The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,345

through. Shopkeepers and residents were beginning to place doors back on hinges, shovel human turds out of their forecourts, &c., but the place was still infested with feckless young men. Daniel mentally sorted these into such categories as armed irregulars, phanatiques, Vagabonds, and hanging-watchers—hasty judgments all, built on slight evidence. Any commerce-minded person passing through here must find it impossible to believe that any oeconomically productive activity ever happened in England at all. And yet England prospered, and Peter knew it; how could he reconcile it with the evidence before his eyes?

“This place used to lie beyond the edge of the city,” Daniel explained, “and bloody-minded young men would come here to practice at sword-play, or even to fight. This was more than a hundred years ago, when it was the fashion to have a wee shield on the left hand—a buckler. The sound of rapiers swashing against bucklers could be heard from far away, when they fought. Young men of that mentality came to be known, in the vernacular, as—”

“Bucklerswashers! Yes, I have heard of this,” said Peter. “Which way do I go here?”

“Take the left fork, if you please, your Tsarish Majesty,” Daniel said, “and then straight on to Clerkenwell.”

As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner but to particular persons, and to divers men divers things.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

UPON ARRIVAL IN Clerkenwell Court, Daniel discovered that Roger Comstock, or someone claiming to speak for him, had quartered two squadrons of Whig Association cavalry in the Court of Technologickal Arts: one Mohawk, the other normally coiffed. He was past caring, and no longer capable of being surprised by anything. It was fortuitous. The Templar-tomb made an impressive vault, with its new set of ironbound doors. The presence of the cavalry only made it seem that much better suited for storing a pile of gold, in Peter’s eyes.

Daniel had been steeling himself, on the drive over, for a long day or two of explaining all of the marvels and oddities on view in the Court of Technologickal Arts—for really it was the worst kind of Peter-the-Great-bait. But most of the ingénieurs and projectors who frequented the place had locked their stuff up, or taken it away, when they had moved out to make room for the cavalry. So there was relatively little on view. Peter did venture underground for a cursory inspection of the Templar-tomb. But the ceiling was too low for him, and he seemed as bored as any other royal on any other ceremonial inspection, which gave Daniel the idea that hidden vaults of bizarre ancient military-religious sects must be altogether common and unremarkable in Russia. Solomon Kohan showed more interest in it than his boss. And so while Baron von Leibniz and Saturn (who had recovered admirably after having been rousted from bed at saber-point) showed the Tsar some of the machinery pertaining to the Logick Mill, Solomon and Daniel sat round a slate sarcophagus down below, and oversaw the transfer of the gold plates from Minerva into the Tomb of the Templars. This was a matter of weighing all that was brought down, and pricking down the weights in ledgers, and getting all of the numbers and the sums to agree: not especially demanding labor for two men such as these. During lulls they engaged in Solomon Kohan’s idea of small talk:

“This is an interesting place.”

“I am pleased you find it interesting.”

“It puts me in mind of an operation I used to have in Jerusalem a long time ago.”

“Now that you mention it, the full name of the Templars was the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. So if you are that Solomon—”

“Do not play word games with me. I refer, not to this hole in the ground, which is but an indifferent crypt for long-forgotten knights, but to what lies over.”

“The Court of Technologickal Arts?”

“If that is what you call it.”

“What would you call it?”

“A temple.”

“Oh? Of what religion?”

“A religion that presupposes that we may draw closer to God by better understanding the World that He made.”

“That being the only evidence available to us, you mean, as to what He was thinking.”

“Available to most of us,” Solomon allowed.

“Oh? Is there a rest of us who have other ways of knowing God?”

“In truth, yes,” Solomon said, “but it is dangerous to say so, for almost all who claim to belong to this rest are charlatans.”

“How gratifying, then, that you