Kepler

by John Banville

  Like a refining fire the fever had rinsed him clean. He went back to his book with new eyes. How could he have imagined it was finished? Squatting in a tangle of sheets he attacked the manuscript, scoring, cutting, splicing, taking the theory apart and reassembling it plane by plane until it seemed to him miraculous in its newfound elegance and strength. The window above him boomed, buffeted by gales, and when he raised himself on an elbow he could see the trees shuddering in the college yard. He imagined washes of that eminent exhilarated air sweeping through him also. Mästlin brought him his food, boiled fish, soups, stewed lights, but otherwise left him alone now; he was nervous of this excitable phenomenon, twenty years his junior, perched on the couch in a soiled nightshirt, like an animated doll, day after day, scribbling. He warned him that the sickness might not be gone, that the feeling of clarity he boasted of might be another phase of it. Johannes agreed, for what was this rage to work, this rapture of second thoughts, if not an ailment of a kind?

  But he recovered from that too, and at the end of a week the old doubts and fears were back. He looked at his remade manuscript. Was it so much better than before? Had he not merely replaced the old flaws with new ones? He turned to Mästlin for reassurance. The Professor, shying under this intensity of need, frowned into a middle distance, as if surreptitiously spying out a hole down which to bolt. "Yes," he said, coughing, "yes, the idea is, ah, ingenious, certainly."

  "But do you think it is true?"

  Mästlin's frown deepened. It was a Sunday morning. They walked on the common behind the main hall of the university. The elms thrashed under a violent sky. The Professor had a grizzled beard and a drinker's nose. He weighed matters carefully before committing them to words. Europe considered him a great astronomer. "I am, "he announced, "of the opinion that the mathematician has achieved his goal when he advances hypotheses to which the phenomena correspond as closely as possible. You yourself would also withdraw, I believe, if someone could offer still better principles than yours. It by no means follows that the reality immediately conforms to the detailed hypotheses of every master."

  Johannes, debilitated and ill-tempered, scowled. This was the first time he had ventured out since the fever had abated. He felt transparent. There was a whirring high in the air, and then suddenly a crash of bells that made his nerves vibrate. "Why waste words?" he said, yelled, bells, damn. "Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself.. ."

  Bang.

  "O!" Mästlin stared at him.

  "… For what," smoothly, "exists in God that is not God himself?" A grey wind swarmed through the grass to meet him; he shivered. "But we are mouthing quotations merely: tell me what you truly think. "

  "I have said what I think," Mästlin snapped.

  "But that, forgive me, magister, is scholastic shilly-shally."

  "Well then, I am a schoolman!"

  "You, who teaches his students-who taught me-the heliocentric doctrine of Copernicus, you a schoolman?" but turned on the professor all the same a thoughtful sidelong glance.

  Mästlin pounced. "Aha, but that was also a schoolman, anda. saver of the phenomena!"

  "He only-"

  "A schoolman, sir! Copernicus respected the ancients."

  "Well then; but I do not?"

  "It seems to me, young man, that you have not much respect for anything!"

  "I respect the past, "Johannes said mildly. "But I wonder if it is the business of philosophers to follow slavishly the teaching of former masters?"

  He did: he wondered: was it? Raindrops like conjured coins spattered the pavestones. They gained the porch of the Aula Maxima. The doors were shut and bolted within, but there was room enough for them to shelter under the stone Platonic seal. They stood in silence, gazing out. Mästlin breathed heavily, his annoyance working him like a bellows. Johannes, oblivious of the other's anger, idly noted a flock of sheep upon the common, their lugubriously noble heads, their calm eyes, how they champed the grass with such fastidiousness, as if they were not merely feeding but performing a delicate and onerous labour: God's mute meaningless creatures, so many and various. Sometimes like this the world bore in upon him suddenly, all that which is without apparent pattern or shape, but is simply there. The wind tossed a handful of rooks out of the great trees. Faintly there came the sound of singing, and up over the slope of the common a ragged file of young boys marched, wading against the gale. Their song, one of Luther's stolid hymns, quavered in the tumultuous air. Kepler with a pang recognised the shapeless tunic of the seminary: thus he, once. They passed by, a tenfold ghost, and, as the rain grew heavy, broke file and scampered the last few paces, yelling, into the shelter of St Anne's chapel under the elms. Mästlin was saying: "… to Stuttgart, where I have business at Duke Frederick's court." He paused, waiting for a response; his tone was conciliatory. "I have drawn up a calendar at the Duke's bidding, and must deliver it…" He tried again: "You have done similar work, of course."

  "What? O, calendars, yes; it is all a necromantic monkey-shine, though."

  Mästlin stared. "All…?"

  "Sortilege and star magic, all that. And yet," pausing, "yet I believe that the stars do influence our affairs…" He broke off and frowned. The past was marching through his head into a limitless future. Behind them the doors with a rattle opened a little way and a skeletal figure peered at them and immediately withdrew. Mästlin sighed. "Will you go with me to Stuttgart or will you not!"

  They set out early next day for the Württemberg capital. Kepler's humour was greatly improved, and by the time they reached the first stop, Mästlin was slumped speechless in a corner of the post coach, dazed by a three-hour disquisition on planets and periodicity and perfect forms. They intended staying in Stuttgart perhaps a week; Johannes was to remain there for six months.

  He conceived a masterly plan to promote his theory of celestial geometry. "You see, " he confided to his fellow diners at the trippeltisch in the Duke's palace, "I have designed a drinking cup, about this size, which shall be a model of the world according to my system, cast in silver, with the signs of the planets cut in precious stones-Saturn a diamond, the moon a pearl, and so on-and, mark this, with a mechanism to serve through seven little taps, from the seven planets, seven different kinds of beverage!"

  The company gazed at him. He smiled, basking in their silent amaze. A portly man in a periwig, whose florid features and upright bearing bespoke ajovian imperium, extracted a bit of gristle from his mouth and asked:

  "And who, pray, is to finance this wonderful project?"

  "Why, sir, his grace the Duke. That is why I am here. For I know that princes like to play with clever toys. "

  "Indeed?"

  A blowsy lady, with a lot of fine old lace at her throat and what looked suspiciously like a venereal herpes coming into bloom on her upper lip, leaned forward for a good look at this bizarre young man. "Well then you must," she said, nodding disconcertingly under the weight of her elaborate capuchon, "cultivate my husband," and let fall an unnerving shriek of laughter. "He is second secretary to the Bohemian ambassador, you know."

  Johannes bobbed his head in what he felt would pass for a bow in this exalted company. "I should be most honoured to meet your husband, " and, for a final flourish, "madame. "

  The lady beamed, and extended a hand palm upward across the table, offering him, as if it were a dish of delicacies, the florid personage in the periwig, who looked down on him and suddenly showed, like a seal of office, a mouthful of gold teeth.

  "Duke Frederick, young sir," he said, "let me assure you, is careful with his money."

  They all laughed, as at a familiar joke, and returned to their plates. A young soldier with a moustache, dismembering a piece of chicken, eyed him thoughtfully. "Seven different kinds of beverage, you say?"

  Johannes ignored the martial manner.

  "Seven, yes, " he said: "aqua vitae from the sun, brandy from Mercury, Venus mead, and water from the moon," busily ticking them of
f on his fingers, "Mars a vermouth, Jupiter a white wine, and from Saturn-" he tittered "-from Saturn will come only a bad old wine or beer, so that those ignorant of astronomy may be exposed to ridicule. "

  "How?" The chicken leg came asunder with a thwack. Kepler's answer was a smug smile. Tellus, the Duke's chief gardener, a jolly fat fellow with a smooth bald skull whose presence at this travellers' table was the result of a recent upheaval in protocol, laughed and said: "Caught, caught!" and the soldier reddened. He had oily brown curls that fell to the collar of his velvet surcoat. A bird-like person stuck his head on its stalk of neck from behind the shoulder of Kepler's neighbour and quacked: "O but, you mean to say, do you, do I understand you, that we are not to be as it were, not to be told your wonderful, ah, theory? Eh?" He laughed and laughed, mercurial and mad, waving his little hands.

  "I intend, " Johannes confided, "to recommend secrecy to the Duke. Each of the different parts of the cup shall be made by different silversmiths, and assembled later, ensuring that my inventum is not revealed before the proper time."

  "Your what?" his neighbour grunted, turning abruptly, a swarthy saturnine fellow with a peasant's head-Johannes later learned he was a baron-who until now had sat as if deaf, consuming indiscriminately plate after plate of food.

  "Latin," the periwig said shortly. "He means invention," and bent on Kepler a look of inordinately stern rebuke.

  "I mean, yes, invention…" Johannes said meekly. All at once he was filled with misgiving. The table and these people, and the hall behind him with its jumbled hierarchy of other tables, the scurrying servants and the uproar of the crowd at feed, all of it was suddenly a manifestation of irremediable disorder. His heart sank. A breezy request for an audience with the Duke, dashed off on the day he arrived at court, had not been replied to; now, fully a week later, the icy blast of that silence struck him for the first time. How could he have been such a fool, and entertain such high hopes?

  He packed up his designs for the cosmic cup and prepared to depart for Graz immediately. Mästlin, however, calling up a last reserve of patience, held him back, urging him to draft another, more carefully considered plea. Preening, he allowed himself to be convinced. His second letter came back with eerie promptness that same evening, bearing in the margin in a broad childish hand a note inviting him to make a model of his cup, and when we see it and decide that it is worth being made in silver, the means shall not want. Mästlin squeezed his arm, and he, beside himself, could only smile for bliss and breathe: "We…!"

  It took him a week to build the model, sitting on the cold floor of his room at the top of a windy turret with scissors and paste and strips of coloured paper. It was a pretty thing, he thought, with the planets marked in red upon sky-blue orbits. He placed it lovingly into the complex channels that would carry it to the Duke and settled down to wait. More weeks went past, a month, another and yet another. Mästlin had long since returned to Tübingen to oversee the printing of the Mysterium. Johannes became a familiar figure in the dull life of the court, another of those poor demented supplicants who wandered like a belt of satellites around the invisible presence of the Duke. Then a letter came from Mästlin: Frederick had requested his expert opinion in the matter. An audience was granted. Kepler was indignant: expert opinion indeed!

  He was received in a vast and splendid hall. The fireplace of Italian marble was taller than he. A gauze of pale light flowed down from enormous windows. On the ceiling, itself a pendant miracle of plaster garlands and moulded heads, an oval painting depicted a vertiginous scene of angels ascending about an angry bearded god enthroned on dark air. The room was crowded, the milling courtiers at once aimless and intent, as if performing an intricate dance the pattern of which could be perceived only from above. A flunkey touched Kepler's elbow, he turned, and a delicate little man stepped up to him and said:

  "You are Repleus?"

  "No, yes, I-"

  "Quite so. We have studied your model of the world," smiling tenderly; "it makes no sense."

  Duke Frederick was marvellously got up in a cloth-of-gold tunic and velvet breeches. Jewels glittered on his tiny hands. He had close-cut grey curls like many small springs and on his chin a little horn of hair. He was smooth, soft, andjohannes thought of the sweet waxen flesh of a chestnut nestled snug within the lustrous cranium of its shell. He perceived the measure of the courtiers' saraband, for here was the centre of it. He began to babble an explanation of the geometry of his world system, but the Duke lifted a hand. "All that is very correct and interesting, no doubt, but wherein lies the significance in general?"

  The paper model stood upon a lacquered table. Two of the orbits had come unstuck. Kepler suspected a ducal finger had been dabbling in its innards.

  "There are, sir," he said, "only five regular perfect solids. also called the Platonic forms. They are perfect because all their sides are identical." Rector Papius would be impressed with his patience. "Of the countless forms in the world of three dimensions, only these five figures are perfect: the tetrahedron or pyramid, bounded by four equilateral triangles, the cube, with six squares, the octohedron with eight equilaterals, the dodecahedron, bounded by twelve pentagons, and the icosahedron, which has twenty equilateral triangles. "

  "Twenty," the Duke said, nodding.

  "Yes. Î hold, as you see here illustrated, that into the five intervals between the six planets of the world, these five regular solids may be…" He was jostled. It was the mercurial madman from the trippeltisch, trying to get past him to the Duke, laughing still and pursing his lips in silent apology. Johannes got an elbow into the creature's ribs and pushed. "… may be inscribed…" and pushed "… so as to satisfy precisely, " panting, "the intervallic quantities as measured and set down by the ancients. " He smiled; that was prettily put.

  The loony was pawing him again, and now he noticed that they were all here, the venereal lady, and Meister Tellus, Kaspar the soldier, and of course the periwig, and, way out at the edge of the dance, the gloomy baron. Well, what of it? He was putting them in their places. He was suddenly intensely aware of himself, young, brilliant, and somehow wonderfully fragile. "And so, as may be seen," he said airily, "between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter I have placed the cube, between those of Jupiter and Mars the tetrahedron, Mars and earth the dodecahedron, earth and Venus the icosahedron, and, look, let me show you-" pulling the model asunder like a fruit to reveal its secret core: "between Venus and Mercury the octahedron. So!"

  The Duke frowned.

  "That is clear, yes, "he said, "what you have done, and how; but, forgive me, may we ask why?"

  "Why?" looking from the dismembered model to the little man before him; "well… well because…"

  A froth of crazy laughter bubbled at his ear.

  * * *

  Nothing came of the project. The Duke did agree that the cup might be cast, but promptly lost interest. The court silversmith was sceptical, and there were cries of dismay from the Treasury. Johannes returned disheartened to Graz. He had squandered half a year on a craving for princely favour. It was a lesson he told himself he must remember. Presently, though, the whole humiliating affair was driven from his thoughts by a far weightier concern.

  It was one of the school inspectors, the physician Oberdörfer, who first approached him, with a stealthy smile and- could it be?-a wink, and invited him to come on a certain day to the house of Herr Georg Hartmann von Stubenberg, a merchant of the town. He went, thinking he was to be asked to draw up a nativity or another ofhis famous calendars. But there was no commission. He did not even meet Herr Burghermeister Hartmann, and forever after that name was to echo in his memory like the reverberation of a past catastrophe. He loitered on a staircase for an hour, clutching a goblet of thin wine and trying to think of something to say to Dr Oberdorfer. In the wide hallway below groups of people came and went, overdressed women and fat businessmen, a bishop and attendant clerics, a herd of hip-booted horsemen from the Archduke's cavalry, clumsy as centaurs. One of Hartmann
's children was being married. From a farther room a string band sent music arching through the house like aimless flights of fine bright arrows. Johannes grew agitated. He had not been officially invited, and he was troubled by images of challenge and ejection. What could Oberdorfer want with him? The doctor, a large pasty man with pendulous jowls and exceedingly small moist eyes, vibrated with nervous anticipation, scanning the passing throng below and wheezing under his breath in tuneless counterpoint to the rapt silvery slitherings of the minstrels. At last he touched a finger to Kepler's sleeve. A stout young woman in blue was approaching the foot of the stairs. Dr Oberdorfer leered. "She is handsome, yes?"

  "Yes, yes," Johannes muttered, looking hard at a point in air, afraid that the lady below might hear; "quite, ah, handsome."

  Oberdorfer, whispering sideways like a bad ventriloquist, inclined his great trembling head until it almost rested against Kepler's ear. "Also she is rich, so I am told." The young woman paused, leaning down to exclaim over a pale pursed little boy in velveteen, who turned a stony face away and tugged furiously at his nurse's hand. Kepler all his life would remember that surly Cupid. "Her father," the doctor hissed, "her father has estates, you know, to the south. They say he has settled a goodly fortune to her name." His voice sank lower still. "And of course, she is certain to have been provided for also by her…" faltering "… her late, ah, husbands. "

  "Her…?"

  "Husbands, yes. " Dr Oberdorfer briefly shut his little eyes. "Most tragic, most tragic: she is twice a widow. And so young!"

  It dawned on Johannes what was afoot. Blushing, he ascended a step in fright. The widow threw him a fraught look. The doctor said: "Her name is Barbara Müller-née, aha, Müller. " Johannes stared at him, and he coughed. "A little joke, forgive me. Her family is Müller-Müller zu Gössendorf-which is also by coincidence the name of her latest, late, her last that is, husband…" trailing off to an unhappy hum.