Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Cryptonomicon (150 page)
Bruce Schneier invented Solitaire, graciously consented to my use of it in this novel, and wrote the appendix. Ian Goldberg wrote the Perl script that appears in Enoch Root’s e-mail message to Randy.
Except for the odd quotation, the rest of the book was, for better or worse, written by me. I am indebted to many other people, though. Accounting for one’s debts in this way can easily lead all the way back to Adam and Eve, and so I’ve chosen to pick World War II as my gratitude cutoff date, and to divide everyone I’m grateful to into three general groups.
First: towering figures of the 1937-45 Titanomachia. Almost every family has its own small pantheon of war figures—such as my uncle Keith Wells, who served as a Marine on Florida and Guadalcanal Islands, and who may have been the first American Marine to hit a beach, in an offensive operation, during that war. But this novel is basically about the technically inclined people who were called upon to do incredibly peculiar things during the war years. Among all these great wartime hackers, some kind of special recognition must go to William Friedman, who sacrificed his health to break the Japanese machine cipher called Purple before the war even began.
But I have dedicated this novel to my late grandfather S. Town Stephenson. In doing so, I run the risk that people will make all kinds of false suppositions about resemblances between his family—which is to say,
my
family—and characters in this book. So, just for the record, let me state that
I made all of this up—honest!—and that it is not a
roman à clef
; this book is merely a novel, and not a sneaky way of unloading deep dark familial secrets on unsuspecting readers.
Second: acquaintances of mine who (mostly unwittingly) exerted huge influences on the direction of this project. These include, in alphabetical order, Douglas Barnes, Geoff Bishop, George Dyson, Marc and Krist Geriene of Nova Marine Exploration, Jim Gibbons, Bob Grant, David Handley, Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, and Walter Wriston—who ran around the Philippines with a crypto machine during the war, and survived to tell me yarns about prewar Shanghai banking fifty years later.
Third: people whose efforts made it possible, or at least much easier, for me to write this book. Sometimes their contributions were huge outpourings of love and support, as in the case of my wife, my children, and my children’s grandparents. Others supported me through the deceptively simple procedure of doing their jobs steadfastly and well: my editor, Jennifer Hershey, and my agents, Liz Darhansoff and Tal Gregory. And many people made unwitting contributions to this book simply by having interesting conversations with me that they have probably long since forgotten: Wayne Barker, Christian Borgs, Jeremy Bornstein, Al Butler, Jennifer Chayes, Evelyn Corbett, Hugh Davis, Dune, John Gilmore, Ben and Zenaida Gonda, Mike Hawley, Eric Hughes, Cooper Moo, Dan Simon, and Linda Stone.
—Neal Town Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson
is the author of
Snow Crash
,
The Diamond Age
,
Zodiac
, and
The Big U
. Born on Halloween 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland — home of the National Security Agency — he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article.
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First Look:
Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Quicksilver
Volume One of “The Baroque Cycle”
by Neal Stephenson
About
Quicksilver
Daniel Waterhouse is a brilliant scientist, yet knows his powers are dwarfed by those of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. Caught up in the conflict between science and alchemy, he is also embroiled in the bloody struggle for religious freedom…
Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London urchin, and is now a reckless adventurer in search of great fortune. The exploits of the King of the Vagabonds are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe…
Eliza is a beautiful young woman whose ingenuity, bravery, and intelligence save her after years spent imprisoned in a Turkish harem…
Set against the backdrop of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
Quicksilver
tells the intertwining tales of these unforgettable main characters as they traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures such as Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, William of Orange, Louis XIV, and many others. This breathtaking story ranges from the American colonies to Whitehall to the glittering palace at Versailles—and plays out during a singular nexus point in history, when humanity was transformed as rationality triumphed over mysticism, monarchy was overthrown, markets became free, and religious tolerance gained ground over harsh oppression.
Excerpt from
Quicksilver
ENOCH ROUNDS THE
corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the witch’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow—and, to a Puritan, tantalizing—glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.
Boston’s a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes. The road up the spoon-handle is barred by a wall, with the usual gallows outside of it, and victims, or parts of them, strung up or nailed to the city gates. Enoch has just come that way, and reckoned he had seen the last of such things—that thenceforth it would all be churches and taverns. But the dead men outside the gate were common robbers, killed for earthly crimes. What is happening now in the Common is of a more Sacramental nature.
The noose lies on the witch’s grey head like a crown. The executioner pushes it down. Her head forces it open like an infant’s dilating the birth canal. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her shoulders. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes to collapse. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts the knot while an official reads the death warrant. This is as bland as a lease. The crowd scratches and shuffles. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets.
He’s not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch’s blundered into one it would be bad form to leave.
There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He judges it very far from the worst hanging he’s ever seen—no kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knots—all in all, an unusually competent piece of work.
As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North, in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell. It reminds everyone here that, if they don’t want to be dead in a few months’ time, they have firewood to stack and chinks to caulk.
How must he look to these people? A man of indefinable age but evidently broad experience, with silver hair queued down to the small of his back, a copper-red beard, pale gray eyes, and skin weathered and marred like a blacksmith’s ox-hide apron. Dressed in a long traveling-cloak, a walking-staff and a gentleman’s rapier strapped ‘longside the saddle of a notably fine black horse. Two pistols in his waistband, prominent enough that Indians, highwaymen, and French raiders can clearly see them from ambuscades (he’d like to move them out of view, but reaching for them at this moment seems like a bad idea). Saddlebags (should they be searched) filled with instruments, flasks of quicksilver and stranger matters—some, as they’d learn, quite dangerous—books in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin pocked with the occult symbols of Alchemists and Kabalists. Things could go badly for him in Boston.
Enoch dismounts into the midst of the colonists. He sweeps the robe round him, concealing the pistols, pulls the hood back from his head, and amounts to just another weary pilgrim.
Flowing like water round the bases of the steep hills, they migrate across a burying ground on the south edge of the common, already full of lost Englishmen, and follow the witch’s corpse down the street. The houses are mostly of
wood, and so are the churches. Spaniards would have built a single great cathedral here, of stone, with gold on the inside, but the colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable from barns, each no doubt preaching that all of the others have it wrong. But at least they can muster a consensus to kill a witch.
He comes to what must be the greatest intersection in the town, where this road from the city gate crosses a very broad street that runs straight down to salt water, and continues on a long wharf that projects far out into the harbor, thrusting across a ruined rampart of stones and logs: the rubble of a disused sea-wall. The long wharf is ridged with barracks. It reaches far enough out into the harbor that one of the Navy’s very largest men-of-war is able to moor at its end. Turning his head the other way he sees artillery mounted up on a hillside, and blue-coated gunners tending to a vatlike mortar, ready to lob iron bombs onto the decks of any French or Spanish galleons that might trespass on the bay.
So, drawing a mental line from the dead criminals at the city gate, to the powder-house on the Common, to the witch-gallows, and finally to the harbor defenses, he has got one Cartesian number-line—what Leibniz would call the Ordinate—plotted out: he understands what people are afraid of in Boston, and how the churchmen and the generals keep the place in hand. But it remains to be seen what can be plotted in the space above and below. The hills of Boston are skirted by endless flat marshes that fade, slow as twilight, into Harbor or River, providing blank empty planes on which men with ropes and rulers can construct whatever strange curves they phant’sy.
He enters into narrower streets, and heads north, leading his horse over a rickety wooden bridge thrown over a little mill-creek. Flotillas of shavings from some carpenter’s block-plane sail down the stream like ships going off to war. Underneath them the weak current nudges turds and bits of slaughtered animals down towards the harbor. It smells accordingly. No denying there is a tallow-chandlery not far upwind, where beast-grease not fit for eating is made into candles and soap.
“Did you come from Europe?”
He had
sensed
someone was following him, but
seen
nothing whenever he looked back. Now he knows why: his doppelgänger is a lad, moving about like a drop of quicksilver that cannot be trapped under the thumb. Ten years old, Enoch guesses. Then the boy thinks about smiling and his lips part. His gums support a rubble of adult teeth shouldering their way into pink gaps, and deciduous ones flapping like tavern signs on skin hinges. He’s closer to eight. But cod and corn have made him big for his age—at least by London standards. And he is precocious in every respect save social graces.
“Europe,” Enoch repeats, “is that what you name it here? Most people
there
say
Christendom
.”
“But we have Christians
here
.”
“So this
is
Christendom, you are saying,” says Enoch, “but, obviously to you, I’ve come from somewhere
else
. Perhaps Europe
is
the better term, now that you mention it. Hmm.”
“What do other people call it?”
“Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?”
“No, but you talk like one.”
“You know something of schoolmasters, do you?”
“Yes sir,” the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg.
“Yet here it is the middle of Monday—”
“The place was empty ’cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and—”
“And what?”
“Get more ahead of the others than I was already.”
“Come, you belong in school.”
“School is where one learns,” says the boy. “If you’d be so kind as to answer my question, sir, then I should be learning something, which would mean I
were
in school.”
The boy is obviously dangerous. So Enoch decides to accept the proposition. “You may address me as Mr. Root. And you are—?”
“Ben. Son of Josiah. The tallow-chandler. Why do you laugh, Mr. Root?”
“Because in most parts of the Christendom—or Eu
rope—tallow-chandlers’ sons do not go to grammar school. It is a peculiarity of… your people. Now, Ben. I grow cold. My horse is restless. I shall be pleased to teach you things, so that when you go home to-night you may claim to Josiah that you were in school the whole day. However, I do require certain minor services in return.”
“Only name them, Mr. Root.”