Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page A

clever hands that had woven the net round the stone. The boy had made stalks of grass into rattan tables, and willow twigs into rocking-chairs. The alchemist in him had been at work copying recipes from that old corrupter of curious youths, Bates’s The Mysteries of Nature & Art, extracting pigments from plants and formulating paints.
    He had tried to draw sketches of the other boys while they were sleeping—the only time they could be relied on to hold still and not behave abominably. He did not yet have the skill to make a regular portrait, but from time to time the Muse would take hold of his hand, and in a fortunate sweep of the arm he’d capture something beautiful in the curve of a jawbone or an eyelash.
    There were broken and dismantled parts of machines that Enoch did not understand. Later, though, perusing the notebook where the boy had been copying out recipes, Enoch found sketches of the hearts of rats and birds that the boy had apparently dissected. Then the little machines made sense. For what was the heart but the model for the perpetual motion machine? And what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.
    The apothecary had joined him in the room. Clarke looked nervous. “You’re up to something clever, aren’t you?” Enoch said.
    “By that, do you mean—”
    “He came your way by chance?”
    “Not precisely. His mother knows my wife. I had seen the boy.”
    “And seen that he had promise—as how could you not.”
    “He lacks a father. I made a recommendation to the mother. She is steady. Intermittently decent. Quasi-literate…”
    “But too thick to know what she has begotten?”
    “Oh my, yes.”
    “So you took the boy under your wing—and if he’s shown some interest in the Art you have not discouraged it.”
    “Of course not! He could be the one, Enoch.”
    “He’s not the one,” Enoch said. “Not the one you are thinkingof. Oh, he will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.”
    “Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?”
    It made his head ache. How was he to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? “Something is happening.”
    Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.
    “Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers. Something is happening now—the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.”
    Enoch couldn’t get Oxford out of his mind—Hooke and Wren and Boyle, all exchanging thoughts so quickly that flames practically leaped between them. He decided to try another tack. “There’s a boy in Leipzig like this one. Father died recently, leaving him nothing except a vast library. The boy began reading those books. Only six years old.”
    “It’s not unheard-of for six-year-olds to read.”
    “German, Latin, and Greek?”
    “With proper instruction—”
    “That’s just it. The boy’s teachers prevailed on the mother to lock the child out of the library. I got wind of it. Talked to the mother, and secured a promise from her that little Gottfried would be allowed free run of the books. He taught himself Latin and Greek in the space of a year.”
    Clarke shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps little Gottfried is the one.”
    Enoch then should’ve known it was hopeless, but he tried again: “We are empiricists—we scorn the Scholastic way of memorizing old books and rejecting what is new—and that is good. But in pinning our hopes on the Philosophick Mercury we have decided in advance what it is that we seek to discover, and that is never right.”
    This merely made Clarke nervous. Enoch tried yet another tack: “I have in my saddlebags a copy of Principia Philosophica, the last thing Descartes wrote before he died. Dedicated to young Elizabeth, the Winter Queen’s daughter…”
    Clarke was