The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,33

and noticed several portraits in ornate gilded frames, which had been taken down from the walls of the chateau, leaned against the hedge, and used for musketry practice. The faces of most of those paintings now consisted of fist-sized holes, and stray balls had punched out novel constellations in the dark backgrounds. I decided I had better get to the point. “How can I make this happen?”

This startled him and he spun round to glare at me. “What?”

“You want the Russian Academy to over-awe those of Berlin, Vienna, and London?”

“Yes.”

“How may I be of service to your Tsarish Majesty? Do you want me to recruit savants?”

“Russia is big. I can make savants. Just as I can make soldiers. But a soldier without a gun is only a fire that burns food. I think the same is true of a savant without his tools.”

I shrugged. “Mathematicians do not require tools. But all the other types of savant need something or other to help them do their work.”

“Get those things,” he commanded.

“Yes, Most Clement Lord.”

“We will make that thing you spoke of,” he announced. “The library-that-thinks.”

“The great machine that manipulates knowledge according to a set of logical rules?”

“Yes. That would be a good thing for my Academy of Science to have. No one else has one.”

“On both counts I am in full agreement, your Imperial Majesty.”

“What do you need, to build it?”

“Just as St. Petersburg cannot be built without architects’ drawings, or a ship without plans—”

“Yes, yes, yes, you need the tables of knowledge, written down as binary numbers, and you need the rules of symbolic logic. I have supported this work for many years!”

“With generosity worthy of a Caesar, sire. And I have developed a logical calculus well adapted to regulate the workings of the machine.”

“What of the tables of knowledge!? You told me a man was working on this in Boston!”

By this point the Tsar had stormed up and put his face quite close to mine and gone into one of his twitching fits, which had spread to involve his arm. To steady himself he had gripped the rim of the wheel upon which I was seated, and was twisting it back and forth, rotating me first this way, then that.

For what I said next, it may help to exonerate me slightly in your eyes, Daniel, if I mention that this Tsar still breaks men on the wheel, and does even worse things to those who have incurred his displeasure; which was impossible for me to put out of my mind in my current circumstance, viz. mounted on a large wheel. Before I could think better of it, I blurted, “Oh, Dr. Waterhouse is on his way across the Atlantic at this very moment, and should, God willing, reach London soon!”

“He is turning over the work I paid for, to the Royal Society!? I knew I should have throttled that Newton when I had the opportunity!” (For when Peter visited London some years ago he met Sir Isaac at the Mint.)

“Not at all, Clement Lord, for indeed, your humble servant and all his works are reviled by the Royal Society, which would never accept anything linked to my name, even if Dr. Waterhouse were to behave so dishonestly, which is inconceivable!”

“I am building up my Navy,” Peter announced.

This, I confess, made little impression on me, for he is never not building up his Navy.

“I have ordered three men-of-war to be constructed in London,” he continued, “and to sail into the Baltic when weather permits in the spring, to join my fleet for a further assault upon the Swedes; for I have not yet fully purged Finland of those vermin. It is my wish that when those ships sail from London, they are to be laden with tools for my savants to use at the Academy of Science, and they are to carry the fruits of the labors of Dr. Waterhouse.”

“It shall be as you say, your Imperial Majesty,” I answered, as it seemed unwise to give any different response.

Then he could not shoo me away fast enough. I was dragged, breakneck, back into the center of Carlsbad on a troika and re-united with my driver. Thence we proceeded to Hanover with only a brief detour to Leipzig, where all of my affairs are in a state of upheaval. Publication of Monadology has gone forward with only the normal amount of bickering with printers. Now that the war is over, Prince Eugene, the Duke of Marlborough’s valiant brother-in-arms, has taken an