Doctor Copernicus (14 page)

*

Nothing less than a new and radical instauration would do, if astronomy was to mean more than itself. It was this latter necessity that had obsessed him always, and now more
than ever. Astronomy was entirely sufficient unto itself: it saved the phenomena, it explained the inexistent. That was no longer enough, not for Nicolas at least. The closed system of the science
must be broken, in order that it might transcend itself and its own sterile concerns, and thus become an instrument for verifying the real rather than merely postulating the possible. He considered
this recognition, of the need to restate the basic function of cosmography, to be his first contribution of value to science; it was his manifesto, as it were, and also a vindication of his right
to speak and be heard.

A new beginning, then, a new science, one that would be objective, open-minded, above all honest, a beam of stark cold light trained unflinchingly upon the world as it is and not as men, out of
a desire for reassurance or mathematical elegance or whatever, wished it to be: that was his aim. It was to be achieved only through the formulation of a sound theory of planetary motion, he saw
that clearly now. Before, he had naturally assumed that the new methods and procedures must be devised first, that they would be the tools with which to build the theory; that, of course, was to
miss the essential point, namely, that the birth of the new science must be preceded by a radical act of creation. Out of nothing, next to nothing, disjointed bits and scraps, he would have to weld
together an explanation of the phenomena. The enormity of the problem terrified him, yet he knew that it was that problem and nothing less that he had to solve, for his intuition told him so, and
he trusted his intuition—he must, since it was all he had.

Night after night in the villa during that tempestuous spring he groaned and sweated over his calculations, while outside the storm boomed and bellowed, tormenting the world. His dazed brain
reeled, slipping and skidding in a frantic effort to marshal into some semblance of order the amorphous and apparently irreconcilable fragments of fact and speculation and fantastic dreaming. He
knew that he was on the point of breaking through, he knew it; time and time over he leapt up from his work, laughing like a madman and tearing his hair, convinced that he had found the solution,
only to sink down again a moment later, with a stricken look, having detected the flaw. He feared he would go mad, or fall ill, yet he could not rest, for if he once let go his fierce hold, the
elaborate scaffolding he had so painfully erected would fall asunder; and also, of course, should his concentration falter he would find himself sucked once more into the quag of that other
unresolved problem of Girolamo.

And then at last it came to him, sauntered up behind him, as it were, humming happily, and tapped him on the shoulder, wanting to know the cause of all the uproar. He had woken at dawn out of a
coma of exhaustion into an immediate, almost lurid wakefulness. It was as if the channels of his brain had been sluiced with an icy drench of water. Involuntarily he began to think at once, in a
curiously detached and yet wholly absorbed fashion that was, he supposed later, a unique miraculous objectivity, of the two seemingly unconnected propositions, which he had formulated long before,
in Bologna or even earlier, that were the solidest of the few building blocks he had so far laid for the foundation of his theory: that the Sun, and not Earth, is at the centre of the world, and
secondly that the world is far more vast than Ptolemy or anyone else had imagined. The wind was high. Rain beat upon the window. He rose in the dawning grey gloom and lifted aside the drapes.
Clouds were breaking to the east over a sullen waterscape. Calmly then it came, the solution, like a magnificent great slow golden bird alighting in his head with a thrumming of vast wings. It was
so simple, so ravishingly simple, that at first he did not recognise it for what it was.

He had been attacking the problem all along from the wrong direction. Perhaps his training at the hands of cautious schoolmen was to blame. No sooner had he realised the absolute necessity for a
creative leap than his instincts without his knowing had thrown up their defences against such a scandalous notion, thrusting him back into the closed system of worn-out orthodoxies. There, like a
blind fool, he had sought to arrive at a new destination by travelling the old routes, had thought to create an original theory by means of conventional calculations. Now in this dawn, how or why
he did not know, his brain, without his help or knowledge, as it were, had made that leap that he had not had the nerve to risk, and out there, in the silence and utter emptiness of the blue, had
done all that it was necessary to do, had combined those two simple but momentous propositions and identified with impeccable logic the consequences of that combining. Of course, of course. Why had
he not thought of it before? If the Sun is conceived as the centre of an immensely expanded universe, then those observed phenomena of planetary motion that had baffled astronomers for millennia
became perfectly rational and necessary. Of course! The verification of the theory, he knew, would take weeks, months, years perhaps, to complete, but that was nothing, that was mere hackwork. What
mattered was not the propositions, but the combining of them:
the act of creation.
He turned the solution this way and that, admiring it, as if he were turning in his fingers a flawless
ravishing jewel. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing.

He crawled back to bed, exhausted now. He felt like a very worn old man. The shining clarity of a moment ago was all gone. He needed sleep, days and days of sleep. However, no sooner had he laid
down than he was up again, scrabbling eagerly at the drapes. He thrust his face against the stippled glass, peering toward the east, but the clouds had gathered again, and there was to be no sun,
that day.

*

Girolamo and he said their farewells in a filthy little inn by the lakeshore; it seemed best to part on neutral ground. They could think of nothing to say, and sat in silence
uneasily over an untouched jar of wine amid the reek of piss and the rancid catty stink of spilt beer. Through a tiny grimed window above their heads they watched the thunderclouds massing over the
lake.

“
Caro Nicolo.
”

“My friend.”

But they were only words. Nicolas was impatient to be away. He was returning to Prussia; Italy had been used up. Go! he told himself, go now, and abruptly he rose, wearing his death’s-head
grin. Girolamo looked up at him with a faint smile. “Farewell then, uncle.” And as Nicolas turned, something of the past came back, and he realised that once, not long ago, there had
been nothing in the world more precious than this young man’s reserved, somehow passionately detached presence by his side. He went out quickly, into the wind and the gauzy warm rain, and
mounted up. Riding away from Incaffi was like riding away from Italy herself. He was leaving behind him a world that had begun and ended, that was complete, and immune to change. What had been, was
still, in his memory. Someday, fleeing from some extremity of anguish or of pain, his spirit would return to this bright place and find it all intact. The ghostly voices rose up at his back.
Do
thyself no harm!
they cried,
for we are all here!

II

Magister Ludi

W
aterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the
drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony
and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking,
the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water dripping at his heels?

One that would speak with you, Canon
.

No! No! Keep him hence! But he will not be denied. He drags himself into the corner where night’s gloom still clings, and there he hangs, watching. At times he laughs softly, at others
lets fall a sob. His face is hidden in his cloak, all save the eyes, but I recognise him well enough, how would I not? He is the ineffable thing. He is ineluctable. He is the world’s worst.
Let me be, can’t you!

*

Canon Koppernigk arrived at Heilsberg as night came on, bone-weary, wracked by fever, a black bundle slumped in the saddle of the starved nag that someone somewhere along the
way had tricked him into buying. He had set out from Torun that morning, and travelled without pause all day, fearful of facing, prostrate in a rat-infested inn, the gross fancies conjured up by
this sickness boiling in his blood. Now he could hardly understand that the journey was over, hardly knew where he was. It seemed to him that, borne thither on the surge and sway of waters, he had
run aground on a strange dark shore. There were stars already, but no moon, and torches smoking high up on the walls. Off to the left a fire burned, tended by still figures, some squatting wrapt in
cloaks and others with halberds leaning at watch. The river sucked and slopped, talking to itself as it ran. All this appeared disjointed and unreal. It was as if in his sickness he could apprehend
only the weird underside of things, while the real, the significant world was beyond his fevered understanding. A rat, caught in a chance reflection of firelight from the river, scuttled up the
slimed steps below the wall and vanished.

He was shaken roughly, and heard himself, as from a great distance, groan. Maximilian, his manservant, gnawing an onion, scowled up at him, mumbling.

“What? What do you say?” The servant only shrugged, and gestured toward the gate. A peasant’s cart with a broken axle straddled the drawbridge. In the half-light it had the
look of a huge malign frog. “Go on, go on,” the Canon said. “There is room enough.”

But they were forced to pass perilously close to the edge. He peered down at the glittering black water, and felt dizzy. How fast it runs! The carter was belabouring with a stick in mute fury
the impassive mule standing trapped between the shafts. Max blessed the fellow gravely, and sniggered. From this hole in the gate-tower a sentry shambled sleepily forth.

“State your business, strangers.”

Max, the good German, waxed immediately indignant, to be addressed thus loutishly in the outlandish jabber of a native Prussian, a barbarian, beneath contempt. Imperiously he announced:
“Doctor Copernicus!” and made to march on. The Prussian poked him perfunctorily in the belly with his blunt lance.

“Nicolas Koppernigk,” the Canon said hastily, “liegeman to our Lord Bishop. Let us pass now, please, good fellow, and you shall have a penny.” Max looked up at him, and
he perceived, not for the first time and yet with wonder still, the peculiar mixture of love and loathing his servant bore for him.

In the deserted courtyard his horse’s hoofs rang frostily and clear upon the flagstones. The hounds began to bay. He lifted his throbbing eyes to the pillared arches of the galleries, to
the lowering mass of the castle keep faintly slimed with starlight, and thought how like a prison the place appeared. Heilsberg was intended to be his home now; not even Prussia itself was that,
any longer.

“Max.”

“
Ja, ja
,” the servant growled, stamping off. “I know—the Bishop must not be disturbed. I know!”

Then there were lights, and voices close by in the darkness, and a decrepit half-blind old woman came and led him inside, scolding him, not unkindly, as though he were an errant child. He had
not been expected until the morrow. A fire of birchwood burned on the hearth in the great main hall, where a pallet had been laid for him. He was glad to be spared the stairs, for his limbs were
liquid. The fever was mounting again, and he trembled violently. He lay down at once and pulled his cloak tight about him. Max and the old woman began to bicker. Max was jealous of her
authority.

“Master, she says your nuncle must be summoned, with you sick and arriving unexpected.”

“No no,” the Canon groaned, “please, no.” And, in a whisper, with a graveyard laugh: “O keep him hence!”

The old woman babbled on, but he closed his eyes and she went away at last, grumbling. Max squatted beside him and began to whistle softly through his teeth.

“Max—Max I am ill.”

“Aye. I seen it coming. And I warned you. Didn’t I say we should have stopped at Allenstein for the night? But you would none of it, and now you’re sicker than a
dog.”

“Yes yes, you were right.” Max was a good cure for self-pity. “You were quite right.” He could not sleep. Even his hair seemed to pulse with pain. The sickness was a
keepsake of Italy; he smiled wryly at the thought. Long shadows pranced like crazed things upon the walls. A dog came to sniff at him, its snout fastidiously twitching, but Max growled, and the
creature pricked up its ears and loped away. Canon Koppernigk gazed into the fire. The flames sang a little song whose melody was just beyond grasping. “Max?”