"That's right."
"You would be better off if they did not come back, the likes ofthat."
"And what do you know about it?"
"I know them, I know their sort! You-"
"Ah, be quiet. What do you know, coming here with your nose in the air. We are not good enough for you, that's what it is."
Heinrich coughed. "Now mam. Johann is only talking to you for your own good."
Kepler considered the ceiling. "These are evil times, mother. You should be careful. "
"And so should you!"
He shrugged. When he was a boy he had nursed the happy notion of them all perishing cleanly and quickly some night, in an earthquake, say, leaving him free and unburdened. Barbara was watching him, Regina also.
"We had a burning here last Michaelmas, " said Heinrich, by way of changing the subject. "By God," slapping his knee, "the old dame fairly danced when the fire got going. Didn't she, mam?"
"Who was it?" said Kepler.
"Damned old fool it was," Frau Kepler put in quickly, glaring at Heinrich. "Gave a philtre to the pastor's daughter, no less. She deserved burning, that one. "
Kepler put a hand over his eyes. "There will be more burnings."
His mother turned on him. "Aye, there will! And not only here. What about that place where you are, that Bohemia, with all those papists, eh? I've heard they burn people by the bushel over there. You should be careful." She stumped off into the kitchen. Kepler followed her. "Coming here and preaching to me," she muttered. "What do you know? I was healing the sick when you were no bigger than that child out there, cacking in your pants. And look at you now, living in the Emperor's pocket and drawing up magic squares for him. I dabble with the world, you keep your snout turned to the sky and think you're safe. Bah! You make me sick, you."
"Mother…"
"Well?"
"I worry for you, mother, that's all."
She looked at him.
All outside was immanent with a kind of stealthy knowing-ness. He stood for a while by thefountain in the marketplace. The stone gargoyles had an air of suppressed glee, spouting fatly from pursed green lips as if it were an elaborate foolery they would abandon once he turned his back. Grandfather Sebaldus used to insist that one of these stone faces had been carved in his likeness. Kepler had always believed it. Familiarity rose up all round him like a snickering ghost. What did he know? Was it possible for life to go on, his own life, without his active participation, as the body's engine continues to work while the mind sleeps? As he walked now he tried to weigh himself, squinting suspiciously at his own dimensions, looking for the telltale bulge where all that secret life might be stored. The murky emotions called forth by Regina 's betrothal were only a part of it: what other extravagances had been contracted for, and at what cost? He felt somehow betrayed and yet not displeased, like an old banker ingeniously embezzled by a beloved son. A warm waft of bread assailed him as he passed by the baker's shop; the baker, all alone, was pummelling a gigantic wad of dough. From an upstairs window a servant girl flung out an exclamation of dirty water, barely missing Kepler. He glared up, and for a moment she goggled at him, then covered her mouth with her fingers and turned laughing to someone unseen behind her in the room, the son of the house, Harry Voliger, seventeen and prodigiously pimpled, creeping toward her with trembling hands… Kepler walked on, brooding over all those years of deceptively balanced books.
He gained the common. The evening rested here, bronzed and quietly breathing, basking like an exhausted acrobat in the afterglow of marvellous exploits of light and weather. The elm tree hung intent above its own reflection in the pond, majestically listening. The children were still here. They greeted him with sullen glances, wishing not to know him: they had been having fun. Susanna slowly ambled away with her hands clasped behind her, smiling back in a kind of blissful idiocy at a file of confused and comically worried ducklings scrambling at her heels. Friedrich tottered to the water's edge carrying a mighty rock. His shoes and stockings were soaked, and he had managed to get mud on his eyebrows. The rock struck the water with a flat smack. "Look at the crown, papa, look look!-did you see it?"
"That's the king, all right," said Heinrich. He had come to fetch the children back. "Hejumps up when you throw something in, and you can see his crown with all the diamonds on it. That right, Johann? I told him that."
"I don't want to go home," the child said, working one foot lovingly into the mud and plucking it out again with a delicious sucking sound. "I want to stay here with Uncle Heinrich and my grandma. " His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "They have a
Pig-"
The surface of the pond smoothed down its ruffled silks.
Tiny translucent flies were weaving an invisible net among the reflected branches of the elm, and skimmers dashed out from the shallows on legs so delicate they did not more than dent the surface of the water. Myriad and profligate life! Kepler sat on the grass. It had been a long day, busy with small discoveries. What was he to do about Regina? And what of his mother, dabbling still in dangerous arts? What was he to do. He remembered, as if the memory might mean something, Felix the Italian dancing with his drunken whores in a back lane on Kleinseit. The great noisome burden of things nudged him, life itself tipping his elbow. He smiled, gazing up into the branches. Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?
IV Harmonice Mundi
Loretoplatz
Hradcany Hill
Prague
Ash Wednesday 1605
David Fabricius: in Friesland
Honoured friend! you may abandon your search for a new theory of Mars: it is established. Yes, my book is done, or nearly. I have spent so much pains on it that I could have died ten times. But with God's help I have held out, and I have come so far that I can be satisfied and rest assured that the new astronomy truly is born. If I do not positively rejoice, it is not due to any doubts as to the truth of my discoveries, but rather to a vision that has all at once opened before me of the profound effects of what I have wrought. My friend, our ideas of the world amp; its workings shall never be the same again. This is a withering thought, and the cause in me of a sombre amp; reflective mood, in keeping with the general on this day. I enclose my wife's recipe for Easter cake as promised.
You, a colleague in arms, will know how things stand with me. Six years I have been in the heat amp; clamour of battle, my head down, hacking at the particular; only now may I stand back to take the wider view. That I have won, I do not doubt, as I say. My concern is, what manner of victory I have achieved, and what price I amp; our science, and perhaps all men, will have to pay for it. Copernicus delayed for thirty years before publishing his majestic work, I believe because he feared the effect upon men's minds of his having removed this Earth from the centre of the world, making it merely a planet among planets; yet what I have done is, I think, more radical still, for I have transformed the very shape of things-I mean of course I have demonstrated that the conception of celestial form amp; motion, which we have held since Pythagoras, is profoundly mistaken. The announcement of this news too will be delayed, not through any Copernican bashfulness of mine, but thanks to my master the Emperor's stinginess, which leaves me unable to afford a decent printer.
My aim in the Astronomia nova is, to show that the heavenly machine is not a divine, living being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has a soul, attributes to the work the maker's glory), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a simple magnetic amp; material force, just as all the motions of the clock are caused by a simple weight. Yet, and most importantly, it is not the form or appearance of this celestial clockwork which concerns me primarily, but the reality of it. No longer satisfied, as I believe astronomy has been for milleniums, with the mathematical representation of planetary movement, I have sought to explain these movements ßom their physical causes. No one before me has ever attempted such a thing; no one has ever before framed his thoughts in this way.