John Banville - Kepler

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.