They left in six canoes, before dawn had even thought about being. The cold waters lapped the boats and the men shivered.
A musket barrel rang as it clattered off a buckle.
Captain van Rijk looked around and glowered. He saw the campfires of Hoboken fade, Governor Kieft still standing on the jetty there, as the mist enveloped the little flotilla. Hoboken, the pipe of peace, named by the Lenape Indians for the deal they made with us. Trust. But that was then. This is 1630 and Hoboken is not enough. Then he turned back towards their destination, the prize: Manhattan island.
The paddlers made sure to slice into the river, twist, propel, then carefully ease out. It was harder work, but it made for silent progress. It was a trick they’d learned from the Indians.
They got to the middle of the river, then allowed the current to take them south, past dense forests, and the three miles to the cleared lower tip of the island. To where the Indians lay asleep in their tents. The captain sighted the camp against the pinkening sky, exactly as he’d planned. With his left arm, he indicated their destination and the paddlers fought the currents to bring them to land.
The Lenape were taken completely by surprise. The Dutch started with swords and knives, going from tent to tent. Men, women, children: each was slaughtered in their turn. Van Rijk led by example, sticking a sleeping woman, then her babe with his cutlass.
There was a shout from across the field, just as the sun touched the sky to the east.
‘Vuren!’ he cried, and the muskets roared.
Some of the braves had assembled to the north of the camp, at the treeline. They were attempting to flank the Dutch raiders. Van Rijk saw them and their bows. He ordered his musketeers to focus their fire on the group as he led the swordsmen into the heart of the camp. Flying lead balls cut the men down, shattered tree trunks, whistled into the blackness.
A formation of seagulls came low, on their way from the flats fringing the Atlantic on the long island, to the freshwater lakes of Nieuw Nederland. The gulls scattered, scared by the blasts and the smoke and the crying and the rich, shocking smell of blood.
Van Rijk’s vision was coloured red as he hacked and chopped and killed. Until there were no more Indians. He was at the furthest reach of the camp. He looked around, saw the tents blazing, the three hundred bodies. His lieutenants saw this too and smiled.
‘Gedaan. Nu de dapperen.’ Done. Now the braves.
Muskets fired in volleys and Indian war cries faded, replaced by screams and death groans. Van Rijk led his men back across the camp, running, adrenaline flooding. But it was done. The braves were done.
One survived, a musket ball having shattered his right shoulder, laying on the red grass, saying Hoboken, Hoboken.
The captain cut his throat.
‘Zege!’
Victory.
The Dutch rejoiced. The land was theirs. Nieuw Amsterdam was born, baptised by a flood of native blood. The captain called his men to prayer. He thanked God for their victory, promised to build a shining city in His name. The Lenape would be remembered, but only in passing, a Brooklyn playground carrying the name of Manhattan’s first owners.
So development proceeded in earnest. Within a few years, a major fortification had been erected along the treeline to keep Indian raiding parties out. Some had come looking for revenge. But what did they know? This was progress. This was civilisation. This was the creation of real estate, value, wealth. The wall rose to twelve feet and, with its snipers and patrols, allowed the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to flourish under its protection.
Later, the city’s first official slave market, where natives and negroes were sold and rented, was here, here on de Waal Straat.
Today, the business of slavery continues, the manufacturing of debt for the little people, while the great and good spin their billions into further billions. Much of their wealth having originated in the sale of slaves right here. On Wall Street.
On the north side of Wall Street, among the flag-laden office blocks and trading houses, is an inconspicuous building, designed in the classical Art Deco style. It houses thirty floors of stock and bond salesmen and investment managers. Gamblers. And high frequency traders, who used the world’s first quantum computers to jump ahead of purchase orders and buy cheap. These market alchemists circled in the dark pool. And the hedge fund gurus, the biggest racketeers of all, two and twenty, percent commission on funds managed and returns earned, and a shit return at that, rich men’s playthings. Nice fucking work if you can get it. Many undercurrents. Many signals not visible to anyone on the outside. Herrenvolk. The master race.
On a typical trading day, one hundred billion dollars - virtual dollars - flow in and out of these walls. Whether the trades make money or lose money, the expensively-dressed men make their commission. It’s often like turning lead into gold. Just do it on a big enough scale and enormous riches are assured.
And deep below the trading floors, down in the blood-soaked earth, between the subway tunnels and the steam pipes, is a secret treasure. A device that converts actual lead into actual gold.
Vierte’s nuclear reactor was assembled in the 1950s, built according to the blueprints that Dr Heim had smuggled out of Germany. The parts and the uranium were sidelined from the American nuclear facilities by the same ex-Nazis that designed Hitler’s atomic programme and then gave America the power to rule the world. Then rental trucks shipped them from the western deserts and into the beating heart of the New York financial system. A steel pipe here, a chunk of uranium there.
Hitler’s love of the occult and the bizarre was well-known. One of his pet projects was alchemy: turning lead into gold. His scientists told him that, using nuclear technology, there was no reason why this should not be achieved. Ernest Rutherford had first achieved transmutation in 1919, when he fired alpha particles at nitrogen to make oxygen. He literally changed one element into another.
On the periodic table of the elements, lead and gold are very close. Forget about the electrons, the buzzing, negatively-charged particles that orbit the nucleus and give us electricity and chemical reactions, let’s dive into the nucleus, the heart of matter. Inside the nucleus are positively-charged protons and neutral neutrons. It is the number of protons inside a nucleus that determines what element the atom actually is. The old alchemists, with their chemical reactions, could never touch the nucleus. They didn’t have a chance. But the dawn of the nuclear age, the splitting of the atom? This made transmutation - the dream of the ages - real. Many believed that Nostradamus had the secret of transmutation, hidden within his quatrains. But his dreams were as lead.
Lead, the dull, inert heavy metal, Pb after the Roman name plumbum. The Romans used it to make water pipes, so that’s why we call plumbers plumbers. But lead is a neurotoxin, a brain poison. Some say that the Roman Empire collapsed because the lead leaching from the water pipes drove them all mad. Today, it’s mainly used for bullets. Dive into its nucleus and you will find eighty-two protons locked together, each a shimmering energy field. Then look to lead’s neighbour, gold. Seventy-nine protons in there, creating the dazzling purity of beauty that makes men insane, that has gripped their imaginations since the dawn of humankind. Just three neutrons separating lead and gold.
So the German scientists found that by targeting lead with a stream of neutrons - uranium was the perfect source - they could knock neutrons out of the lead nuclei. Over time, the lead that enveloped the neutron source became gold. It was a tricky process to get right. A delicate spindle mechanism slowly brought a thin sheet of lead around the core, gently winding onto a spool of fine gold leaf at the far side. Gold leaf perfect for melting down into bars. Or for wrapping around roasted fingers.
So went the magic of converting poisonous lead into the 24 karat gift of the kings to the son of a God.
But it was far less troublesome to turn gold into lead, sticking three extra neutrons into the atom’s nucleus.
Two blocks away from Vierte’s gold machine, up on Liberty Street, is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, home of the world’s largest reserve of gold bars. Seven thousand tonnes of seventy-nine neutron goodness, held in trust for half the world’s economies, underpinning their currencies, giving some faith to the financial instrument alchemists on the world’s trading floors. Imagine turning all that into lead?
And the final blow, the killer, the ultimate gift of breeder nuclear reactors - the conversion of the uranium (brought down from Canada) that drives the reaction, with ninety-two neutrons in its nucleus, its conversion into plutonium by adding just two neutrons, so easy you can’t not do it, and you have the stuff of nuclear bombs. This is the main function of all the world’s nuclear ‘power stations’. This is the function of Vierte’s reactor.
The seer sat alone in a tiny room, dark save for the glow from a little fire under the tripod, from which dangled a brass bowl on chains. Water in the bowl - sacred water - pulsed from the heat, ripples gently boiling across the surface, starlight dancing. The seer's mind danced too, chemicals coursing, neurons tingling. The mescaline powder, isolated from a Mexican peyote cactus, had opened his doors of perception.
His mouth tasted of dry compost.
He felt his spirit animal stirring deep within his spine, and he fought to restrain it. Not now, not yet. He consulted his astrology logs once more, glanced at Polaris, the north star. Then he focused on the water, allowed his mind to empty. And so the images began to form.
There were scenes of events that had not yet occurred. Great deeds, grand falls, yes, but also minutiae, the seemingly inconsequential occurrences. Images of the future and of the past and of some unknowable time also. So he concentrated, lost his mind entirely to the visions and allowed the most important predictions to occupy the sacred central space.
At last, the image solidified, commanded his attention. He calmly unravelled its subtleties of meaning and, once all was clear, he took his writing paper and committed the quatrain to words, words which could be shared so that others might believe.
The exuberant nectar of the vine,
Brings joy to the King of the North.
Those who take it from the amber sea,
Shall taste the victory of immortality.
- Century XV, Quatrain 4.