The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (18 page)
Read The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Fiction
“You saw the jar.”
“Yes.”
“If you take the Rev.’s urine and pour off the fluid and examine what remains under the Microscope, you will see a hoard of jewels that would make the Great Mogul swoon. At lower magnification it seems nothing more than a heap of gravel, but with a better lens, and brighter light, it is revealed as a mountain of crystals—plates, rhomboids, rectangles, squares—white and yellow and red ones, gleaming like the diamonds in a courtier’s ring.”
“Is that true of everyone’s urine?”
“It is more true of his than of most people’s,” Hooke said. “Wilkins has the stone.”
“Oh, God!”
“It is not so bad now, but it grows within him, and will certainly kill him in a few years,” Hooke said.
“And the stone in his bladder is made of the same stuff as these crystals that you see in his urine?”
“I believe so.”
“Is there some way to—”
“To dissolve it? Oil of vitriol works—but I don’t suppose that our Reverend wants to have that introduced into his bladder. You are welcome to make investigations of your own. I have tried all of the
obvious
things.”
W
ORD ARRIVED THAT
F
ERMAT
had died, leaving behind a theorem or two that still needed proving. King Philip of Spain died, too, and his son succeeded him; but the new King Carlos II was sickly, and not expected to live to the end of the year. Portugal was independent. Someone named Lubomirski was staging a rebellion in Poland.
John Wilkins was trying to make horse-drawn vehicles more efficient; to test them, he had rigged up a weight on a rope, above a well, so that when the weight fell down into the well, it would drag his chariots across the ground. Their progress could then be timed using one of Hooke’s watches. That duty fell to Charles Comstock, who spent many days standing out in the field making trials or fixing broken wheels. His father’s servants needed the well to draw water for livestock, and so Charles was frequently called out to move the contraption out of the way. Daniel enjoyed watching all of this, out the window, while he worked on Punishments:
PUNISHMENTS CAPITAL
ARE THE VARIOUS MANNERS OF PUTTING MEN TO DEATH IN A JUDICIAL WAY, WHICH IN SEVERAL
N
ATIONS ARE, OR HAVE BEEN, EITHER
SIMPLE
;
BY
Separation of the parts;
Head from Body: BEHEADING, strike of one’s head
Member from Member: QUARTERING, Dissecting.
Wound
At distance, whether
from hand: STONING, Pelting
from Instrument, as Gun, Bow, &c.: SHOOTING.
At hand, either by
Weight;
of something else: PRESSING
.
of one’s own: PRECIPITATING, Defenestration, casting headlong
.
Weapon
;
any way: STABBING
direct upwards: EMPALING
Taking away necessary Diet: or giving that which is noxious
STARVING, famishing
POISONING, Venom, envenom, virulent
Interception of the air
at the
Mouth
in the air: stifling, smother, suffocate
.
in the Earth: BURYING ALIVE
in water: DROWNING
in fire: BURNING ALIVE
at the
Throat
by weight of a man’s own body: HANGING
by the strength of others: STRANGLING, throttle, choke, suffocate
M
IXED
OF WOUNDING AND STARVING; THE BODY BEING
Erect
: CRUCIFYING
Lying on a Wheel
: BREAKING ON THE WHEEL
PUNISHMENTS NOT CAPITAL
ARE DISTINGUISHED BY THE THINGS OR SUBJECTS RECEIVING DETRIMENT BY THEM, AS BEING EITHER OF THE
B
ODY
;
according to the
General name;
signifying great pain: TORTURE
according to special kinds:
by
Striking;
with a limber instrument: WHIPPING, lashing, scourging, leashing, rod, slash, switch, stripe, Beadle
with a stiff instrument: CUDGELLING, bastinado, baste, swinge, swaddle, shrubb, slapp, thwack;
by
Stretching of the limbs violently;
the body being laid along: RACK
the body lifted up into the Air: STRAPPADO
L
IBERTY
;
OF WHICH ONE IS DEPRIVED, BY
R
ESTRAINT
into
a place: IMPRISONMENT, Incarceration, Durance, Custody, Ward, clap up, commit, confine, mure, Pound, Pinfold, Gaol, Cage, Set fast
an
Instrument:
BONDS, fetters, gyves, shackles, manicles, pinion, chains.
Out of
a place or country, whether
with allowance of any other:
EXILE, banishment
confinement to one other:
RELEGATION
R
EPUTE, WHETHER
more gently:
INFAMIZATION, Ignominy, Pillory
more severely by burning marks in one’s flesh:
STIGMATIZATION, Branding, Cauterizing
E
STATE; WHETHER
in part:
MULCT, fine, sconce
in whole:
CONFISCATION, forfeiture
D
IGNITY AND POWER
;
BY DEPRIVING ONE OF
his degree:
DEGRADING, deposing, depriving
his capacity to bear office:
INCAPACITATING, cashier, disable, discard, depose, disfranchize.
As Daniel scourged, bastinadoed, racked, and strappadoed his mind, trying to think of punishments that he and Wilkins had missed, he heard Hooke striking sparks with flint and steel, and went down to investigate.
Hooke was aiming the sparks at a blank sheet of paper. “Mark where they strike,” he said to Daniel. Daniel hovered with a pen, and whenever an especially large spark hit the paper, he drew a tight circle around it. They examined the paper under the Microscope, and found, in the center of each circle, a remnant: a more or less complete hollow sphere of what was obviously steel. “You see that the Alchemists’ conception of heat is ludicrous,” Hooke said. “There is no Element of Fire. Heat is really nothing more than a brisk agitation of the parts of a body—hit a piece of steel with a rock hard enough, and a bit of steel is torn away—”
“And that is the spark?”
“That is the spark.”
“But why does the spark emit light?”
“The force of the impact agitates its parts so vehemently that it becomes hot enough to melt.”
“Yes, but if your hypothesis is correct—if there is no Element of Fire, only a jostling of internal parts—then why should hot things emit light?”
“I believe that light consists of vibrations. If the parts move violently enough, they emit light—just as a struck bell vibrates to produce sound.”
Daniel supposed that was all there was to that, until he went with Hooke to collect samples of river insects one day, and they squatted in a place where a brook tumbled over the brink of a rock into a little pool. Bubbles of water, forced beneath the pool by the falling water, rose to the surface: millions of tiny spheres. Hooke noticed it, pondered for a few moments, and said: “Planets and stars are spheres, for the same reason that bubbles and sparks are.”
“What!?”
“A body of fluid, surrounded by some different fluid, forms into a sphere. Thus: air surrounded by water makes a sphere, which we call a bubble. A tiny bit of molten steel surrounded by air makes a sphere, which we call a spark. Molten earth surrounded by the Cœlestial Æther makes a sphere, which we call a planet.”
And on the way back, as they were watching a crescent moon chase the sun below the horizon, Hooke said, “If we could make sparks, or flashes of light, bright enough, we could see their light reflected off the shadowed part of that moon later, and reckon the speed of light.”
“If we did it with gunpowder,” Daniel reflected, “John Comstock would be happy to underwrite the experiment.”
Hooke turned and regarded him for a few moments with a cold eye, as if trying to establish whether Daniel, too, was made up out of cells. “You are thinking like a courtier,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice; he was stating, not an opinion, but a fact.
The chief Design of the aforementioned Club, was to propagate new Whims, advance mechanic Exercises, and to promote useless, as well as useful Experiments. In order to carry on this commendable Undertaking, any frantic Artist, chemical Operator, or whimsical Projector, that had but a Crotchet in their Heads, or but dream’d themselves into some strange fanciful Discovery, might be kindly admitted, as welcome Brethren, into this teeming Society, where each Member was respected, not according to his Quality, but the searches he had made into the Mysteries of Nature, and the Novelties, though Trifles, that were owing to his Invention: So that a Mad-man, who had beggar’d himself by his Bellows and his Furnaces, in a vain pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone; or the crazy Physician who had wasted his Patrimony, by endeavouring to
recover that infallible Nostrum,
Sal Graminis
, from the dust and ashes of a burnt Hay-cock, were as much reverenc’d here, as those mechanic Quality, who, to shew themselves
Vertuoso’s
, would sit turning of Ivory above in their Garrets, whilst their Ladies below Stairs, by the help of their He-Cousins, were providing Horns for their Families.
—N
ED
W
ARD,
The Vertuoso’s Club
T
HE LEAVES WERE TURNING,
the Plague in London was worse. Eight thousand people died in a week. A few miles away in Epsom, Wilkins had finished the Ark digression and begun to draw up a grammar, and a system of writing, for his Philosophical Language. Daniel was finishing some odds and ends, viz. Nautical Objects: Seams and Spurkets, Parrels and Jears, Brales and Bunt-Lines. His mind wandered.
Below him, a strange plucking sound, like a man endlessly tuning a lute. He went down stairs and found Hooke sitting there with a few inches of quill sticking out of his ear, plucking a string stretched over a wooden box. It was far from the strangest thing Hooke had ever done, so Daniel went to work for a time, trying to dissolve Wilkins’s bladder-gravel in various potions. Hooke continued plucking and humming. Finally Daniel went over to investigate.
A housefly was perched on the end of the quill that was stuck in Hooke’s ear. Daniel tried to shoo it away. Its wings blurred, but it didn’t move. Looking more closely Daniel saw that it had been glued down.
“Do that again, it gives me a different pitch,” Hooke demanded.
“You can hear the fly’s wings?”
“They drone at a certain fixed pitch. If I tune this string”—
pluck, pluck
—“to the same pitch, I know that the string, and the fly’s wings, are vibrating at the same frequency. I already know how to reckon the frequency of a string’s vibration—hence, I know how many times in a second a fly’s wings beat. Useful
data
if we are ever to build a flying-machine.”
Autumn rain made the field turn mucky, and ended the chariot experiments. Charles Comstock had to find other things to do. He had matriculated at Cambridge this year, but Cambridge was closed for the duration of the Plague. Daniel reckoned that as a
quid pro quo
for staying here at Epsom, Wilkins was obliged to tutor Charles in Natural Philosophy. But most of the tutoring was indistinguishable from drudge work on Wilkins’s diverse experiments,
many of which (now that the weather had turned) were being conducted in the cottage’s cellar. Wilkins was starving a toad in a jar to see if new toads would grow out of it. There was a carp living out of water, being fed on moistened bread; Charles’s job was to wet its gills several times a day. The King’s ant question had gotten Wilkins going on an experiment he’d wanted to try for a long time: before long, down in the cellar, between the starving toad and the carp, they had a maggot the size of a man’s thigh, which had to be fed rotten meat, and weighed once a day. This began to smell and so they moved it outside, to a shack downwind, where Wilkins had also embarked on a whole range of experiments concerning the generation of flies and worms out of decomposing meat, cheese, and other substances. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that this happened spontaneously. But Hooke with his microscope had found tiny motes on the undersides of certain leaves, which grew up into insects, and in water he had found tiny eggs that grew up into gnats, and this had given him the idea that perhaps all things that were believed to be bred from putrefaction might have like origins: that the air and the water were filled with an invisible dust of tiny eggs and seeds that, in order to germinate, need only be planted in something moist and rotten.
From time to time, a carriage or wagon from the outside world was suffered to pass into the gate of the manor and approach the big house. On the one hand, this was welcome evidence that some people were still alive out there in England. On the other—
“Who is that madman, coming and going in the midst of the Plague,” Daniel asked, “and why does John Comstock let him into his house? The poxy bastard’ll infect us all.”