Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)

by Neal Stephenson

Enoch approved, so far. Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear—the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram.

So like a sojourner in a foreign city who eventually finds a coffeehouse where he feels at home, Daniel has settled on this place, and been accepted here.

Daniel has learned to read the state of the captain’s mind from the figure and rhythm of his movements—each pattern like the steps of a courtly dance.

Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors.

Of course I was just a boy. I didn’t know that projectiles rise and fall in parabolic curves.

Isaac was accustomed to being so much brighter than everyone else that he really had no idea of what others were or weren’t capable of.

But as Daniel sat and pretended to read his newspaper, the sun swung up over York House and then Scotland Yard, the place became comfortable, and Personages began to occupy seats nearby, and to pretend to read their newspapers. He even sensed that in this very coffee-house were some members of the cast of characters he had heard about while listening to his siblings talk over the dinner table. Actually being here and mingling with them made him feel like a theatregoer relaxing after a performance with the actors—and in these racy times, actresses.

“Ah—he’s squeamish—abhors cruelty?” “Cruelty to animals.”

“I’ve always wondered who does the reading,” Wilkins reflected. “He must be very bright, or else perpetually confused.”

I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character…but it’s too depressing. ‘Look, we have invented a new Philosophickal Language so that when we are imprisoned by Kings we can scratch a higher form of graffiti on our cell walls.’

if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy.

“Don’t be pedantic, Mr. Pepys. Everyone will understand what it means.” “Everyone who is clever enough to matter, anyway,” Wren put in.

There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by a fiction. —HOBBES, Leviathan

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

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.”

“I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliothèque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.” “And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”

“What a watch is to time, this engine is to thought.”

“What is a number, Mr. Waterhouse?” Daniel groaned. “How can you ask such questions?” “How can you not ask them, sir? You are a philosopher, are you not?”

“And you propose building a machine to do this?” “Pourquoi non? With the aid of a machine, truth can be grasped as if pictured on paper.” “But it is still not thinking. Thinking is what angels do—it is a property given to Man by God.”

“I cannot make out what is going on,” said Daniel, quietly, to his neighbor. “Well, you’d best make it out before you say anything else,” Roger said. “Just a suggestion.”

“I phant’sied I’d heard someone moving about in there!” Roger exclaimed. Which was obviously a lie; but it made the conversation move along better.

Daniel was keen to ask Roger what he’d been doing with the gunpowder. But perhaps it would be better to wait for Roger to volunteer something.

“Happens all the time,” said Roger, a-bristle with bogus authority.

It was funny in a painful way. God had given him the desire to be a great Natural Philosopher—then put him on earth in the midst of Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz.

Or having it gambled for him by a Captain who shows signs of—what’s a diplomatic way to put it—having a rich and complicated inner life.

“Yes…it is time for me to plunge into it. Henceforth, that is my only purpose. The next time you see me, Daniel, I will be a mathematician second to none.” From any other Continental lawyer these words would have been laughably arrogant; but they had come from the mouth of the monster.

Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would’ve been.

“What kind of conversation is this? What place do you come from, where people actually care about how everyone feels about things? What possible bearing could anyone’s feelings have on anything that makes a bloody difference?”

It may seem hard for you to believe, but mark my word—whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

“I am not well versed in any of those subjects,” Eliza began, obviously (to Jack) making an heroic bid to change the subject, and obviously (to the Doctor) begging to be given an advanced course of instruction.

“It has been finished for years,” the Doctor said, sounding unusually sad. “The decision: should I publish it at all?” “Is it a good yarn?” “It is not a narrative. It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it,” the Doctor said. “When published, it will bring about enormous changes in not only mathematics, but all forms of natural philosophy and engineering. People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel to other planets, and its very power and brilliance will sweep old, tottering, worn-out systems of thought into the dustbin.”

“And you invented it, Doctor?” Eliza asked, as Jack was occupied making finger-twirling movements in the vicinity of his ear.

“Where do you get this stuff? Who told you that one?” Jack demanded, a bloody head popping out between their feet, looking up at them. “I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “Someone has to come up with new ideas.”

“You may not know this, but you have a way of talking to yourself as you go about—telling yourself a story about what’s happening, or what you suppose is happening—for this reason I already know you are Jack. I’m Enoch.

He wanted badly to sleep, but he knew that if the fire went out while he slumbered, the air-current would stop and he’d lose the thread that, as with that bloke in the myth, was showing him the way out.

Having nothing else to do, he sat down to die, and fell asleep instead, and had nightmares that were an improvement on reality.

Much simpler to be saucily irreligious everywhere and, if people got offended, run away.

“Why indeed? There must be a reason. In commerce there is a reason for everything. That’s why I like it.”

“He’s accomplishing nothing—that’s very different from doing nothing,” Enoch said gravely.

“The Doctor provides quicksilver to the mines whose masters do what the Doctor wants.” “So,” Eliza said, “the Doctor has—what?” “Power,” Jack finally said after a few wrong guesses.

The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered.

To accept coffee for free was to demean oneself; to overpay was to publicly shame Christopher, by implying that he was the sort of man who cared about something as low and dirty as money; to merely agree on a fair price was to proclaim oneself a simpleton, and accuse Christopher of the same. Arduous haggling, however, laid bare the soul and made the participants blood-brothers.

“Mademoiselle, in my circles, anyone who transacts business of any sort, on any level, is a whore.

“You say little but mean much…what do you mean?”

“Yes—but he needn’t know what is being planned, or when. We need only manipulate his mental state, so that he has reason to believe that V.O.C. shares are soon to rise.”

“And—as I’m now beginning to understand—you are something of a virtuoso when it comes to manipulating men’s mental states,” Monmouth said. “You make it sound ever so much more difficult than it really is,” Eliza answered. “Mostly I just sit quietly and let the men manipulate themselves.”

“You will spoil me, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said, “for how can I return to the common sort of female—stupid and ignorant—after I have conversed with you?

“But wit fails and beauty fades, and I don’t wish to be a house on piles, sinking into the bog a little each day,” Eliza said. “Somewhere I must stick. I must have a foundation that does not always move.” “Where on this earth can such a miracle be found?” “Money,” Eliza said. “Here, I can make money.”

This was (as Jack figured out later, when he had much time to consider it) Eliza’s way of saying that she thought Mr. Vliet was a knave, and the voyage not fit for persons in their right minds to invest in. But having been in Amsterdam for so long, she said it in the zargon of bankers.