The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (232 page)

“Your majesty’s situation vis-à-vis the bat is very like that of a terrestrial astronomer when the earth’s orbit—a segment of which is here represented by the table—is intersected by that of a comet, crossing over twice, once inbound towards Sol, and once outbound.” Leibniz nodded significantly at the dazzling blaze of the candelabra, which had been set down on the floor between the table and the wall.

“Less sarcasm, more philosophy.”

“As you know, the library is being moved here—”

“I just thought, what’s the use of having a library if I must journey to Wolfenbüttel to use it? My husband never cared much for books,
but now that he spends all his time in bed—”

“I do not criticize, Majesty. On the contrary, it has been good to withdraw from day-to-day management of the collection, and turn my attention to the library’s true purpose.”

“Now you really have got me confused.”

“The mind cannot work with things
themselves.
I see the bat over yonder, my mind is aware of it, but my mind does not manipulate the bat
directly.
Instead my mind is (I suppose) working with a symbolic representation of the bat that exists inside my head. I can do things to that symbol—such as imagining the bat dead—without affecting the real bat itself.”

“All right, so thinking is manipulation of symbols in the head, I have heard this from you before.”

“A library is a sort of catalog or warehouse of all that men think about—so by cataloging a library I can make a more or less orderly and comprehensive list of all the symbols that sapient beings carry around in their heads. But rather than trying to dissect brains and ransack the actual gray matter for those symbols—rather than use the same sorts of symbolic representations that the brain manipulates—I simply assign a prime number to each. Numbers have the advantage that they may be manipulated and processed with the aid of machines—”

“Oh, it’s
that
project again. Why don’t you stick to monads? Monads are a perfectly lovely subject and you don’t need machines to process them.”

“I
am
sticking to monads, Majesty, I work on the monadology every day. But I am also working on this other thing—”

“You used to call it something else, didn’t you? This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money’ project,” said Sophie distractedly, and made a rush down the table.

Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. “The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money,” he said with great dignity, “is that it requires
some
money every year, and I hope it shall go on
forever.
Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn’t work because of
sabotage
, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million
livres tournoises
. They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines.”

“Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people
have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England. First William, and then Princess Anne (who would be Queen Anne by that point) and then that little Duke of Gloucester, and any other children she might have in the meantime. I am sixty-seven years old. You need to seek support elsewhere—eeeYAHH! There you are! Invade my dining room, will you! Doctor Leibniz, how do you like my cooking?”

The sword was no longer moving. Leibniz ventured closer, keeping his eyes fixed on Sophie’s powdered face, then traced a line from her soft, plump white shoulder, down the sleeve of her dress, across a rubble of jewelry encrusting her wrist and fingers, down the rusty rapier-blade, to a Dresden china plate where a deceased bat lay, wings arranged artfully as if it had been put there as a garnish by a French chef. “The comet has come to earth!” she proclaimed.

“Oh, how very poetickal you are, Mummy!” exclaimed a voice from behind Leibniz.

Leibniz turned around to face the door and discovered a large bloke, nearing forty, but with the face and manner of a somewhat younger man. George Louis, or Georg Ludwig as he was called in the vernacular, seemed to have only just realized that his mother was standing on a table. He blinked slowly a few times, froglike.

“The comet is approaching, er, the tree,” he said uncomfortably.

“The
tree
!? Comets don’t approach trees!”

“He has been ensnared, as it were, by the net cast by the falcon.”

“Falcons don’t cast nets,” Leibniz blurted, unable to stop himself. The look he got in return from George Louis made him wish that he hadn’t handed his only means of self-defense to Sophie.

“What does it matter, since it’s all nonsense to begin with!? Once you’ve made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all
consistent
?”

“George, my firstborn, my pride, my love. What are you trying to say to us?” Sophie asked indulgently.

“That the Tsar is approaching the Herrenhausen!”

“So the Tsar is the comet?”

“Of course!”

“We were using ‘comet’ to mean this bat.”

The corners of George’s mouth now drew back and downwards so far that his lips ceased to exist and the slit between them took on the appearance of a garrotte. He threw a dark look at Leibniz, blaming him for
something.

“Who is the falcon, your royal highness?” Leibniz asked him.

“Your fawning disciple—
and my little sister
—Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, Dr. Leibniz.”

“Splendid! So the metaphor of the net was to say that she had
ensnared
Peter by her charm and wiles.”

“He passed through Berlin like a cannonball—didn’t even slow down—she had to hunt him down like a fox at Koppenbrügge—”

“Do you mean, Sophie Charlotte was like a fox, in that she was so clever to hunt down the cannonball? Or that the Tsar was foxlike in his evasions?” Sophie asked patiently.

“I mean they are coming right now.”

“Go to your father’s bedchamber. Send the
embalmers
away,” Sophie commanded, meaning the physicians. “Get your father to understand that someone very tall, and frightfully important, may swim into his vision, and that he should try to mumble a pleasantry or two if he is feeling up to it.”

“Yes, Mummy,” said the obedient son. With a parting bow for his mother, and a momentary eye-narrowing at Leibniz, George Louis took his leave.

It felt now as if Sophie and the Doctor ought to say something concerning George Louis, but Sophie very deliberately
didn’t
and Leibniz easily decided to follow her lead. There was a brief upwelling of chaos and hilarity as Sophie was brought down to floor level again (she threatened to jump, and probably could have), but word had reached them that the Tsar of All the Russias had entered the building, preceded by Sophie Charlotte, who was essentially dragging him in by the ear. If this had been an official state visit they’d have had plenty of time to get ready. As matters stood, Peter was traveling
incognito
and so they were going to behave more or less as if he were a country cousin who had decided to drop by for dinner.

Clanking noises and guttural accents approached, and the avian trilling of Sophie Charlotte’s laughter! A couple of ladies-in-waiting darted in on Sophie to tuck in loose hair-strands and yank down on her bodice; she counted to ten and slapped them away. Behind her one servant, moving in a posture of awful dignity, bore the bat-plate out of the room while another replaced it with a clean one. Still others made frenetic repairs to the candelabra and the centerpiece. “Doctor! Your sword!” Sophie exclaimed. She snatched the moist weapon up off the table and, in an absent-minded way, made for Leibniz as if to impale him. Leibniz side-stepped politely, took the weapon by its hilt, and then embarked upon the project of trying to get it back into its scabbard. The tip had to be introduced into an opening that was too small for Leibniz to even
see,
inasmuch as he had pocketed his spectacles, and he was loath to touch the bat-smeared metal with the fingers of his other hand. So when the Tsar’s advance-guard rounded the corner into the room, he was still standing directly before the entrance holding it up in a posture that was
ambiguous. The guards, who were not paid to be meditative, could not really discern, at a moment’s glance, whether he was yanking the blade out, or shoving it in.

Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades—quite a bit shinier than his—triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant—possibly because he had gone slack with terror—the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz’s arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going
wuv, wuv, wuv.
Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face—clean-shaven except for a dark moustache—still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte’s arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. “I would borrow three large wheels!”

“What for?” Sophie Charlotte inquired, as if she and everyone else in the room did not already know.

“Merely breaking all of the bones in their bodies does not cause sufficient pain to punish them for this crime. But if they are first tied to a wheel, which is continually rotated, the shifting of their weight
causes the broken bone-ends to jar and grind against each other—”

“We have this form of punishment, too,” Sophie Charlotte said. “But,” she added diplomatically, “we have not actually employed it recently, and our punishment-wheels are in storage. Mother, may I introduce Mr. Romanov. Mr. Romanov is from Muscovy and is traveling to Holland to visit the ship-yards. He is very very very interested in ships.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Romanov,” said Sophie, allowing the giant Tsar to spring forward and kiss her hand. “Did my daughter show you my gardens and greenhouses as you drove in?”

“She told me of them. You walk in them.”

“I
do
walk in them, Mr. Romanov, for hours and hours every day—it is how I preserve my health—and I am terribly afraid that if these three wonderful gentlemen were to be mounted on wheels and broken and rotated for days and days screaming with the torments of the damned as they slowly died, that it would quite spoil my recreations.”

Peter looked somewhat baffled. “I am merely trying to—”

“I
know
what you are trying to do, Mr. Romanov, and it is so very dear of you.”

“He is worried about Raskolniki,” Sophie Charlotte said helpfully.

“As very well he
should
be!” Sophie returned without hesitation.

“They believe that I am the Antichrist,” Peter said sheepishly.

“I can assure you that Doctor Leibniz is in no way offended to have been mistaken for a Raskolniki, are you, Doctor?”

“In a strange way I am almost honored, your majesty.”

“There, you see?”

But Peter, upon hearing Leibniz’s name, had turned questioningly to Sophie Charlotte and said something no one could quite make out—except Sophie Charlotte. She got a look of joyous surprise on her face, causing every male heart in the room to stop beating for ten seconds. “Why, yes, Mr. Romanov, it
is
the same fellow! Your memory is quite excellent!” Then, for the benefit of everyone else, she continued, “This is indeed the same Dr. Leibniz who gave me the tooth.”

A ripple of mis-translation and conjecture spread outwards through the carnival of Prussians, Muscovites, Tatars, Cossacks, dwarves, Dutchmen, Orthodox priests,
et cetera
, who had piled up behind them. Sophie Charlotte clapped her hands. “Bring out the tooth of the Leviathan! Or whatever it was.”

“Some sort of giant elephant, I rather think, but with plenty of hair on it,” Leibniz put in.

“I have seen such beasts frozen in the ice,” said Peter Romanov. “They are bigger than elephants.”

George Louis had returned from his errand and had been skirting the back of the crowd trying to find a way in without getting into a shoving-match with any Cossacks. The crowd parted to admit one of Sophie Charlotte’s footmen, who glided in carrying a tray with a velvet pillow on it, and on the pillow, a rock still nestled in torn-up wrapping paper. George Louis followed the lead and took up an appropriate position next to his mother, and got an expression on his face that said,
I am ready to be introduced and to have a jolly good time playing along with this incognito business,
but everyone else—especially Peter—was gazing at the rock instead. It was pinkish-brown, and about the size of a melon, but sort of Gibraltar-shaped, with a flat, angled grinding-surface on the top and a system of rootlike legs below. There was a lot of rude behavior going on in the outer fringes of Peter’s retinue, as diverse furry muscular steppe-dwellers jostled for position. They seemed to have convinced themselves that “Tooth of the Leviathan” was a flowery monicker for some very large diamond. Men who were eager to lay eyes on the treasure collided with others who already had, and were recoiling in dismay. Meanwhile Leibniz had been nudged up to the front by Sophie, who did not believe in breaking her minions on the wheel, but was not above delivering swift jabs to the arse and kidney with her bejewelled knuckles. Leibniz bellied up to the tooth and caught the edge of the underlying tray, which was almost too heavy for the servant to hold up. Sophie Charlotte’s heavenly face was beaming at him. Next to it was the Tsar’s watch-chain. Leibniz began to tilt his head back, and did not stop until he was gazing at the undersurface of Peter’s chin. His wig slipped and Sophie cuffed him in the back of the head to set it aright, and said: “The Doctor is hard at work on a wonderful project in Natural Philosophy, which my son does not understand, but which should produce miraculous results, provided some wise monarch can only supply him with an infinite amount of money.”