Quicksilver (39 page)

One would think that being blown up would throw one’s evening’s schedule all awry. But all of this had passed very quickly, and there was no reason Daniel could not accomplish the errand that had brought him here. Indeed, the grave problems that had so burdened him on his walk over here were quite forgotten now, and would appear to be perfectly trivial seen against the stunning adventure of the last few minutes. His hand and, to a lesser degree, his face, were raw and red from flash-burns, and he suspected he might have to do without eyebrows for a few weeks. A quick change
of robes and a wash were very much in order; no difficulty, as he lived upstairs.

But having done those, Daniel picked up the tangents paper, shook off the black grit that re-punctuated it, and headed out the door. This was no more than a tenth of everything Isaac had accomplished with fluxions, but it was at least a
shred
of evidence—better than nothing—and sufficient to keep most Fellows of the Royal Society in bed with headaches for weeks. The night overhead was clear, the view excellent, the mysteries of the Universe all spread out above Trinity College. But Daniel lowered his sights and plodded toward the cone of steamy light where everyone was waiting.

1673

Once the characteristic numbers of most notions are determined, the human race will have a new kind of tool, a tool that will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses helped our eyes, a tool that will be as far superior to microscopes or telescopes as reason is to vision.

—
LEIBNIZ,
Philosophical Essays
,
TRANS. BY ARLEW AND GARBER

NEAR THE MIDPOINT
of London Bridge, a bit closer to the City than to Southwark, was a firebreak—a short gap in the row of buildings, like a missing tooth in a crowded jawbone. If you were drifting down-river in a boat, so that you could see all nineteen of the squat piers that held the bridge up, and all twenty of the ragstone arches and wooden drawbridges that let the water through, you’d be able to see that this open space—“the square,” it was called—stood directly above an arch that was wider than any of the others—thirty-four feet, at its widest.

As you drew closer to the bridge, and it became more and more obvious that your life was in extreme danger, and your mind, therefore, became focused on practical matters, you’d notice something even more important, namely that the sluice between the starlings—the snowshoe-like platforms of rubble that served as footings for the piers—was also wider, in this place, than anywhere else on the bridge. Consequently the passage through it looked less like a boiling cataract than a river rushing down from mountains during the spring thaw. If you still had the ability to steer for it, you would. And if you were a passenger on this hypothetical boat, and you valued your life, you’d insist that the waterman tie up for a moment at the tip of the starling and let you out, so that you could pick your way over that jammed horde of more or less ancient piles and the in-fill of mucky rubble; take a stair up to the level of the roadway; run across the Square, not forgetting to dodge the carts rushing both ways; descend another stair to the other end of the starling; and then hop, skid, and stagger across it until you reached the end, where your waterman would be waiting to pick you up again if indeed his boat, and he, still existed.

This accounted, anyway, for much that was peculiar about the part of London Bridge called the Square. Persons who went east and west on watermen’s boats on the Thames tended to be richer and more important than those who went north and south across the Bridge, and the ones who actually cared enough about their lives, limbs, and estates to bother with climbing out and hiking over the starling tended to be richer and more important yet, and so the buildings that stood atop the Bridge to either side of the Square constituted location! location! location! to the better sort of retailers and publicans.

Daniel Waterhouse spent a couple of hours loitering in the vicinity of the Square one morning, waiting for a certain man on a certain boat. However, the boat he waited for would be coming the other direction: working its way upstream from the sea.

He took a seat in a coffee-house and amused himself watching flushed and sweaty ferry-passengers appear at the head of the stairs, as if they’d been spontaneously generated from the fœtid waters of the Thames. They’d crawl into the nearby tavern for a pint, fortifying themselves for the traversal of the Bridge’s twelve-foot-wide roadway, where passengers were crushed between carts a few times a week. If they survived that, then they’d pop into the glover’s or the haberdasher’s for a bit of recreational shopping, and then perhaps dart into this coffee-house for a quick mug of
java. The remainder of London Bridge was getting down at the heels, because much more fashionable shops were being put up in other parts of the city by the likes of Sterling, but the Square was prosperous and, because of the continual threat of boat-wrack and drowning, the merriest part of town.

And in these days it tended to be crowded, especially when ships came across the Channel, and dropped anchor in the Pool, and their Continental passengers were ferried hither in watermen’s boats.

As one such boat drew near the Bridge, Daniel finished his coffee, settled his bill, and ventured out onto the street. Cartage and drayage had been baffled by a crowd of pedestrians. They all wanted to descend to the starling on the downstream side, and had formed a sort of bung that stopped not only the stairs but the street as well. Seeing that they were by and large City men, intent on some serious purpose, and not Vagabonds intent on his purse, Daniel insinuated himself into this crowd and was presently drawn in to the top of the stairs and flushed down to the top of the starling along with the rest. He supposed at first that all of these well-dressed men had come to greet specific passengers. But as the boat drew within earshot, they began to shout, not friendly greetings, but questions, in several languages, about the war.

“As a fellow Protestant—albeit Lutheran—it is
my
hoping that England and Holland shall become reconciled and that the war you speak of will no more exist.”

The young German was standing up in a boat, wearing French fashions. But as the boat drew closer to the turbulence downstream of the Bridge, he came to his senses, and sat down.

“So much for hopes—now what of your
observations,
sir?” someone fired back—one of a few dozen who had by now crowded onto the starling, trying to get as close to the incoming boats and ferries as they could without falling into the deadly chute. Others were perched up on the edge of the Square, like gargoyles, still others were out on the river in boats plotting intercept courses, like bocaneers in the Caribbean. None of them was having any of this Lutheran diplomacy. None even knew who the young German was—just a passenger on a boat from abroad who was willing to talk. There were several other travelers on the same boat, but all of them ignored the shouting Londoners. If these had information, they would take it to the ’Change, and tell the tale with silver, and propagate it through the chthonic channels of the Market.

“What ship were you on, sir?” someone bellowed.

“
Ste-Catherine,
sir.”

“Where did that ship come from, sir?”

“Calais.”

“Had you any conversation with Naval persons?”

“A little, perhaps.”

“Any news, or rumor, of cannons bursting on English ships?”

“Oh, sometimes it happens. By everyone in the ships of the
melee,
it is seen, for the whole side of the hull is out-blown, and out the bodies fly, or so they say. To all of the sailors, friend and enemy, it is a lesson of mortality, perhaps. Consequently they all talk about it. But in the present war it happens no more than usual, I think.”

“Were they Comstock cannons?”

The German took a moment to understand that, without even having set foot on English soil yet, he had talked himself into deep trouble. “Sir! The cannons of my lord Epsom are reckoned the finest in the world.”

But no one wanted to hear that kind of talk. The topic had changed.

“Whence came you to Calais?”

“Paris.”

“Did you see troops moving on your journey across France?”

“A few ones, exhausted, south-going.”

The gentlemen on the starling hummed and vibrated for a few moments, assimilating this. One broke away from the crowd, toiling back towards the stairs, and was engulfed in barefoot boys jumping up and down. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and handed it to the one who jumped highest. This one spun, forced a path through the others, took the stairs four at a time, broke loose onto the Square, vaulted over a wagon, spun a fishwife, and then began to build speed up the bridge. From here to the London shore was a hundred and some yards, from there to the ’Change was six hundred—he’d be there in three minutes. Meanwhile the interrogation continued: “Did you see Ships of Force in the Channel,
mein Herr?
English, French, Dutch?”

“There was—” and here the man’s English gave way. He made a helpless, encompassing gesture.

“Fog!”

“Fog,” he repeated.

“Did you hear guns?”

“A few—but very likely they were only signals. Coded
data
speeding through the
fog,
so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound—” and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working
out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins’s
Cryptonomicon
but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.

Leibniz set foot on England. He was closely followed by a couple of other German gentlemen, somewhat older, much less talkative, and (Daniel could only suppose) more important. They in turn were pursued by a senior servant who headed up a short column of porters lugging boxes and bags. But Leibniz had burdened himself with a wooden box he would not let go of. Daniel stepped forward to greet them, but was cut off by some brusque fellow who shouldered in to hand a sealed letter to one of the older gentlemen, and whispered to him for a moment in Low-Dutch.

Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It
could
have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn’t, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them—incredibly—just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham’s College an hour ago.
Not
so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he’d noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.

Leibniz and the others discussed matters in High-Dutch. The interloper turned round to glance at Daniel. It was one of the Dutch Ambassador’s errand-boys-
cum
-spies. The Germans formed some sort of a plan, and it seemed to involve splitting up. Daniel stepped in and introduced himself.

The other Germans were introduced by their
names
but what mattered was their
ancestry:
one of them was the nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg, who was the same Archbishop’s Minister. In other words
very
important people in Mainz, hence
rather
important ones in the Holy Roman Empire, which was more or less neutral in the French/English/Dutch broil. It had all the signs of being some sort of peace-brokering mission, i.e.

Leibniz knew who he was, and asked, “Is Wilkins still alive?”

“Yes…”

“Thank God!”

“Though very ill. If you would like to visit him I would suggest doing it
now.
I’ll escort you gladly, Dr. Leibniz…may I have the honor of assisting you with that box?”

“You are very civil,” Leibniz said, “but I’ll hold it.”

“If it contains gold or jewelry, you’d best hold it
tight
.”

“Are the streets of London not safe?”

“Let us say that the Justices of the Peace are mostly concerned with Dissenters and Dutchmen, and our cutpurses have not been slow to adapt.”

“What this contains is infinitely more valuable than gold,” Leibniz said, beginning to mount the stairs, “and yet it cannot be stolen.”

Daniel lunged forward in an effort to keep step. Leibniz was slender, of average height, and tended to bend forward when he walked, the head anticipating the feet. Once he had reached the level of the roadway he turned sharply and strode towards the City of London, ignoring the various taverns and shops.

He did not
look
like a monster.

According to Oldenburg, the Parisians who frequented the Salon at the Hotel Montmor—the closest French equivalent to the Royal Society of London—had begun using the Latin word
monstro
to denote Leibniz. This from men who’d personally known Descartes and Fermat and who considered exaggeration an unspeakably vulgar habit. It had led to some etymological researches among some members of the R.S. Did they mean Leibniz was grotesquely misshapen? An unnatural hybrid of a man and something else? A divine warning?

“He lives up this way, does he not?”

“The Bishop has had to move because of his illness—he’s at his stepdaughter’s house in Chancery Lane.”

“Then still we go this way—then left.”

“You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?”

“I have been studying London-paintings.”

“I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire—like street-plans of Atlantis.”

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,” Leibniz said. “Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle—all on the
same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees it from every point of view
at once.
By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

Daniel decided to step back and let Leibniz’s words reverberate, as organ-chords must do in Lutheran churches. Meanwhile they reached the north end of the Bridge, where the racket of the water-wheels, confined and focused in the stone vault of the gatehouse, made conversation impossible. Not until they’d made it out onto dry land, and begun to ascend the Fish Street hill, did Daniel ask, “I note you’ve already been in communication with the Dutch Ambassador. May I assume that your mission is not entirely
natural-philosophick
in nature?”

“A rational question—in a way,” Leibniz grumbled. “We are about the same age, you and I?” he asked, giving Daniel a quick inspection. His eyes were unsettling. Depending on what
kind
of monster he was, either beady, or penetrating.