Read Online Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Neal Stephenson
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Enoch says. “Nothing here is going according to plan. The music. The furniture. It’s all contrary to expectations.”
“My father and I took in the execution of Hugh Peters—Cromwell’s chaplain—in London one day. We rode straight from that spectacle to Cambridge. Since executions are customarily held at daybreak, you see, an industrious Puritan can view one and yet get in a full day’s hard traveling and working before evening prayers. It was done with a knife. Drake wasn’t shaken at all by the sight of Brother Hugh’s intestines. It only made him that much more determined to get me into Cambridge. We went there and called upon Wilkins at Trinity College.”
“Hold, my memory fails—wasn’t Wilkins at Oxford ? Wadham College?”
“Anno 1656 he married Robina. Cromwell’s sister.”
“ That I remember.”
“Cromwell made him Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. But of course that was undone by the Restoration. So he only served in that post for a few months—it’s no wonder you’ve forgotten it.”
“Very well. Pardon the interruption. Drake took you up to Cambridge—?”
“And we called on Wilkins. I was fourteen. Father went off and left us alone, secure in the knowledge that this man—Cromwell’s Brother-in-Law, for God’s sake!—would lead me down the path of righteousness—perhaps explicate some Bible verses about nine-headed beasts with me, perhaps pray for Hugh Peters.”
“You did neither, I presume.”
“You must imagine a great chamber in Trinity, a gothickal stone warren, like the underbelly of some ancient cathedral, ancient tables scattered about, stained and burnt alchemically, beakers and retorts clouded with residues pungent and bright, but most of all, the books— brown wads stacked like cordwood—more books than I’d ever seen in one room. It was a decade or two since Wilkins had written his great Cryptonomicon. In the course of that project, he had, of course, gathered tomes on occult writing from all over the world, compiling all that had been known, since the time of the Ancients, about the writing of secrets. The publication of that book had brought him fame among those who study such things. Copies were known to have circulated as far as Peking, Lima, Isfahan, Shahjahanabad. Consequently more books yet had been sent to him, from Portuguese crypto-Kabbalists, Arabic savants skulking through the ruins and ashes of Alexandria, Parsees who secretly worship at the altar of Zoroaster, Armenian merchants who must communicate all across the world, in a kind of net-work of information, through subtle signs and symbols hidden in the margins and the ostensible text of letters so cleverly that a competitor, intercepting the message, could examine it and find nothing but trivial chatter—yet a fellow-Armenian could extract the vital data as easy as you or I would read a hand-bill in the street. Secret code-systems of Mandarins, too, who because of their Chinese writing cannot use cyphers as we do, but must hide messages in the position of characters on the sheet, and other means so devious that whole lifetimes must have gone into thinking of them. All of these things had come to him because of the fame of the Cryptonomicon, and to appreciate my position, you must understand that I’d been raised, by Drake and Knott and the others, to believe that every word and character of these books was Satanic. That, if I wereto so much as lift the cover of one of these books, and expose my eyes to the occult characters within, I’d be sucked down into Tophet just like that.”
“I can see it made quite an impression on you—”
“Wilkins let me sit in a chair for half an hour just to soak the place in. Then we began mucking about in his chambers, and set fire to a tabletop. Wilkins was reading some proofs of Boyle’s The Skeptical Chemist— you should read it sometime, Enoch, by the way—”
“I’m familiar with its contents.”
“Wilkins and I were idly trying to
“My father and I took in the execution of Hugh Peters—Cromwell’s chaplain—in London one day. We rode straight from that spectacle to Cambridge. Since executions are customarily held at daybreak, you see, an industrious Puritan can view one and yet get in a full day’s hard traveling and working before evening prayers. It was done with a knife. Drake wasn’t shaken at all by the sight of Brother Hugh’s intestines. It only made him that much more determined to get me into Cambridge. We went there and called upon Wilkins at Trinity College.”
“Hold, my memory fails—wasn’t Wilkins at Oxford ? Wadham College?”
“Anno 1656 he married Robina. Cromwell’s sister.”
“ That I remember.”
“Cromwell made him Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. But of course that was undone by the Restoration. So he only served in that post for a few months—it’s no wonder you’ve forgotten it.”
“Very well. Pardon the interruption. Drake took you up to Cambridge—?”
“And we called on Wilkins. I was fourteen. Father went off and left us alone, secure in the knowledge that this man—Cromwell’s Brother-in-Law, for God’s sake!—would lead me down the path of righteousness—perhaps explicate some Bible verses about nine-headed beasts with me, perhaps pray for Hugh Peters.”
“You did neither, I presume.”
“You must imagine a great chamber in Trinity, a gothickal stone warren, like the underbelly of some ancient cathedral, ancient tables scattered about, stained and burnt alchemically, beakers and retorts clouded with residues pungent and bright, but most of all, the books— brown wads stacked like cordwood—more books than I’d ever seen in one room. It was a decade or two since Wilkins had written his great Cryptonomicon. In the course of that project, he had, of course, gathered tomes on occult writing from all over the world, compiling all that had been known, since the time of the Ancients, about the writing of secrets. The publication of that book had brought him fame among those who study such things. Copies were known to have circulated as far as Peking, Lima, Isfahan, Shahjahanabad. Consequently more books yet had been sent to him, from Portuguese crypto-Kabbalists, Arabic savants skulking through the ruins and ashes of Alexandria, Parsees who secretly worship at the altar of Zoroaster, Armenian merchants who must communicate all across the world, in a kind of net-work of information, through subtle signs and symbols hidden in the margins and the ostensible text of letters so cleverly that a competitor, intercepting the message, could examine it and find nothing but trivial chatter—yet a fellow-Armenian could extract the vital data as easy as you or I would read a hand-bill in the street. Secret code-systems of Mandarins, too, who because of their Chinese writing cannot use cyphers as we do, but must hide messages in the position of characters on the sheet, and other means so devious that whole lifetimes must have gone into thinking of them. All of these things had come to him because of the fame of the Cryptonomicon, and to appreciate my position, you must understand that I’d been raised, by Drake and Knott and the others, to believe that every word and character of these books was Satanic. That, if I wereto so much as lift the cover of one of these books, and expose my eyes to the occult characters within, I’d be sucked down into Tophet just like that.”
“I can see it made quite an impression on you—”
“Wilkins let me sit in a chair for half an hour just to soak the place in. Then we began mucking about in his chambers, and set fire to a tabletop. Wilkins was reading some proofs of Boyle’s The Skeptical Chemist— you should read it sometime, Enoch, by the way—”
“I’m familiar with its contents.”
“Wilkins and I were idly trying to
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