Age Of Unreason - Newton's Cannon Part 31

Adrienne reached for the towel, staring at this strange woman. What new ploy was this? "Do not say these things if you do not mean them," she cautioned.

"I do not."

"Then here is what we must do first, tonight."

The trouble with sneaking about Versailles at night was that it was as bright as it was during the day. Lanterns of fanciful design lined the halls-nymphs with glowing eyes and mouths, sun standards, seraphim with wings like slivers of moon. Guarding the stair ahead of her was a golden Michael with flaming sword. She wondered briefly how the uneven fluttering of his lantern-sword had been produced. In stockinged feet she glided past the archangel, down the stairs.

A rustle of skirts and the clatter of shoes on marble followed, and Crecy stood beside her.

"Well?" Adrienne whispered. They were in the part of the chateau where older ministers and household servants had their lodgings. Most were asleep or in the fashionable salons of Paris or flattering some member of royalty.

"He is distracted," Crecy a.s.sured her, speaking of the guard who had taken Nicolas' place in front of Adrienne's door. "For an hour or so, anyway." She smiled. "One of the kitchen girls owes me a favor.

"Worry not," Crecy added. "This one had an itch to scratch anyway. She will not suffer, I promise."

"Very well. The laboratory will be guarded as well."

"And that is what I am for, is it not?" Crecy asked.

Adrienne did not answer, but Crecy kissed her on the cheek and started ahead.

Adrienne stood at the head of the stairway and waited, until she heard whispered conversation, and then more dubious sounds, down the corridor. She edged up and peered down the hall.

Crecy was leading the guard away by the hand; the young man was kissing her neck playfully. They vanished around a corner.

So simple. She wondered if she could unlearn this use of people when everything was over.

Of course, when everything was over, she would doubtless be dangling from a gallows.

Her key still fit the laboratory lock. She opened the door gently and then shut it behind her and locked it again.

She found the papers she sought, copying the parts of the formula she did not already know. She no longer needed the broad outlines. In fact, looking at Fatio's final calculations, she saw that she could have even suggested improvements. She understood this city-killing spell now; what she wanted were the specifics.

She found them. She also found a sheaf of papers with odd, stippled patterns on them, as if they had been smudged by dirty fingers. A closer examination revealed that the patterns had been burnt on.

The comet's ma.s.s and dimensions and gross composition- the alchemical symbol for iron in greatest proportion-were recorded. A rough sphere of iron half a league in diameter was going to hit London. How fast would it be moving? Did it matter?

Something nagged her that it did, so she found that, too, and wrote it down.

She didn't have to check the date when it would strike London. That she knew already.

Now there was one more thing, perhaps the most important. She rapped very lightly on the door of Fatio's bedchamber.

If a kitchen girl and Crecy could do it, so could she. She closed her eyes, preparing what she would say.

But no answer came, so she tried the handle and found the door was unlocked. She glanced in.

The bedchamber was lit by a half-shuttered lantern but Fatio was out. He could return anytime. Her heart was thumping, but she knew she only needed a few moments to commit the treason she planned. Where was his aetherschreiber?

She found it immediately. It was a very old one, probably one of the first fifty made, sitting on a little stand in the corner.

Removing the lid, she found that spiders had made a home within; cities of silk tore as she readied the device for use. When Fatio went to use it next, he would know that someone else had.

She was dreadfully aware of the clock ticking by the nightstand as she lay paper in the machine.

She began to write. If this machine's mate was not there, if it was not wound, her labors would be for nothing.

She was not finished when she heard the outer door open. Condensing as much as she could, she hurried through formulae, omitting explanatory text, knowing that if this machine had its mate where she thought it did, a longer explanation was not necessary. It had to be with Newton himself. Given Fatio's betrayed love and his sick pride, it could not be otherwise.

Someone fumbled at Fatio's chamber door.

No time to remove the paper. She wrote the last line and quickly placed the lid on the machine. Just as Fatio stumbled into the chamber, she dashed into the open closet.

She was not quick enough, and Fatio glimpsed her. He looked puzzled, then laughed.

He was very, very drunk. He tried to get his breeches off and fell on the floor, then he whimpered a bit before rising unsteadily and flopping across the bed.

After Adrienne counted a hundred breaths and he hadn't moved, she slipped out of the closet and removed the paper from the schreiber.

Once back in the laboratory she moved to one of the windows that opened onto a broad ledge. She planned to walk along it until she reached an outside stairway. She could then reenter the chateau as if she had merely gone out for some air.

The window creaked as it opened, and suddenly all of the hairs on Adrienne's neck stood up. The pane before her reddened with reflected light. She turned, and her heart seemed to stop in her chest.

Drifting toward her from the center of the room was a cloud of smoke and flame with a single glowing orb that resembled a huge eye.

Newton

"Don't get stupid, Ben, I need you payin' attention," Maclaurin snapped, interrupting Ben's speculations.

"Maybe if I understood what we were doing," Ben grumbled.

"I'll explain in a moment," Maclaurin said. "For now just keep up wi' me. This all must be performed wi'in a certain short period of time."

Ben did as he was told, though he continued to eye the telescope speculatively.

If it even was a telescope. What kind of telescope could you use at midday! What was Maclaurin looking at?

He should have learned by now that the mathematician-or whatever he was-did not give answers readily. He preferred Ben to deduce what he was about.

A click sounded, and Maclaurin quickly handed him another plate. It was about a foot square and seemed to be made of rusty iron. Handling had shown Ben it was some nonferrous metal- he suspected zinc-with a fine emulsion of rust on one side. Following Maclaurin's instructions, Ben laid a piece of paper on the plate, clipped a frame onto it that held the paper tight against the metal, and dusted it with iron powder. Then he blew to clear it, revealing swirling patterns that resembled fingerprints. Next he removed a similar plate-on which he had put paper about a minute ago-from a boxy device. This plate was warm. He placed the new plate into the box and pulled the handle. The machine hissed. Meantime, he undipped the frame from the earlier plate and brushed off the filings. The patterns remained on the paper, apparently burned there.

This was the sixteenth such sheet, and he numbered it accordingly.

Maclaurin, during all of this, had shifted the telescope a few degrees. He depressed a switch, and another plate came out. Ben handed him the old one and began the process once more.

"This would be easier if there were more than three plates," Ben remarked.

"Yes. But those things are expensive," Maclaurin explained. "Hang on, now, just a few more to go. We ha' to make all of these as close together as we can."

A quarter of an hour later, the philosopher stepped away from the telescope. "Let's see what we got," he said.

Ben finished up the last sheet, then brought it over to where Maclaurin was spreading the rest out on a table, overlapping them a bit. Ben noticed that the sheets matched at the edges, and together they formed a large image.

"Well?" Maclaurin said expectantly.

"Ah... it looks a little like star patterns or something, but the sizes are all wrong."

"What do ya mean?"

"I mean that stars don't vary that much in size. Here's one the size of a shilling and another no larger than a pinhead. Besides, it's daylight... Wait, I see. This telescope doesn't look at light at all, does it?"

Maclaurin grinned broadly and slapped him on the back. "Good lad! Would it help if I called it an affinascope?"

"Yes," Ben replied immediately.

"Explain, then."

Ben felt a rising tide of excitement lifting the words out of him. "The scope registers the proportionate pull of gravity of different celestial bodies. You must have a mercuric translator that transforms the gravitic harmonics into magnetism. That, in turn, writes patterns on the rust. The patterns hold the iron dust in similar patterns when I sprinkle it on, and that gets burned on the paper. This is a star chart, but it indicates the ma.s.s of the stars."

"Aye!" Maclaurin confirmed. "Though I must correct you in one particular; what you see here are not stars, but planets, moons, and comets." He stabbed at the largest mark. "This is Jupiter, and these-" He pointed in turn at seven smaller blobs. "-are its moons."

"I thought Jupiter had four moons."

"Haven't you looked at the orrery?"

"Yes. I meant to ask about the extra moon, but I a.s.sumed that it had been discovered recently."

"Indeed. By Edwin and I. And now we can add two more!" he crowed. "Things too small to see wi' an optical telescope are easily found wi' the affinascope. Of course, we knew they were there already-this is only the proof."

"How did you know?"

"Remember Newton's laws of harmonic affinity? Attraction is a function of the generality of the affinity and the distance. In the case of gravity 'tis a simple matter of ma.s.s and the inverse square of the distance. Wi' more specific affinities, the proportion changes so that the attraction is stronger over longer distances."

"Yes, I understand all of that."

"Well, that means one orbiting body will skew the orbit of another, if it's close enough and ma.s.sive enough. We could tell, for instance, that Ganymede's...o...b..t was perturbed in a way that Jupiter, the sun, and the moons we know could'na account for. Ipso facto, there must be other moons. And there they are!" He gestured wildly at the sheets.

Maclaurin tousled Ben's hair and then began searching about for paper and pen. "You've been a great help," he said. "Why na' go an see if one o' the others has some use for you now?"

"What of these?" he asked of a handful of sheets that had not been spread.

"Och! I forgot! Those need to be run over to Sir Isaac's place right away. I dunno what they are, to tell you the truth. He just sent a message to look at such and such a place in the sky and compose some affinagraphs. Best run those now, Ben. This is the first any of us have heard from him in an age, and 'twould be impertinent to keep him waitin'."

"But I don't know where Sir Isaac lives."

"It's on Saint Martin's Lane, near Leicester Fields."

"Ah... what should I say when I see him?" "Oh, I don't think you'll see him, lad. Just give the papers to his niece, Mrs. Barton." "We'll see," Ben replied.

Ben's first impression was red, and so was his second. The rug was red; the chairs were red; the walls were red.

After red, he noticed the portraits. He counted five paintings: Sir Isaac draped in the gowns of the Trinity Lucasian professor, periwig on his head; Sir Isaac holding a copy of his Principia, gazing abstractedly at the universe; Sir Isaac with his own, spa.r.s.e gray hair, dignified, one fierce dark eye fixed toward the artist... There were busts, too. All of these depicted him old. He was vague in some, haughty in others, but in all he bore a frown, ranging from a small puckering between his nose to a full-out glower.

Ben noticed, somewhat abstractedly, that his palms were damp. How many times had he imagined meeting Newton? He had even written out one of the speeches he had hoped to give by way of introducing himself. He realized that he had imagined that the old man would greet him like a soul mate, a long-lost grandson. But no such grandfatherly man gazed down at him.

Mrs. Barton-an attractive, fortyish woman-let him gaze, open-mouthed. She must be used to the reaction.

"You say you come from the Colonies," she said, offering Ben a chair.

Ben paused, distracted by a sort of pinging noise issuing from behind a heavy wooden door. "Yes, I was born in Boston Town, in Ma.s.sachusetts."

"Ma.s.sachusetts," she repeated. "What a mouthful, eh? My brother used to write me, and I could never p.r.o.nounce those American names to my friends. I had to show them the letters."

"Your brother traveled in America?"

"He died there, unfortunately," Mrs. Barton replied.

The pinging was getting louder. Mrs. Barton followed Ben's glance to the closed door and sighed. "Well, if you have brought those things for him..."

"I was given to understand," Ben quickly lied, "that I was to deliver them to him personally."

Mrs. Barton gazed at him thoughtfully for a moment. "I rather doubt that."

Ben pursed his lips, and then nodded slightly. "I'm sorry. But won't you see if he will receive me?"

"He won't," she told him.

"Tell him it is 'Ja.n.u.s' calling."

"Very well. It won't hurt to try. Wait a moment."

Her skirts whisked briskly as she went to the door and rapped.

The pinging stopped.

"Sir Isaac," she called through the door, "a young man has brought you something from Colin Maclaurin. He wishes to speak with you, if you have a moment. He says that it is Ja.n.u.s come to call."