Free Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson Page A

this, I have nothing.” Flicking one nail angrily upon a train of zeroes inscribed in the heart of the letter.
    “Then it seems as if Her Royal Highness is making a persuasive case.”
    Waterhouse has just, at this instant, realized that very soon he is going to climb aboard ship and sail for London. That much can be read from his face. But he’s still an hour or two away from admitting it. They will be difficult hours for Enoch.
    “Even without the insurance policy,” Enoch says, “it would be in your best interests. Natural philosophy, like war and romance, is best done by young men. Sir Isaac has not done any creative work since he had that mysterious catastrophe in ’93.”
    “It’s not mysterious to me. ”
    “Since then, it’s been toiling at the Mint, and working up new versions of old books, and vomiting flames at Leibniz.”
    “And you are advising me to emulate that ?”
    “I am advising you to put down the file, pack up your cards, step back from the workbench, and consider the future of the revolution.”
    “What revolution can you possibly be talking about? There was the Glorious one back in ’88, and people are nattering on about throwing one here, but…”
    “Don’t be disingenuous, Daniel. You speak and think in a language that did not exist when you and Sir Isaac entered Trinity.”
    “Fine, fine. If you want to call it a revolution, I won’t quibble.”
    “That revolution is turning on itself now. The calculus dispute is becoming a schism between the natural philosophers of the Continent and those of Great Britain. The British have far more to lose. Already there’s a reluctance to use Leibniz’s techniques—which are now more advanced, since he actually bothered to disseminate his ideas. Your difficulties in starting the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts are a symptom of the same ailment. So do not lurk on the fringes of civilization trifling with cards and cranks, Dr. Waterhouse. Return to the core, look at first causes, heal the central wound. If you can accomplish that, why, then, by the time your son is of an age to become a student, the Institute will no longer be a log cabin sinking into the mire, but a campus of domed pavilions and many-chambered laboratories along the banks of the River Charles, where the most ingenious youth of America will convene to study and refine the art of automatic computation!”
    Dr. Waterhouse is favoring him with a look of bleak pity usually directed toward uncles too far gone to know they are incontinent. “Or at least I might catch a fever and die three days from now and provide Faith and Godfrey with a comfortable pension.”
    “There’s that added inducement.”
    T O BE A E UROPEAN C HRISTIAN (the rest of the world might be forgiven for thinking) was to build ships and sail them to any and all coasts not already a-bristle with cannons, make landfall at river’s mouth, kiss the dirt, plant a cross or a flag, scare the hell out of anyindigenes with a musketry demo’, and—having come so far, and suffered and risked so much—unpack a shallow basin and scoop up some muck from the river-bottom. Whirled about, the basin became a vortex, shrouded in murk for a few moments as the silt rose into the current like dust from a cyclone. But as that was blown away by the river’s current, the shape of the vortex was revealed. In its middle was an eye of dirt that slowly disintegrated from the outside in as lighter granules were shouldered to the outside and cast off. Left in the middle was a huddle of nodes, heavier than all the rest. Blue eyes from far away attended to these, for sometimes they were shiny and yellow.
    Now, ‘twere easy to call such men stupid (not even broaching the subjects of greedy, violent, arrogant, et cetera ), for there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and