The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World by Neal Stephenson Read Free Book Online Page B

daughter…”
    Clarke was straining to look receptive, like a dutiful university student still intoxicated from last night’s recreations at the tavern. Enoch remembered the stone on the string, and decided to aim for something more concrete. “Huygens has made a clock that is regulated by a pendulum.”
    “Huygens?”
    “A young Dutch savant. Not an alchemist.”
    “Oh!”
    “He has worked out a way to make a pendulum that will always go back and forth in the same amount of time. By connecting it to the internal workings of a clock, he has wrought a perfectly regular time-piece. Its ticks divide infinity, as calipers step out leagues on a map. With these two—clock and calipers—we can measure both extent and duration. And this, combined with the new method of analysis of Descartes, gives us a way to describe Creation and perhaps to predict the future.”
    “Ah, I see!” Clarke said. “So this Huygens—he is some kind of astrologer?”
    “No, no, no! He is neither astrologer nor alchemist. He is something new. More like him will follow. Wilkins, down in Oxford, is trying to bring them together. Their achievements may exceed those of alchemists.” If they did not, Enoch thought, he’d be chagrined. “I am suggesting to you that this little boy may turn out to be another one like Huygens.”
    “You want me to steer him away from the Art?” Clarke exclaimed.
    “Not if he shows interest. But beyond that do not steer him at all—let him pursue his own conclusions.” Enoch looked at the faces and diagrams on the wall, noting some rather good perspective work. “And see to it that mathematics is brought to his attention.”
    “I do not think that he has the temperament to be a mere computer,” Clarke warned. “Sitting at his pages day after day, drudging out tables of logarithms, cube roots, cosines—”
    “Thanks to Descartes, there are other uses for mathematics now,” Enoch said. “Tell your brother to show the boy Euclid and let him find his own way.”
    T HE CONVERSATION MIGHT NOT HAVE gone precisely this way. Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging—a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose. So the conversation with Clarke might have wandered into quite a few more blind alleys than he remembered. A great deal of time was probably spent on politeness. Certainly it took up most of that short autumn day. Because Enoch didn’t ride out of Grantham until late. He passed by the school one more time on his way down towards Cambridge. All the boys had gone home by that hour save one, who’d been made to stay behind and, as punishment, scrub and scrape his own name off the various windowsills and chair-backs where he’d inscribed it. Theseinfractions had probably been noticed by Clarke’s brother, who had saved them up for the day when the child would need particular discipline.
    The sun, already low at mid-afternoon, was streaming into the open windows. Enoch drew up along the northwest side of the school so that anyone who looked back at him would see only a long hooded shadow, and watched the boy work for a while. The sun was crimson in the boy’s face, which was ruddy to begin with from his exertions with the scrub-brush. Far from being reluctant, he seemed enthusiastic about the job of erasing all traces of himself from the school—as if the tumbledown place was unworthy to bear his mark. One windowsill after another came under him and was wiped clean of the name I. NEWTON.

Newtowne, Massachusetts Bay Colony
    OCTOBER 12, 1713
             How are these Colonies of the English increas’d and improv’d, even to such a Degree, that some have suggested, tho’ not for Want of Ignorance, a Danger of their revolting from the English Government, and setting up an Independency of Power for themselves. It is true, the Notion is absurd, and without Foundation, but