Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)

by Neal Stephenson

“It all comes from first principles. Everything can be measured. Everything acts according to physical laws. Our minds included. My mind, that’s doing the deciding, is already set in its course, like a ball rolling down a trough.” “Uncle! Surely you are not denying the existence of souls—of a Supreme Soul.” Daniel says nothing to this. “Neither Newton nor Leibniz would agree with you,” Wait Still continues. “They’re afraid to agree with me, because they are important men, and they would be destroyed if they came out and said it. But no one will bother to destroy me.”

The construction of equations was an exercise in translation. By following those rules, one could create new statements that were true, without even having to think about what the symbols referred to in any physical universe. It was this seemingly occult power that scared the hell out of some Puritans at the time, and even seemed to scare Isaac a bit.

“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”

“If we stayed away from politics, we could be flying winged chariots to the Moon within a few generations. All that’s needed is to pull down certain barriers to progress—”

But Hooke only became irritated. “I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”

But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not. Daniel had liked to tell himself that rational thought led to better actions than brute force of will; yet here was the Duke of York all but rolling his eyes at them and their experiment, seeing naught that was new.

They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance—they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

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. So when he got it into his head to be tricky, he came up with tricks that would not deceive a dog. It was hard not to be insulted—but being around Isaac was never for the thin-skinned.

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.

Daniel hadn’t moved or spoken in what seemed like ten minutes…he was (glancing at the telltale coffee cup here) paralyzed, in fact! Then he solved Sir Winston’s etiquette jam by blurting something like “I say!” and attempting to stand up, which came out as a palsied spasm of the entire body—he got into a shin-kicking match with his own table and produced a disturbance that sheared cups off their saucers. Everyone looked.

“Wilkins! Yes! 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.’ ” “Perhaps it’ll lead us to a world where Kings can’t, or won’t, imprison us at all—

“To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers—and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy—whatever that means.”

When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Year, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going on in their minds. He’d decided, in the end, that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thought of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that this made it worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows. Hooke took up his blade and reached for Daniel.