The System of the World

London Bridge
THE NEXT DAY

“IT WAS NOT HALF so blubbery as it might have been,” said Leibniz, “when one considers how long the Duchess and I have known each other, and all we have been through, and whatnot. We shall keep in touch, of course, through letters.”

He was describing his leave-taking from Eliza at Leicester House the day before; but he might as well have been talking of the one that was happening now, on London Bridge, between him and Daniel.

“Forty-one years,” Daniel said.

“I was thinking the same thing!” Leibniz said, practically before Daniel had got the words out. “It was forty-one years ago when you and I first met, right here, on this very what-do-you-call-it.”

“Starling,” Daniel said. They were standing on the one beneath the Square, near the mid-point of the Bridge, and not awfully far from the Main-Topp where the Clubb had of late conducted its Stake-out. But Daniel’s memory of that, though only a few weeks old, was already quite washed-out and indistinct compared to what Leibniz was speaking of: the day in 1673 when a young Leibniz (no Baron in those days) with an Arithmetickal Engine tucked under his arm had disembarked from a ship that had brought him over from Calais, and been conveyed to this starling-to this very spot-by a lighter, and first made the acquaintance of young Daniel Waterhouse of the Royal Society.

Leibniz’s memory was no less distinct. “I believe it was-here!” (tapping a flat rock at starling’s edge with his toe) “where I first touched down.”

“That is how I remember it.”

“Of course we are both wrong, if Absolute Space is correct,” Leibniz went on. “For during those forty-one years the Earth has rotated, and revolved about the Sun, and the Sun, for all we know, has careered for some vast distance. So I did not really touch down here but in some other place that is now far out in the interstellar vacuum.”

Daniel did not rise to this bait. He was fearful that Leibniz was about to burst out into some bitter declamation against Newton and Newton’s philosophy. But Leibniz drew back from that brink, even as he was drawing back from the stony rim of the starling. A longboat was working up towards them. It was the lighter that would take Leibniz out to the Hanoverian sloop Sophia, where Princess Caroline had already settled into her cabin.

“What do I remember of that day? We were espied, and glared at, by Hooke, who was over yonder surveying a wharf,” said Leibniz, pointing at the London bank. “We went to pay a call on poor old Wilkins, who lay some great responsibility on your shoulders-”

“He wanted me to ‘make it all happen,’ ” said Daniel.

Leibniz laughed. “What do you suppose the rascal meant by that?”

“I have thought about it a million times,” said Daniel. “Religious toleration? The Royal Society? Pansophism? The Arithmetickal Engine? I cannot be sure. But all of those things were linked together in Wilkins’s mind.”

“He had a prefiguring of what Caroline calls the System of the World.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, I have tried to preserve in my mind, since then, that linkage-the notion that all of those things must move together, somewhat like prisoners on a common chain-”

“A cheerful image!” Leibniz remarked.

“And if there has been any plan whatever to my life in those forty-one years, it’s been that I have tried to keep an eye out for whichever of them was lagging farthest behind, and chivvy it along. For two decades, the laggard has been Arithmetickal Engines and Logic Mills, et cetera.”

“And so you have toiled on that,” said Leibniz, “for which you have my ?ternal gratitude. But who knows? With the support of the Tsar, and the motive Power of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, perhaps it shall be laggardly no more.”

“Perhaps,” said Daniel. “It grieves me, now-especially since yesterday-that I went off into seclusion, and did not involve myself in the Metaphysickal rift until it was too late.”

“But if you had, you’d be now berating yourself over having neglected some other matter-good Puritan that you are.”

Daniel snorted.

“Remember that in those days Newton was known chiefly as a very clever telescope-maker,” Leibniz went on. “Wilkins could not have foreseen the rift you spoke of-and so could not have charged you with healing it. You are clear of any such burthen.”

“But the grand project of Pansophism was a thing he saw very clearly, and, I’m sure, wanted me to support in whatever way I could,” Daniel said. “I wonder now if I did the best possible job of it.”

“And I should say the answer is yes,” said Leibniz, “for that we live in the best of all possible worlds.”

“I hope that is not true,” said Daniel, “as it seems to me now that my journey here from Boston, which I confess I undertook with a certain kind of foolish and thrilling hope in my heart, has concluded in tragedy-and not even grand tragedy but something much more futile and ignominious.”

“After we visited Wilkins on his death-bed,” said Leibniz, “we went to a coffee-house, did we not, and talked. We spoke of Mr. Hooke’s observations of snowflakes-their remarkable property, which is that each of the six arms grows outwards from a common center, and each grows independently, of its own internal rules. One arm cannot affect the others. And yet the arms are all alike. To me this is an embodiment of the pre-established harmony. Now, Daniel, in like manner, there grows out of the core of Natural Philosophy more than one system for understanding the Universe. They grow according to their own internal principles, and one does not affect another-as Newton and I demonstrated yesterday by utterly failing to agree on anything! But if it’s true-as I believe-that they are rooted in a common seed, then in the fullness of time they must adopt a like form, and become reflections of one another, as a snowflake’s arms.”

“I hope the poor snowflake does not melt before it reaches that perfection,” said Daniel, “in the heat of those fires that Caroline dreams of.”

“That is beyond our ability to predict or prevent. We can only do all in our power to move the work forward,” said Leibniz.

“Speaking of which,” said Daniel, “here is something for you.” During Leibniz’s remarks he had from time to time glanced up at the traffic coming out of London on the Bridge. Now he raised a hand and waved to someone up in the Square. Leibniz followed his eye-line up to behold William Ham, the banker, waving back from atop a cart that had just drawn to a halt at the head of the stairs. It was populated by a conspicuously large number of beefier-than-average porters, some of whom remained where they were, engaging all and sundry passersby in stare-downs. Others hopped off and went to work carrying several small crates down the stairs and piling them at Leibniz’s feet. At about the same time, the lighter from Sophia drew close enough to pelt them with rope-ends, and several watermen who loitered on the starling caught them out of the air and made the boat fast. A Hanoverian servant vaulted over the gunwale and bent to take and move the first of the crates; but Leibniz asked him in German if he would terribly mind waiting for a moment. “If these are what I think they are-” he said to Daniel.

“Indeed.”

“Then later they shall be counted by men who are ever so sharp when it comes to weights and measures; and I would that all of the numbers add up!”

So the crates accumulated until the wagon up above was empty. Each had been sealed with a medallion of wax bearing the imprint of the Bank of England-for that is where they had been stored until a few minutes ago, and one could still smell the damp of the Bank’s cellars escaping from the pores in the wood. William Ham came down with a great wallet of musty paperwork, on which was traced the provenance of what was in the crates, beginning with Solomon Kohan’s accompt of the gold taken from Minerva, and passing through all of the intermediate stages of rolling and cutting at the Court of Technologickal Arts and punching at Bridewell. Leibniz examined it all, and finally counted the crates (7) and counted them again (7) and asked Daniel to verify the count (7). Finally he signed the papers GOTTFRIED FREIHERR VON LEIBNIZ in diverse places, and Daniel counter-signed as Witness. At last Leibniz gave leave for the crates to be moved aboard the lighter; but he counted them as they were moved (7).

“It is a start,” Daniel said. “There are many more yet to come, as you know. But as long as you were making a journey to Hanover anyway, I thought I might as well give you all that we have managed to bang out so far.”

“It adds a most pleasing coda to what might otherwise be a melancholy parting,” said Leibniz, and squared off before Daniel, forcing his features into a simulacrum of a smile. “And it really ought to put to rest any mistaken thoughts that might have been troubling your sleep as to whether you have done right by Wilkins. You have, sir, done him proud.”

Daniel was now helpless to say anything and so he stepped forward and embraced Leibniz hard. Leibniz returned the embrace, giving as good as he got, then broke away and turned his back on Daniel before Daniel could see his face and vaulted into the boat almost in the same motion. He counted the crates, or pretended to, one last time as lines were cast off and the boat fell away and yawed in the turbulent gulf of the lock.

“Seven?” Daniel shouted.

“Seven exactly!” came the answer. “I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!”

“I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.”

“That is what I am building,” said Leibniz, “and that is where you shall find me. Good-bye, Daniel!”

“Good-bye, Gottfried!” Daniel shouted, and then stood and watched for some time as the boat became indistinct, and quite lost itself, in the welter of shipping in the Pool of London, there below the charred battlements of the Tower. It was almost a mirror image of the way Leibniz had appeared, out of nowhere, forty-one years earlier, except that the mirror was a misty and a streaky one. For much had changed in those years and Daniel could not watch with the clear eyes of a young man.