"I intend, " Johannes confided, "to recommend secrecy to the Duke. Each of the different parts of the cup shall be made by different silversmiths, and assembled later, ensuring that my inventum is not revealed before the proper time."
"Your what?" his neighbour grunted, turning abruptly, a swarthy saturnine fellow with a peasant's head-Johannes later learned he was a baron-who until now had sat as if deaf, consuming indiscriminately plate after plate of food.
"Latin," the periwig said shortly. "He means invention," and bent on Kepler a look of inordinately stern rebuke.
"I mean, yes, invention…" Johannes said meekly. All at once he was filled with misgiving. The table and these people, and the hall behind him with its jumbled hierarchy of other tables, the scurrying servants and the uproar of the crowd at feed, all of it was suddenly a manifestation of irremediable disorder. His heart sank. A breezy request for an audience with the Duke, dashed off on the day he arrived at court, had not been replied to; now, fully a week later, the icy blast of that silence struck him for the first time. How could he have been such a fool, and entertain such high hopes?
He packed up his designs for the cosmic cup and prepared to depart for Graz immediately. Mästlin, however, calling up a last reserve of patience, held him back, urging him to draft another, more carefully considered plea. Preening, he allowed himself to be convinced. His second letter came back with eerie promptness that same evening, bearing in the margin in a broad childish hand a note inviting him to make a model of his cup, and when we see it and decide that it is worth being made in silver, the means shall not want. Mästlin squeezed his arm, and he, beside himself, could only smile for bliss and breathe: "We…!"
It took him a week to build the model, sitting on the cold floor of his room at the top of a windy turret with scissors and paste and strips of coloured paper. It was a pretty thing, he thought, with the planets marked in red upon sky-blue orbits. He placed it lovingly into the complex channels that would carry it to the Duke and settled down to wait. More weeks went past, a month, another and yet another. Mästlin had long since returned to Tübingen to oversee the printing of the Mysterium. Johannes became a familiar figure in the dull life of the court, another of those poor demented supplicants who wandered like a belt of satellites around the invisible presence of the Duke. Then a letter came from Mästlin: Frederick had requested his expert opinion in the matter. An audience was granted. Kepler was indignant: expert opinion indeed!
He was received in a vast and splendid hall. The fireplace of Italian marble was taller than he. A gauze of pale light flowed down from enormous windows. On the ceiling, itself a pendant miracle of plaster garlands and moulded heads, an oval painting depicted a vertiginous scene of angels ascending about an angry bearded god enthroned on dark air. The room was crowded, the milling courtiers at once aimless and intent, as if performing an intricate dance the pattern of which could be perceived only from above. A flunkey touched Kepler's elbow, he turned, and a delicate little man stepped up to him and said:
"You are Repleus?"
"No, yes, I-"
"Quite so. We have studied your model of the world," smiling tenderly; "it makes no sense."
Duke Frederick was marvellously got up in a cloth-of-gold tunic and velvet breeches. Jewels glittered on his tiny hands. He had close-cut grey curls like many small springs and on his chin a little horn of hair. He was smooth, soft, andjohannes thought of the sweet waxen flesh of a chestnut nestled snug within the lustrous cranium of its shell. He perceived the measure of the courtiers' saraband, for here was the centre of it. He began to babble an explanation of the geometry of his world system, but the Duke lifted a hand. "All that is very correct and interesting, no doubt, but wherein lies the significance in general?"
The paper model stood upon a lacquered table. Two of the orbits had come unstuck. Kepler suspected a ducal finger had been dabbling in its innards.
"There are, sir," he said, "only five regular perfect solids. also called the Platonic forms. They are perfect because all their sides are identical." Rector Papius would be impressed with his patience. "Of the countless forms in the world of three dimensions, only these five figures are perfect: the tetrahedron or pyramid, bounded by four equilateral triangles, the cube, with six squares, the octohedron with eight equilaterals, the dodecahedron, bounded by twelve pentagons, and the icosahedron, which has twenty equilateral triangles. "
"Twenty," the Duke said, nodding.
"Yes. Î hold, as you see here illustrated, that into the five intervals between the six planets of the world, these five regular solids may be…" He was jostled. It was the mercurial madman from the trippeltisch, trying to get past him to the Duke, laughing still and pursing his lips in silent apology. Johannes got an elbow into the creature's ribs and pushed. "… may be inscribed…" and pushed "… so as to satisfy precisely, " panting, "the intervallic quantities as measured and set down by the ancients. " He smiled; that was prettily put.
The loony was pawing him again, and now he noticed that they were all here, the venereal lady, and Meister Tellus, Kaspar the soldier, and of course the periwig, and, way out at the edge of the dance, the gloomy baron. Well, what of it? He was putting them in their places. He was suddenly intensely aware of himself, young, brilliant, and somehow wonderfully fragile. "And so, as may be seen," he said airily, "between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter I have placed the cube, between those of Jupiter and Mars the tetrahedron, Mars and earth the dodecahedron, earth and Venus the icosahedron, and, look, let me show you-" pulling the model asunder like a fruit to reveal its secret core: "between Venus and Mercury the octahedron. So!"
The Duke frowned.
"That is clear, yes, "he said, "what you have done, and how; but, forgive me, may we ask why?"
"Why?" looking from the dismembered model to the little man before him; "well… well because…"
A froth of crazy laughter bubbled at his ear.
Nothing came of the project. The Duke did agree that the cup might be cast, but promptly lost interest. The court silversmith was sceptical, and there were cries of dismay from the Treasury. Johannes returned disheartened to Graz. He had squandered half a year on a craving for princely favour. It was a lesson he told himself he must remember. Presently, though, the whole humiliating affair was driven from his thoughts by a far weightier concern.
It was one of the school inspectors, the physician Oberdörfer, who first approached him, with a stealthy smile and- could it be?-a wink, and invited him to come on a certain day to the house of Herr Georg Hartmann von Stubenberg, a merchant of the town. He went, thinking he was to be asked to draw up a nativity or another ofhis famous calendars. But there was no commission. He did not even meet Herr Burghermeister Hartmann, and forever after that name was to echo in his memory like the reverberation of a past catastrophe. He loitered on a staircase for an hour, clutching a goblet of thin wine and trying to think of something to say to Dr Oberdorfer. In the wide hallway below groups of people came and went, overdressed women and fat businessmen, a bishop and attendant clerics, a herd of hip-booted horsemen from the Archduke's cavalry, clumsy as centaurs. One of Hartmann's children was being married. From a farther room a string band sent music arching through the house like aimless flights of fine bright arrows. Johannes grew agitated. He had not been officially invited, and he was troubled by images of challenge and ejection. What could Oberdorfer want with him? The doctor, a large pasty man with pendulous jowls and exceedingly small moist eyes, vibrated with nervous anticipation, scanning the passing throng below and wheezing under his breath in tuneless counterpoint to the rapt silvery slitherings of the minstrels. At last he touched a finger to Kepler's sleeve. A stout young woman in blue was approaching the foot of the stairs. Dr Oberdorfer leered. "She is handsome, yes?"