.

  “Seven?” Daniel shouted.

  “Seven exactly!” came the answer. “I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!”

  “I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.”

  “That is what I am building,” said Leibniz, “and that is where you shall find me. Good-bye, Daniel!”

  “Good-bye, Gottfried!” Daniel shouted, and then stood and watched for some time as the boat became indistinct, and quite lost itself, in the welter of shipping in the Pool of London, there below the charred battlements of the Tower. It was almost a mirror image of the way Leibniz had appeared, out of nowhere, forty-one years earlier, except that the mirror was a misty and a streaky one. For much had changed in those years and Daniel could not watch with the clear eyes of a young man.

  Greenwich

  A MONTH LATER (18 SEPTEMBER 1714)

  Let other Princes, surrounded with couching Slaves, glory in the unlimited Obedience of stupid Wretches that have no sense of Liberty, and little else to brag of, than that like so many Stocks or Stones, they can bear being kick’d and trod upon, whilst a King of Great Britain, almost alone in all the Universe, may boast himself to be a Monarch over Rational Creatures.

  —The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

  “NOW THERE IS SOMETHING you don’t see every day!” exclaimed Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar. It was the first thing he had said in a quarter of an hour—a long time, for him—and it prodded Daniel out of a sort of walking coma into which he had sunk during this, the third hour he and Roger had spent standing in this queue.

  Daniel started awake and looked round.

  Philosophers came to Greenwich all the time, and some even lived here, for the Observatory was up on the hill. Kings and Queens came here rarely, even though the place belonged to them. Architects came here frequently, and almost always wished they hadn’t. For building-projects at Greenwich always had money trouble, and things seemed to decay faster than they could be erected. Inigo Jones had been adroit enough to scamper in and out of this Slough of Despond and actually get a thing built and roofed before it got bogged down: this was the Queen’s House, and the secret to its success was that it was small. The bloody thing seemed to be a mile from the river. Or so it felt to Daniel and the others in the queue, whose head was lodged somewhere in Mr. Jones’s Opus and whose tail wandered all the way to bankside. Some stone steps descended to the river there. A gaudy barge had been made fast. Beyond, anchored in a deeper part of the Thames, was the Navy ship that had fetched George, King, over from the Eurasian landmass. Daniel was only able to see these things because he and Roger had, at long last, reached the foot of, and (half an hour later) trudged to the top of, one of the curving stairways that led up to the terrace of the Queen’s House. From there a few minutes’ shuffling and doddering had got them as far as the front door. They were on the threshold. Daniel had his back to the entrance and was enjoying the view—such as it was—down to the river. Roger, with his stoat-like instinct for dark, seething, infested places, faced opposite. The open doors expired a miasma of rose-water and armpits, cut with the tang of new paint, a-throb with a sort of Beowulfian mélange of German and English. Daniel couldn’t bear to turn round and see whatever Roger found so interesting, and so he and Roger passed over the threshold in this Janus-like configuration. Daniel was convinced he had caught
a glimpse of Sir Christopher Wren, about an hour behind them in the queue, and had been trying to work out some way of getting Wren’s attention, and of inducing him, by furtive gesticulations, to jump the line. But it was perfectly hopeless; this was the worst place in the world for it. Twenty-some years ago, Wren had been brought in to impose some order on this place, as only Wren could. It had been his place ever since. He was working for free—the idea was to build a hospital for Naval pensioners. Queen Mary had started flogging the plan after the battle at La Hougue in ’92, but she had expired in ’94. There was no telling when a driblet of cash might spill forth from the Royal coffers. Whenever this occurred, Wren would blow it immediately on great blocks of stone and slam them down at the corners, and later along the perimeters, of the things he proposed to build here. For he could see perfectly well that he’d be dead before it went up. Later, and lesser, architects might botch the details, but none would be able to place the actual buildings other than where Wren had flung these plinths into the earth. His deputy Nick Hawksmoor, perceiving the genius of this strategy, and very much getting into the spirit, had lately bought a great bloody block of sculpture-grade marble at some scandalously low price and arranged for it to be vomited up on to the riverbank; when they could get enough money to hire someone to beat on it with a chisel, they’d make it into a brilliant statue of whomever happened to be King or Queen then. And so the general picture that Daniel was seeing from the terrace—and that owned Wren’s attention—was one of colossal foundations, laid by giants: a tiered echelon of rectangles—a Pythagorean dream. In that it was all foundations and no actual buildings, it seemed to confirm all that the Princess of Wales had said, a month ago, about the System, and the importance of putting it on a sound philosophical base. But what Newton and Leibniz had come up with—or failed to—seemed rickety compared to the works of Wren: further evidence that Wren had chosen wisely by turning away from pure philosophy and applying his genius to architecture.

  Daniel gave up all hope of catching Wren’s eye and turned round to see what Roger was on about.

  “All right,” he had to admit, after a few moments’ taking it in, “you don’t see it every day.”

  Two jowls, stapled together by a grimace, and supervised by a stare: the face of George. Lots of clothing to hide his body—nothing unusual there, though, beyond that the clothes were nicer than those of the people massed around him: his Court. Most of these Daniel recognized from his visit to Hanover. He pointed out a few of them to Roger, who had heard of all of them—knew more about them, as it turned out, than Daniel did—but needed a sort of key by which rumors, slanders, calumnies, and salacious anecdotes could be mapped to faces. Pretty soon they were all shooting chilly looks Daniel’s way, even though he was only about the dozenth person in the queue. Perhaps it was because they had caught him pointing and muttering to Roger. More likely, though, it was because the last time they’d seen him, in Hanover, round the time of Sophie’s death, he had been pretending to be senile and useless. Then he had been named a Regent. No proof of compos mentis, that, but they’d read into it that he had pull over someone. Certainly not George. By process of elimination, then, he’d been influencing Princess Caroline.

  Caroline did not even seem to be in the room. No, on second thought, there she was in the corner with her husband. They’d already drawn their own little shadow Court of mostly young, witty Londoners, all talking too much, laughing, and drawing evil looks from the old and not so witty, who tended to keep their faces turned toward the new King. It was weirdly obvious and bold: if you thought you’d live long enough to march in George I’s funeral procession, why then you would gravitate toward the future George II. Most had the decency and good form to hew to this general principle, but Daniel Waterhouse was fouling it up by being an old man in the young people’s camp. And here he was on the arm of the Marquis of Ravenscar!

  “I’d best stop pointing and staring now, as we seem to’ve been noticed,” he said to Roger, trying to look as if he were making a remark about yesterday’s weather, “but in closing I’ll just add that you can see plainly enough the fat one and the skinny one.”

  As tout le monde knew, these were George’s mistresses; his actual wife, of course, was still locked up in a dank Schloß somewhere beyond the Weser.

  “I had already marked them, sir,” said Roger drily. “And they seem to have marked me—for death!”

  “I think you altogether misinterpret their glaring,” Daniel said, after verifying that the fat one and the skinny one were, in fact, attempting to set fire to Roger’s eyebrows with the heat of their scrutiny. “A she-wolf in the Thüringerwald stares thus at her prey, before pouncing. But it is not out of hate that the feral bitch of the north does so, but rather a cool understanding that it’s from the hapless rabbit, sheep, or what-have-you, that she is to derive her sustenance.”

  “Oh, is that all they want? Money?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “I’d supposed that they wanted me to draw out my sword and plunge it into my own vitals, or something, from the way they were looking at me.”

  “No,” Daniel confirmed, “they want your money.”

  “It is good to know this.”

  “Why? Are you going to give them some of your money now?”

  “That would be impolite,” said Roger, blushing at the very thought. “But I see no obstacle to giving them someone else’s.”

  Finally they had drawn near enough that it was no longer the done thing for them to acknowledge anyone other than their (as yet uncrowned) King. For once Daniel got precedence over Roger, because of being a Regent; and his majesty even recognized him. “Dr. Vaterhouse of der Royal Society,” he rattled off, as he allowed Daniel to kiss his hand—the very last occasion, or so Daniel hoped, that Daniel would ever give his Puritan ancestors occasion to roll over in their graves. Daniel was so consumed by the horror of what he was doing, and by wondering whether he was going to catch anything from that hand, which had already been kissed, today, by half of the syphilitics in England, that he failed to attend to what the King was saying. The problem was that his majesty had jumped over to some other language—some language, that is, that he actually spoke—and Daniel had not kept up—had not re-tuned his ear to follow it. With his unkissed left hand, George was gesturing toward the windows in the back, or south wall of the house, which provided a pleasant enough view over a rising green lawn, crossed here and there by paths, and tufted with carefully managed outbreaks of trees. Jutting from the biggest and most elevated of these, off to the right, was the queer edifice known as the Royal Observatory: two bookends imprisoning one book. But other than that, few buildings were visible, as the whole point was for it to be a park.

  Daniel, belatedly coming alive to the fact that he was being personally addressed in an as-yet-unidentified language by the King, got only a single word: Rüben. What did it mean? To rub something? Perhaps the King was remarking that the custodians of the Queen’s House had rubbed the windows very clean? Daniel was just beginning to nod when the King helpfully said “navet.” Daniel realized in some horror that he’d switched to French to make himself better understood—but Daniel still didn’t understand! Was he talking about the Navy? That would be reasonable in a way, since the activities of the Royal Observatory were of great importance to the Navy. Daniel kept nodding. Finally Bothmar intervened—Baron von Bothmar, who’d been the Hanoverian ambassador to the Court of St. James back in the days when Hanover and England had been different countries. “His majesty hates to see good land go to waste,” Bothmar translated, “and has been eyeing yonder open space all morning, wondering how it might be put to some practical use; the difficulty being that it inclines toward the north and does not, in consequence, receive good sunlight. Knowing that you, Dr. Waterhouse, are a man of great Natural-philosophick acumen, his majesty asks you whether you are in agreement with him in thinking that, in the springtime, one might, with some hope of success, plant on that ground Rüben—nave
ts—turnips.”

  “Tell his majesty that if I had a shovel I’d go plant some right now,” Daniel said hopelessly.

  The King, having been made aware of this, blinked and nodded. He had got a distant look now in his eyes, which reflected the green light of the future turnip-patch. Daniel could almost see the man’s jowls fill up with saliva as he envisioned a grand turnip-feast in a year’s time.

  Ravenscar was chuckling. “How your shovel-work would discomfit those prancing, Frenchified Tory courtiers,” he remarked, “who, seeing such an excellent plot of land as that, have not the wit to imagine any use for it save to parade about on their gaudy chevals.”

  “The Marquis of Ravenscar,” von Bothmar explained, and Daniel now had to avert his gaze from the not especially appetizing spectacle of Roger planting a smooch on George’s hand.

  When Daniel felt it was safe to look back, the King seemed to have been put in mind of something. He was casting about for an eye-line to the Duke of Marlborough, and presently got one—Marlborough was one of the few actual English people suffered to stand anywhere near the King of England. Much as iron filings stand up and get organized in the presence of a magnet, certain facts and memories that had been scattered round the King’s periwig came into alignment when his visual cortex was stimulated by the face of Marlborough. He harrumphed and began to burp out some phrases having to do with a soirée and a Vulkan that were translated into prose, and into English, by Bothmar. “His majesty has heard from my lord Marlborough that the Duke very much enjoyed your recent party, at which the famous Volcano was made to erupt. His majesty would fain witness this amusement. Not now. Later. But my lord Marlborough spoke well of how the Royal Mint has been looked after, and of the quality of the coinage. His majesty will require good men to look after the Treasury. Good men—not a good man. For such is the importance of this task that he has decided to change the tradition of appointing a Lord Treasurer, and place that office in commission. His majesty is pleased to nominate my lord Ravenscar First Lord of the Treasury. And he is also pleased to nominate Daniel Waterhouse a member of that same Commission.”