Fatio said: “So you are not troubled by the plight of my hypothetical scholar, a-mazed in the penetralia of your Knowledge Engine. But Doctor Leibniz, how many persons, dropped into a library of books written in unknown languages, could do what you did?”
“The question is more than just rhetorical. The situation is not merely hypothetical,” Leibniz answered. “For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme—pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again.”
“But what if it can only be understood by a mind as great as God’s? What if we can only find what we want by factoring twenty-digit numbers?”
“Let us understand what we may, and extend our reach, insofar as we can, by the making of engines, and content ourselves with that much,” Leibniz answered. “It will suffice to keep us busy for a while. We cannot perform all of the calculations needed without turning every atom in the Universe into a cog in an Arithmetickal Engine; and then it would be God—”
“I think you are coming close to words that could get you burnt at the stake, Doctor—meanwhile, I turn to ice. Is there a place where we could strike a balance between those two extremes?”
THE DOCTOR HAD CAUSED a large shed to be scabbed onto the outer wall of the stable and filled with the books and papers most important to him. In one corner stood a black stove having the general size and shape of the biblical Tower of Babel. When they arrived it was merely warm, but Leibniz wrenched open several doors, rammed home half a cord or so of wood, and clanged them to. Within seconds, ears began to pop as the mickle Appliance sucked the air from the room. The iron tower began to emit an ominous rumbling and whooshing noise, and Leibniz and Fatio spent the rest of the conversation nervously edging away from it, trying to find the radius where (to paraphrase Fatio) being burnt alive was no more likely than freezing to death. This zone proved surprisingly narrow. As Leibniz fussed with the stove, which had taken up a kind of eerie keening, Fatio stepped back a pace, and let his eye fall on a sheet of paper—the topmost of several that were sticking out of a book. A few lines of printing were visible at the top of the page, written in Leibniz’s hand:
DOCTOR
THE RECENT EVENTS IN THE BALLROOM OF THE H?TEL ARCACHON WERE OF SUCH A DRAMATICK NATURE THAT I CANNOT BUT THINK YOU HAVE ALREADY HAD ACCOUNTS OF THEM FROM DIVERSE SOURCES HOWEVER MY VERSION FOLLOWS...
Beyond that point all was swallowed up between the pages of the enclosing book, which was expensively bound in red leather, ornately gilded with both Roman and Chinese characters.
“Any possibility of tea?” Fatio inquired, spying a kettle that had been left on one of the steps of the flaming ziggurat. Shielding his face in the crook of one arm, Leibniz ventured closer, seized a poker, and lunged like a fencing-master at the kettle to see whether it contained any water. Meanwhile Fatio peeled back the topmost sheet to reveal a letter written on different paper, in a different hand: Eliza’s!
To G. W. Leibniz from Eliza, the Marrying Maiden
Doctor,
You will want to know everything about the dress I was married in. The stomacher is made of Turkish watered silk decorated with several thousand of the tiny pearls that come from Bandar-Kongo on the Persian Gulf…
Leibniz had been rummaging in a drawer. He pulled up a black slab about the size of a folio book, impressed with a single huge Chinese character, and snapped off a corner. “Caravan tea,” he explained. “Unlike your English and Dutch tea, which comes loose off of ships, this stuff was brought overland, via Russia—it is a million dried leaves pressed together into a brick.”
Fatio did not seem to be as fascinated by this as Leibniz had hoped. Leibniz tried another gambit: “Huygens wrote to me recently, and mentioned you had come over from London.”
“Monsieur Newton and I devoted the month of March to reading Mr. Huygens’s Treatise on Light and were so taken with it that we agreed to divide forces for the year—I have been studying with Huygens—”
“And Newton toils at his Alchemy.”
“Alchemy, theology, philosophy—call it what you will,” Fatio said coolly, “he is close to an achievement that will dwarf the Principia.”
“I don’t suppose it has anything to do with gold?” asked Leibniz.