Newton's Cannon (30 page)

“You seem to have a great many gifts,” Adrienne muttered.

“They are not without their price,” Crecy replied. There was something final in the way she said it.

Adrienne reluctantly took the hint. “Can you tell me where we are going?” she asked.

“One of the duke's houses,” Crecy answered. “There we have an entourage to accompany you back to Versailles. They will all swear that you have been in the country.”

“What is this, Crecy? What schemes am I involved in?”

“I'm not altogether certain,” Crecy replied. “I will tell you what I can.”

“Do you know who tried to kill the king?”

“No.” But did she hesitate a bare instant? How would Adrienne know if Crecy lied?

They broke from the forest and entered a region of hilly fields. The sky had clouded, and sparse dapples of sunlight seemed like the footprints of an angel on the waving green wheat.

She wondered if Nicolas were still alive. Surely he would have caught up with them by now.

“You could have gotten Fatio to say what he said without me,” Adrienne said. “Why did you need me?”

“You were the only one who could interpret what he said, ask the right
second
question. Also—” Crecy paused. “—you must know that I
never
suspected that this outing of ours would put you in such grave danger. If I had known that, I would not have even suggested it. I thought …”

“What?”

“I thought you might actually enjoy it. I thought you
needed
some diversion.”

“Why do you care what I need?”

Crecy was silent for so long that Adrienne believed that she had ignored the question. Finally, however, she slowed the horse to a walk—its coat was foamy—and began speaking once more.

“For you,” Crecy said, “it has only been a short time since we met. For me, I have seen you many times, Mademoiselle, in dreams and visions. I have known us as friends, in the future. I feel what I
shall
feel. Does that make sense?”

“This is real, then, this ‘sight’ of yours? And what you see always comes true?”

“To be frank, I cannot say that what I see is
always
true. But it is certainly very often true.”

“If you are less than certain, why do you insist that I marry the king?”

“The truth is—” But then Crecy stopped again. “I'm sorry, Adrienne, but I cannot tell you that. I have sworn an oath.”

That sounded final, but Adrienne was unwilling to stop talking without learning
something
. “Then tell me this,” she appealed. “You spoke of a great catastrophe coming. What do you see?”

“The apocalypse: storms of flame, walls of water, flood, famine, plague.”

“And in the sky? Do you see anything in the sky?”

“Yes. A comet, another omen of disaster.”

“This comet: did it rest in the sky or move?”

“It moved swiftly.”

Adrienne sighed. “Then you have known the answer all along, Mademoiselle.”

“No. Seeing and knowing are different things. Can you explain my vision?”

“When I came to work with Fatio, he had already completed a calculation of two trajectories, but he was searching for a way of attracting the two bodies to each other so that their trajectories would intersect. For one of the bodies he had a very precise harmonic equation; for the other he had none. To attract two bodies, you must know their harmonic natures and then you must build a sort of bridge between them. We call this
mediation
.”

“But if you do not know the nature of both bodies you cannot create a mediator,” Crecy interjected.

“Precisely, and that was the problem for Fatio. However, during that time, I intercepted a strange communication from someone calling himself Janus who had been eavesdropping on our aetherschreiber conversations.”

“I didn't think that was possible.”

“It wasn't, and for the same reason; the mediation between
the two chimes of matched aetherschreibers is so specific that it only bridges between them. But this Janus had solved that problem, thus enabling us to see the way clear to solve Fatio's problem of attracting bodies.”

“This equation from Janus, then—it allowed you to read the nature of the second body?”

“Not at all, though I think that may be what
Janus
thought. But what his equation really does is to allow us to quickly and exhaustively create the whole range of possible mediators between the two bodies. When the correct one is applied, it should immediately become obvious through counter-resonance.”

“I see that. What I don't quite see is how this creates a weapon, though it raises some interesting possibilities.”

“Last night, Fatio mentioned ‘Lead’ and ‘Tin’ eating their children. He was using alchemical parlance.
Lead
is the planet Saturn, and
Tin
is Jupiter. By their children he means comets.”

“Comets?”

“Planets have elliptical orbits tending toward circular. Comets have very
narrow
elliptical orbits. They approach the sun very nearly and then retreat to the nothingness out beyond Saturn. It has been guessed that the great attraction of the large planets likely pulls some comets into them—they thus ‘eat their children,’ as Saturn did in Roman myth.”

“So one of these bodies in the equation is a comet?”

“Yes. Or something like a comet. He also babbled of the ‘dogs of Iron.’ By
Iron
I suppose him to mean the planet Mars.”

“Mars?
War
dogs, then?”

Adrienne shrugged. “The language of alchemy is more poetic than exact. But there has been some suggestion that there are dark comets between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If the gravity of Mars perturbed one of these comets, it might be ‘sent baying in’ toward the sun and thus Earth. In any event, it is clear that one of the objects in the equation is a celestial body, like a planet but smaller. The body was of
unknown
affinity.”

“Why unknown?”

“Because no one knows what comets are composed of. We can make guesses, but that is all.”

“Then the known body? The other moving object?”

“Why,
Earth
, of course,” Adrienne replied. “And more specifically, London.”

Maclaurin gave him a moment for that to sink in by signaling the server to pour them more coffee. Ben surveyed the others for some confirmation of the Scotsman's bizarre assertion.

“You think I have not a capful of wit?” Ben finally asked. “Why tell me such a thing—to see how gullible I might be?”

“There's too much salt in this boy,” Heath muttered acidly. “He might be most useful to us as bacon.”

But Voltaire and Vasilisa both grinned at his impertinence, and he knew he had won headway in that quarter.

Maclaurin stared at him, a perplexed scowl on his face. “Now why in th' hell would I do
that
?”

“Do you mean to say you are in earnest? What has become of the Royal Society?” Ben asked.

“It's not the least thing that Parliament has dissolved it,” Vasilisa said.

“Replaced it, rather,” Maclaurin clarified. “Our charter has been revoked.”

“Why?”

Maclaurin sighed and scratched his chin. “The reasons given are many and complicated, but when the broth is boiled down, what's left is three things. First, the king and Parliament want killin'magics, and Sir Isaac won't give them any more. Second, Sir Isaac ha' made a number of enemies of late of a purely personal nature—but nothing stays purely personal in politics. Third … well, as I intimated earlier, Sir Isaac ha' not been entirely well.”

“Not well?”

“And that is
all
you will hear on this subject for the moment, sir,” Maclaurin said firmly. “So just leave it at that.”

Ben nodded thoughtfully. “You said something about the society being replaced …”

To Ben's surprise Heath answered his unspoken question.

“The London Philosophical Society,” he said, “received our charter. Many of our number defected to them.”

“Muttering, chanting Rosicrucians,” Voltaire opined with a sort of languid vindictiveness. “Superstitious, churchish pretenders …”

“So you see, Ben,” Maclaurin said, sipping his coffee and speaking loudly enough to drown out Voltaire's continued muttering, “when I told you that there were many who wished to join our ranks, I lied. You're the most likely candidate we've had in a month.” Ben felt a little flare of hope, but the rest of them either chuckled or smiled. Now they
were
playing with him.

“There's also the other matter …” Vasilisa began.

Maclaurin nodded. “We'll ha't'talk a few things out in private, Benjamin, now that we've heard your story. Come around Crane Court aboot noon, day after tomorrow. Do y'know the place?”

“Yes, sir!” Ben replied. “But if the Royal Academy is dissolved—”

“The charter is dissolved, true enough, and our funds cut off. But the laboratories and halls at Crane Court are
ours
. Sir Isaac bought them outright, years ago. Now go on. We'll see you Thursday.”

Ben stood awkwardly and then bowed. “Thank you all for your time,” he said.

The miracle was that he survived the walk home. A locomotive might have come up from behind without his noticing. At one point he was sent reeling against a wall by the burly bearers of a sedan chair, and he didn't even bother to curse after them, he was so deep in thought.

The dissolution of the Royal Society was an unexpected development, but he quickly saw that it presented him with an opportunity. The older, more famous philosophers would probably
have paid him little mind. But these Newtonians were not unlike his brother's Couranteers back in Boston. They were young, full of wit and sarcasm, ready to fight the Crown or anyone else for what they wanted.

Remembrance of the Couranteers summoned his brother's ghost, however, and from Charing Cross on, he returned to the guilt he thought he had buried on the long sea voyage. The worst was not James. The problem was John Collins, who might be alive and might not.

He knew he should write him, but he remembered Bracewell. If Bracewell knew where he was, he would come for him, Ben was certain of that. Could he find him in London? Yes, because he would know where to look—Crane Court.

Which was where he was going the day after tomorrow. The thought brought a little chill.

As ridiculous as the notion was, once it entered his head, he could not force it away. He wasn't able to sleep until Robert returned sometime after midnight, staggering and reeking of gin.

The next day, Ben took himself down to a bookstore he had noticed—The Archimedes Glass and Bookshop—and bought two books with money Robert reluctantly paid him. The first was
Occult Philosophy
by Cornelius Agrippa, a general text on magic written in prescientific times. It was concerned somewhat with fantastic beings—demons and the like. He felt ashamed to spend good money on such rubbish, but no more scientific book had given him any clue to Bracewell's weird nature. And Bracewell was
real
, his abilities and strange companions were
real
. If scientific philosophy did not account for such beings, perhaps occult philosophy did.

Another book caught his eye—a thin chapbook entitled
The Secret Commonwealth
by a Reverend Kirk with a “studious” note by a T. Deitz. He pulled it down and thumbed through it.

A line on the first page caught his attention:

The words “condensed cloud” brought the image of Brace-well's familiar—or whatever it was—vividly to mind.

He read the entire book on the way home. That night he slept dreamlessly, the inchoate terror held at bay by the beginnings of a hypothesis.

Despite his worries, he reached Crane Court without anything unusual happening. The court itself was so narrow as to be almost a lane, a canyon with four stories of handsome red brick for walls. A fifth floor of a darker, almost black brick surmounted the older building. From his narrow prospect, Ben could just make out what appeared to be a hemisphere on the roof. Was it an observatory?

He was surprised to be greeted by Vasilisa at the door.

“Good day, Benjamin,” the Russian said. She wore an indigo dress with black lace, the cut of which seemed somehow Oriental. He felt an embarrassing rush of desire for her that he hoped did not show.

“Good day,” he said.

“The others aren't here yet,” she informed him. “They all have their own homes, but I stay here.”

“I'm a little early,” he admitted. “I suppose I'm overeager.”

“Believe me, I understand,” Vasilisa told him, casually linking her arm with his. “Imagine how
I
felt. A poor girl from Kiev, reading what bits and pieces of Sir Isaac's work I could get. I never in all of my life dared hope that I might
come
here and meet him, work with his students.” She smiled, and Ben was gloriously aware of her arm in his, of the occasional pressure of her hip against his own.

Don't be stupid
, he thought. He had seen how all of the other men—especially Voltaire—watched Vasilisa. They were all infatuated with her. Perhaps she was even involved with one of them. What could she ever see in a boy?

“This is one of the meeting halls,” she said, gesturing through an open set of double doors at a spacious room. Ben gazed in
with a certain awe. Who had spoken in that room—Boyle? Huygens? Of course, Newton himself had, and his presence made itself known in a pair of portraits.

“Come here,” Vasilisa urged, tugging on his arm. “When I first saw this, I thought I would faint.”

Ben didn't come near fainting when they reached the next room, but he did grin ear to ear.

“An orrery,” he gasped. “I've never really seen one.”

“I love just to watch it move.” Vasilisa sighed.

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the clicking of clockwork.

The sun in the center of the orrery glowed with a gentle radiance, save where it was marred by darker spots. Ben felt a little thrill at such accuracy. Nearest the sun raced Mercury, a grayish sphere, its orbital movement visible. Next out was Venus, then their own Earth, Mars, and finally the giant globes of Jupiter and Saturn. Earth's moon was present, as were the moons of the larger planets.