"By process of elimination, he would be the obese Catholic?"
"Yes. He appropriated the Duchy and raised an army to defend it. By the time news of this coup de main had made its way to the Venetian brothel where Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm had set up their headquarters, 'twas a fait accompli. Later, like good brothers, they worked out a settlement. John Frederick got the great prize, and was made Duke of Hanover. Georg Wilhelm became Duke of Celle. Ernst August—despite being a Protestant—remained the Bishop of Osnabrück. The odds and ends of the clan ended up here in Wolfenbüttel—you have just met them. Now, Ernst August and Sophie had already resolved to make their little fiefdom into a Parnassus, a kingdom of Reason—"
"So they hired you, naturally."
"No, actually, there was a lot of that going round at the time. John Frederick wanted to do the same at Hanover."
"It must have been a good time to be a savant."
"Indeed, one could name one's price. John Frederick had more money and a vast library."
"Right, now I am starting to remember it. Huygens told me that after he taught you everything he knew concerning mathematics—which would have been round about the early 1670s—you had to leave Paris and take a job in some cold bleak place." Fatio looked significantly out the window.
"'Twas Hanover actually—a distinction without a difference, as to you it would seem very like Wolfenbüttel."
Leibniz ushered Fatio into an entrance hall dominated by frighteningly massive staircases.
Sounding a bit perplexed, Fatio said, "Rather a lot of people must have died then, for Ernst August to become Duke of Hanover—"
"John Frederick died in '79. Georg Wilhelm still lives. But it was Ernst August who became Duke of Hanover, by dint of this or that sub-clause in the agreement made between him and his brothers—I'll spare you details."
"So Sophie got to merge her Parnassus with John Frederick's—of which you were the crowning glory—"
"Really you do flatter, sir."
"But why did I have to come down here to meet you? I'd expected to find you at Hanover."
"The Library!" Leibniz answered, surging past the younger man and hurling himself against an immense door. There was a bit of preliminary cracking and tinkling as ice shattered and fell from its hinges. Then it yawned open to afford Fatio a view across several hundred yards of flat snow-covered ground to a dark uneven mountainous structure that was a-building there.
"No fair making comparisons with the one Wren's building at Trinity College," Leibniz said cheerfully. "His will be an ornament—not that there is anything wrong with that—mine will be a tool, an engine of knowledge."
"Engine?" Fatio, who was well-shod, pranced out into the snow in pursuit of Leibniz, who had given up any hope of preserving his boots and shifted to a sort of plodding, stomping gait.
"Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God," Leibniz said, as if making an off-handed comment about the weather. "Adam named the beasts; meaning, that from casual observations of particular specimens, he moved to the recognition of species, and then devised abstract names for them—a sort of code, if you will. Indeed, if he had not done so, Noah's task would have been inconceivable. Later, a system of writing was developed: spoken words were abstracted into chains of characters. This became the basis for the Law—it is how God communicated His intentions to Man. The Book was written. Then other books. At Alexandria the many books were brought together into the first Library. More recently came the invention of Gutenberg: a cornucopia that spills books out into specialized markets in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The merchants there have been completely unreceptive to my proposals! There are too many books in the world now for any one mind to comprehend. What does Man do, Fatio, when he is faced with a task that exceeds the physical limits of his body?"
"Harnesses beasts, or makes a tool. And beasts are of no use in a Library. So—"
"So we want tools. Behold!" Leibniz proclaimed, taking his hands from his coat-pockets just long enough to direct a sort of shoveling gesture at the looming Pile. "It must be obvious to you that this was a stable Leibniz said.
Viewed end-on, the Bücherrad was hexagonal, and nearly as tall as Fatio. When he worked his way round to the front, he saw that it consisted mostly of six massive shelves, each one a couple of fathoms long, bridging the interval between hexagonal end-caps that were mounted on axles so that the whole apparatus could be revolved. But each of the six shelves was free to revolve on an axis of its own. As the Bücherrad spun, each of those shelves counter-rotated in such a way that it maintained a fixed angle with respect to the floor, and did not spill its load of books.
Going round to the other end, Fatio was able to see how it worked: a system of planetary gears, carven from hard wood, spun about the central axle-tree like Ptolemaic epicycles.
Then Fatio turned his attention to the books themselves: curious folio volumes, hand-written, all in the same hand, all in Latin.
"These were written out personally by one Duke August, a forerunner of that lot you just met. He lived to a great age and died some twenty-five years ago. It was he who assembled most of this collection," Leibniz explained.
Fatio bent slightly at the waist to read one of the pages. It consisted of a series of paragraphs each preceded by a title and a long Roman numeral. "It is a description of a book," he concluded.
"The process of abstraction continues," Leibniz said. "Duke August could not keep the contents of his library in his memory, so he wrote out catalogs. And when there were too many catalogs for him to use them conveniently, he had woodwrights make Bücherrads—engines to facilitate the use and maintenance of the catalogs."
"It is very ingenious."
"Yes—and it is threescore years old," Leibniz returned. "If you do the arithmetick, as I have, you may easily demonstrate that to hold all the catalogs needed to list all the world's books would require so many Bücherrads that we would need some Bücherradrads to spin them around, and a Bücherrad-rad-rad to hold all of them—"
"German is a convenient language that way," Fatio said diplomatically.
"And so on with no end in sight! There are not enough woodwrights to carve all of the gears. New sorts of knowledge-engines will be demanded."
"I confess you have lost me, Doctor."
"Observe—each book is identified by a number. The numbers are arbitrary, meaningless—a kind of code, like the names Adam gave to the beasts. Duke August was of the old school, and used Roman numerals, which makes it that much more cryptickal."
Leibniz led Fatio away from the center of the floor toward the rugged stone walls, which were mostly barricaded by high thick ramparts covered in canvas tarpaulins. He peeled up the edge of one and flung it back to reveal that the rampart was a stack of books, thousands of them. All of them had been bound in the same style, in pigskin (for like many noble bibliophiles Duke August had bought all his books as masses of loose signatures and had them bound in his own bindery, by his own servants). The newest ones (say, less than half a century old) were still white. More ancient ones had turned cream, beige, tan, brown, and tar-colored. Many bore scars of long-forgotten encounters between pigs and swineherds' cudgels. The titles, and those long Roman numerals, had been inscribed on them in what Fatio now recognized as Duke August's hand.
"Now they are in a heap, later they shall be on shelves—either way, how do you find what you want?" Leibniz asked.
"I believe you are now questioning me in a Socratic mode."
"And you may answer in any mode you like, Monsieur Fatio, provided that you do answer."
"I suppose one would go by the numbers. Supposing that they were shelved in numerical order."