Doctor Copernicus (36 page)

*

Where?

He had drifted down into a dreadful dark where all was silent and utterly still. He was frightened. He waited. After a long time, what seemed a long time, he saw at an immense distance a minute
something in the darkness, it could not be called light, it was barely more than nothing, the absolute minimum imaginable, and he heard afar, faintly, O, faintly, a tiny shrieking, a grain of sound
that was hardly anything in itself, that served only to define the infinite silence surrounding it. And then, it was strange, it was as if time had split somehow in two, as if the
now
and
the
not yet
were both occurring at once, for he was conscious of watching something approaching through the dark distance while yet it had arrived, a huge steely shining bird it was, soaring
on motionless outstretched great wings, terrible, O, terrible beyond words, and yet magnificent, carrying in its fearsome beak a fragment of blinding fire, and he tried to cry out, to utter the
word, but in vain, for down the long arc of its flight the creature wheeled, already upon him even as it came, and branded the burning seal upon his brow.

And then he was once again upon that darkling shore, with the sea at his back and before him the at once mysterious and familiar land. There too was the cruel god, leading him away from the sea
to where the others awaited him, the many others, the all. He could see nothing, yet he knew these things, knew also that the land into which he was descending now was at once all the lands he had
known in his life, all! all the towns and the cities, the plains and woods, Prussia and Poland and Italy, Torun, Cracow, Padua and Bologna and Ferrara. And the god also, turning upon him full his
great glazed stone face, was many in one, was Caspar Sturm, was Novara and Brudzewski, was Girolamo, was more, was his father and his mother, and their mothers and fathers, was the uncountable
millions, and was also that other, that ineluctable other. The god spoke:

Here now is that which you sought, that thing which is itself and no other. Do you acknowledge it?

No, no, it was not so! There was only darkness and disorder here, and a great clamour of countless voices crying out in laughter and pain and execration; he would know nothing of this vileness
and chaos.

Let me die!

But the god answered him:

Not yet.

Swiftly then he felt himself borne upwards, aching upwards into the world, and here was his cell, and dawnlight on the great arc of the Baltic, and it was Maytime. He was in pain, and his limbs
were dead, but for the first time in many weeks his mind was wonderfully clear. This clarity, however, was uncanny, unlike anything experienced before; he did not trust it. All round about him a
vast chill stillness reigned, as if he were poised at an immense height, in an infinity of air. Could it be he had been elevated thus only in order that he might witness desolations? For he wanted
no more of that, the struggle and the anguish. Was this true despair at last? If so, it was a singularly undistinguished thing.

He slept for a little while, but was woken again by Anna when she came up with the basin and the razor to shave him. Could she not leave him in peace, even for a moment! But then he chided
himself for his ingratitude. She had shown him great kindness during the long weeks of his illness. The shaving, the feeding, the wiping and the washing, these were her necessary rituals that held
at bay the knowledge that soon now she would be left alone. He watched her as she bustled about the couch, setting up the basin, honing the razor, painting the lather upon his sunken jaws, all the
while murmuring softly to herself, a tall, too-heavy, whey-faced woman in dusty black. Lately she had begun to yell at him, this unmoving grey effigy, as she would at a deaf mute, or an infant, not
in anger or even impatience, but with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, as if she believed she were summoning him back by this means from the dark brink. Her manner irritated him beyond endurance,
especially in the mornings, and he mouthed angry noises, and sometimes even tried to smack at her in impotent rage. Today, however, he was calm, and even managed a lop-sided smile, although she did
not seem to recognise it as such, for she only peered at him apprehensively and asked if he were in pain. Poor Anna. He stared at her in wonderment. How she had aged! From the ripe well-made woman
who had arrived at his tower twenty years before, she had without his noticing become a tremulous, agitated, faintly silly matron. Had he really had such scant regard for her that he had not even
attended the commonplace phenomenon of her aging? She had been his housekeeper, and, on three occasions, more than that, three strange, now wholly unreal encounters into which he had been led by
desperation and unbearable self-knowledge and surrender; she had thrice, then, been more, but not much more, certainly not enough to justify Dantiscus’s crass relentless hounding. Now,
however, he wondered if perhaps those three nights were due a greater significance than he had been willing to grant. Perhaps, for her, they had been enough to keep her with him. For she could have
left him. Her children were grown now. Heinrich, her son, had lately come out of the time of his apprenticeship in the cathedral bakery, and Carla was in service in the household of a burgher of
the town. They would have supported her, if she had left him. She had chosen to remain. She had endured. Was this what she signified, what she meant? He recalled green days of hers, storms in
spring and autumn moods, grievings in wintertime. He should have shown her more regard, then. Now it was too late.

“Anna.”

“Yes, Canon?”

“
Du
, Anna.”

“Yes, Herr Canon. You know that the Herr Doctor is coming today? You remember, yes? from Nuremberg?”

What was she talking about? What doctor? And then he remembered. So that was why he had been granted this final lucidity! All that, his work, the publishing and so forth, had lost all meaning.
He could remember his hopes and fears for the book, but he could no longer feel them. He had failed, yes, but what did it matter? That failure was a small thing compared to the general disaster
that was his life.

Andreas Osiander arrived in the afternoon. Anna, flustered by the coming of a person of such consequence, hurried up the stairs to announce him, stammering and wringing her hands in distress.
The Canon remembered, too late, that he had intended to send her away during the Nuremberger’s visit, for her presence under his keen disapproving nose would surely lead to all that
focaria
nonsense being started up again—not that the Canon cared any longer what Dantiscus or any of them might say or do to him, but he did not want Anna to suffer new humiliations;
no, he did not want that. She had hardly announced his name before Osiander swept roughly past her and began at once to speak in his brusque overbearing fashion. Confronted however by the sight of
the shrivelled figure on the couch he faltered in his speechifying and turned uncertainly to the woman hovering at the door.

“It is the palsy, Herr Doctor,” Anna said, bowing and bobbing, “brought on by a bleeding in the brain, they say.”

“O. I understand. Well, that will be all, thank you, mistress, you may go.”

The Canon wished her to remain, but she made a soothing sign to him and went off meekly. He strained to hear her heavy step descending the stairs, a sound that suddenly seemed to him to sum up
all the comfort that was left in the world, but Osiander had begun to boom at him again, and Anna departed in silence out of his life.

*

“I had not thought to find you brought so low, friend Koppernigk,” Osiander said, in a faintly accusing tone, as if he suspected that he had been deliberately
misled in the matter of the other’s state of health.

“I am dying, Doctor.”

“Yes. But it comes to us all in the end, and you must put yourself into God’s care. Better this way than to be taken suddenly, in the night, the soul unprepared, eh?”

He was a portly arrogant man, this Lutheran, noisy, pompous and unfeeling, full of his own opinions; the Canon had always in his heart disliked him. He began to pace the floor with stately
tread, his puffed-up pigeon’s chest an impregnable shield against all opposition, and spoke of Nuremberg, and the printing, and his unstinting efforts on behalf of the Canon’s work.
Rheticus he called
that wretched creature.
Poor, foolish Rheticus! another victim sacrificed upon the altar of decorum. The Canon sighed; he should have ignored them all, Dantiscus and Giese
and Osiander, he should have given his disciple the acknowledgment he deserved. What if he was a sodomite? That was not the worst crime imaginable, no worse, perhaps, than base ingratitude.

Osiander was poking about inside the capacious satchel slung at his side, and now he brought out a handsome leather-bound volume tooled in gold on the spine. The Canon craned for a closer look
at it, but Osiander, the dreadful fellow, seemed to have forgotten that he was in the presence of the author, who was still living, despite appearances, and instead of bringing it at once to the
couch he took the book into the windowlight, and, dampening a thumb, flipped roughly through the pages with the careless disregard of one for whom all books other than the Bible are fundamentally
worthless.

“I have altered the title,” he said absently, “as I may have informed you was my intention, substituting the word
coelestium
for
mundi
, as it seemed to me safer
to speak of the
heavens
, thereby displaying distance and detachment, rather than of the
world
, an altogether more immediate term.”

No, my friend, you did not mention that, as I recall; but it is no matter now.

“Also, of course, I have attached a preface, as we agreed. It was a wise move, I believe. As I have said to you in my various letters, the Aristotelians and theologians will easily be
placated if they are told that several hypotheses can be used to explain the same apparent motions, and that the present hypotheses are not proposed because they are in reality true, but because
they are the most convenient to calculate the apparent composite motions.” He lifted his bland face dreamily to the window, with a smug little smile of admiration at the precision and style
of his delivery. Just thus did he pose, the Canon knew, when lecturing his slack-jawed classes at Nuremberg. “For my part,” the Lutheran went on, “I have always felt about
hypotheses that they are not articles of faith, but bases of computation, so that even if they are false it does not matter, provided that they save the phenomena . . . And in the light of this
belief have I composed the preface.”

“It must not be,” the Canon said, his dull gaze turned upward toward the ceiling. Osiander stared at him.

“What?”

“It must not be: I do not wish the book to be published.”

“But . . . but it is already published, my dear sir. See, I have a copy here, printed and bound. Petreius has made an edition of one thousand, as you agreed. It is even now being
distributed.”

“It must not be, I say!”

Osiander, quite baffled, pondered a moment in silence, then came and sat down slowly on a chair beside the couch and peered at the Canon with an uncertain smile. “Are you unwell, my
friend?”

The Canon, had he been able, would have laughed.

“I am dying, man!” he cried. “Have I not told you so already? But I am not raving. I want this book suppressed. Go to Petreius, have him recall whatever volumes he has sent
out. Do you understand?
It must not be
!”

“Calm yourself, Doctor, please,” said Osiander, alarmed by the paralytic’s pent-up vehemence, the straining jaw and wild anguished stare. “Do you require assistance?
Shall I call the woman?”

“No no no, do nothing.” The Canon relaxed somewhat, and the trembling in his limbs subsided. There was a fever coming on, and a pain the like of which he had not known before was
crashing and booming in his skull. Terror extended a thin dark tentacle within him. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “Is there water? Let me drink. Thank you, you are most kind.
Ah.”

Frowning, Osiander set down the water jug. He had a look now of mingled embarrassment and curiosity: he wanted to escape from the presence of this undignified dying, yet also he wished to know
the reason for the old man’s extraordinary change of mind. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “I may return later in the day, when you are less wrought, and discuss then this matter of
your book?”

But the Canon was not listening. “Tell me, Osiander,” he said, “tell me truly, is it too late to halt publication? For I would halt it.”

“Why, Doctor?”

“You have read the book? Then you must know why. It is a failure. I failed in that which I set out to do: to discern truth, the significance of things.”

“Truth? I do not understand, Doctor. Your theory is not without flaws, I agree, but—”

“It is not the mechanics of the theory that interest me.” He closed his eyes. O burning, burning! “The project itself, the totality . . . Do you understand? A hundred thousand
words I used, charts, star tables, formulae, and yet I said nothing . . .”

He could not go on. What did it matter now, anyway? Osiander sighed.

“You should not trouble yourself thus, Doctor,” he said. “These are scruples merely, and, if more than that, then you must realise that the manner of success you
sought—or now believe that you sought!—is not to be attained. Your work, however flawed, shall be a basis for others to build upon, of this you may be assured. As to your failure to
discern the true nature of things, as you put it, I think you will agree that I have accounted for such failing in my preface. Shall you hear what I have written?”

Plainly he was proud of his work, and, a born preacher, was eager to descant it. The Canon panicked: he did not want to hear, no! but he was sinking, and could no longer speak, could only growl
and gnash his teeth in a frenzy of refusal. Osiander, however, took these efforts for a sign of pleased anticipation. He laid down the book, and, with the ghastly excruciated smile of one obliged
to deal with a cretin, rose and thrust his hands under the Canon’s armpits, and hauled him up and propped him carefully against the bank of soiled pillows as if he were setting up a target.
Then, commencing his stately pacing once more, he held the book open before him at arm’s length and began to read aloud in a booming pulpit voice.