Greg Keyes - Age of Unreason 1 - Newton's Cannon

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NEWTON’S CANNON

NEWTON’S

CANNON

Book One of

The Age of Unreason

J. Gregory Keyes

A Del Rey® Book

THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP • NEW YORK

A DelRey®Book

THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP • NEW YORK

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it

may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the

author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

A DelRey®Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of

Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of

Canada Limited, Toronto.

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NEWTON’S CANNON

Del Rey and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/delrey/

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96913

ISBN 0-345-43378-5

Maps by Mapping Specialists Ltd.

Printed in Canada

First Trade Paperback Edition: May 1998 First Mass Market Edition: April 1999

For my Father

John Howard Keyes

Acknowledgments

My thanks to:

My readers.

Pat Duffy, Nell Keyes, Heli Willey, Nancy Ridout Landrum, Joe Sneuer, Tracey Abla.

Ken Carleton—for general eighteenth-century minutia. Dr. Thomas Poss—for ironing

out the Greek passages. Maitre d’Armes Adam Adrian Crown—for his expert opinions

on eighteenth-century weapons and fencing.

Any mistakes herein are not theirs, but mine.

Kuo-Yu Liang, Amy Victoria Meo, Richard Curtis, and Marga de Boer for support and

encouragement; Veronica Chapman for working harder than an editor ought to;

Martha Schwartz for doing the hard things; Dave Stevenson, Min Choi, Alix Krijgsman,

and all the other folks who make books read and look like books should.

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NEWTON’S CANNON

… it may also be allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes

and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps different Densities and

Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in

several Parts of the Universe.

—Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31

Contents

Prologue

Part One

REASON AND MADNESS, 1720

1. Versailles

2. The Printer’s Apprentice

3. Adrienne

4. An Ingenious Device

5. Of Carriage Rides and Cabals

6. The Sorcerer on the Common

7. The Grand Canal

8. Silence Dogood

9. Regicide

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NEWTON’S CANNON
The Hellfire Club
Three Conversations
Painful Gardens
Harmonic Sympathy
Renascence
Of Secrets
Lullaby
The Korai
Lightning Rod
Dreams of Queens
Teach
Part Two
THE CANNON
City of Science
Menagerie
Coffeehouse
Masque
Hermes
Disclosures
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NEWTON’S CANNON
The Newtonians
Children of Lead and Tin
The Royal Society
Sin
Newton
In the Maze
Vasilisa
Magic Mirror
The Aegis
Maneuvers
The Orrery
The Elixir of Life
Traitor
The Face of Thetis
Magus
Bridges
Cannon
The Night-Dark Day
Epilogue: The Angel of Kings
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NEWTON’S CANNON

Prologue

1681

Jupiter Flying on His Eagle

Humphrey wiped the sweat from his forehead and paused briefly in his working of the

bellows. He glanced nervously at Isaac, who was staring into the red maw of the

furnace with all of the intensity of a lover—or a madman.

“Isaac, should you not rest?” Humphrey pleaded. “How many days have you been at

this?”

Isaac did not even deign to glance at him. He stepped instead to the worktable and

emptied the contents of a mortar into a beaker. Then, he attacked his notebook with

pen, scribbling furiously. “I do not know. What day is it?”

Humphrey stared at his friend, whose stained shirt clung to his emaciated frame like

parchment. “And how long since you have eaten?” he persisted.

“Work the furnace, Humphrey,” Newton growled. Humphrey had seen him like this

before, going days without eating or sleeping, utterly consumed by thoughts that even

other scholars could only vaguely guess at. If Isaac were merely deluded, Humphrey

would not stand here pumping the bellows like a slave, but Newton was not insane. He

was that rarest of creatures. He was a genius. Holding the coveted Lucasian

professorship at Cambridge at the age of thirty-nine, Newton was virtually without

peer.

“Now,” Isaac muttered, gripping up the iron tongs from his bench. He flung open the

furnace. A blast of greater heat rushed out into the room, so that the last of the cool

breeze wafting through the open windows was banished. Newton squinted against the

heat, but his hand was sure as he reached in with the tongs and withdrew the effulgent

crucible.

With a more considered motion, Isaac tilted the stoneware cylinder over a thick beaker.

Humphrey winced, expecting a molten fluid to pour spattering from the spout, but

instead a small silvery sphere tumbled out. He had a glimpse of it before an acrid cloud

of steam erupted from the beaker. As Humphrey coughed into his handkerchief, Isaac

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NEWTON’S CANNON

calmly reached over and closed the furnace.

As the heat diminished, the room was momentarily still. With the shuttering of the

furnace, everything suddenly seemed quite ordinary. For the past ten hours,

Humphrey had felt engulfed by an alchemical nightmare.

“Now,” Isaac muttered, “we shall see. We shall see if Jupiter rides his eagle.”

Humphrey was not well versed in the arcane hermetic language of alchemy. He knew,

though, that jupiter was a metal of some sort, said to be useful in producing

philosopher’s mercury—the original, truest metal of all, the source of all other metal.

Newton peered into the flask. “And the menstruum carries it up,” he said, quite matter-

of-factly. Humphrey watched Isaac dash off a few notes.

“May I see?” he asked.

Newton nodded impatiently, biting the end of his quill.

Humphrey ventured to gaze into the flask. A sphere of some metal rested in what

remained of the yellowish fluid. He recognized the smell now—the sharpness could

only be ammonia. But what was that swirling, those flashes? The latter suddenly

increased dramatically.

“Isaac,” he began, when suddenly the flaring redoubled, tripled. He staggered back

from the workbench. A tree trunk of lightning suddenly grew up from the beaker,

passing through the air where his face had been. It grew, fluorescing between red and

blue, and shuddering the room with thunder. Humphrey screamed and turned his back

on the terrible flame. He could not see; brightness etched across his eyes like acid

spilled on copper. He tripped, sprawled, fell over a table.

Strong arms pushed up beneath his and lifted, and he opened his eyes. The light was

brighter still, the flaming sword of an archangel, and he squealed once more with

terror before fainting.

Humphrey came to himself lying on cool grass, the spots before his eyes fading. Dazed,

he looked around. He lay in the garden just outside of Isaac’s laboratory. Overhead the

heavens were mild and blue, cottony with clouds. Isaac sat a few feet from him, writing

furiously in a notebook. The air crackled with a sort of tearing sound.

A serpent of flame rose through the roof of Isaac’s shed and writhed high into the sky

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NEWTON’S CANNON

beyond sight, a Jacob’s ladder.

“What?” Humphrey groaned, pleased that he could hear his own voice again.

“And the menstruum carries it up,” Newton explained, as if to a child. “But how could I

have known? This changes all.”

“That lightning—”

Newton nodded his head furiously. “Yes! Yes! It is the air, decomposing. Lux, liberated

by the true mercury! The very aether is exposed, Humphrey. We have touched the

nature of matter. Do you understand what this means?”

“Yes,” Humphrey replied, faintly. “It means that you need a new roof.”

1715

The Angel of Kings

Louis flinched at the faint rattle of musket shots he heard through the thick glass.

Following them, the mob suddenly erupted in renewed shouting. At the window,

Phillipe began to wail.

“Come away from the window, Phillipe,” Louis told his eight-year-old brother. What if

one of the balls were to find its way into the Palais Royal itself?

Phillipe turned a tear-streaked face toward him, his dark eyes wide with terror.

“Louis, they are going to kill us!” he moaned. “They will burn the palace down and they

will— Where is Maman?”

“Mother is about the royal business,” Louis said. He strode across the gallery and took

hold of his younger brother by the sleeve.

“Come,” Louis insisted, “your king commands you.” He said it with as much authority

as he could muster.

It worked. It always worked, if people knew in their bones that you were the king. The

trick was in convincing them of that. Especially with Cardinal Mazarin around, always

telling him what to do. Mazarin thought himself king.

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NEWTON’S CANNON

As Phillipe came away from the window, Louis took a quick glance outside. He saw the

mob below and the ghost of his own face on the glass, the pale image of a ten-year-old

monarch. Was it set and determined enough, or did his eyes, like Phillipe’s, parade his

terror?

His features seemed composed. He remembered the set of his mother’s lips, the brave

light in her eyes, and copied it as best he could.

“Here, Phillipe,” he said sternly, “come beneath my arm. I will protect you.”

“Where is Maman?” Phillipe repeated. “Where are the soldiers?”

“The soldiers are guarding the doors.”

Louis remembered the terror in the eyes of the handful of guards. He remembered

what they had said to his mother. “ We shall all die at your doorstep.” Perhaps they

had meant to sound brave, but they had sounded defeated. Louis doubted that they

could be counted on should the mob burst through the doors.

“Who will guard us?” Phillipe asked.

Louis drew his sword. It was a tiny thing, a toy. But gesture was more powerful than

reality. He took Phillipe under one arm and held the little rapier with the other. “Your

king will defend you,” he promised. “Now, let us go to one of the rooms without

windows.”

They made their way into a darkened salon lit by a single lamp. There Louis sat on a

gilded settee and drew his little brother against him. “Here we shall be safe,” he said,

knowing it was a lie. “And should the mob come through the door, they will learn how a

king defends his brother.”

“God is with us, is he not?” Phillipe asked, trying to sound brighter but only managing

to sound pitiful.

“God is with us,” Louis assured him.

“Then why is Monsieur Cardinal dressed in gray?”

Louis bit back a retort. He, too, had seen Cardinal Mazarin forsake his red robes for

gray, anonymous clothing. What a fool! What a coward! But to Phillipe, he said, “The

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NEWTON’S CANNON

cardinal knows what he is doing. Hush, and think of more pleasant things.”

“I will, Louis,” the younger boy promised.

More faint reports, and Louis battled once again with his own fear. It was all coming

apart around him, but he was the king. Had he no control over his kingdom? How

could Paris be rising up against him?

How he hated Paris.

“I will build us a great palace,” he told Phillipe idly, “in the country, far from here, from

these mobs.”

But Phillipe was asleep, and Louis realized that he spoke to comfort himself.

And now shots rang closer—they were in the hall! The thud of boots and the clamor of

rough soldiers’ voices were outside. Louis tightened his grip on his toy sword. If he

behaved the king, he was the king, was the king… He repeated it, saying it to make it

real.

Now the door burst open, and there stood John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough,

ruddy face haughty above his adamantium breastplate, long black coat swept around

him like raven wings. Marlborough, the thrice damned, the devil, come here to burn

Versailles around him.

But this wasn’t Versailles. It was the Palais Royal, and he was only ten, and Versailles

only barely a dream.

“Your Majesty,” Marlborough smirked in his heavily accented French. “Your Majesty

may put away his toy.” He did not even bother to raise the barrel of his kraftpistole.

“Get out of my palace,” Louis demanded, but Marlborough only laughed. He saw

through Louis, knew him for a fraud…

This was all wrong. Louis ran, the laughter echoing behind him. A shriek tore from his

lips, and a wave of humiliation flooded him. He wanted to wake from the nightmare…

Louis XIV, the Sun King, awoke in the seventy-second year of his reign to a reality far

more bitter. Pain flamed in his leg, coursing through his groin and belly, seeking his

very heart. Though his bedclothes and person had been doused in flower-scented

perfume, the sickly corrupt smell of gangrene lay heavily in his nostrils. He was, he

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NEWTON’SCANNONNEWTON’SCANNONBookOneofTheAgeofUnreasonJ.GregoryKeyesADelRey®BookTHEBALLANTINEPUBLISHINGGROUP•NEWYORKADelRey®BookTHEBALLANTINEPUBLISHINGGROUP•NEWYORKSaleofthisbookwithoutafrontcovermaybeunauthorized.Ifthisboo\kiscoverless,itmayhavebeenreportedtothepublisheras“unsoldordestroyed”a\ndneit...

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