"Of course, certainly."
Rudolph frowned, annoyed not at his guest it seemed but with himself. "What was I saying? Yes: these tables which Herr Brahe wishes to draw up, you consider them a worthwhile venture?"
Kepler felt like a hamfisted juggler, diving frantically this way and that as the balls spun out of control. "They would contain, your majesty, everything that is known in our science. "
"Facts, then, you mean, figures?"
"Everything that is known."
"Yes?"
"The Tychonic tables will be the foundation of a new science of the sky. Herr Brahe is a great and diligent observer. The material he has amassed is a priceless treasure. The tables must be made, they shall be, and those who come after us will bless the name of any who had a hand in their making. "
"I see, I see, yes," and coughed. "You are an Austrian, Herr Kepler?"
"Swabia is my birthplace; but I was in Graz for some years before I-"
"Ah, Graz."
"But I was driven out. The Archduke Ferdinand-"
" Graz," Rudolph said again. "Yes, our cousin Ferdinand is diligent."
Kepler closed his eyes. His cousin, of course.
The music ceased, and a parting glass was distributed. Tycho took Kepler's arm, trying it seemed to crush it in his fist. They bowed, and backed off towards the doors that were drawing open slowly behind them. Kepler halted, frowning, and trotted forward again before the Dane could stop him, muttering under his breath. "Nines, nines of course! Your majesty, a moment. See, sire, it is because of the nines, or I mean the tens, because we count in tens, and therefore the result will always be divisible by nine. For if we computed by nines, now, it would be eight, divisible by eight that is, and so on. You see?" sketching a triumphantly gay figure eight on the air. But the Emperor Rudolph only looked at him, with a kind of sadness, and said nothing. As they went out Tycho Brahe, sucking his teeth, turned on Kepler savagely. "The wrong thing you say, always the wrong thing!"
In the lamplight at the gate a few absent-minded flakes of snow were falling. The horse's hoofs rang on the cold stones, and somewhere off to the left the watch called out. At Kepler's side the Dane snorted and struggled, trying to contain the unwieldy parcel of his rage. "Have you no sense of of of," he gasped, "no understanding of-of anything? Why, at times today I suspected that you were trying, trying to anger him."
Kepler said nothing. He did not need Tycho to tell him how badly he had fared. Yet he could not be angry at himself, for it was not he had done the damage, but that other Kepler shambling at his heels, that demented other, whose prints upon his life were the black bruises that inevitably appeared in the places whereon Johannes the Mild had impressed no more than a faint thumb-print of protest.
"Well, it is no matter, in the end," said Tycho wearily. "I convinced him, despite your clumsiness, that you should work with me in compiling the tables. I am to call them the Tabulae Rudolphinae. He believes that those who come after us will bless his name!"
"Yes?"
"And he will grant you two hundred florins annually, though God knows if you will ever see it, he is not renowned either for generosity or promptness."
On the bridge the carriage halted, and Kepler gazed for a long time into the illusory emptiness outside. What would be his future, bound to a protector in need of protecting? He thought of that woebegone king immured in perpetual check in his ice palace. Tycho elbowed him furiously in the ribs. "Have you nothing to say?"
"O-thank you." The carriage lurched forward into the darkness. "He does not like the world. "
"What?"
"The Emperor, he told me that he does not like the world. Those were his words. I thought it strange. "
"Strange? Strange? Sir, you are as mad as he."
"We are alike, yes, in ways…"
That night he fell ill. An insidious fever originated in the gall, and, bypassing the bowels, gained access to the head. Barbara forced him to take a hot bath, though he considered total immersion an unnatural and foolhardy practice. To his surprise the measure brought him temporary relief. The heat, however, constricted his bowels; he administered a strong purgative, and then bled himself. He decided, after careful investigation of his excreta, that he was one of those cases whose gall bladder has a direct opening into the stomach. This was an interesting discovery, though such people, he knew, are shortlived as a rule. The sky was catastrophic at that time. But he had so much still to do! The Emperor sent good wishes for his recovery. That decided him: he would not die. The fever abated at last. He felt like one of those neatly parcelled flies that adorn spiders' webs. Death was saving him up for a future feast.
Was there a lesson for him in this latest bout of illness? He was not living as he knew he should. His rational self told him he must learn continence of thought and speech, must practise grovelling. He set himself diligently to work at the Rudolphine Tables, arranging and transcribing endless columns of observations from Tcyho's papers. In his heart the predictability of astronomical events meant nothing to him; what did he care for navigators or calendar makers, for princes and kings? The demented dreamer in him rebelled. He remembered that vision he had glimpsed in Baron Hoffmann's garden, and was again assailed by the mysteriousness of the commonplace. Give this world's praise to the angel! He had only the vaguest notion of what he meant. He recalled too the squabbling when he had come first to Tycho, the farce of that flight from Benatek and the ignominious return. Would it be likewise with Rudolph? He wrote to Mästlin: I do not speak like I write, I do not write like I think, I do not think like I ought to think, and so everything goes on in deepest darkness. Where did these voices come from, these strange sayings? It was as if the future had found utterance in him.
III Dioptrice
Pausing in the midst of Weilderstadt's familiar streets, he looked about him in mild amaze. It was still here, the narrow houses, the stucco and the spires and the shingled roofs, that weathervane, all of it by some means still intact, unaware that his memory had long ago reduced it all to a waxwork model. The morning air was heavy with a mingled smell of bread and dung and smoke-that smell!-and everywhere a blurred clamour was trying and just failing to make an important announcement. The lindens in Klingelbrunner lane averted their sheepish gaze from the puddles of sticky buds they had shed during the night. Faces in the streets puzzled him, familiar, and yet impossibly youthful, until presently he realised that these were not his former schoolfellows,but their sons. There is the church, there the marketplace. Here is the house. There was bedlam when the carriage stopped, the children tussling, the baby squealing in Barbara's lap; it seemed to Kepler a manifestation of the speechless uproar in his heart. The street door was shut, the upstairs shutters fastened. Had the magic ofhis long absence worked here at least, bundled it all up and disappeared it? But the door was opening already, and his brother Heinrich appeared, with his awkward grin, stooping and bobbing in a paroxysm of shyness. They embraced, both of them speaking at once, and Kepler stepped back with a quick glance at the starched tips of his winged lace collar. Regina, a young woman now, had the protesting baby in her arms, and Barbara was trying to get at Susanna to give her a smack, and Susanna, nimbly escaping, knocked over little Friedrich, who cut his knee on the step and after a moment of open-mouthed silence suddenly howled, and a black dog trotting by on the street came over and began to bark at them all in furious encouragement. Heinrich laughed, showing a mouthful of yellow stumps, and waved them in. The old woman at the fire looked over her shoulder and went off at once, muttering, into the kitchen. Kepler pretended he had not seen her.