“Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man’s brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?”
Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes.
“You’ve already sided with Hooke, and against Newton, concerning snowflakes-so may I assume you take the same position concerning brains?” Leibniz continued, now with exaggerated politeness.
Daniel spent a while staring out the window at a point far away. Eventually his awareness came back into the coffee-house. He glanced, a bit furtively, at the arithmetical engine. “There is a place in Micrographia where Hooke describes the way flies swarm around meat, butterflies around flowers, gnats around water-giving the semblance of rational behavior. But he thinks it is all because of internal mechanisms triggered by the peculiar vapors arising from meat, flowers, et cetera. In other words, he thinks that these creatures are no more rational than a trap, where an animal seizing a piece of bait pulls a string that fires a gun. A savage watching the trap kill the animal might suppose it to be rational. But the trap is not rational-the man who contrived the trap is. Now, if you-the ingenious Dr. Leibniz-contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking-is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?”
“You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?”
“Suppose I had asked it, Doctor-what would your answer be?”
“My answer, sir, is both.”
“Both? But that’s impossible. It has to be one or the other.”
“I do not agree with you, Mr. Waterhouse.”
“If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking.”
“But Mr. Waterhouse, you were raised by Puritans, who believe in predestination.”
“Raised by them, yes…” Daniel said, and let it hang in the air for a while.
“You no longer accept predestination?”
“It does not resonate sweetly with my observations of the world, as a good hypothesis ought to.” Daniel sighed. “Now I see why Newton has chosen the path of Alchemy.”
“When you say he chose that path, you imply that he must have rejected another. Are you saying that your friend Newton explored the idea of a mechanically determined brain, and rejected it?”
“It may be he explored it, if only in his dreams and nightmares.”
Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it-which must have been a great spiritual struggle-and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”
“But you claim to know of a third way, Doctor. I should like to hear of it.”
“And I should like to tell of it,” Leibniz said, “but I must part from you now, and make rendezvous with my traveling companions. May we continue on some other day?”
HE DISSECTED MOREthan his share of dead men’s heads during those early Royal Society days, and knows that the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: haul-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails on the jawbone and temple, tugging at the corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line. As Daniel trudges up out of Minerva ’s bilge, dragging a chinking sack of ammunition behind him, he feels all that stuff tightening up, steadily and inexorably, each stairstep a click of the pawls, as if invisible sailors were turning capstans inside his skull. He’s spent the last hour below the water-line-never his favorite place on shipboard, but safe from cannonballs anyway-smashing plates with a hammer and bellowing old songs, and never been so relaxed in all his life. But now he’s climbed back up into the center of the hull, just the sort of bulky bull’s-eye pirates might aim swivel-guns at if they lacked confidence in their ability to pick off small fine targets from their wave-tossed platforms.
Minerva’s got a spacious stairwell running all the way down through the middle of her, just ahead of the mighty creaking trunk of the mainmast, with two flights of stairs spiraling opposite directions so the men descending don’t interfere with those ascending-or so doddering Doctors with sacks of pottery-shards do not hinder boys running up from the hold with-what? The light’s dim. They appear to be canvas sacks-heavy bulging polyhedra with rusty nails protruding from the vertices. Daniel’s glad they’re going up the other stairs, because he wouldn’t want one of those things to bump into him. It’d be certain death from lockjaw.
Some important procedure’s underway on the gundeck. The gunports are all closed, except for one cracked open a hand’s breadth on the starboard side-therefore, not far from Daniel when he emerges from the staircase. Several relatively important officers have gathered in a semicircle around this port, as if for a baptism. There’s a general commotion of pinging and thudding coming from the hull-planks and the deck above. It could be gunfire. And if it could be, it probably is. Someone grabs the sack from Daniel and drags it to the center of the gundeck. Men with empty blunderbusses converge on it like jackals on a haunch.
Daniel’s elbowed hard by a man hauling on a line that enters Minerva through a small orifice above the gunport. This has the effect of (1) knocking Daniel down on his bony pelvis and (2) swinging said gunport all the way open, creating a sudden square of light. Framed in it is part of the rigging of a smaller ship, so close that a younger man could easily jump to it. There is a man-a pirate-on that ship pointing a musket in Daniel’s direction, but he’s struck down by a gaudy spray of out-moded china fragments, fired down from Minerva’s upperdeck. “Caltrops away!” says someone, and boys with sacks lunge toward the open gunport and hurl out a tinkling cosmos, down to the deck of the smaller ship. Moments later the same ceremony’s repeated through a gunport on the larboard side-so there must be a pirate-vessel there, too. The gunports are hauled closed again, sporting new decorations: constellations of lead balls fired into ’em from below.
The screaming/bellowing ratio has climbed noticeably. Daniel (helping himself to his feet, thank you, and hobbling crabwise to a safe haven near the mainmast, to inventory his complaints) reckons that the screaming must originate from shoeless pirates with caltrop-spikes between their metatarsals-until he hears “Fire! Fire!” and notes a curl of smoke invading the gundeck through a cracked gunport, speared on a shaft of sunlight. Then some instinct makes Daniel forget his bruises and sprains-he’s up the last flight of stairs, spry as any eight-year-old powder monkey, and out in the sail-dappled sunlight, where he’ll happily risk musket-balls.
But it’s the pirate-sloop, not Minerva, that’s on fire. Lines are going slack all over the starboard half of the ship. Each of them happens to terminate in a rusty grappling-hook that’s lodged in a ratline or a rail. The pirates are cutting themselves free!
Now comes a general rush of men to larboard, where a whaleboat is still pestering them. Minerva rolls that direction on a sea. The whaleboat comes into view, no longer eclipsed by the hull’s tumblehome, and a score of muskets and blunderbusses fire down into it at once. Daniel only glimpses the result-appalling-then Minerva rolls starboard and hides it from view.