But that would’ve been irresponsible. Jack had a job that needed doing. He was a man of affairs now, a City man, and no mudlark. He told the captain to keep making way upstream until the lights of London Bridge were in view.
When they rounded the last river-bend at Wapping, light broke across the mile of water between them and the Bridge, outlining every spar and line of the countless ships riding at anchor in the Pool. Jack had remembered the Bridge as a gleaming dam of light across the Thames, but now he could scarcely make it out for the radiance of the rebuilt city piled up behind it. It was almost as if London had caught fire again, just in time for Jack’s homecoming.
But the most brilliant object in Jack’s vision was neither the Bridge nor the City. On the northern bank of the river, downstream of the Bridge, rose the Tower. Jack recalled this as a dull stone pile with the occasional candle gleaming through an embrasure. But on this night, anyway, the Tower was a massive stone plinth supporting a pillar of airborne light, and all the ships in the Pool below it seemed to have collected around its radiance like gnats besieging a lanthorn. Actually the eastern end of the place was as dark as ever, but at its western edge hot fires had been kindled. Piles of smoke and steam were rising up to black out the stars, and sparks careered through those clouds like meteors. The flames were concealed behind Tower walls, but they lit up their own smoke from beneath, and made of it a screen to project boiling and flaring light across the water. “Closer, closer,” Jack kept demanding-it had become obvious that the captain was under orders to do Jack’s bidding no matter what. So sailors were sent below to work the sweeps, and, like a many-legged insect crawling through a crowded burrow, the brig felt its way among anchored ships for hours, shrugging off curses and threats from men on other vessels who did not want to see their anchor cables fouled.
Jack could hear now the rumble of coal-carts inside the Tower, and the steady pounding beat of some giant machine inside the Mint: some massive trip-hammer coining golden guineas. When the brig had shouldered up to the front rank of ships, affording Jack an unobstructed view, he gave the signal to drop anchor, directly before the sprawling span of the Traitor’s Gate. The ship swung around to point upstream and, as it did, Jack performed a slow pirouette on the foredeck so that the heat of the Mint shone always on his face.
High above, on one of the ancient towers, he could see a gentleman who had gone up there for a stroll, perhaps to get some fresh air and clear his head after too long spent down in the broiling Mint. This fellow stopped on the parapet to look out over the river, silhouetted against the burning cloud behind him, and a sea-breeze caught his long hair and blew it back like a banner. Jack could see that the man’s hair was snow-white.
“That must be him, then,” he said to no one, “him that was put in charge of the Mint.” Raising his voice a bit he said, “Enjoy your perch up there, Mister Newton, because Jack the Coiner has come back to London-town, and he aims to knock you down; the game has begun, and may the best man win!”
NEAL STEPHENSON issueth from a Clan of yeomen, itinerant Parsons, ingenieurs, and Natural Philosophers that hath long dwelt in bucolick marches and rural Shires of his native Land, and trod the Corridors of her ’Varsities. At a young age, finding himself in a pretty Humour for the writing of Romances, and the discourse of Natural Philosophy and Technologick Arts, he took up the Pen, and hath not since laid it down.
Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan
Jacket illustration: 1746 plan of Versailles/Historic Urban Plans, Inc.
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Zodiac
The epigraph on page 292 is from The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, edited and translated by H. T. Mason. Published by Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1967.
The epigraph on page 646 is from Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994.
The epigraph on page 707 is from G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Hackett. Published by Hackett, Indianapolis, 1989.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE CONFUSION. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
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