“Brother Daniel!”

“My lord.”

“You’ll do as well as anyone-better than most.”

“Do for what, sir?”

“Witnessing the Bishop’s signature.”

Bolstrood got a quill charged with ink. Daniel wrapped Wilkins’s puffy fingers around it. After a bit of heavy breathing on the part of its owner, the hand began to move, and a tangle of lines and curves began to take shape on the page, bearing the same relationship to Wilkins’s signature as a ghost to a man. It was a good thing, in other words, that several persons were on hand to verify it. Daniel had no idea what this document was. But from the way it was engrossed he could guess that it was meant for the eyes of the King.

Count Penistone was a man in a hurry, after that. But before he left he said to Daniel: “If you have any stock in the Duke of York’s Guinea Company, sell it-for that Popish slave-monger is going to reap the whirlwind.” Then, for maybe the second or third time in his life, Knott Bolstrood smiled.

“Show it to me, Dr. Leibniz,” Wilkins said, skipping over all of the formalities; he had not urinated in three days and so there was a certain urgency about everything.

Leibniz sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, and opened the box.

Daniel saw gears, cranks, shafts. He thought it might be a new sort of timepiece, but it had no dial and no hands-only a few wheels with numbers stamped on them.

“It owes much to Monsieur Pascal’s machine, of course,” Leibniz said, “but this one can multiply numbers as well as add and subtract them.”

“Make it work for me, Doctor.”

“I must confess to you that it is not finished yet.” Leibniz frowned, tilted the box toward the light, and blew into it sharply. A cockroach flew out and traced a flailing parabola to the floor and scurried under the bed. “This is just a demo’. But when it is finished, it will be magnifique. ”

“Never mind,” Wilkins said. “It uses denary numbers?”

“Yes, like Pascal’s-but binary would work better-”

“You needn’t tell me, ” Wilkins said, and then rambled for at least a quarter of an hour, quoting whole pages from relevant sections of the Cryptonomicon.

Leibniz finally cleared his throat and said, “There are mechanical reasons, too-with denary numbers, too many meshings of gears are necessary-friction and backlash play havoc.”

“Hooke! Hooke could build it,” Wilkins said. “But enough of machines. Let us speak of Pansophism. Tell me, now-have you met with success in Vienna?”

“I have written to the Emperor several times, describing the French king’s Bibliotheque du Roi-”

“Trying to incite his Envy-?”

“Yes-but in his hierarchy of vices, Sloth would appear to reign unchallenged by Envy or anything else. Have you met with success here, my lord?”

“Sir Elias Ashmole is starting a brave library-but he’s distracted and addled with Alchemy. I have had to attend to more fundamental matters-” Wilkins said, and gestured weakly toward the door through which Bolstrood had departed. “I believe that binary arithmetickal engines will be of enormous significance-Oldenburg, too, is most eager.”

“If I could carry your work forward, sir, I would consider myself privileged.”

“Now we are only being polite-I have no time. Waterhouse!”

Leibniz closed up his box. The Bishop of Chester watched the lid closing over the engine, and his eyelids almost closed at the same moment. But then he summoned up a bit more strength. Leibniz backed out of the way, and Daniel took his place.

“My Lord?”

It was all he could get out. Drake had been his father, but John Wilkins really was his lord in almost every sense of the word. His lord, his bishop, his minister, his professor.

“The responsibility now falls upon you to make it all happen.”

“My Lord? To make what happen?”

But Wilkins was either dead or asleep.

THEY STUMBLED THROUGHa small dark kitchen and out into the maze of yards and alleys behind Chancery Lane, where they drew the attention of diverse roosters and dogs. Pursued by their hue and cry, Mr. Waterhouse and Dr. Leibniz emerged into a district of theatres and coffee-houses. Any one of those coffee-houses would have sufficed, but they were close to Queen Street-another of Hooke’s paving-projects. Daniel had begun to feel like a flea under the Great Microscope. Hooke subtended about half of the cosmos, and made Daniel feel as if he were flitting from one place of refuge to another, even though he had nothing to hide. Leibniz was hale, and seemed to enjoy exploring a new city. Daniel got them turned back in the direction of the river. He was trying to make out what responsibility, specifically, had just been placed on his shoulders by Wilkins. He realized-after a quarter of an hour of being a very poor conversationalist-that Leibniz might have ideas on the subject.

“You said you wanted to carry Wilkins’s work forward, Doctor. Which of his projects were you referring to? Flying to the moon, or-”

“The Philosophical Language,” Leibniz said, as if this should have been obvious.

He knew that Daniel had been involved in that project, and seemed to take the question as a sign that Daniel wasn’t especially proud of it-which was true. Noting Leibniz’s respect for the project, Daniel felt a stab of misgivings that perhaps the Philosophical Language had some wonderful properties that he had been too stupid to notice.

“What more is there to be done with it?” Daniel asked. “You have some refinements-additions-? You wish to translate the work into German-? You’re shaking your head, Doctor-what is it, then?”

“I was trained as a lawyer. Don’t look so horrified, Mr. Waterhouse, it is respectable enough, for an educated man in Germany. You must remember that we don’t have a Royal Society. After I was awarded my Doctor of Jurisprudence, I went to work for the Archbishop of Mainz, who gave me the job of reforming the legal code-which was a Tower of Babel-Roman and Germanic and local common law all mangled together. I concluded that there was little point in jury-rigging something. What was needed was to break everything down into certain basic concepts and begin from first principles.”

“I can see how the Philosophical Language would be useful in breaking things down,” Daniel said, “but to build them back up, you would need something else-”

“Logic,” Leibniz said.

“Logic has a dismal reputation among the higher primates in the Royal Society-”

“Because they associate it with the Scholastic pedants who tormented them in university,” Leibniz said agreeably. “I’m not talking about that sort of thing! When I say logic, I mean Euclidean.”

“Begin with certain axioms and combine them according to definite rules-”

“Yes-and build up a system of laws that is as provable, and as internally consistent, as the theory of conic sections.”

“But you have recently moved to Paris, have you not?”

Leibniz nodded. “Part of the same project. For obvious reasons, I need to improve my knowledge of mathematics-what better place for it?” Then his face got a distracted, brooding look. “Actually there was another reason-the Archbishop sent me as an emissary, to tender a certain proposal to Louis XIV.”

“So today is not the first time you have combined Natural Philosophy with Diplomacy-”

“Nor the last, I fear.”

“What was the proposal you set before the King?”

“I only got as far as Colbert, actually. But it was that, instead of invading her neighbors, La France ought to make an expedition to Egypt, and establish an Empire there-creating a threat to the Turk’s left flank-Africa-and forcing him to move some armies away from his right flank-”

“Christendom.”

“Yes.” Leibniz sighed.

“It sounds-er-audacious,” Daniel said, now on a diplomatic mission of his own.

“By the time I’d arrived in Paris, and secured an appointment with Colbert, King Louis had already flung his invasion-force into Holland and Germany.”