“There was-” and here the man’s English gave way. He made a helpless, encompassing gesture.

“Fog!”

“Fog,” he repeated.

“Did you hear guns?”

“A few-but very likely they were only signals. Coded data speeding through the fog, so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound-” and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins’s Cryptonomicon but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.

Leibniz set foot on England. He was closely followed by a couple of other German gentlemen, somewhat older, much less talkative, and (Daniel could only suppose) more important. They in turn were pursued by a senior servant who headed up a short column of porters lugging boxes and bags. But Leibniz had burdened himself with a wooden box he would not let go of. Daniel stepped forward to greet them, but was cut off by some brusque fellow who shouldered in to hand a sealed letter to one of the older gentlemen, and whispered to him for a moment in Low-Dutch.

Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It could have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn’t, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them-incredibly-just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham’s College an hour ago. Not so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he’d noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.

Leibniz and the others discussed matters in High-Dutch. The interloper turned round to glance at Daniel. It was one of the Dutch Ambassador’s errand-boys- cum-spies. The Germans formed some sort of a plan, and it seemed to involve splitting up. Daniel stepped in and introduced himself.

The other Germans were introduced by their names but what mattered was their ancestry: one of them was the nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg, who was the same Archbishop’s Minister. In other words very important people in Mainz, hence rather important ones in the Holy Roman Empire, which was more or less neutral in the French/English/Dutch broil. It had all the signs of being some sort of peace-brokering mission, i.e.

Leibniz knew who he was, and asked, “Is Wilkins still alive?”

“Yes…”

“Thank God!”

“Though very ill. If you would like to visit him I would suggest doing it now. I’ll escort you gladly, Dr. Leibniz… may I have the honor of assisting you with that box?”

“You are very civil,” Leibniz said, “but I’ll hold it.”

“If it contains gold or jewelry, you’d best hold it tight. ”

“Are the streets of London not safe?”

“Let us say that the Justices of the Peace are mostly concerned with Dissenters and Dutchmen, and our cutpurses have not been slow to adapt.”

“What this contains is infinitely more valuable than gold,” Leibniz said, beginning to mount the stairs, “and yet it cannot be stolen.”

Daniel lunged forward in an effort to keep step. Leibniz was slender, of average height, and tended to bend forward when he walked, the head anticipating the feet. Once he had reached the level of the roadway he turned sharply and strode towards the City of London, ignoring the various taverns and shops.

He did not look like a monster.

According to Oldenburg, the Parisians who frequented the Salon at the Hotel Montmor-the closest French equivalent to the Royal Society of London-had begun using the Latin word monstro to denote Leibniz. This from men who’d personally known Descartes and Fermat and who considered exaggeration an unspeakably vulgar habit. It had led to some etymological researches among some members of the R.S. Did they mean Leibniz was grotesquely misshapen? An unnatural hybrid of a man and something else? A divine warning?

“He lives up this way, does he not?”

“The Bishop has had to move because of his illness-he’s at his stepdaughter’s house in Chancery Lane.”

“Then still we go this way-then left.”

“You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?”

“I have been studying London-paintings.”

“I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire-like street-plans of Atlantis.”

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,” Leibniz said. “Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle-all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe-for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

Daniel decided to step back and let Leibniz’s words reverberate, as organ-chords must do in Lutheran churches. Meanwhile they reached the north end of the Bridge, where the racket of the water-wheels, confined and focused in the stone vault of the gatehouse, made conversation impossible. Not until they’d made it out onto dry land, and begun to ascend the Fish Street hill, did Daniel ask, “I note you’ve already been in communication with the Dutch Ambassador. May I assume that your mission is not entirely natural-philosophick in nature?”

“A rational question-in a way,” Leibniz grumbled. “We are about the same age, you and I?” he asked, giving Daniel a quick inspection. His eyes were unsettling. Depending on what kind of monster he was, either beady, or penetrating.

“I am twenty-six.”

“So am I. We were born about sixteen forty-six. The Swedes took Prague that year, and invaded Bavaria. The Inquisition was burning Jews in Mexico. Similar terrible things were happening in England, I assume?”

“Cromwell crushed the King’s army at Newark-chased him out of the country-John Comstock was wounded-”

“And we are speaking only of kings and noblemen. Imagine the sufferings of common people and Vagabonds, who possess equal stature in God’s eyes. And yet you ask me whether my mission is philosophick or diplomatic, as if those two things can neatly be separated.”

“Rude and stupid I know, but it is my duty to make conversation. You are saying that it should be the goal of all natural philosophers to restore peace and harmony to the world of men. This I cannot dispute.”

Leibniz now softened. “Our goal is to prevent the Dutch war from growing into a general conflagration. Please do not be offended by my frankness now: the Archbishop and the Baron are followers of the Royal Society-as am I. They are Alchemists-which I am not, except when it is politic. They hope that through pursuit of Natural Philosophy I may make contacts with important figures in this country, whom it would normally be difficult to reach through diplomatic channels.”

“Ten years ago I might have been offended,” Daniel said. “Now, there’s nothing I’ll not believe.”

“But my interest in meeting the Lord Bishop of Chester is as pure as any human motive can be.”