John Banville - Kepler

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.

He liked to work at night, savouring the silence and the candleglow and the somehow attentive darkness, and then the dawn that always surprised him with that sense of being given a glimpse of the still new and unsullied other end of things. In the Curtius house he had burrowed into a little room on the top floor where he could lock himself away. The summer passed. Early one October morning he heard a step outside his door, and peering out spied Tycho Brahe standing in the corridor, his arms folded, gazing down pensively at his large bare feet. He was in his nightshirt, with a cloak thrown over his shoulders. Behind him, by the far wall, Jeppe the dwarf was creeping. They had the air of weary and discouraged searchers after some hopelessly lost small thing. Tycho looked up at Kepler without surprise.

"Sleep, " said the Dane, "I do not sleep. "

As if at a signal, there arose in the sky outside a vehement clanging. Kepler turned an ear to it and smiled. "Bells," he said. Tycho frowned.

Kepler's room was a cramped brown box with a pallet and a stool, and a rickety table aswarm with his papers. Tycho sat down heavily, fussing at his cloak; Jeppe scuttled under the table. Rain spoke suddenly at the window: the sky was coming apart and falling on the city in undulant swathes. Kepler scratched his head and absently inspected his fingernails. He had lice again.

"You progress?" said Tycho, nodding at thejumbled papers by his elbow.

"O yes, a little."

"And you still hold to the Copernican system?"

"It is a useful basis of computation…" But that was not it. "Yes," he said grimly, "I follow Copernicus."

The Dane might not have heard. He was looking away, toward the door, where on a hook there hung a mildewed court uniform, complete with sash and feathered hat, a limp ghost of the previous householder, the late vice chancellor. Under the table Jeppe stirred, muttering. "I came to speak to you, "Tycho said. Kepler waited, but there was nothing more. He looked at the Dane's big yellow feet clinging to the floorboards like a pair of purblind animals. In his time Tycho Brahe had determined the position of a thousand stars, and had devised a system of the world more elegant than Ptolemy's. His book on the new star of 1572 had made him famous throughout Europe.

"I have made," said Kepler, picking up his pen and looking at it with a frown, "I have made a small discovery regarding orbital motion."

"That it is invariable, after all?" Tycho suddenly laughed.

"No," Kepler said. "But the radius vector of any planet, it seems, will sweep out equal areas in equal times. " He glanced at Tycho. "I regard this as a law."

"Moses Mathematicus, " said Jeppe, and sniggered.

The rain was still coming down, but the clouds to the east had developed a luminous rip. There was a sudden beating of wings at the window. Kepler's steelpen, not to be outdone by the deluge outside, deposited with a parturient squeak upon his papers a fat black blot.

"Bells," said Tycho softly.

That night he was brought home drunk from dinner at the house of Baron Rosenberg in the city, and relieved himself in the fireplace of the main hall, waking everyone with his yelling and the stench of boiled piss. He kicked the dwarf and staggered away upstairs to his bed, from which Mistress Christine, gibbering in rage, had already fled. The household was no sooner settled back to sleep than the master reared up again roaring for lights and his fool and a meal of quails' eggs and brandy. At noon next day he summoned Kepler to his bedside. "I am ill. He had a mug of ale in his hand, and the bed was strewn with pastry scraps.

"You should not drink so much, perhaps," said Kepler mildly.

"Pah. Something has burst in my gut: look at that! He pointed with grim pride to a basin of bloodied urine on the floor by Kepler's feet. "Last night at Rosenberg 's my bladder was full for three hours, I could not leave the table for fear of seeming gross. You know what these occasions are. "

"No," said Kepler, "I do not."

Tycho scowled, and took a swig of ale. He looked at Kepler keenly for a moment. "Be careful of my family, they will try to hinder you. Watch Tengnagel, he is a fool, but ambitious. Protect my poor dwarf. " He paused. "Remember me, and all I have done for you. Do not let me seem to have lived in vain.

Kepler ascended laughing to his room. All he has done for me! Barbara was there before him, poking among his things. He edged around her to the table and plunged into his papers, mumbling.

"How is he?" she said.

"Eh? Who?"

"Who!"

"O, it's nothing. Too much wine."

She was silent for a moment, standing behind him with her arms folded, nursing enormities. "How can you," she said at last, "how can you be so… so… "

He turned to stare at her. "What. "

"Have you thought, have you, what will become of us when he dies?"

"Good God, woman! He was dining with his fine friends, and drank too much as always, and was too lazy to leave his chair to pee, and injured his bladder. He will be over it by tomorrow. Permit me to know enough of doctoring to recognise mortal illness when-"

"You recognise nothing!" shrieking a fine spray of spit in his face. "Are you alive at all, with your stars and your precious theories and your laws of this and that and and and…" Fat tears sprang from her eyes, her voice broke, and she fled the room.

Tycho failed rapidly. Within the week Kepler was summoned again to his chamber. It was crowded with family and pupils and court emissaries, poised and silent like a gathering in the gloom on the fringes of a dream. Tycho was enthroned in lamplight upon his high bed. The flesh hung in folds on his shrunken face, his eyes were vague. He held Kepler's hand. "Remember me. Do not let me seem to have lived in vain." Kepler could think of nothing to say, and grinned uncontrollably, nodding, nodding. Mistress Christine plucked at the stuff of her gown, looking about her dazedly as if trying to remember something. The dwarf, blotched with tears, made to scramble on to the bed but someone held him back. Kepler noticed for the first time that Elizabeth Brahe was pregnant. Tengnagel skulked at her shoulder. There was a commotion outside the door of the chamber and Felix burst in, spitting Italian over his shoulder at someone outside. He strode to the bed and, thrusting Kepler away, took the Dane's hand in his own. But the Dane was dead.