Read The System of the World Online
Authors: Neal Stephenson
The System of the World (73 page)
19 J
ULY A.M.
Sir Isaac did not fail to awaken me at the time mentioned. I have obsvd. naught since. But I should not be perfectly honest if I stated that my eyes were open for the whole duration of my watch.
Dr. Waterhouse
19 J
ULY MIDDAY
If Brother Daniel had found the Discipline to keep his eyes open, he might have seen candle-light in the Tatler-Lock during the wee hours. For Mr. Partry called at ten of the clock, bringing the News that a five-guinea piece (
sic
) has been laid down in the Auction-room. Someone has perused the first page of the Receipt, and liked what he has seen; I’d wager five guineas of my own that he’ll offer us another such Coin for another Page.
Orney
19 J
ULY EVENING
Sent Partry to the Tatler-Lock with Page 2; but I do not like the Direction we are taking. What is to prevent the buyer from simply copying out the Receipt and then paying us nothing?
Threader
20 J
ULY VERY EARLY A.M.
Lights have been burning behind the rude Veil of the Window in Question for better than an hour, which would seem to confirm Mr. Threader’s fears. I can allay these with a few particulars as to the Chest. As shall be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a few moments’ inspection, it has a false bottom. There is a locked compartment beneath. This can only be opened with a key, which we have not offered yet. If the buyer reads all the way to the end of Page 4 he shall reach a Notation to the effect that an Ingredient, essential to the Receipt, is concealed in the bottom of the Chest. Merely to copy out all four pages shall avail him nothing, save writer’s cramp. He must have the Chest and Key, and these he shall not get until he pays for them.
I also remind Mr. Threader that the purpose of the exercise is not to get paid, but to ensnare the Buyer.
Peter Hoxton, Esq.
20 J
ULY MIDDAY
Nothing.
Orney
20 J
ULY EVENING
Mr. Orney would have won his wager had anyone been foolhardy enough to accept it, for Partry reports a second five-guinea piece has been laid on top of the first. I have taken the liberty of sending down Page 3.
Kikin
21 J
ULY EARLY A.M.
Further Lucubrations obsvd. I suspect the Buyer is copying or translating the Receipt.
Peter Hoxton, Esq.
21 J
ULY MIDDAY
The point is conceded, that our Undertaking is a
snare
and not a legitimate commercial Transaction. But as this pile of five-guinea pieces ascends toward the sky I find myself sorely tempted to enter into the business of selling
philosophical
Arcana. Partry reports that the price offered is now fifteen (
sic
) guineas. I sent him back with the fourth and final Page.
Threader
21 J
ULY MIDNIGHT
Curtain was open in early eve. and I glimpsed our dark Philosopher at work once again. He goes hooded—this explains why I have not been
able to see his face. Perhaps he is pox-marked, or burned in an Alchemical mishap. A gray goose-quill bobbed in the gloom next to his shoulder as he stain’d page after page of a Waste-book with ink. Later the curtain was dropp’d again, and my view replaced with dim flickerings that lasted until 11:12:30.
Peter Hoxton, Esq.
22 J
ULY MIDDAY
Disaster. Partry reports the five-guinea pieces are all gone, replaced by a silver penny.
Orney
22 J
ULY EVENING
I beg to differ with Brother Norman. This is not a disaster, but a clear sign from the Buyer that he has correctly decyphered the Receipt and understands that it is not useful to him without the Ingredient that is supposed to be contained in the bottom of the chest. I have sent Partry back to the Tatler-Lock with the key. Henceforth I shall remain here at the Main-Topp until the culmination of the Stake-out.
Dr. Waterhouse
23 J
ULY MIDDAY
Mr. Partry has been at the Tatler-Lock since day-break. He has persuaded Mr. Knockmealdown to allow him to sit vigil in a store-room directly beneath the place of the Auction. Such are the floor-boords of that edifice that not even a cat could stalk from the door to the table without producing a
fusillade
of cracks and booms. As soon as Mr. Partry hears anything of that nature he is to—
“Your pint, sirrah.”
“That is very kind of you, Saturn,” said Daniel, setting the quill into its pot, and glancing once more at the distant window where Partry was puffing on his pipe. “How did you guess I was in the mood for a pint?”
“
I
am in the mood for one,” Saturn said.
“Then why didn’t you bring up two?”
“You forget that I am a Paragon of Sobriety. I shall derive my pleasure from watching you drink yours.”
“I am happy to oblige,” Daniel said, and took a swallow. “There has been no signal from Mr. Partry,” he said, for Saturn’s dark eyes had strayed to the page of the Log, still dewy with unblotted ink. “I was merely refreshing the account.”
“I must ask, why you do not write it in the Real Character,” Saturn teased him, “if it is as excellent as all that.”
“It
is
excellent. A much better way of setting down knowledge than Latin or English. Which is why I have devoted some years to making it more excellent yet, by transliterating it into numbers.”
“Ah,” said Saturn, “are you saying, then, that the cypher in which the women of Bridewell punch the cards, is a descendant of the Real Character?” By now he had changed places with Daniel, and taken up that position on the balcony of which they had all grown so weary in the last eleven days.
Daniel moved the Log over to its customary station on a crate-top, and busied himself blotting the latest entry with sand. “Not so much a
descendant
as a
sibling,
” he said. “The father of both is the Philosophic Language, which is a system of classification of ideas. Once an idea has been enrolled or registered in the tables of the Philosophic Language, it may be addressed with a number, or a set of numbers—”
“Cartesian coordinates,” Saturn mused, “for plotting the wand’rings of our thoughts, like.”
“The similarity only holds to a point,” Daniel cautioned him. “To avoid ambiguity, the Philosophic Language—Leibniz’s version of it, anyway—employs only prime numbers. In this, it is quite different from the number-lines of Descartes. In any case, the Language, as it consists of ideas and numbers, may be writ down using any scheme one may care to choose. The binary cypher of our Logic Mill is one such. But when I was a young man, John Wilkins devised another—the Real Character—which for a time was all the rage in the Royal Society. Hooke and Wren used it fluently.”
“Who uses it now?”
“No one.”
“Then how is the Dark Philosopher able to read it?”
“The same question has been bedeviling me.”
“This Wilkins cove must have published a dictionary or key—”
“Yes. I helped write it, during the Plague. The page-proofs were burnt up in the Fire. But it
was
published, and can be found in any number of libraries. But in order for our mysterious Buyer to go to such a library, and consult the book, he must first
recognize
the outlandish glyphs on the page as belonging to something called the Real Character. Think—if I shewed you, Peter, a page writ in the script of Malabar, would you know to consult a Malabar-Dictionary?”
“No—for these eyes, though they’ve seen much, have never seen Malabar-letters, and would not know ’em from Japanese or Æthiopian.”
“Just so. Yet our buyer seems to have known the Real Character on sight.”
“But is that really so extraordinary, when one considers that the same buyer knew that Hooke-stuff was to be found hidden in the walls of Bedlam? From which it’s evident he knows much of your Society.”
“I believe that the knowledge of where to look for the stuff came to the buyer through Henry Arlanc: the Royal Society’s porter.”
“I know who he is.”
“Oh really? How do you know him?”
“He worked for a Huguenot watch-maker, with whom I had professional contacts before I turned to drink, and fell on black days. Several Fellows of the Royal Society patronized this horologist—that is how they got to know Henry Arlanc, and that is how Arlanc got the position at Crane Court.”
“Until recently,” Daniel said, “I had supposed that Arlanc was passing intelligence to Jack the Coiner, or someone in his organization, who was, at bottom, ignorant of Natural Philosophy.”
“There’s a hole in that hypothesis, Doc. Why’d such a cull want to rake through the mouse-eaten leavings of a dead Vertuoso?”
“Ignorant men have fanciful notions of what may be found in such residue. Alchemists frequently work with gold. Perhaps—”
“Still, the hypothesis does not hold up well under close examination.”
“I agree!” said Daniel, exasperated. “I no longer believe in it.”
“Well,
now
is a fine time to say so,” said Saturn. “What’s the
new
hypothesis?”
“That the buyer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, or else has made a close study of the Society’s early years. He knows a great deal about Hooke and about the Real Character, and…” Daniel paused.
“And?”
“And about poison,” Daniel said. “An attempt was recently made on the life of Princess Caroline. The weapon was a poniard smeared with nicotine, excellently prepared.”
“Bloody peculiar,” reflected Peter Hoxton, “when this benighted world doth so abound in simpler means of killing.”
“During the ’sixties—Hooke’s heyday, and the æra of the Real Character—several Fellows of the Royal Society took an interest in nicotine.”
“It’s obvious then, isn’t it?” Saturn said.
“What is obvious?”
“The villain must be Sir Christopher Wren!” Saturn clearly meant this as a preposterous jest, and so he was appalled
to see Daniel considering it seriously. “Because he is one of the very few still living from that æra, you mean,” Daniel finally said. “It is a good thought. But no. This is not being done by Wren, or Halley, or Roger Comstock, or any of the others who were in the Royal Society in those days. Supposing
I
wanted to kill someone—would I brew up nicotine? No. No, Peter, this is being done by someone of a more recent generation. He has conceived a diseased Fascination with the Royal Society of the 1660s. He has poured an unhealthy amount of time into studying what we did, and reading our annals.”
“Why?”
“Why? When a young man falls under the spell of a particular young woman, and will not leave her alone, though her father and brothers menace him with daggers drawn, ask you why?”
“But this is different.”
“Perhaps.”
“Trust me, ’tis different. The buyer desires something. I believe you know what the something is. Will you please let me in on the secret?”
“I have held it back, not because I wish to keep secrets from you,” Daniel sighed, “but because I find the entire subject painfully embarrassing. The buyer seeks the Philosopher’s Stone.”
Saturn slapped his forehead theatrically. “Why’d I even take the trouble to ask?”
“He has heard at least part of the story about the man who died in Bedlam when Hooke cut him for the stone, and who was (some would say) resurrected by the elixir of Enoch Root.”
“Ah, that is the name of—?”
“Of the Alchemist in that story, yes. If you are the sort of chap who believes in Alchemy, then it is implicit, in that story, that the elixir must have been made using something akin to the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, according to the lore of the Alchemists, that Stone is made by combining the Philosophic Mercury with the Philosophic Sulphur. Where, might you ask, does a bloke get his hands on such ingredients? The answers are many and various, depending on which Alchemist you talk to. But many believe that King Solomon was an Alchemist, who knew how to get, or to make, the Philosophic Mercury, and who used it to turn lead into gold.”
“Ah, that would explain why he was so rich!”
“Just so. Now, the story goes that if you could find some of King Solomon’s gold and put it in a crucible, you could extract from it minute traces of the Philosophic Mercury. I believe that our buyer somehow got wind of this yarn about the Alchemical Resurrection in
Bedlam twenty-five years ago, and reckoned that the shortest and quickest way for him to get his hands on a sample of the Philosophic Mercury was—”
“To ransack London for Hooke’s old notes and knick-knacks.”
“Yes. Now, consider that, when I got back to London at the end of January, the first thing I did was to begin searching for Hooke’s old notes and equipment. Arlanc was the first man I questioned. He must have mentioned this to his contact in Jack’s organization. Shortly, word must have got round to our buyer.”
“Who was already disposed to believe that this thing of infinite value had been hidden away, somewhere, by Hooke.”
“Yes. Imagine the effect the news must have had upon him!”
“He must have been frantic,” Saturn said, “believing that you were in quest of the same goods, and would get to them first.”
“Indeed. As we now know, this led to the series of burglaries. I had only a dim and fragmentary understanding of these matters until a fortnight ago, when we found that document in the wall at Bedlam. Then all became clear. But, too, it was clear that the buyer’s search was doomed to failure, for Hooke’s receipt
mentions
a certain ingredient without offering any explanation of
how to obtain
it. For that reason, the document was useless as bait for the Stake-out.”
“Which is why you and Sir Isaac had to produce the fake.”
“The fake, and the box that it came in,” Daniel said. “The buyer believes that a small amount of the Solomonic Gold is locked in the compartment in the bottom of that chest.”