Neal Stephenson - Baroque Cycle 2 - The Confusion

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

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Crucible

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Vol. II of

THE BAROQUE CYCLE

Neal Stephenson

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To Maurine

THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE TO BE THANKED

for their help in the creation of the Baroque Cycle of which this book, The Confusion, is the second

volume. Accordingly, please see the acknowledgments in Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque

Cycle.

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Author’s Note

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THIS VOLUME CONTAINS two novels, Bonanza and Juncto, that take place concurrently during the span

1689–1702. Rather than present one, then the other (which would force the reader to jump back to 1689

in mid-volume), I have interleaved sections of one with sections of the other so that the two stories move

forward in synchrony. It is hoped that being thus con-fused shall render them the less confusing to the

Reader.

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

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When at the first I took my pen in hand,

Thus for to write, I did not understand

That I at all should make a little book

In such a mode; nay, I had undertook

To make another, which when almost done,

Before I was aware, I this begun.

—JOHN BUNYAN,The Pilgrim’s Progress,

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY FOR HIS BOOK

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Contents

Thanks

Author’s Note

Epigraph

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Barbary Coast

Book 5: The Juncto

Dundalk, Ireland

The Dunkerque Residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
Throne Room of the Pasha, the Kasba, Algiers 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Château Juvisy 
Dunkerque Residence of the d’Ozoirs 
Cap Gris-Nez, France 
Letter from Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza 
Letter from Eliza to Daniel 
La Dunette 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
The Gulf of Cadiz 
Off Malta 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Eliza to Leibniz 
Leibniz to Eliza 
Schloß Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony 
Ireland 
A Hay-rick, St.-Malo, France 
Château d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France 
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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson
Eliza to Lothar von Hacklheber 
Eliza to King William III of England 
Eliza to Monsieur le Chevalier d’Erquy 
Café Esphahan, Rue de l’Orangerie, Versailles 
Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza 
Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, to Eliza 
Leibniz to Eliza 
Eliza to Samuel de la Vega 
Eliza to the Marquis of Ravenscar 
Eliza to Samuel Bernard 
Samuel Bernard to Eliza 
Cabin of Météore, off Cherbourg, France 
London 
Gresham’s College 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
Ahmadabad, the Mogul Empire 
The Surat-Broach Road, Hindoostan 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Mrs. Bligh’s Coffee-house, London 
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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson
Bonaventure Rossignol to Eliza 
Eliza to Rossignol 
Eliza to Pontchartrain 
Rossignol to Eliza 
Pretzsch, Saxony 
Pontchartrain to Eliza 
Eliza to Pontchartrain 
The Dower-house of Pretzsch 
Jean Bart to Eliza 
Leipzig 
Eliza to Jean Bart 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire 
Malabar 
Book 5: The Juncto 
The Thames 
Dunkirk 
An Abandoned Church in France 
Winter Quarters of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards Near Namur 
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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson
The Track to Pretzsch 
A House Overlooking the Meuse Valley 
Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
Japan 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Berlin 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
The Pacific Ocean 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
Mexico City, New Spain 
Mexico City 
Qwghlm 
Book 5: The Juncto 
Hôtel Arcachon 
BOOK 4: BONANZA 
En Route from Paris to London 
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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

About the Author

Also by Neal Stephenson

Credits

About the Publisher

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Book 4

Bonanza

So great is the dignity and excellency of humane nature, and so active those sparks of heavenly fire it

partakes of, that they ought to be look’d upon as very mean, and unworthy the name of men, who thro’

pusillanimity, by them call’d prudence, or thro’ sloth, which they stile moderation, or else through

avarice, to which they give the name of frugality, at any rate withdraw themselves from performing

great and noble actions.

—GIOVANNI FRANCESCO GEMELLI CARERI,

A Voyage Round the World

Barbary Coast

OCTOBER 1689

HE WAS NOT MERELY AWAKENED, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream. He

could not remember any of the details of the dream now that it was over. But he had the idea that it had

entailed much rowing and scraping, and little else; so he did not object to being roused. Even if he had

been of a mind to object, he’d have had the good sense to hold his tongue, and keep his annoyance well-

hid beneath a simpering merry-Vagabond façade. Because what was doing the waking, today, was the

most tremendous damned noise he’d ever heard—it was some godlike Force not to be yelled at or

complained to, at least not right away.

Cannons were being fired. Never so many, and rarely so large, cannons. Whole batteries of siege-guns

and coastal artillery discharging en masse, ranks of ’em ripple-firing along wall-tops. He rolled out from

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

beneath the barnacle-covered hull of a beached ship, where he had apparently been taking an afternoon

nap, and found himself pinned to the sand by a downblast of bleak sunlight. At this point a wise man,

with experience in matters military, would have belly-crawled to some suitable enfilade. But the beach

all round him was planted with hairy ankles and sandaled feet; he was the only one prone or supine.

Lying on his back, he squinted up through the damp, sand-caked hem of a man’s garment: a loose robe

of open-weave material that laved the wearer’s body in a gold glow, so that he could look directly up

into the blind eye of the man’s penis—which had been curiously modified. Inevitably, he lost this

particular stare-down. He rolled back the other way, performing one and a half uphill revolutions, and

clambered indignantly to his feet, forgetting about the curve of the hull and therefore barking his scalp

on a phalanx of barnacles. Then he screamed as loud as he could, but no one heard him. He didn’t even

hear himself. He experimented with plugging his ears and screaming, but even then he heard naught but

the sound of the cannons.

Time to take stock of matters—to bring the situation in hand. The hull was blocking his view. Other than

it, all he could see was a sparkling bay, and a stony break-water. He strode into the sea, watched

curiously by the man with the mushroom-headed yard, and, once he was out knee-deep, turned around.

What he saw then made it more or less obligatory to fall right on his arse.

This bay was spattered with bony islets, close to shore. Rising from one of them was a squat round

fortress that (if he was any judge of matters architectural) had been built at grand expense by Spaniards

in desperate fear of their lives. And apparently those fears had been well founded because the top of that

fort was all fluttery with green banners bearing silver crescent moons. The fort had three tiers of guns on

it (more correctly, the fort was three tiers of guns) and every one of ’em looked, and sounded, like a

sixty-pounder, meaning that it flung a cannonball the size of a melon for several miles. This fort was

mostly shrouded in powder-smoke, with long bolts of flame jabbing out here and there, giving it the

appearance of a thunderstorm that had been rammed and tamped into a barrel.

A white stone breakwater connected this fort to the mainland, which, at first glance, impressed him as a

sheer stone wall rising forty or feet from this narrow strip of muddy beach, and crowded with a great

many more huge cannons, all being fired just as fast as they could be swabbed out and stuffed with

powder.

Beyond the wall rose a white city. Being as he was at the base of a rather high wall, he wouldn’t

normally expect to be able to see anything on the opposite side thereof, save the odd cathedral-spire

poking out above the battlements. But this city appeared to’ve been laboriously spackled onto the side of

a precipitous mountain whose slopes rose directly from the high-tide mark. It looked a bit like a wedge

of Paris tilted upwards by some tidy God who wanted to make all the shit finally run out of it. At the

apex, where one would look for whatever crowbar or grapple the hypothetical God would’ve used to

accomplish this prodigy, was, instead, another fortress—this one of a queer Moorish design, surrounded

with its own eight-sided wall that was, inevitably, a-bristle with even more colossal cannons, as well as

mortars for heaving bombs out to sea. All of those were being fired, too—as were all of the guns

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

spraying from the several additional fortresses, bastions, and gun-platforms distributed around the city’s

walls.

During rare intervals between the crushing thuds of the sixty-pounders, he could hear peppery waves of

pistol-and musket-fire rolling around the place, and now (beginning to advert on smaller things) he saw

a sort of smoky, crowded lawn growing out of the wall-tops—save instead of grass-blades this lawn was

made up of men. Some were dressed in black, and some in white, but most wore more colorful

costumes: baggy white trousers belted with brilliantly hued swathes of silk, and brightly embroidered

vests—frequently, several such vests nested—and turbans or red cylindrical hats. Most of those who

were dressed after this fashion had a pistol in each hand and were firing them into the air or reloading.

The man with the outlandish johnson—swarthy, with wavy black hair in a curious ’do, and a knit

skullcap—hitched up his robe, and sloshed out to see if he was all right. For he still had both hands

clamped over the sides of his head, partly to stanch the bleeding of the barnacle-gashes, and partly to

keep the sound from blowing the top of his skull out to sea. The man peered down and looked into his

eyes and moved his lips. The look on his face was serious, but ever so slightly amused.

He reached up and grabbed this fellow’s hand and used it to haul himself up to his feet. Both men’s

hands were so heavily callused that they could practically catch musket-balls out of the air, and their

knuckles were either bleeding, or else recently scabbed over.

He had stood up because he wanted to see what was the target of all of this shooting, and how it could

possibly continue to exist. A fleet of three or four dozen ships was arrayed in the harbor, and (no

surprise here) they were all firing their guns. But the ones that looked like Dutch frigates were not firing

at the ones that looked like heathen galleys, nor vice versa, and none of them seemed to be firing at the

vertiginous white city. All of the ships, even the ones that were of European design, flew crescent-moon

banners.

Finally his eye settled on one ship, which was unique in that she was the only vessel or building in sight

that was not vomiting smoke and spitting flame in all directions. This one was a galley, very much in the

Mohametan style, but extraordinarily fine, at least to anyone who found whorish decoration appealing—

her non-functioning bits were a mess of gold-leafed gewgaws that glowed in the sun, even through

drifting banks of powder-smoke. Her lateen sail had been struck and she was proceeding under oar-

power, but in a stately manner. He found himself examining the movements of her oars just a bit too

closely, and admiring the uniformity of the strokes more than was healthy for a Vagabond in his right

mind: leading to the questions, was he still a Vagabond, and was he in his right mind? He recalled—

dimly—that he had lived in Christendom during one part of his sorry life, and had been well advanced in

the losing of his mind to the French Pox—but he seemed all right now, save that he couldn’t recall

where he was, how he’d gotten there, or anything at all of recent events. And the very meaning of that

word “recent” was called into question by the length of his beard, which reached down to his stomach.

The intensity of the cannonade waxed, if such a thing were possible, and reached a climax as the gold-

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The Confusion - Baroque Cycle 02 - Neal Stephenson

plated galley drew up alongside a stone pier that projected into the harbor not awfully far away. Then,

all of a sudden, the noise stopped.

“What in Christ’s name—” he began, but the rest of his utterance was drowned out by a sound that—

compared to hundreds of cannons firing at once—made up in shrillness what it lacked in volume.

Listening to it in amazement, he began to detect certain resemblances between it and musick. Rhythm

was there, albeit of an overly complicated and rambunctious nature, and melody, too, though it was not

cast in any civilized mode, but had the wild keening intonations of Irish tunes—and then some.

Harmony, sweetness of tone, and other qualities normally associated with musick, were absent. For

these Turks or Moors or whatever they were had no interest in flutes, viols, theorbos, nor anything else

that made a pleasing sound. Their orchestra consisted of drums, cymbals, and a hideous swarm of giant

war-oboes hammered out of brass and fitted with screeching, buzzing reeds, the result sounding like

nothing so much as an armed assault on a belfry infested with starlings.

“I owe an ’umble apology to every Scotsman I’ve ever met,” he shouted, “for it isn’t true, after all, that

their music is the most despicable in the world.” His companion cocked an ear in his direction but heard

little, and understood less.

Now, essentially all of the city was protected within that wall, which shamed any in Christendom. But

on this side of it there were various breakwaters, piers, gun-emplacements, and traces of mucky beach,

and everything that was capable of bearing a man’s weight, or a horse’s, was doing so—covered by

ranks of men in divers magnificent and outlandish uniforms. In other words, all the makings of a parade

were laid out here. And indeed, after a lot of bellowing back and forth and playing of hellish musicks

and firing of yet more guns, various important Turks (he was growingly certain that these were Turks)

began to ride or march through a large gate let into the mighty Wall, disappearing into the city. First

went an impossibly magnificent and fearsome warrior on a black charger, flanked by a couple of

kettledrum-pounding “musicians.” The beat of their drums filled him with an unaccountable craving to

reach out and grope for an oar.

“That, Jack, is the Agha of the Janissaries,” said the circumcised one.

This handle of “Jack” struck him as familiar and, in any case, serviceable. So Jack he was.

Behind the kettledrums rode a graybeard, almost as magnificent to look at as the Agha of the Janissaries,

but not so heavily be-weaponed. “The First Secretary,” said Jack’s companion. Next, following on foot,

a couple of dozen more or less resplendent officers (“the aghabashis”) and then a whole crowd of

fellows with magnificent turbans adorned with first-rate ostrich plumes—“the bolukbashis,” it was

explained.

Now it had become plain enough that this fellow standing next to Jack was the sort who never tired of

showing off his great knowledge, and of trying to edify lowlives such as Jack. Jack was about to say that

he neither wanted nor needed edification, but something stopped him. It might’ve been the vague,

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TheConfusion-BaroqueCycle02-NealStephensontp_riggingCrucibletp_typeVol.IIofTHEBAROQUECYCLENealStephensonlogoopsmarkt3ToMaurineTHEREAREMANYPEOPLETOBETHANKEDfortheirhelpinthecreationoftheBaroqueCycleofwhichthisbook,TheConfusion,isthesecondvolume.Accordingly,pleaseseetheacknowledgmentsinQuicksilver,Vo...

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