A Calculus of Angels (4 page)

It was, he thought with a trace of an old anguish, the least he could do for having taken it away.

A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

The inconstant sun was hiding again when he reached the Charles Bridge, and neither the span nor the baroque iron saints that stood watch upon it cast a shadow as he slid to the river’s edge and the quay below them. A small crowd had gathered to watch him with a sullen and superstitious curiosity he had come to know well. Even though they whispered, he still heard one of them hiss “der Lehrling,” the Apprentice. That was what they called him, these people of Bohemia. They did not say whose apprentice he was, for everyone knew the unspoken part of the phrase: the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—Sir Isaac Newton’s apprentice.

The lone person actually waiting for him was not frightened, however, but stood, arms akimbo, an irritated expression on his handsome face.

“Oh, 'tis a fine thing!“ the auburn-haired man shouted, Ben pushing back his gold-ribboned tricorn. ”Walkin‘ on water whilst I wait on you! The other fellow as performed that feat had more consideration f’r his friends!“

“Yes, and look how they treated him for his troubles,” Ben rejoined. “Anyway, by the toll of the clock—or its lack, I should say—I’m not yet late for our appointment.”

“Any moment that separates me from a beer is a moment too long.”

“Well, Robin, let’s remedy that, then.” The solid stone felt strange beneath Ben’s feet, as if he had been on shipboard for some time. He considered taking his new shoes off—they were clumsy and thick, for he was no cobbler—but going about in stocking feet would quickly ruin his stockings. So he left them on, noting with satisfaction that not a single drop of water adhered to them.

Robert was looking at them, too, shaking his head as they started up the stairs.

“I don’t know as I should show out an‘ you’ve been doin’,” he said, more softly than his greeting. “These affrighted Catholics might pitch you up and make a torch from you an‘ them.”

“Let ‘em try,” Ben replied, trying to smooth a wrinkle on his waistcoat with the palm of his hand. “They’ll learn a hard lesson in science from me and a harder one in politics from their emperor. Anyhow, suspicious as these folks are, they know who keeps the Turk from the gate and food in their bellies. Don’t worry about me.”

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“Never that!” Robert assured him. “I worry about
me.
How would I explain to Sir Isaac that I, your s‘pposed bodyguard, let his little homunculus end up at the bottom of the Moldau?”

“If I’m at the bottom of the Moldau, it’ll be to hunt mermaids,” Ben replied.

They reached the top of the stairs, and Robert started to turn left and cross the bridge.

“Let’s not go that way,” Ben suggested.

“Ain’t we goin‘ back to Kleinseit, to Saint Thomas’?”

“I thought to go to the Vulture,” Ben said.

“Ain’t you meetin‘ his sirness in three hours?”

“A few hours is plenty,” Ben replied. “It’ll—eh—give a certain fatherly sort time to calm and quit roaming the streets of Kleinseit.”

“Indeed? The father of a certain golden-haired lass?”

“Ockham’s razor,” Ben supplied. “The least complicated answer—”

“Is the best,” Robert finished. “I saw ya throwin‘ sparks at each other in the square’t’other day.”

“She has considerable spark,” Ben acknowledged.

Robert shrugged. “Well, then, to the Vulture and a pint for your adventures.”

“And to celebrate my new invention,” Ben added. “Then we’re back across the bridge.”

“A pint,” Robert agreed, turned right onto Charles Way, and began to walk into the Old Town.

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Ben loved the Old Town. Across the river in Kleinseit and Hradcany there were castles and palaces, pomp and splendor. In Old Town there was life. The streets

—even Charles Way, a central thoroughfare—were narrow, darkened by several stories of buildings on each side. And such buildings! Medieval edifices like the tower of the bridge behind them, brooding and black. The strong heaven-seeking arches and spires of gothic cathedrals and state buildings, scrolled and ornamented baroque houses from the last century. It was like something from a fairy tale—from all fairy tales—and it was nothing at all like Boston, where he had been born and where nothing was even a hundred years old. Prague was a city with its foundations sunk nearer the creation, the memories of a thousand generations in its walls and streets. Even London had never struck him in this way, for the core of London had been gutted by fire and rebuilt according to scientific plan, a vast structure designed by a single architect, Sir Christopher Wren. It had been modern, not a hodgepodge from every human age.

But, of course, London was dust. It was worse than dust, and with very few exceptions, everyone who had ever lived there was dead. Like the blotted sun, that too was his fault.

London was gone, but Prague he would save.

They went on, past the Italian Chapel, past the Golden Serpent and its fountain of red wine, out into the Old Town square. Just as they arrived, the clock began to toll, and Ben quickened his steps.

“Now what’s your hurry?” Robert asked.

Ben didn’t answer, instead skirting to the opposite side of the Old Town Hall, so he could see the clock.

It was a magnificent creation. Dancing its minuet of brass and time, it displayed not only the hour and minute, but the movements of the spheres. As it tolled, Jesus and his apostles shuffled behind small windows, bowing to the watching square before receding into the mechanical labyrinth where they dwelt.

“I should think such frippery would not impress you, Benjamin Franklin,”

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Robert said. “You’ve made much greater magic than this.”

“I suppose,” Ben replied, “but perhaps that’s what impresses me. This clock was here for hundreds of years before true science came to be. It’s just a clever machine. But
so
clever, Robin, and with so much attention to beauty. It is entirely practical and entirely a thing of art at the same moment—and that moment stretched to centuries.”

“I’m sure he was very clever with his hands, the man who built this,” Robert temporized, “but p’rhaps not so quickwitted in other ways. As I hear it, he was blinded so he couldn’t repeat his feat. A truly intelligent man would know’t‘ be wary of the whims o’ kings ‘n’ lords.”

“Is it my imagination, or are you still mothering me?” Ben asked softly. “Do you know something I don’t, Robin?”

Robert chuckled. “I
know plenty
you don’t, boyo, and don’t you f’rget it. But nothin‘ specific worrisome—just an itch I have today.”

“Maybe it’s time you settled down and became a father. That’ll scratch that itch right well.”

“Hah. Some cures are worse than any affliction.”

A gilded cockerel suddenly stuck its head from the clock face and flapped its wings. “Let’s on,” Ben said. “The performance is at an end, and the Vulture is a stone’s throw that way.”

The Vulture was indeed only a few doors away, but the beggars in the square had noticed them now and swarmed about, hands thrusting out, eyes and mouths pleading. Ben set his gaze straight ahead and brushed through them—the children, the nursing mothers, the old men. In his first months in the city, Ben had been wont to give them what he could, but by degrees his heart had hardened; for the simple fact was that there were too many of them, and for each he satisfied with a coin, twenty were left to stare grudgingly after him.

Prague was bursting its walls with refugees of all sorts, from peasants driven from the land to the emperor himself, fleeing the fall of Vienna. The most and poorest of them dwelt in New Town, sleeping in whatever tents or shanties A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

they could piece together; but many made their way here, to the heart of things, during the day, despite the periodic rounds of soldiers who cleared them out.

Ben also knew that none of them were starving, due to the manna machines he had helped Newton design. Manna might be unpleasant, but it was food and free for the asking.

A man at the door of the Vulture looked them over in case
they
might be beggars, but he let them pass without comment. Even at this time of day the tavern was nearly full, though it was no small place. Soldiers in uniforms rough and fine, gentlemen in stylish frock coats, workmen in stained shirts stood or sat at the long wooden tables, both in the darkened rooms and outside in the beer garden. Ben and Robert chose a table in the corner mostly because there was still room on its benches. Almost as they sat down, a serving girl with a thin face and lank brown hair brought them each a beer.

“Thank you, my dear,” Ben said, flashing her a smile.

Robert lifted his wooden tankard. “To your new invention, the Jesus shoes!”

he pronounced.

“Hush, you butterhead!” Ben said, nearly choking on his drink. “Now who’s being incautious around the Romish?”

Robert grinned and took a gulp of his beer. “ ‘An eagle abroad but an owl at home,” “ he quoted. ”So what
do
you call those things?“ He gestured vaguely beneath the table.

“Aquapeds,” Ben replied.

“Of course. Nothing is scientifical unless you name it in the Latin,” Robert remarked, a bit mockingly.

Ben didn’t bite at the bait, but instead tasted his beer—it was black, bitter, and solid going down. “God save the king,” he toasted automatically, and then wished he hadn’t.

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“The king!” Robert agreed, and they tipped their tankards hard.

When they settled them back down, however, Robert looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think there
is
a king, anymore? Do you think he might have escaped?”

Ben resisted frowning. He would rather discuss more pleasant things, but he had started it with his thoughtless toast. He shrugged, hoping Robert might think his blunder a sardonic jest. “It depends upon how convincing Heath and Voltaire were. I wouldn’t bet a single crown upon it.”

“Well,” Robert said, “well… let’s just drink to England, for even without London there must be Englishmen, and as there are Englishmen, there is England.”

“Hear, hear,” Ben agreed, but his heart wasn’t really in it. It always felt as if his chest were stuffed with thistles when the subject of London came up.

“So what will you do with these magic shoes of yours?” Robert asked, probably to change the subject.

“I will present several pair of them to the emperor and his daughters for their amusement. Perhaps he will not have my eyes put out.”

Robert shrugged his shoulders and gestured with one hand, like a dandy indicating a painting. “If they did, ya would have only the challenge of inventing a new pair’t‘ see with.” He glanced again at the table, as if looking through it to Ben’s feet. “Is Sir Isaac pleased?”

“Pleased? With the shoes? No, he thinks my continued experiments with affinity a useless divertissement. I must work on such things in my spare time.”

“That provokes you,” Robert observed.

“Dogs and damsels, yes, it provokes me!” Ben agreed, following his words with a substantial quaff of his beer. “He’s at work on some New System of his—biblical stuff with angels and such—while I’m left to keep the emperor happy.”

He considered for a moment. “Not a bad job all in all—it keeps us in high style A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

—but it’s not practical. Who knows when another comet may be called upon our heads?”

“Wouldn’t the airy shield around the city stop it?”

Ben shook his head. “No, that’s just an aegis built large. We should have written a real countermeasure two years ago. The thing you have to know about Newton is that he does not care about the useful, only about philosophizing. His research is directed not by what might produce something good, but by impulses of—of I know not what. He seeks to understand God’s universe, to know its depths. Not for me or you or Prague or even England, but for himself. Because he thus believes to curry God’s favor.”

He finished his beer and called for another.

“And what make you of all of this, then?” Robert asked.

Ben was silent for a moment, and then he smiled and lifted his mug. “I make I’m being too serious about it all. Let’s just drink and be merry.”

Robert shook his head. “This is not the same lad I met just come from Boston.”

“Nor is it the same world we live in,” Ben rejoined. “Our wonderful new age has come, and so let us enjoy it.”

The two men emerged from the Vulture an hour and a half later, several pints heavier, their moods and feet much lighter.

“We’d best walk this off,” Robert suggested, “else the emperor might notice that the apprentice has some sway in his stance.”

“He will be so pleased by his new toy that he will not care if I vomit on his rug,”

Ben scoffed. “Especially when he discovers that I’m having one of his boats fitted to operate thus. Can you imagine what speeds a seagoing craft might travel with no resisting friction from the water?”

“With no ports he’d have little account to test such a craft. Best you build a rowboat, unless you can make such as the fairy tales tell of, that sails both land A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

and sea.”

“That has more difficulties involved,” Ben said. “Water is simpler than soil.”

He cocked his head. “But I shall think on it.”

“What of the aerial ship by which we arrived here? Could you not combine the two?”

Ben shrugged. “Perhaps, if Sir Isaac would ever give up the secret of its operation. At first I thought it built on the principle of some repulsive affinity, but Newton claims that it is not.”

“You know,” Robert began hesitantly, “I always fancied that there was some sort of—well,
creature
in the globe that bore our boat aloft.”

Ben nodded. “I believe that there was, a sort of creature that he names malakus. But he will say nothing else on it."

“Could it be some sort of demon?”

“No. Yes—I don’t know,” Ben said. “Nor at the moment do I much care.”

“Aye,” Robert grunted. “But there’s the stories about him ‘n’ demons, you know.”

“Told by whom?”

“Servants. Them that cleans his laboratories. They whisper things about.”