The System of the World by Neal Stephenson Page B

he were angry with me, or wanted me to do something. As it turned out, I was right about both.
    The conversation was direct. Some would say brutal. It is not that Peter is a brute. Extremely violent and dangerous to be sure, but more in the style of a highly effective Roman Emperor than of a cave-bear. It is simply that he likes to accomplish things, preferably with his own hands, and tends to view conversations as impediments. He would rather do something of an essentially stupid and pointless nature, than talk of something beautiful or momentous. He wants his servants to be like his hands, which carry out his will immediately and without the tedium of verbal instructions—so much so that if a conversation extends beyond a few sentences, he will grow intolerably restless, his face will become disfigured by uncontrollable tics, and he will shoulder his interlocutor out of his way and take action himself. Since he and I do not share fluency in any language, he might have summoned an interpreter—but he was content to get along with a few crude sentences in a mixture of Dutch, German, and Russian.
    “At St. Petersburg there is a place staked out to build the Academy of Sciences as you have suggested,” he began.
    “Most Clement Lord,” I said, “as I have had the honor and privilege of founding such an Academy in Berlin; and as I have made some head-way in persuading the Emperor to found one in Vienna; my joy upon hearing this news, cannot but be commingled with apprehension that that of Russia will one day out-shine those of the Germans, and perhaps even put the Royal Society in the shade.”
    You can well imagine his impatience as I croaked this out. Before I was half-way through it, he was stomping back and forth in the frozen garden like a frost-bitten sentry. I looked down tothe opposite end of the clearing and noticed several portraits in ornate gilded frames, which had been taken down from the walls of the chateau, leaned against the hedge, and used for musketry practice. The faces of most of those paintings now consisted of fist-sized holes, and stray balls had punched out novel constellations in the dark backgrounds. I decided I had better get to the point. “How can I make this happen?”
    This startled him and he spun round to glare at me. “What?”
    “You want the Russian Academy to over-awe those of Berlin, Vienna, and London?”
    “Yes.”
    “How may I be of service to your Tsarish Majesty? Do you want me to recruit savants?”
    “Russia is big. I can make savants. Just as I can make soldiers. But a soldier without a gun is only a fire that burns food. I think the same is true of a savant without his tools.”
    I shrugged. “Mathematicians do not require tools. But all the other types of savant need something or other to help them do their work.”
    “Get those things,” he commanded.
    “Yes, Most Clement Lord.”
    “We will make that thing you spoke of,” he announced. “The library-that-thinks.”
    “The great machine that manipulates knowledge according to a set of logical rules?”
    “Yes. That would be a good thing for my Academy of Science to have. No one else has one.”
    “On both counts I am in full agreement, your Imperial Majesty.”
    “What do you need, to build it?”
    “Just as St. Petersburg cannot be built without architects’ drawings, or a ship without plans—”
    “Yes, yes, yes, you need the tables of knowledge, written down as binary numbers, and you need the rules of symbolic logic. I have supported this work for many years!”
    “With generosity worthy of a Cæsar, sire. And I have developed a logical calculus well adapted to regulate the workings of the machine.”
    “What of the tables of knowledge!? You told me a man was working on this in Boston!”
    By this point the Tsar had stormed up and put his face quite close to mine and gone into one of his twitching fits, which had spread to involve his arm. To steady himself he hadgripped the rim of the wheel upon