John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Anna.”

“Yes, Canon?”

“ Du , Anna.”

“Yes, Herr Canon. You know that the Herr Doctor is coming today? You remember, yes? from Nuremberg?”

What was she talking about? What doctor? And then he remembered. So that was why he had been granted this final lucidity! All that, his work, the publishing and so forth, had lost all meaning. He could remember his hopes and fears for the book, but he could no longer feel them. He had failed, yes, but what did it matter? That failure was a small thing compared to the general disaster that was his life.

Andreas Osiander arrived in the afternoon. Anna, flustered by the coming of a person of such consequence, hurried up the stairs to announce him, stammering and wringing her hands in distress. The Canon remembered, too late, that he had intended to send her away during the Nuremberger’s visit, for her presence under his keen disapproving nose would surely lead to all that focaria nonsense being started up again — not that the Canon cared any longer what Dantiscus or any of them might say or do to him, but he did not want Anna to suffer new humiliations; no, he did not want that. She had hardly announced his name before Osiander swept roughly past her and began at once to speak in his brusque overbearing fashion. Confronted however by the sight of the shrivelled figure on the couch he faltered in his speechifying and turned uncertainly to the woman hovering at the door.

“It is the palsy, Herr Doctor,” Anna said, bowing and bobbing, “brought on by a bleeding in the brain, they say.”

“O. I understand. Well, that will be all, thank you, mistress, you may go.”

The Canon wished her to remain, but she made a soothing sign to him and went off meekly. He strained to hear her heavy step descending the stairs, a sound that suddenly seemed to him to sum up all the comfort that was left in the world, but Osiander had begun to boom at him again, and Anna departed in silence out of his life.

*

“I had not thought to find you brought so low, friend Koppernigk,” Osiander said, in a faintly accusing tone, as if he suspected that he had been deliberately misled in the matter of the other’s state of health.

“I am dying, Doctor.”

“Yes. But it comes to us all in the end, and you must put yourself into God’s care. Better this way than to be taken suddenly, in the night, the soul unprepared, eh?”

He was a portly arrogant man, this Lutheran, noisy, pompous and unfeeling, full of his own opinions; the Canon had always in his heart disliked him. He began to pace the floor with stately tread, his puffed-up pigeon’s chest an impregnable shield against all opposition, and spoke of Nuremberg, and the printing, and his unstinting efforts on behalf of the Canon’s work. Rheticus he called that wretched creature. Poor, foolish Rheticus! another victim sacrificed upon the altar of decorum. The Canon sighed; he should have ignored them all, Dantiscus and Giese and Osiander, he should have given his disciple the acknowledgment he deserved. What if he was a sodomite? That was not the worst crime imaginable, no worse, perhaps, than base ingratitude.

Osiander was poking about inside the capacious satchel slung at his side, and now he brought out a handsome leather-bound volume tooled in gold on the spine. The Canon craned for a closer look at it, but Osiander, the dreadful fellow, seemed to have forgotten that he was in the presence of the author, who was still living, despite appearances, and instead of bringing it at once to the couch he took the book into the windowlight, and, dampening a thumb, flipped roughly through the pages with the careless disregard of one for whom all books other than the Bible are fundamentally worthless.

“I have altered the title,” he said absently, “as I may have informed you was my intention, substituting the word coelestium for mundi , as it seemed to me safer to speak of the heavens , thereby displaying distance and detachment, rather than of the world , an altogether more immediate term.”

No, my friend, you did not mention that, as I recall; but it is no matter now.

“Also, of course, I have attached a preface, as we agreed. It was a wise move, I believe. As I have said to you in my various letters, the Aristotelians and theologians will easily be placated if they are told that several hypotheses can be used to explain the same apparent motions, and that the present hypotheses are not proposed because they are in reality true, but because they are the most convenient to calculate the apparent composite motions.” He lifted his bland face dreamily to the window, with a smug little smile of admiration at the precision and style of his delivery. Just thus did he pose, the Canon knew, when lecturing his slack-jawed classes at Nuremberg. “For my part,” the Lutheran went on, “I have always felt about hypotheses that they are not articles of faith, but bases of computation, so that even if they are false it does not matter, provided that they save the phenomena. . And in the light of this belief have I composed the preface.”

“It must not be,” the Canon said, his dull gaze turned upward toward the ceiling. Osiander stared at him.

“What?”

“It must not be: I do not wish the book to be published.”

“But. . but it is already published, my dear sir. See, I have a copy here, printed and bound. Petreius has made an edition of one thousand, as you agreed. It is even now being distributed.”

“It must not be, I say!”

Osiander, quite baffled, pondered a moment in silence, then came and sat down slowly on a chair beside the couch and peered at the Canon with an uncertain smile. “Are you unwell, my friend?”

The Canon, had he been able, would have laughed.

“I am dying, man!” he cried. “Have I not told you so already? But I am not raving. I want this book suppressed. Go to Petreius, have him recall whatever volumes he has sent out. Do you understand? It must not be !”

“Calm yourself, Doctor, please,” said Osiander, alarmed by the paralytic’s pent-up vehemence, the straining jaw and wild anguished stare. “Do you require assistance? Shall I call the woman?”

“No no no, do nothing.” The Canon relaxed somewhat, and the trembling in his limbs subsided. There was a fever coming on, and a pain the like of which he had not known before was crashing and booming in his skull. Terror extended a thin dark tentacle within him. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “Is there water? Let me drink. Thank you, you are most kind. Ah.”

Frowning, Osiander set down the water jug. He had a look now of mingled embarrassment and curiosity: he wanted to escape from the presence of this undignified dying, yet also he wished to know the reason for the old man’s extraordinary change of mind. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “I may return later in the day, when you are less wrought, and discuss then this matter of your book?”

But the Canon was not listening. “Tell me, Osiander,” he said, “tell me truly, is it too late to halt publication? For I would halt it.”

“Why, Doctor?”

“You have read the book? Then you must know why. It is a failure. I failed in that which I set out to do: to discern truth, the significance of things.”

“Truth? I do not understand, Doctor. Your theory is not without flaws, I agree, but—”

“It is not the mechanics of the theory that interest me.” He closed his eyes. O burning, burning! “The project itself, the totality. . Do you understand? A hundred thousand words I used, charts, star tables, formulae, and yet I said nothing. .”

He could not go on. What did it matter now, anyway? Osiander sighed.

“You should not trouble yourself thus, Doctor,” he said. “These are scruples merely, and, if more than that, then you must realise that the manner of success you sought — or now believe that you sought! — is not to be attained. Your work, however flawed, shall be a basis for others to build upon, of this you may be assured. As to your failure to discern the true nature of things, as you put it, I think you will agree that I have accounted for such failing in my preface. Shall you hear what I have written?”