Kepler

by John Banville

  "My wife, perhaps," said Kepler, "would dress that for you?"

  The Italian brought out from a pocket of his leather jerkin a bit of grimy rag, tore it with his teeth and wrapped the wound in it. He held up the ends to be tied. Kepler leaning down could feel the heat of the festering flesh and smell its gamey stink.

  "So, they have not hanged you yet, " the Italian said. Kepler stared at him, and then, slowly lifting his eyes to the mirror, saw Jeppe standing behind him.

  "Not yet, master, no," the dwarf said, grinning. "But what of you?"

  Kepler turned to him. "He is hurt, see: this arm…"

  The Italian laughed, and leaning back against the mirror he fainted quietly into his own reflection.

  Felix was the name he went by. His histories were various. He had been a soldier against the Turks, had sailed with the Neapolitan fleet. There was not a cardinal in Rome, so he said, that he had not pimped for. He had first encountered the Dane at Leipzig two years before, when Tycho was meandering southward towards Prague. The Italian was on the run, there had been a fight over a whore and a Vatican guard had died. He was starving, and Tycho, displaying an unwonted sense of humour, had hired him to escort his household animals to Bohemia. But the joke misfired. Tycho had never forgiven him the loss of the elk. Now, alerted by Mistress Christine, he came roaring into the hall in search of the fellow to throw him out. Kepler and the dwarf, however, had already spirited him away upstairs.

  It seemed that he must die. For days he lay on a pallet in one of the big empty rooms at the top of the house, raving and cursing, mad with fever and the loss of blood. Tycho, fearing a scandal if the renegade should die in his house, summoned Michael Maier, the imperial physician, a discreet and careful man. He applied leeches and administered a purgative, and toyed wistfully with the idea of amputating the poisoned arm. The weather was hot and still, the room an oven; Maier ordered the windows sealed and draped against the unwholesome influence of fresh air. Kepler spent long hours by the sickbed, mopping the Italian's streaming forehead, or holding him by the shoulders while he puked the green dregs of his life into a copper basin, which each evening was delivered to the haru-spex Maier at the palace. And sometimes at night, working at his desk, he would suddenly lift his head and listen, fancying that he had heard a cry, or not even that, but a flexure of pain shooting like a crack across the delicate dome of candlelight wherein he sat, and he would climb through the silent house and stand for a while beside the restless figure on the bed. He experienced, in that fetid gloom, a vivid and uncanny sense of his own presence, as if he had been given back for a brief moment a dimension of himself which daylight and other lives would not allow him. Often the dwarf was there before him, squatting on the floor with not a sound save the rapid unmistakable beat of his breathing. They did not speak, but bided together, like attendants at the shrine of a demented oracle.

  Young Tyge came up one morning, sidled round the door with his offal-eating grin, the tip of a pink tongue showing. "Well, here's a merry trio. " He sauntered to the bed and peered down at the Italian tangled in the sheets. "Not dead yet?"

  "He is sleeping, young master," said Jeppe.

  Tyge coughed. "By God, he stinks." He moved to the window, and twitching open the drapes looked out upon the great blue day. The birds were singing in the palace grounds. Tyge turned, laughing softly.

  "Well, doctor," he said, "what is your prognosis?"

  "The poison has spread from the arm," Kepler answered, shrugging. He wished the fellow would go away. "He may not live."

  "You know the saying: those who live by the sword…" The rest was smothered by a guffaw. "Ah me, how cruel is life, " putting a hand to his heart. "Look at it, dying like a dog in a foreign land! "He turned to the dwarf. "Tell me, monster, is it not enough to make even you weep?"

  Jeppe smiled. "You are a wit, master. "

  Tyge looked at him. "Yes, I am." He turned away sulkily and considered the sick man again. "I met him in Rome once, you know. He was a great whoremaster there. Although they say he prefers boys, himself. But then the Italians all are that way." He glanced at Kepler. "You would be somewhat too ripe for him, I think; perhaps the frog here would be more to his taste." He went out, but paused in the doorway. "My father, by the way, wants him well, so he may have the pleasure of kicking him down the Hradcany. You are a fine pair of little nurses. Look to it."

  He recovered. One day Kepler found him leaning by the window in a dirty shirt. He would not speak, nor even turn, as if he did not dare break off this rapt attendance upon the world that he had almost lost, the hazy distance, those clouds, the light of summer feeding on his upturned face. Kepler crept away, and when he returned that evening the Italian looked at him as if he had never seen him before, and waved him aside when he attempted to change the crusted bandage on his arm. He wanted food and drink. "And where is the nano? You tell him to come, eh?"

  The days that followed were for Kepler an ashen awakening from a dream. The Italian continued to look through him with blank unrecognition. What had he expected? Not love, certainly not friendship, nothing so insipid as these. Perhaps, then, a kind of awful comradeship, by which he might gain entry to that world of action and intensity, that Italy of the spirit, of which this renegade was an envoy. Life, life, that was it! In the Italian he seemed to know at last, however vicariously, the splendid and exhilarating sordidness of real life.

  The Brahes, with that casual hypocrisy which Kepler knew so well, celebrated Felix's recovery as ifhe were the first hope of the house. He was brought down from his bare room and given a new suit, and led out, grinning, into the garden, where the family was at feed at a long table in the shade of poplar trees. The Dane sat him down at his right hand. But though the occasion started off with toasts and a slapping of backs, it began before long to ooze a drunken rancour. Tycho, ill and half drunk, brought up again the sore subject of his lost elk, but in the midst of loud vituperation fell suddenly asleep into his plate. The Italian ate like a dog, jealously and with circumspect hurry: he also knew well these capricious Danes. His arm was in a black silk sling that Tycho's daughter Elizabeth had fashioned for him. Tengnagel threatened to call him out with rapiers if he did not stay away from her, and then stood up, overturning his chair, and stalked away from the table. Felix laughed; the Junker did not know, what everyone else knew, that he had ploughed the wench already, long before, at Benatek. It was not for her that he had come back. The court at Prague was rich, presided over by a halfwit, so he had heard. Perhaps Rudolph might have use for a man of his peculiar talents? The dwarf consulted Kepler, and Kepler responded with wry amusement. "Why, I had to wait a year myself before your master would arrange an audience for me, and I have been to the palace only twice again. What influence have I?"

  "But you will have, soon,"Jeppe whispered, "sooner than you would guess. "

  Kepler said nothing, and looked away. The dwarf's prophetic powers unnerved him. Tycho Brahe suddenly woke up. "You are wanted, sir," said Jeppe softly.

  "Yes, I want you," Tycho growled, wiping bleared eyes.

  "Well, here I am."

  But Tycho only looked at him wearily, with a kind of hapless resentment. "Bah." He was unmistakably a sick man. Kepler was aware of the dwarf behind him, smiling. What was it the creature saw in their collective future? A warm gale was blowing out of the sky, and the evening sunlight had an umber tinge, as if the wind had bruised it. The poplars shook. Suddenly everything seemed to him to tremble on the brink of revelation, as if these contingencies of light and weather and human doings had stumbled upon a form of almost speech. Felix was whispering to Elizabeth Brahe, making the tips of her translucent ears glow with excitement. He was to leave, this time forever, before the year was out, no longer interested in imperial patronage, though by then Jeppe's prophecy would be fulfilled, and the astronomer would have become indeed a man ofinfluence.

  * * *

  Kepler turned again now to his work on Mars. Conditions around him had improved. Chri
stian Longberg, tired of squabbling, had gone back to Denmark, and there was no more talk of their wager. Tycho Brahe too was seldom seen. There were rumours of plague and Turkish advances, and the stars needed a frequent looking to. The Emperor Rudolph, growing ever more nervous, had moved his imperial mathematician in from Benatek, but even the Curtius house was not close enough, and the Dane was at the palace constantly. The weather was fine, days the colour of Mosel wine, enormous glassy nights. Kepler sometimes sat with Barbara in the garden, or with Regina idly roamed the Hradcany, admiring the houses of the rich and watching the imperial cavalry on parade. But by August the talk of plague had closed the great houses for the season, and even the cavalry found an excuse to be elsewhere. The Emperor decamped to his country seat at Belvedere, taking Tycho Brahe with him. The sweet sadness of summer settled on the deserted hill, and Kepler thought of how as a child, at the end of one of his frequent bouts of illness, he would venture forth on tender limbs into a town made magical by the simple absence of his schoolfellows from its streets.

  Mars suddenly yielded up a gift, when with startling ease he refuted Copernicus on oscillation, showing by means of Tycho's data that the planet's orbit intersects the sun at a fixed angle to the orbit of the earth. There were other, smaller victories. At every advance, however, he found himself confronted again by the puzzle of the apparent variation in orbital velocity. He turned to the past for guidance. Ptolemy had saved the principle of uniform speed by means of the punctutn equans, a point on the diameter of the orbit from which the velocity will appear invariable to an imaginary observer (whom it amused Kepler to imagine, a crusty old fellow, with his brass tri-quetrum and watering eye and smug, deluded certainty). Copernicus, shocked by Ptolemy's sleight of hand, had rejected the equant point as blasphemously inelegant, but yet had found nothing to put in its place except a clumsy combination of five uniform epicyclic motions superimposed one upon another. These were, all the same, clever and sophisticated manoeuvres, and saved the phenomena admirably. But had his great predecessors taken them, Kepler wondered, to represent the real state of things? The question troubled him. Was there an innate nobility, lacking in him, which set one above the merely empirical? Was his pursuit of the forms of physical reality irredeemably vulgar?

  In a tavern on Kleinseit one Saturday night he met Jeppe and the Italian. They had fallen in with a couple of kitchen-hands from the palace, a giant Serb with one eye and a low ferrety fellow from Württemberg, who claimed to have soldiered with Kepler's brother in the Hungarian campaigns. His name was Krump. The Serb rooted in his codpiece and brought out a florin to buy a round of schnapps. Someone struck up on a fiddle, and a trio of whores sang a bawdy song and danced. Krump squinted at them and spat. "Riddled with it, them are," he said, "I know them. " But the Serb was charmed, ogling the capering drabs out of his one oystrous eye and banging his fist on the table in time to thejig. Kepler ordered up another round. "Ah," said Jeppe. "Sir Mathematicus is flush tonight; has my master forgot himself and paid your wages?" "Something of that, " Kepler answered, and thought himself a gay dog. They played a hand of cards, and there was more drink. The Italian was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with a slouch hat. Kepler spotted him palming a knave. He won the hand and grinned at Kepler, and then, calling for another jig, got up and with a low bow invited the whores to dance. The candles on the tavern counter shook to the thumping of their feet. "A merry fellow, " said Jeppe, and Kepler nodded, grinning blearily. The dance became a general rout, and somehow they were suddenly outside in the lane. One of the whores fell down and lay there laughing, kicking her stout legs in the air. Kepler propped himself against the wall and watched the goatish dancers circling in a puddle of light from the tavern window, and all at once out of nowhere, out of every where, out of the fiddle music and the flickering light and the pounding of heels, the circling dance and the Italian's drunken eye, there came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle of uniform velocity is false. He found it very funny, and smiling turned aside and vomited absent-mindedly into a drain. Krump laid a hand on his shoulder. "Listen, friend, if you puke up a little ring don't spit it out, it'll be your arsehole. " Somewhere behind him the Italian laughed. False, by Jesus, yes!

  They went on to another tavern, and another. The Serb got lost along the way, and then Felix and the dwarf reeled off arm in arm with the bawds into the darkness, and Krump and the astronomer were left to stagger home up the Hradcany, falling and shouting and singing tearful songs of Württemberg their native land. In the small hours, his elusive quarters located at last, Kepler, a smouldering red eye in his mind fixed on the image of a romping whore, attempted with much shushing and chuckling to negotiate Barbara's rigid form into an exotic posture, for what precise purpose he had forgotten when he woke into a parched and anguished morning, though something of the abandoned experiment was still there in the line of her large hip and the spicy tang of her water in the earthen pot under the bed. She would not speak to him for a week.

  Later that day, when the fumes of the charnel house had dispersed in his head, he brought out and contemplated, like a penniless collector with a purloined treasure, the understanding that had been given to him that the principle of uniform orbital velocity was a false dogma. It was the only, the obvious answer to the problem of Mars, of all the planets probably, and yet for two thousand years and more it had resisted the greatest of astronomy's inquisitors. And why had this annunciation been made to him, what heaven-hurled angel had whispered in his ear? He marvelled at the process, how a part of his mind had worked away in secret and in silence while the rest of him swilled and capered and lusted after poxed whores. He experienced an unwonted humility. He must be better now, behave himself, talk to Barbara and listen to her complaints, be patient with the Dane, and say his prayers, at least until the advent of new problems.

  They were not long in coming. His rejection of uniform velocity threw everything into disarray, and he had to begin all over again. He was not discouraged. Here was real work, after all, fully worthy of him. Where before, in the Mysterium, there had been abstract speculation, was now reality itself. These were precise observations of a visible planet, coordinates fixed in time and space. They were events. It was not by chance he had been assigned the study of Mars. Christian Longberg, that jealous fool, had insisted on keeping the lunar orbit; Kepler laughed, glimpsing there too the quivering tips of angelic wings, the uplifted finger. For he knew now that Mars was the key to the secret of the workings of the world. He felt himself suspended in tensed bright air, a celestial swimmer. And seven months were becoming seventeen.

  Tycho told him he was mad: uniform velocity was a principle beyond question. Next he would be claiming that the planets do not move in perfect circles! Kepler shrugged. It was the Dane's own observations that had shown the principle to be false. No no no, and Tycho shook his great bald head, there must be some other explanation. But Kepler was puzzled. Why should he seek another answer, when he had the correct one? There stood at the hatch of his mind an invoice clerk with a pencil and slate and a bad liver, who would allow no second thoughts. Tycho Brahe turned away; what little chance there had been that this Swabian lunatic would solve Mars for him was gone now. Kepler plucked at him, wait, look-where is my compass, I have lost my compass-the thing was as good as done! Even assuming a variable rate of speed, to define the orbit he had only to determine the radius of its circle, the direction relative to the fixed stars of the axis connecting aphelion and perihelion, and the position on that axis of the sun, the orbital centre, and the punctum equans, which for the moment he would retain, as a calculating device. Of course all this could only be done by a process of trial and error, but… but wait! And Tycho swept away, muttering.

  He made seventy attempts. At the end, out of nine hundred pages of closely-written calculations, came a set of values which gave, with an error of only two minutes of arc, the correct position of
Mars according to the Tychonic readings. He clambered up out of dreadful depths and announced his success to anyone who would listen. He wrote to Longberg in Denmark, demanding settlement of their wager. The fever which he had held at bay with promises and prayers took hold of him now like a demented lover. When it had spent itself, he returned to his calculations to make a final test. It was only play, really, a kind of revelling in his triumph. He chose another handful of observations and applied them to his model. They did not fit. Arrange matters as he would, there was always an error of eight minutes of arc. He plodded away from his desk, thinking of daggers, the poison cup, a launching into empty air from a high wall of the Hradcany. And yet, in a secret recess of his heart, a crazy happiness was stirring at the prospect of throwing away all he had done so far and starting over again. It was the joy of the zealot* in his cell, the scourge clasped in his hand. And seventeen months were to become seven years before the thing was done.

  His overloaded brain began to throw off sparks of surplus energy, and he conceived all kinds of quaint ingenious enterprises. He developed a method of measuring the volume of wine casks by conic section. The keeper of the Emperor's cellars was charmed. He tested his own eyesight and made for himself an elaborate pair of spectacles from lenses ground in Linz by his old friend Wincklemann. The prosaic miracle of water had always fascinated him; he set up water clocks, and designed a new kind of pump which impressed the imperial engineers. Others of his projects caused much hilarity among the Brahes. There was his design for an automatic floor-sweeper, worked by suction power from a double-valved bellows attached to the implement's ratcheted wheels. He consulted the scullery maids on a plan for a laundry machine, a huge tub with paddles operated by a treadle. They ran away from him, giggling. These were amusing pastimes, but at the end of the day always there was the old problem of Mars waiting for him.