NEAL STEPHENSON - Quicksilver

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF everyone’s immigrating to America- sailing-ships on the North Atlantic as thick as watermen’s boats on the Thames, more or less wearing ruts in the sea-lanes-and so, in an idle way, Enoch supposes that his appearance on the threshold of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts will come as no surprise at all to its founder. But Daniel Waterhouse nearly swallows his teeth when Enoch walks through the door, and it’s not just because the hem of Enoch’s cloak knocks over a great teetering stack of cards. For a moment Enoch’s afraid that some sort of apoplectic climax is in progress, and that Dr. Waterhouse’s final contribution to the Royal Society, after nearly a lifetime of service, will be a traumatically deranged cardiac muscle, pickled in spirits of wine in a crystal jug. The Doctor spends the first minute of their interview frozen halfway between sitting and standing, with his mouth open and his left hand on his breastbone. This might be the beginnings of a courteous bow, or a hasty maneuver to conceal, beneath his coat, a shirt so work-stained as to cast aspersions on his young wife’s diligence. Or perhaps it’s a philosophick enquiry, viz. checking his own pulse-if so, it’s good news, because Sir John Floyer just invented the practice, and if Daniel Waterhouse knows of it, it means he’s been keeping up with the latest work out of London.

Enoch takes advantage of the lull to make other observations and try to judge empirically whether Daniel’s as unsound as the faculty of Harvard College would have him believe. From the Doctors’ jibes on the ferry-ride, Enoch had expected nothing but cranks and gears. And indeed Waterhouse does have a mechanic’s shop in a corner of the-how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There. But anyway, most of it is given over not to the hard ware of gears, but to softer matters: cards. They are stacked in slender columns that would totter in the breeze from a moth’s wings if the columns had not been jammed together into banks, stairways, and terraces, the whole formation built on a layer of loose tiles on the dirt floor to (Enoch guesses) prevent the card-stacks from wicking up the copious ground-water. Edging farther into the room and peering round a bulwark of card-stacks, Enoch finds a writing-desk stocked with blank cards. Ragged gray quills project from inkpots, bent and broken ones crosshatch the floor, bits of down and fluff and cartilage and other bird-wreckage form a dandruffy layer on everything.

On pretext of cleaning up his mess, Enoch begins to pick the spilled cards off the floor. Each is marked at the top with a rather large number, always odd, and beneath it a long row of ones and zeroes, which (since the last digit is always 1, indicating an odd number) he takes to be nothing other then the selfsame number expressed in the binary notation lately perfected by Leibniz. Underneath the number, then, is a word or short phrase, a different one on each card. As he picks them up and re-stacks them he sees: Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g., mirlitons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The Skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura bakufu; The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophytes (e.g., liverwort); Euclidean geometry-homotheties and similitudes; Pantomime; The Election amp; Reign of Rudolf of Hapsburg; Testes; Nonsymmetrical dyadic relations; the Investiture Controversy; Phosphorus; Traditional impotence remedies; the Arminian heresy; and-

“Some of these strike one as being too complicated for monads,” he says, desperate for some way to break the ice. “Such as this-‘The Development of Portuguese Hegemony over Central Africa.’ “

“Look at the number at the top of that card,” Waterhouse says. “It is the product of five primes: one for development, one for Portuguese, one for Hegemony, one for Central, and one for Africa. ”

“Ah, so it’s not a monad at all, but a composite.”

“Yes.”

“It’s difficult to tell when the cards are helter-skelter. Don’t you think you should organize them?”

“According to what scheme?” Waterhouse asks shrewdly.

“Oh, no, I’ll not be tricked into that discussion.”

“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. “But if each one is assigned a unique number-prime numbers for monads, and products of primes for composites-then organizing them is simply a matter of performing computations… Mr. Root. ”

“Dr. Waterhouse. Pardon the interruption.”

“Not at all.” He sits back down, finally, and goes back to what he was doing before: running a long file back and forth over a chunk of metal with tremendous sneezing noises. “It is a welcome diversion to have you appear before me, so unlooked-for, so implausibly well-preserved, ” he shouts over the keening of the warm tool and the ringing of the work-piece.

“Durability is preferable to the alternative-but not always convenient. Less hale persons are forever sending me off on errands.”

“Lengthy and tedious ones at that.”

“The journey’s dangers, discomforts, and tedium are more than compensated for by the sight of you, so productively occupied, and in such good health.” Or something like that. This is the polite part of the conversation, which is not likely to last much longer. If he had returned the compliment, Daniel would have scoffed, because no one would say he’s well preserved in the sense that Enoch is. He looks as old as he ought to. But he’s wiry, with clear, sky-blue eyes, no tremors in his jaw or his hands, no hesitation in his speech once he’s over the shock of seeing Enoch (or, perhaps, anyone ) in his Institute. Daniel Waterhouse is almost completely bald, with a fringe of white hair clamping the back of his head like wind-hammered snow on a tree-trunk. He makes no apologies for being uncovered and does not reach for a wig-indeed, appears not to own one. His eyes are large, wide and staring in a way that probably does nothing to improve his reputation. Those orbs flank a hawkish nose that nearly conceals the slot-like mouth of a miser biting down on a suspect coin. His ears are elongated and have grown a radiant fringe of lanugo. The imbalance between his organs of input and output seems to say that he sees and knows more than he’ll say.

“Are you a colonist now, or-”

“I’m here to see you.”

The eyes stare back, knowing and calm. “So it is a social visit! That is heroic-when a simple exchange of letters is so much less fraught with seasickness, pirates, scurvy, mass drownings-”

“Speaking of letters-I’ve one here,” Enoch says, taking it out.

“Great big magnificent seal. Someone dreadfully important must’ve written it. Can’t say how impressed I am.”

“Personal friend of Dr. Leibniz.”

“The Electress Sophie?”

“No, the other one.”

“Ah. What does Princess Caroline want of me? Must be something appalling, or else she wouldn’t’ve sent you to chivvy me along.”

Dr. Waterhouse is embarrassed at having been so startled earlier and is making up for it with peevishness. But it’s fine, because it seems to Enoch that the thirty-year-old Waterhouse hidden inside the old man is now pressing outward against the loose mask of skin, like a marble sculpture informing its burlap wrappings.