The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World by Neal Stephenson Page B

thirty-year-old Waterhouse hidden inside the old man is now pressing outward against the loose mask of skin, like a marble sculpture informing its burlap wrappings.
    “Think of it as coaxing you forward. Dr. Waterhouse! Let’s find a tavern and—”
    “We’ll find a tavern—after I’ve had an answer. What does she want of me?”
    “The same thing as ever.”
    Dr. Waterhouse shrinks—the inner thirty-year-old recedes, andhe becomes just an oddly familiar-looking gaffer. “Should’ve known. What other use is there for a broken-down old computational monadologist?”
    “It’s remarkable.”
    “What?”
    “I’ve known you for—what—thirty or forty years now, almost as long as you’ve known Leibniz. I’ve seen you in some unenviable spots. But in all that time, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you whine, until just then.”
    Daniel considers this carefully, then actually laughs. “My apologies.”
    “Not at all!”
    “I thought my work would be appreciated here. I was going to establish what, to Harvard, would’ve been what Gresham’s College was to Oxford. Imagined I’d find a student body, or at least a protégé. Someone who could help me build the Logic Mill. Hasn’t worked out that way. All of the mechanically talented sorts are dreaming of steam-engines. Ludicrous! What’s wrong with water-wheels? Plenty of rivers here. Look, there’s a little one right between your feet!”
    “Engines are naturally more interesting to the young.”
    “You needn’t tell me. When I was a student, a prism was a wonder. Went to Sturbridge Fair with Isaac to buy them—little miracles wrapped in velvet. Played with ‘em for months.”
    “This fact is now widely known.”
    “Now the lads are torn every direction at once, like a prisoner being quartered. Or eighthed, or sixteenthed. I can already see it happening to young Ben out there, and soon it’ll happen to my own boy. ‘Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?’ Against that, what’s in my shack here to interest them?”
    “Could this lack of interest have something to do with that everyone knows the project was conceived by Leibniz?”
    “I’m not doing it his way. His plan was to use balls running down troughs to represent the binary digits, and pass them through mechanical gates to perform the logical operations. Ingenious, but not very practical. I’m using pushrods.”
    “Superficial. I ask again: could your lack of popularity here be related to that all Englishmen believe that Leibniz is a villain—a plagiarist?”
    “This is an unnatural turn in the conversation, Mr. Root. Are you being devious?”
    “Only a little.”
    “You and your Continental ways.”
    “It’s just that the priority dispute has lately turned vicious.”
    “Knew it would happen.”
    “I don’t think you appreciate just how unpleasant it is.”
    “You don’t appreciate how well I know Sir Isaac.”
    “I’m saying that its repercussions may extend to here, to this very room, and might account for your (forgive me for mentioning this) solitude, and slow progress.”
    “Ludicrous!”
    “Have you seen the latest flying letters, speeding about Europe unsigned, undated, devoid of even a printer’s mark? The anonymous reviews, planted, like sapper’s mines, in the journals of the savants? Sudden unmaskings of hitherto unnamed ‘leading mathematicians’ forced to own, or deny, opinions they have long disseminated in private correspondence? Great minds who, in any other era, would be making discoveries of Copernican significance, reduced to acting as cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers for the two principals? New and deservedly obscure journals suddenly elevated to the first rank of learned discourse, simply