The system of the world - By Neal Stephenson Page 0,81

you have wandered in the wilderness for two decades, I shall grant you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Then cure me of naïveté, and tell me, what sort of man is he?”

“A weigher.”

“Well, he is obviously that, inasmuch as he weighs things, but you seem to invest the word with connotations that are lost on a back-woodsman such as I.”

“In spite of all my efforts to reform the practices of the Mint, and to make each newly coined guinea identical to the last, some variation in weights persists. Some guineas are slightly heavier than others. Such errors are reducible but not eradicable. I have reduced them to the degree that, where honest persons are concerned, no variation exists. That is, most men in London—and I include sophisticated men of commerce—would trade one guinea for another without hesitation, and certainly without bothering to take out a scale and weigh them.”

“I well remember when that was not the case,” Daniel remarked.

“You refer to our visits to Stourbridge Fair, before the Plague,” Isaac said immediately.

“Yes,” Daniel answered, after a moment of awkwardness.

He and Isaac had walked from Trinity to the Fair once, to buy prisms, and along the way, Isaac had made some remarks about fluxions—the beginnings of the calculus. During his recent sea-voyage from Massachusetts, Daniel had summoned that ancient memory to mind, and brought it back to life in his head, remembering certain queer details, like the shapes of the aquatic plants in the river Cam, bent downstream by the sluggish fluxion of the water. It was now obvious that Isaac had been thinking hard, and recently, about the same memory.

To go on prating of coins, when the true topic of the conversation was so close to breaking the surface, were faintly ridiculous. But Englishmen, given a choice, would always prefer the faintly ridiculous over the painfully direct. So, on with numismatics.

“It got even worse—the coinage did—later,” Isaac said.

“I remind you that I did not depart until the middle of the 1690s, when there were hardly any coins left in the country, and our oeconomy was a confetti of I.O.U.s.”

“Now England is awash in gold. The currency is as hard as adamant. Our commerce is the wonder of all the earth, and even Amsterdam is in our shade. It were vanity for me to take too much credit for this. But it is simple honesty to say, that it could not happen in the absence of this plain understanding, shared by all Englishmen, that a guinea may be exchanged for a guinea without a second thought. That all guineas are the same.”

Suddenly all that Daniel had observed of Mr. Threader rearranged, in his mind, into a novel, strange, but perfectly coherent picture; it was like watching a pile of rubble spontaneously assemble itself into a marble statue. “Allow me to hazard,” Daniel said, “that a weigher” (he almost said, “Mr. Threader”) “is a chap who to outward appearances believes what every honest, plain-dealing Englishman believes about the value of a guinea. But in secret, he takes every guinea that comes his way, and weighs it ’pon scales of the most exacting precision. Such as are light, or of the mean weight, he returns into circulation. But such as are heavy, he hoards. And when he has hoarded an hundred such—I am only making up numbers for the sake of argument—perhaps he has enough gold, in sum, to mint an hundred and one guineas. He has created a new guinea out of thin air.”

Isaac said yes by slowly blinking his pink eyelids. “Of course, what you have described is only the most elementary of their practices. Those who master it, move on quickly to more nefarious schemes.”

But Daniel was still new to all of this, and stuck on the elementary. “It would only be feasible,” he guessed, “if one were already in a line of work that involved handling large numbers of coins.”

“Naturally! And that is why the practice is so rife among the money-scriveners. I make guineas, and send them out into the country; they scurry about unraveling the tapestry I’ve so laboriously woven, and return the heaviest coins to London, where they invariably make their way to the coffers of the most vile and execrable traitors in the realm!”

Daniel recalled driving past shredded corpses at Tyburn. “You mean that weighers are connected with coiners.”

“As spinners are with weavers, Daniel.”

Daniel was silent for a moment, rehearsing every memory he had of Mr. Threader.

“That is why I was so shocked—shocked half to death,