The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [101]
“Benjamin, could you come here a moment?” Vasilisa asked, after several hours of tacitly excluding him.
“I'm rather busy.”
“This is important. Could you come here, please?”
“Very well.” He strode over to where they were working.
“What do you think of this?” she asked, pointing at a string of calculations and accompanying text in Latin. He read it, at first with some irritation—it was clearly nonsense—but after a few moments, he began to see a sneaky sort of logic in it.
“Whose work is this?” he asked.
“It belongs to Monsieur Lomonosov,” she said, indicating a young man. The fellow perked up at his name and leaned to shake hands. Franklin responded with reluctance.
“Can he speak English or French?”
“I'm afraid not. I can translate. But you understand his theory—that matter as such is not real but merely the least perfect of affinities?”
“Yes, well, I can find no flaw in his figuring, but it must be there. The idea is absurd.”
“Why? Because Newton did not know it?”
“Don't speak his name.”
She stared at him. “Benjamin, are you angry with me?”
He noticed the others were staring at him.
“Let us speak in the hall,” he said.
“Very well.”
In the hall she faced him with her arms folded. “Well? Where does this rudeness come from?”
“Rudeness? Call it reserve. I had almost forgotten your treacherous nature, but your friend Montchevreuil reminded me. You were there, too, when Newton was killed. Did you have a hand in it?”
“For pity's sake, Benjamin, don't be such a child. Adrienne and I only did what we had to. What would you have done if some madman were causing your airship to fall from the sky with all of your friends and your infant son?”
“None of it would have happened if you and yours had not launched an unprovoked attack first on Prague and then on Venice.”
“Well, then, it is the tsar's fault. Go lay it at his feet, not mine. To answer your question, I did not have the power or the knowledge to do what Adrienne did, but if I could have done it, I most certainly would have. Newton was a casualty of war, Benjamin. That is the way of nations, the way it always has been. What have you been doing these past few months if not exerting every effort—honest and dishonest—to bring to your side nations you formerly fought against, convincing them that their old blood debts are now overshadowed? Are you become hypocrite?”
That seemed to run her out of breath and composure, both of which, in his experience, were things Vasilisa usually had in tremendous supply.
He wanted to reply in kind, in words of justified fury.
Instead, he realized that she was on the mark—if not for a bullet, then at least for a grenado.
It hurt too much to admit it, though, so he stood silent for a few seconds and said, “Let's have another look at that formula. And you'll explain to me why such a theoretical question matters in this time of crisis.”
She relinquished her fierce expression and beckoned him back into the room.
“It matters because, if it is true, the problem of dissolving Swedenborg's engine may not be exactly as you phrased it before. You wanted to disrupt the connection between aetheric forces and matter—but what if they are the same, like different notes of the same musical scale? What if the difference between them is only the difference in how tightly the string on a violin is tuned?”
“I'll grant it for argument.”
“Then if we change the pitch—”
“The pitch of what, the universe?”
“Yes.”
“It's insane.”
“No, it isn't. Come here—give me time to convince you.”
He studied her face, wondering why she would bother with such an outrageous lie.
“I'll give you two hours to convince me. It's all I can spare.”
“It's enough.”
After an hour he was completely engrossed in the idea, and began adding suggestions of his own.
“Even if we rough out the shape of this theory,” he cautioned, “it remains to propose experiments by which we might support it. And a device which might