Quicksilver (95 page)

“I understand your question now,” Daniel said. “Astronomers used to explain the seeming retrograde movements of the planets by imagining a phantastic heavenly axle-tree fitted out with crystalline spheres.
Now
we know that in fact the planets move in smooth ellipses and that retrograde motion is an
illusion
created by the fact that we are making our observations from a moving platform.”

“Viz. the Earth.”

“If we could see the planets from some fixed frame of reference, the retrograde motion would disappear. And you, Roger, observing Newton’s wandering trajectory—one year devising new receipts for the Philosophic Mercury, the next hard at work on Conic Sections—are trying to figure out whether there might be some Reference Frame within which all of Isaac’s moves make some kind of damned sense.”

“Spoken like Newton himself,” Roger said.

“You want to know whether his recent work on gravitation is a change of subject, or merely a new point of view—a new way of perceiving the same old Topic.”

“
Now
you are talking like Leibniz,” Roger said grumpily.

“And with good reason, for Newton and Leibniz are both working on the same problem, and have been since at least ’77,” Daniel said. “It is the problem that Descartes could not solve. It comes down to whether the collisions of those billiard balls can be explained by geometry and arithmetic—or do we need to go beyond pure thought and into Empirical and/or Metaphysical realms?”

“Shut up,” Roger said, “I’m working on a murderous headache
as it is.
I do not want to hear of metaphysics.” He seemed partly sincere—but he was keeping one eye on someone who was coming up behind Daniel. Daniel turned around and came face to face with—

“Mr. Hooke!” Roger said.

“M’lord.

“You, sir, taught this fellow to make thermometers!”

“So I did, m’lord.”

“I was just explaining to him that I wanted him to go up to Cambridge and gauge the heat of that town.”

“The entire country seems warm to me, m’lord,” said Hooke gravely, “in particular the eastern limb.”

“I hear that the warmth is spreading to the West country.”

“Here is a
pretext,
” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, stuffing a sheaf of papers into Daniel’s right hip pocket, “and here is something for you to peruse on your journey—the latest from Leipzig.” He shoved something rather heavier into the left pocket. “Good night, fellow Philosophers!”

“Let us go and walk in the streets of London,” Hooke said to Daniel. He did not need to add:
Most of which I laid out personally.

“R
AVENSCAR HATED HIS COUSIN
John Comstock, ruined him, bought his house, and tore it down,” Hooke said, as if he’d been backed into a corner and forced to admit it, “but learned from him all the same! Why did John Comstock back the Royal Society in its early days? Because he was curious as to Natural Philosophy? Perhaps. Because Wilkins talked him into it? In part. But it cannot have escaped your notice that most of our experiments in those days—”

“Had something to do with gunpowder. Obviously.” “
Roger
Comstock owns no gunpowder-factories. But his interest in the doings of our Society is no less pragmatic. Make no mistake. The French and the Papists are running the country now—are they running Newton?”

Daniel said nothing. After years of sparring with Hooke over
gravitation, Isaac had soared far beyond Hooke’s reach since Halley’s visit.

“I see,” Daniel said finally. “Well, I must go north anyway, to play at being the Puritan Moses.”

“It would be worth an excursion to Cambridge, then, in order to—”

“In order to clear Newton’s name of any scurrilous accusations that might be made against him by jealous rivals,” Daniel said.

“I was going to say, in order to disentangle him from the foreign supporters of a doomed King,” Hooke said. “Good night, Daniel.” And with a few dragging steps he was swallowed up in the sulfurous fog.

T
HE ENTIRE COUNTRY SEEMS WARM
to me…in particular the eastern limb.
Hooke might throw accusations carelessly, but not words. Among men who peered through telescopes, “limb” meant the edge of a heavenly body’s disk, such as the moon’s crescent when it was illumined from the side. Setting out to the northeast the next day, Daniel glanced at a map of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk and noticed that they formed a semicircular limb, bounded by the Thames on the south and the Wash on the north, and in between them, bulging eastwards into the North Sea. A bright light kindled above the Hague would shine a hundred nautical miles across the sea and light up that entire sweep of coastline, setting it aglow like a crescent moon, like the alchemist’s symbol for silver. Silver was the element of the Moon, the complement and counterpart of the Sun, whose element was gold. And as the Sun King was now pouring much gold into England, the possible existence of a silvery lunar crescent just to the north of London had import. Roger had no patience with alchemical suppositions and superstitions, but politics he knew well.

The fifty-second parallel ran directly from Ipswich to the Hague, so any half-wit with a back-staff and an ephemeris could sail unerringly from one to the other and back. Daniel knew the territory well—the North Sea infiltrated the Suffolk coast with so many spreading rays of brackish water that when you gazed east at sunrise the terrain seemed to be crazed with rivers of light. It was impossible to travel up the coast proper. The road from London was situated ten to twenty miles inland, running more or less straight from Chelmsford to Colchester to Ipswich, and everything to the right side—between it and the sea—was hopeless, from the point of view of a King or anyone else who wanted to rule it: a long strip of fens diced up by estuaries and therefore equally impassable
to horses and boats, easier to reach from Holland than from London.
Staying
there wasn’t so bad, and staying out was even better, but
movement
was rarely worth the trouble. Objects would not move in a resistive medium unless impelled by a powerful force—ergo, any travelers in that coastal strip had to be smugglers, drawn by profit and repulsed by laws, shipping England’s rude goods to Holland and importing Holland’s finished ones. So Daniel, like his brothers Sterling and Oliver and Raleigh before him, had spent much time in this territory as a youth, loading and unloading flat-bottomed Dutch boats lurking beneath weeping willows in dark river-courses.

The first part of the journey was like being nailed, with several other people, into a coffin borne through a coal-mine by epileptic pallbearers. But at Chelmsford some passengers got out of the carriage and thereafter the way became straight and level enough that Daniel could attempt to read. He took out the printed document that Roger had given him in the coffee-house. It was a copy of
Acta Eruditorum,
the scholarly rag that Leibniz had founded in his home town of Leipzig.

Leibniz had been trying for a long time to organize the smart Germans. The smart Britons tended to see this as a shabby mockery of the Royal Society, and the smart Frenchmen viewed it as a mawkish effort by the Doctor (who’d been living in Hanover since ’77) to hold up a flawed and tarnished mirror to the radiant intellectual life of Paris. While Daniel (reluctantly) saw some justice in these opinions, he suspected that Leibniz was
mostly
doing it simply because it was a good idea. At any rate
Acta Eruditorum
was Leibniz’s (hence Germany’s) answer to
Journal des Savants
, and it tended to convey the latest and best ideas coming from Germany—i.e., whatever Leibniz had been thinking about lately.

This particular issue had been printed several months earlier and contained an article by Leibniz on mathematics. Daniel began skimming it and right away saw distinctly familiar terms—the likes of which he had not glimpsed since ’77—

“Stab me in the vitals,” Daniel muttered, “he’s finally done it!”

“Done what!?” demanded Exaltation Gather, who was sitting across from Daniel hugging a large box full of money.

“Published the calculus!”

“And what, pray tell, is that, Brother Daniel? Other than something that grows on one’s teeth.” The hoard of coins in Exaltation Gather’s strong-box made dim muffled chinking noises as the
carriage rocked from side to side on its Suspension—one of those annoyingly good French ideas.

“New mathematics, based upon the analysis of quantities that are infinitesimal and evanescent.”

“It sounds very
metaphysical,
” said the Reverend Gather. Daniel looked up at him. No one and nothing had ever been less metaphysical than he. Daniel had grown up in the company of men like this and for a while had actually considered them to be normal-looking. But several years spent in London coffee-houses, theatres, and royal palaces had insensibly altered his tastes. Now when he gazed upon a member of a Puritan sect he always cringed inside. Which was just the effect that the Puritans were aiming for. If the Rev. Gather’s Christian name had been Exultation his garb would have been wildly inappropriate. But Exaltation it was, and for these people exaltation was a grim business.

Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty’s claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell’s skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II’s quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they’d forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice. Daniel’s request, James’s ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as “Oliver,” the joke being that many of them—being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed—looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him.

“Newton seems to agree with you,” Daniel said, “or else he’s afraid that some Jesuit will
say
so, which amounts to the same thing.”

“One need not be a Jesuit to be skeptical of vain imaginings—” began the now miffed Gather.

“
Something
must be there,” Daniel said. “Look out the window, yonder. That fen is divided into countless small plots by watercourses—some natural, some carved out by industrious farmers. Each rectangle of land could be made into two smaller ones—just
drag a stick across the muck and the water will fill up the scratch in the ground, like the æther filling the void between particles of matter. Is that metaphysical yet?”

“Why no, it is a good similitude, earthy, concrete, like something from the Geneva Bible. Have you looked into the Geneva Bible recently, or—”

“What happens then if we continue subdividing?” Daniel asked. “Is it the same all the way down? Or is it the case that
something happens
eventually, that we reach a place where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental properties of Creation are brought into play?”

“Er—I have no idea, Brother Daniel.”

“Is it vanity for us to consider the question? Or did God give us brains for a reason?”

“No religion, with the possible exception of Judaism, has ever been more favorably disposed towards education than ours,” said Brother Exaltation, “so that question is answered before ’twas asked. But we must consider these, er, infinitesimals and evanes-cents in a way that is rigorous, pure, free from heathenish
idolatry
or French
vanity
or the metaphysical infatuations of the Papists.”

“Leibniz agrees—and the result of applying just the approach you have prescribed, in the mathematical realm, is here, and it is called the calculus,” said Daniel, patting the document on his knee.

“Does Brother Isaac agree?”

“He did twenty years ago, when he
invented
all of this,” Daniel said. “Now I have no idea.”

“I have heard from one of our brethren in Cambridge that Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.”

“Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren
out
—shall we?”

I
PSWICH HAD BEEN A CLOTH
port forever, but that trade had fallen on hard times because of the fatal combination of cheap stuff from India and Dutch shipping that could bring it to Europe. It was the prototype of the ridiculously ancient English town, situated at the place where the River Orwell broadened into an estuary, the obvious spot where anyone from a cave-man to a Cavalier would drive a stake into the muck and settle. Daniel judged that the gaol had been the first structure to go up, some five or six thousand years ago perhaps, and that the rats had moved in a week or two later. Ipswich was the county seat, and so when Charles II had
whimsically decided to enforce the Penal Laws, all of Suffolk’s most outstanding Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the odd Jew had been rounded up and been deposited here. They might just as well have been released a month ago, but it was important to the King that Daniel, his chosen representative, come out and handle the matter in person.

The carriage pulled up in front of the gaol and Exaltation Gather sat in it nervously gripping his strong-box while Daniel went inside and scared the gaoler half to death by brandishing a tablecloth-sized document with a wax seal as big as a man’s heart dangling from it. Then Daniel went into the gaol, interrupting a prayer meeting, and spouted an oration he’d already used in half a dozen other gaols, a wrung-out rag of a speech so empty and banal that he had no idea whether he was making any sense at all, or just babbling in tongues. The startled, wary looks on the faces of the imprisoned Puritans suggested that they were extracting
some
meaning from Daniel’s verbalizations—he had no idea
what
exactly. Daniel did not really know how his speech was being interpreted until later. The prisoners had to be released one at a time. Each of them had to pay the bill for his meals and other necessaries—and many had been here for years.