Doctor Copernicus (34 page)

“I have come this day from Wittenberg, whither I was summoned in connection with certain matters of which I think you are aware. Please, Herr von Lauchen, I would ask you: no protestations
of injured innocence. That will only cause delay, and I wish, indeed I
intend
, to conclude this unfortunate business as swiftly as possible, to prevent the further spread of scandal. The
fact is, that for a long time now, we—and I include in that others whose names I need not mention!—for a long time, I say, we have been watching your behaviour with increasing dismay.
We do not expect that a man should be without blemish. However, we do expect, we
demand
, at the very least, discretion. And you, my friend, have been anything but discreet. The manner in
which you comported yourself at the university was tolerated. I use the word advisedly: you were tolerated. But, that you should go to Prussia, to Ermland, that very bastion of popery, and there
disgrace not only yourself, not only the reputation of your university, but your religion as well, that,
that
, Herr von Lauchen, we could not tolerate. We gave you every chance to mend your
ways. When you returned from Frauenburg, we granted you one of the highest honours at our disposal, and created you Dean of your faculty; yet how did you repay us—how? You fled, sir, and
abandoned behind you a living and speaking—I might say
chattering
—testimony of your pernicious indulgences! I mean, of course, the boy, whose presence fortunately was brought to
our attention by the master he deserted, and we were able to silence him.”

“Boy? What boy?” But of course I knew, I knew. Already light had begun to dawn upon me. Osiander sighed heavily. He said:

“Very well, Herr von Lauchen, play the fool, if that is what you wish. You know who I mean—and I know you know. You think to win some manner of reprieve by playing on my discretion;
you think that by pressing me to speak openly of these distasteful matters you will embarrass me, and force me to withdraw—is that it? You shall not succeed. The boy’s name is
Raphaël. He is, or was, a servant in the household of the Bishop of Kulm, Tiedemann Giese, at Löbau, where you stayed for some time, did you not, in the company of Canon Koppernigk? You
behaviour there, and your . . . your connection with this boy, was reported to us by the Bishop himself, who, I might add, was charitable enough to defend you (as did Canon Koppernigk himself!),
even while you were spreading scandal and corruption throughout his household. But what I want to ask you, for my own benefit, you understand, so that I shall know—what I want to ask you is:
why,
why
did you have this boy follow you across the length of Germany?”

“He did not follow me,” I said. “He was sent.” I saw it all, yes, yes, I saw it all.

“
Sent
?” Osiander bellowed, and his wasp’s wings buzzed and boomed in the gloom. “What do you mean, sent? The boy arrived in Wittenberg in rags, with his feet
bandaged. His horse had died under him. He said you told him to come to you, that you would put him to schooling, that you would make a gentleman of him. Sent? Can you not spare even a grain of
compassion for this unfortunate creature whom you have destroyed, whom you could not face, and fled before he came; and do you think to save yourself by this wild and evil accusation? Sent? Who
sent him, pray?”

I turned my face to the wall. “It’s no matter. You would not believe me, if I told you. I shall say only this, that I am not a sodomite, that I have been slandered and vilified, that
you have been fed a pack of lies.”

He began a kind of enraged dance then, and shrieked:

“I will not listen to this! I will not listen! Do you want me to tell you what the child said, do you want to hear, do you? These are his very words, his very words, I cannot forget them,
never; he said:
Every morning I brought him his food, and he made me wank him tho’ I cried, and begged him to release me.
A child, sir, a child! and you put such words into his mouth,
and made him do such things, and God knows what else besides. May God forgive you. Now, enough of this, enough; I have said more than I intended, more than I should. If we were in Rome no doubt you
would have been poisoned by now, and spirited away, but here in Germany we are more civilised than that. There is a post at Leipzig University, the chair of mathematics. It has been arranged that
you will fill it. You will pack your bags today, now, this instant, and be gone. You may—
silence
!—you may not protest, it is too late for that: Melanchton himself has ordered
your removal. It was he, I might add, who decided that you should be sent to Leipzig, which is no punishment at all. Had I my way, sir, you would be driven out of Germany. And now, prepare to
depart. Whatever work of yours there is unfinished here, I shall take charge of it. I am told you are engaged in the printing of an astronomical work from the pen of Canon Koppernigk? He has asked
that I should oversee the final stages of this venture. For the rest, we shall put it about that, for reasons of health, you felt you must abandon the task to my care. Now go.”

“The boy,” I said, “Raphaël: what has become of him?” I remembered him in the courtyard at Heilsberg, in his cap and cape, mounted on his black horse; just thus must
he have looked as he set out from Löbau to come to me at Wittenberg.

“He was sent back to Löbau Castle, of course,” said Osiander. “What did you expect?”

Do you know what they do to runaway servants up there in Prussia? They nail them by the ear to a pillory, and give them a knife with which to cut themselves free. I wonder what punishment worse
than that did Giese threaten the child with, to force him to follow me and tell those lies, so as to destroy me?

*

I could not at first understand why they, I mean Koppernigk and Giese, had done this to me, and I went off to exile in Leipzig thinking that surely some terrible mistake had
been made. Only later, when I saw the preface which Osiander added to the book (which, when he was finished with it, was called
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
), only then did I see how
they had used me, poor shambling clown, to smuggle the work into the heart of Lutheran Germany, to the best Lutheran printer, with the precious Lutheran letters of recommendation in my fist, and
how, when all that was done, they had simply got rid of me, to make way for Osiander and the
imprimatur
of his preface, which made the book safe from the hounds of Rome and Wittenberg alike.
They did not trust me, you see, except to do the hackwork.

*

Did I in some way, I asked myself then, merit this betrayal? For it seemed to me inconceivable that all my labours should have been rewarded thus without some terrible sin on
my part; but I could not, try as I might, find myself guilty of any sin heinous enough to bring down such judgment on my head. Throughout the book,
there is not one mention of my name.
Schönberg is mentioned, and Giese, but not I. This omission affected me strangely. It was as if, somehow, I had not existed at all during those past years. Had this been my crime, I mean some
essential lack of presence; had I not been
there
vividly enough? That may be it, for all I know. Frauenburg had been a kind of death, for death is the absence of faith, I hardly know what I
am saying, yet I feel I am making sense. Christ! I have waited patiently for this moment when I would have my revenge, and now I am ruining it. Why must I blame myself, search for some sin within
myself, all this nonsense, why? No need of that, no need—it was all his doing, his his
his
! Calm, Rheticus.

Here is my revenge. Here it is, at last.

*

The
Book of revolutions
is a pack of lies from start to finish . . . No, that will not do, it is too, too something, I don’t know. Besides,
it is not true, not entirely, and truth is the only weapon I have left with which to blast his cursed memory.

The
Book of revolutions
is an engine which destroys itself, yes yes, that’s better.

The
Book of revolutions
is an engine which destroys itself, which is to say that by the time its creator had completed it, by the time he had, so to speak, hammered home the last bolt,
the thing was in bits around him. I admit, it took me some time to recognise this fact, or at least to recognise the full significance of it. How I swore and sweated during those summer nights at
Löbau, striving to make sense of a theory wherein each succeeding conclusion or hypothesis seemed to throw doubt on those that had gone before! Where, I asked, where is the beauty and
simplicity, the celestial order so confidently promised in the
Commentariolus
, where is the pure, the pristine thing? The book which I held in my hands was a shambles, a crippled, hopeless
mishmash. But let me be specific, let me give some examples of where it went so violently wrong. It was, so Koppernigk tells us, a profound dissatisfaction with the theory of the motions of the
planets put forward by Ptolemy in the
Almagest
which first sent him in search of some new system, one that would be mathematically correct, would agree with the rules of cosmic physics, and
that would, most importantly of all, save the phenomena. O, the phenomena were saved, indeed—but at what cost! For in his calculations, not 34 epicycles were required to account for the
entire structure of the universe, as the
Commentariolus
claimed, but 48—which is 8 more at least than Ptolemy had employed! This little trick, however, is nothing, a mere somersault,
compared with the one of which I am now about to speak. You imagine that Koppernigk set the Sun at the centre of the universe, don’t you? He did not. The centre of the universe according to
his theory is not the Sun,
but the centre of Earth’s orbit
, which, as the great, the mighty, the all-explaining
Book of revolutions
admits, is situated at a point in space some
three times the Sun’s diameter distant from the Sun! All the hypotheses, all the calculations, the star tables, charts and diagrams, the entire ragbag of lies and half truths and
self-deceptions which is
De revolutionibus orbium mundi
(or
coelestium
, as I suppose I must call it now), was assembled simply in order to prove that at the centre of all there is
nothing, that the world turns upon chaos.

*

Are you stirring in your grave, Koppernigk? Are you writhing in cold clay?

*

When at last, one black night at Löbau Castle, the nature of the absurdity which he was propounding was borne in upon me, I laughed until I could laugh no more, and then I
wept. Copernicus, the greatest astronomer of his age, so they said, was a fraud whose only desire was to save appearances. I laughed, I say, and then wept, and something died within me. I do not
willingly grant him even this much, but grant it I must: that if his book possessed some power, it was the power to destroy. It destroyed my faith, in God and Man—but not in the Devil.
Lucifer sits at the centre of that book, smiling a familiar cold grey smile. You were evil, Koppernigk, and you filled the world with despair.

He knew it, of course, knew well how he had failed, and knew that I knew it. That was why he had to destroy me, he and Giese, the Devil’s disciple.

If I saw all this, his failure and so forth, even so early as the Löbau period, why then did I continue to press him so doggedly to publish? But you see, I wanted him to make known his
theory simply so that I could refute it. O, an ignoble desire, certainly; I admit, I admit it freely, that I planned to make my reputation on the ruins of his. Poor fool that I was. The world
cannot abide truth: men remember heliocentricity (they are already talking of the
Copernican revolution
!), but forget the defective theory on which the concept of heliocentricity is founded.
It is his name that is remembered and honoured, while I am forgotten, and left to rot here in this dreadful place. What was it he said to me?—
first they will laugh, and then weep, seeing
their Earth diminished, spinning upon the void
. . . He knew, he knew. They are weeping now, bowed down under the burden of despair with which he loaded them. I am weeping. I believe in
nothing. The mirror is shattered. The chaos

-Freunde
! What joy! The most extraordinary, the most extraordinary thing has happened: Otho has come! O God, I believe in You, I swear it. Forgive me for ever
doubting You! A disciple, at last! He will spread my name throughout the world. Now I can return to that great work, which I planned so long ago: the formulation of a
true
system of the
universe, based upon Ptolemaic principles. I shall not mention, I shall not even
mention
that other name. Or perhaps I shall? Perhaps I have been unjust to him? Did he not, in his own poor
stumbling way, glimpse the majestic order of the universe which wheels and wheels in mysterious ways, bringing back the past again and again, as the past has been brought back here again today?
Copernicus, Canon Nicolas,
domine praeceptor
, I forgive you: yes, even you I forgive. God, I believe: resurrection, redemption, the whole thing, I believe it all. Ah! The page shakes before
my eyes. This joy!

*

Lucius Valentine Otho has this day come to me from Wittenberg, to be my amanuensis, my disciple. He fell to his knees before me. I behaved perfectly, as a great scientist
should. I spoke to him kindly, enquiring how things stood at Wittenberg, and of his own work and ambitions. But behind my coolness and reserve, what a tangle of emotions! Of course, this joy I felt
could not be contained, and when I had enquired his age, I could not keep myself from grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattled in his head, for just at that same age
did I, so many years ago, come to Copernicus at Frauenburg. The past comes back, transfigured. Shall I also send a Raphaël to destroy Otho?—but come now, Rheticus, come clean. The fact
is, there never was a Raphaël. I know, I know, it was dreadful of me to invent all that, but I had to find something, you see, some terrible tangible thing, to represent the great wrongs done
me by Copernicus. Not a mention of my name in his book! Not a word! He would have done more for a dog. Well, I have forgiven him, and I have admitted my little joke about Raphaël and so forth.
Now a new age dawns. I am no longer the old Rheticus, banished to Cassovia and gnawing his own liver in spite and impotent rage, no: I am an altogether finer thing—I am Doctor Rheticus! I am
a believer. Lift your head, then, strange new glorious creature, incandescent angel, and gaze upon the world. It is not diminished! Even in that he failed. The sky is blue, and shall be forever
blue, and the earth shall blossom forever in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe it, I think.
Vale.