Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
“What fair did he pick her up at?”
Eliza arched her eyebrows, leaned forward, and spoke in a whisper that could etch glass: “Don’t speak of her that way—Sophie is none other than the daughter of the Winter Queen herself. She is the Duchess of Hanover!”
“Jeezus. How’d a man like the Doctor end up in such company?”
“Sophie inherited the Doctor when her brother-in-law died.”
“What do you mean by that? Is he a slave?”
“He is a librarian. Sophie’s brother-in-law hired him in that capacity, and when he died, Sophie inherited the library, and the Doctor along with it.”
“But that’s not good enough—the Doctor has ambitions—he wants to be the Emperor’s librarian?”
“As it is now, a savant in Leipzig may never become aware of a book that’s been published in Mainz, and so the world of letters is fragmented and incoherent—not like in England, where all the savants know each other and belong to the same Society.”
“What!? A Doctor here wants to make things more like England?”
“The Doctor proposed to the Emperor that a new decree be drawn up, ordering that all booksellers at the Leipzig and Frankfurt fairs must write up a description of every book they publish, and send these, along with copies of each book, to—”
“Let me guess—to the Doctor?”
“Yes. And then he would make them all part of some vast, hard-to-understand thing he wants to build—he couldn’t restrain himself from breaking into Latin here, so I don’t know exactly—part library, part academy, part machine.”
“Machine?” Jack was imagining a mill-wheel assembled from books.
But they were interrupted by ribald, helpless, snorting laughter from the corner of the Common-Room, where the Doctor himself was sitting on a stool, reading (as they saw when they came over and joined him) one of the hurled books that had lodged in the baggage-cart. As usual their progress across the room, or to be specific Eliza’s, was carefully tracked by lonely merchants whose eyeballs were practically growing out of their heads on stalks. Jack had at first been surprised, and was now growingly annoyed, that other men were capable of noticing Eliza’s beauty—he suspected that they did so in some base way altogether different from how he did it.
“I love reading novels,” the Doctor exclaimed. “You can understand them without thinking too much.”
“But I thought you were a philosopher,” Eliza said, apparently having waxed close enough to him now that she could get away with teasing and pouting maneuvers.
“But when philosophizing, one’s mind follows its natural inclination—gaining profit along with pleasure—whereas following another philosopher’s meditations is like stumbling through a mine dug by others—hard work in a cold dark place, and painful if you want to zig where they decided to zag. But this—” holding up the book “—you can read without stopping.”
“What’s the story about?”
“Oh, all these novels are the same—they are about picaroons—that means a sort of rogue or scoundrel—could be male or female—they move about from city to city like Vagabonds (than whom, however, they are much more clever and resourceful)—getting into hilarious scrapes and making fools—or trying to—out of Dukes, Bishops, Generals, and
“…Doctors.”
Lengthy silence, then, followed by Jack saying, “Errr…is this the chapter where I’m supposed to draw my weapon?”
“Oh, stop!” the Doctor said. “I didn’t bring you all this way to have an imbroglio.”
“Why, then?” Jack asked—quickly, as Eliza was still so red-faced he didn’t think it would be clever or resourceful to give her a chance to speak.
“For the same reason that Eliza sacrified some of your silk to make some dresses, and thereby fetched a higher price. I need to draw some attention to the mine project—make it seem exciting—fashionable even—so that people will at least think about investing.”
“I’m guessing, then,” Jack said, “that my role will be to hide behind a large piece of furniture and not emerge until all rich fashionable persons have departed?”
“I gratefully accept your proposal,” the Doctor said. “Meanwhile, Eliza—well—have you ever seen how mountebanks ply their trade in Paris? No matter what they are selling, they always have an accomplice in the crowd, attired like the intended victims—”
“That means, like an ignorant peasant,” Jack informed Eliza. “And at first this accomplice seems to be the most skeptical person in the whole crowd—asking difficult questions and mocking the entire proceedings—but as it continues he is conspicuously won over, and gladly makes the first purchase of whatever the mountebank is selling—”
“Kuxen, in this case?” Eliza said.
The Doctor: “Yes—and in this case the audience will be made up of Hacklhebers, wealthy merchants of Mainz, Lyons bankers, Amsterdam money-market speculators—in sum, wealthy and fashionable persons from all over Christendom.”
Jack made a mental note to find out what a money-market speculator was. Looking at Eliza, he found her looking right back at him, and reckoned that she was thinking the same thing. Then the Doctor distracted her with: “In order to blend in with that crowd, Eliza, we shall only have to find some way to make you seem half as intelligent as you really are, and to dim your natural radiance so that they’ll not be blinded by awe or jealousy.”
“Oh, Doctor,” Eliza said, “why is it that men who desire women can never speak such words?”
“You’ve only been in the presence of men who are in the presence of you, Eliza,” Jack said, “and how can they pronounce fine words when the heads of their yards are lodged in their mouths?”
The Doctor laughed, much as he’d been doing earlier.
“What’s your excuse, Jack?” Eliza responded, eliciting some sort of violent thoracic Incident in the Doctor.
Tears of joy came to Jack’s eyes. “Thank God women have no way to rid themselves of the yellow bile,” he said.
At this same inn they joined up with a train of small but masty ore-wagons carrying goods that the Doctor had acquired at Leipzig and sent on ahead to wait for them. Some of these were laden with saltpeter from India, others with brimstone from the Ore Range.* The others—though laden only with a few small crates—sagged and screeched like infidels on the Rack. Peering between the boards of same, Jack could see that they contained small earthenware flasks packed in straw. He asked a teamster what was in them: “Quecksilber” was the answer.
Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d
In vision beatific; by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid.
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
THE ENTIRE TRAIN, amounting to some two dozen wagons, proceeded west through Halle and other cities in the Saxon plain. Giant stone towers with dunce-cap rooves had been raised over city gates so that the burghers could see armies or Vagabond-hordes approaching in time to do something about it. A few days past Halle, the ground finally started to rise up out of that plain and (like one of the Doctor’s philosophical books) to channel them this way and that, making them go ways they were not especially inclined to. It was a slow change, but one morning they woke up and it was no longer disputable that they were in a valley, the most beautiful golden valley Jack had ever seen, all pale green with April’s first shoots, thickly dotted with haystacks even after cattle had been reducing them all winter long. Broad fells rose gently but steadily from this valley and developed, at length, into shapes colder and more mountainous—ramps built by giants, leading upwards
Eliza and the Doctor mostly shared the coach, she amending her dresses according to what he claimed was now in fashion, and he writing letters or reading picaroon-novels. It seemed that Sophie’s daughter, Sophie Charlotte, was fixing to marry the Elector of Brandenburg later this year, and the trousseau was being imported direct from Paris, and this gave occasion for them to talk about clothing for days. Sometimes Eliza would ride in the seat atop the carriage if the weather was fine, giving the teamsters reason to live another day. Sometimes Jack would give Turk a rest by walking alongside, or riding on, or in, the coach.
The Doctor was always doing something—sketching fantastic machines, writing letters, scratching out pyramids of ones and zeroes and rearranging them according to some set of contrived rules.
“What’re you doing there, Doc?” Jack asked one time, just trying to be sociable.
“Making some improvements to my Theory of Matter,” the Doctor said distantly, and then said no more for three hours, at which time he announced to the driver that he had to piss.
Jack tried to talk to Eliza instead. She’d been rather sulky since the conversation at the Inn. “Why is it you’ll perform intimate procedures on one end of me, but you won’t kiss the other end?” he asked one evening when she returned his affections with eye-rolling.
“I’m losing blood—the humour of passion—what do you expect?”
“Do you mean that in the normal monthly sense, or—”
“More than usual this month—besides I only kiss people who care about me.”
“Aw, whatever made you think otherwise?”
“You know almost nothing about me. So any fond emotions you might have, proceed from lust alone.”
“Well, whose fault is that, then? I asked you, months ago, to tell me how you got from Barbary to Vienna.”
“You did? I remember no such thing.”
“Well, p’r’aps it’s just the French Pox going to my brain, lass, but I clearly remember—you gave it a few days’ profound thought, hardly speaking, and then said, ‘I don’t wish to reveal that.’”
“You haven’t asked me recently.”
“Eliza, how’d you get from Barbary to Vienna?”
“Some parts of the story are too sad for me to tell, others too tedious to hear—suffice it to say, that when I reached an age that a horny Moor construes as adulthood, I came, in their minds, to bear the same relationship to my mother as a dividend does to a joint stock corporation—viz. a new piece of wealth created out of the normal functioning of the old. I was liquidated.”
“What?”
“Tendered to a Vizier in Constantinople as part of a trade, no different from the trades that sustain the City of Leipzig—you see, a person can also be rendered into a few drops of mercury, and combine with the mysterious international flow of that substance.”
“What’d that Vizier have to pay for you? Just curious.”
“As of two years ago the price of one me, in the Mediterranean market, was a single horse, a bit slimmer and faster than the one you’ve been riding around on.”
“Seems, er…well, any price would seem too low, of course—but even so—for Christ’s sake…”
“But you’re forgetting that Turk’s an uncommon steed—a bit past his prime, to be sure, and worn round the edges—but, what matters, capable of fathering others.”
“Ah…so the horse that paid for you was a thoroughbred stallion.”
“A strange-looking Arab. I saw it on the docks. It was perfectly white, except for the hooves of course, and its eyes were pink.”
“The Berbers are breeders of racehorses?”
“Through the network of the Society of Britannic Abductees, I learned that this stallion was bound, eventually, for la France. Someone there is connected to the Barbary pirates—I assume it is the same person who caused me and my mother to be made slaves. Because of that man I shall never see Mum again, for she had a cancer when I left her in Barbary. I will find that man and kill him someday.”
Jack counted silently to ten, then said: “Oh, hell, I’ll do it. I’m going to die of the French Pox anyway.”
“First you have to explain to him why you’re doing it.”
“Fine, I’ll try to plan in an extra few hours—”
“It shouldn’t take that long.”
“No?”
“Why would you kill him, Jack?”
“Well, there was your abduction from Qwghlm—perverse goings-on in the ship—years of slavery—forcible separation from an ailing—”
“No, no! That’s why I want to kill him. Why do you?”
“Same reason.”
“But many are involved in the slave trade—will you kill all of them?”
“No, just—oh, I get it—I want to kill this evil man, whoever he is, because of my fierce eternal pure love for you, my own Eliza.”
She did not swoon, but she did get a look on her face that said This conversation is over, which Jack took as a sign he was going in the right direction.
Finally, after a couple of days of skirting and dodging, the Doctor gave the word and they turned north and began straightforwardly ascending into what had plainly become a mountain range. At first this was a grassy rampart. Then strange dark hummocks began to pock the fields. At the same time, they began frequently to see pairs of men turning windlasses, like the ones mounted above wells, but this equipment was stouter and grimier, and it brought up not buckets of water but iron baskets filled with black rock. Jack and Eliza had seen it before at Joachimsthal and knew that the dark mounds were the fœces left behind when the metal (copper here) had been smelted out of the ore. Germans called it schlock. When they were wet with rain (which was frequently, now), the schlock-heaps glistened and gave back light tinged blue or purple. Men collected the ore from the hand-haspels (as the winches were called) into wheelbarrows and staggered behind them, among schlock-piles, to smoking furnaces tended and stirred by coal-smeared men.
Several times they entered into wooded valleys full of smoke, and followed the traces of dragged logs across the ground until they came to gunpowder-mills. Here, tall whip-thin trees, the trunks hairy with miserable scrawny branches,* were cut and burnt endlessly until they became charcoal. This was taken to a water-powered mill to be ground to dust and mixed with the other ingredients. Men came out of these mills looking all drawn and nervous from never really knowing when they’d be blown up, and the Doctor supplied them with brimstone and saltpeter from the wagons. Teaching Jack that wars, like great rivers, had their well-springs in numerous high remote valleys.
Eliza was beginning to see some of the enormous trees of Mum’s færy-tales, though many had blown down and could be viewed only as fists of roots thrust into the air still clutching final handfuls of dirt. The air up here was not still for a moment—it was never rainy, cloudy, or sunny for more than a quarter of an hour at a time—but when they were out of those smoky valleys, it was cold and clear. Their progress was slow, but one time the sky cleared as they came through an open place in the woods (it was clear that Harz was a rock and the forest no more substantial than the film of hop-vines that sometimes grew on an ancient schlock-heap), and then it was obvious that they’d risen to a great height above the plains and valleys. Those schlock-heaps like cowls of robed men in a procession. Patrols of black vultures chased and swirled about one another like ashes ascending a flue. Here and there a tower braced itself on a mountain-top or a conspiracy of trees huddled. Crows raided distant fields for the
So the Doctor decided to cheer them up by taking them down into an old abandoned copper mine.
“Sophie was the first woman to enter a mine,” he said helpfully. “You, Eliza, might be the second.”
This mine’s vein (or the vein-shaped cavity where the vein had once been) was close to the surface and so there was no need to descend numerous ladders in some deep shaft: they pulled up before an old semi-collapsed building, rummaged in a skewed cabinet for lights, sledded down a ramp where once a short staircase had been, and there they were in a tunnel as high as Jack’s head and an arm’s length wide. Their lights were called kienspans: splits of dry resinous wood about the dimensions of a rapier blade, dipped in some kind of wax or pitch, which burnt enthusiastically, and looked like the flame-swords wielded by Biblical standouts. By this means, they could see that the mine-tunnel was lined with logs and timbers: a hefty post-and-beam lintel every couple of yards, and many horizontal logs, as thick as a person’s thigh, laid parallel down the tunnel so as to join each post-and-lintel with the ones before and after it. In this way a long tubular wooden cage was formed, not to keep them in (though it did) but to protect them from a stalled avalanche of loose rubble pressing in from all sides.
The Doctor led them down this tunnel—the entrance quickly lost from view. Frequently, side-tunnels took off to one side or another, but these came up only to mid-thigh on Jack and there was no question of entering them.
Or so he thought until the Doctor stopped before one. The floor all around was strewn with curiously wrought planks, half-moon-shaped pieces of ox-hide, and tabular chunks of black rock. “There is a wonder at the end of this tunnel—no more than half a dozen fathoms back—which you must see.”
Jack took it for a joke until Eliza agreed to scurry down the tunnel without hesitation—which meant that according to Rules that applied even to Vagabonds, Jack had to do it first, in order to scout for danger. The Doctor told him that the pieces of ox-hide were called arsch-leders, which was self-explanatory, so Jack put one on. The Doctor then demonstrated the use of the planks, which miners used to protect elbows and forearms from the stony floor when creeping along on their sides. All of this settled, Jack lay down on the floor and crept into it, wielding the plank with one arm and the kienspan with the other. He found it reasonably easy going as long as he didn’t think about…well, about anything.