A More Perfect Heaven (18 page)

RHETICUS. What will become of me?

COPERNICUS. Good as new, you’ll see.

RHETICUS. I came here in good faith …

COPERNICUS. Yes, yes. I know.

RHETICUS. And what do I find? A lunatic! A deluded old … a … a recluse! Obsessed with an insane idea.

COPERNICUS. Get hold of yourself, now.

RHETICUS. (
jumping up, stronger now
) Where are my clothes? Where’s my satchel?

COPERNICUS. You don’t need any of that now.

RHETICUS. My horoscopes are in there.

COPERNICUS. I don’t have to see your horoscope. I know how to treat your symptoms without that.

RHETICUS. You don’t understand. Where is that satchel?

COPERNICUS. Calm yourself.

ANNA. (
returning with another cup
) You must have left his things up in the tower.

COPERNICUS. They can wait there for now. Here.

RHETICUS
resists, but then weakens again, drinks the broth.

ANNA. I think we all need something to eat.

ANNA
exits.

RHETICUS. I know it by heart. I can recite the whole thing without looking at it.

COPERNICUS. What can you recite?

RHETICUS. Every house, every aspect, every conjunction and opposition. Every indicator of doom.

COPERNICUS. Don’t tell me you believe in that?

RHETICUS. It’s not as though I have a choice.

COPERNICUS. You should know better.

RHETICUS. If only I could forget what I know.

COPERNICUS. (
a little sarcastic
) Change it, then. If you don’t like what your horoscope portends, you can simply reconfigure it. Isn’t that right? Reapportion the houses, or adjust the presumed time of birth, and … make it say something else. Something better. Whatever you like.

RHETICUS. (
dead serious
) I’ve tried that. Tried all those things. It always comes out the same.

COPERNICUS. I’m sorry, Professor. I can’t help you with your horoscope.

RHETICUS. And you call yourself a mathematician?

COPERNICUS. What do you take me for? A fortune-teller?

RHETICUS. The fates of empires depend on the positions of the planets.

COPERNICUS. No, Professor. The fates of empires depend on the positions of armies on battlefields. Not the planets in the heavens. The sky does not enter into human affairs.

RHETICUS. You don’t understand.

COPERNICUS. A man’s fate is in God’s hands.

RHETICUS. Tell that to your pope! Don’t you know he brought his favorite astrologer to Rome?!

COPERNICUS. Doesn’t your Luther denounce the whole practice?

RHETICUS. I told you, he knows nothing about mathematics.

COPERNICUS. Is that all you came here for? Some new trick for casting your horoscope?

RHETICUS. Not just mine! Yours. Schöner’s. Everybody’s! Wars. Floods. Plagues. All the global predictions for the coming year. For years to come! That’s what I saw as the fruit of your labors. The long march of history. The rise of Luther. The fall of Islam. The Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ!

COPERNICUS. I give you the true order of the planets. The workings of the whole heavenly machinery, with every one of its former kinks hammered out. But all of that is useless to you, unless it provides excuses for every petty human failing.

RHETICUS. You think you can just twirl the Earth through the heavens like some … like a … like … Oh, my God. Wait a minute. If the Earth moved … then … If the Earth moved through the heavens …

COPERNICUS. It does move.

RHETICUS. If the Earth moved among the planets, then it would approach them and recede from them, and maybe even … It would! Yes! If that happened, it would magnify the effect of every planetary influence.

COPERNICUS. No.

RHETICUS. That would have to happen, as a natural consequence. An enhancement of the influence that each planet exerted on the individual …

COPERNICUS. The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

RHETICUS. How can you be sure? Have you checked for those effects?

COPERNICUS. No.

RHETICUS. Not even in your own chart? That would be so easy to do. To compare, say, Mars at opposition with Mars at solar conjunction, and then to …

COPERNICUS. No!

RHETICUS. This is better than I’d hoped. Better than I ever dreamed! Think what it means! This truly could dispel the whole fog of absurdity that hangs over your theory.

COPERNICUS. If you want to know the future, you should go slaughter a goat and examine its entrails. And leave the planets out of your predictions.

RHETICUS. I think there’s really something to it. Let’s say, just for the moment, just for argument’s sake, that the Earth … turns. How fast would it … ? It has to spin around very fast, right? For the turning to cause day and night?

COPERNICUS. It is rapid, yes.

RHETICUS. How rapid?

COPERNICUS. You do the math.

RHETICUS. All right. The circumference of the Earth is … What? Twenty thousand miles?

COPERNICUS. Twenty-four.

RHETICUS. Twenty-four thousand, right. And it has to make a full rotation every … twenty-four hours.

COPERNICUS. Not a very difficult calculation, is it?

RHETICUS. God in Heaven! A thousand miles an hour?

COPERNICUS. That’s what it must be.

RHETICUS. But that can’t be. We would feel that.

COPERNICUS. No. We don’t feel it.

RHETICUS. We don’t feel it because we don’t really turn.

COPERNICUS. We don’t feel it because we move along with it. Like riding a horse.

RHETICUS. When I ride a horse, I feel it.

COPERNICUS. On a ship, then. Sailing on a calm sea. You move along in the direction of the wind, but you don’t have any sense that you’re moving.

RHETICUS. Yes, I do. I see the shore receding. I feel the breeze in my face.

COPERNICUS. Go inside the cabin, then.

RHETICUS. (
crestfallen again
) It won’t work. It’s too … It’s … If the Earth turned as fast as you claim, there would be a gale, like the wind from God, howling and blowing against us all the time.

COPERNICUS. No, there’s no wind.

RHETICUS. That’s what I’m saying.

COPERNICUS. There’s no wind because the air turns along with the Earth.

RHETICUS. The air? Turns?

COPERNICUS. It’s all of a piece, yes. They turn together, as one. The Earth and the air. And the water, of course.

RHETICUS. We could not be moving that fast and not feel anything. It’s impossible.

COPERNICUS. (
grabbing
RHETICUS
by the shoulders to shake him
) It’s turning!

All the time, it’s turning. And that turning is what makes the Sun appear to rise …

COPERNICUS
turns
RHETICUS
by the shoulders, roughly, so he faces away (his back to
COPERNICUS
).

COPERNICUS. And set …

COPERNICUS
turns
RHETICUS
the rest of the way around, so they face each other again.

COPERNICUS. And rise again on the following day.

COPERNICUS
holds
RHETICUS
there for a moment, their faces close, then pushes him away, drops his hands, steps back.

RHETICUS. What about the other motion?

COPERNICUS. You think I don’t know it sounds crazy? Do you have any idea how long it took me to accept it myself? To go against the judgments of centuries, to claim something so … so totally at odds with common experience?

RHETICUS. Tell me about the other motion, around the Sun.

COPERNICUS. It’s the same thing. You don’t feel it. It’s part of you, like breathing.

RHETICUS. No, I mean, is it … just as fast?

COPERNICUS. Oh.

RHETICUS. Is it?

COPERNICUS. No.

RHETICUS. Good.

COPERNICUS. It’s faster.

RHETICUS. Damn!

They turn away from each other.

RHETICUS. (
turning back to
COPERNICUS) How fast does it go?

COPERNICUS. Around the Sun?

RHETICUS. Around the Sun, yes.

COPERNICUS. I don’t know.

RHETICUS. Oh, come on. Tell me.

COPERNICUS. (
turning to
RHETICUS) I really don’t know. No one knows the actual distance that the Earth would have to go to get all the way around, but it must be in the millions … It must be many millions of miles. Which means we go around the Sun at least … at least ten times faster than we spin.

RHETICUS. So, ten thousand miles per …

COPERNICUS. Maybe a hundred times faster.

RHETICUS. A hundred times a thousand miles?

COPERNICUS. Maybe.

RHETICUS. That’s where it all falls apart.

COPERNICUS. Why?

RHETICUS. Why?

COPERNICUS. Why does it make more sense for the Sun to go around the Earth? The Sun should stand as a light for all creation, unmoved, at the center of the universe. The way a king or an emperor rules from his throne. He doesn’t hurry himself about, from city to city. Once you let the Sun take his rightful place at the hearth, the Earth and the other planets arrange themselves in perfect order around it. And they take their speed from his command. That is why Mercury, the nearest to him, travels around him the fastest. And after Mercury, each successive planet takes a slower course, all the way out to Saturn, the slowest of them all.

RHETICUS. Really? They line up like that? In order of their speed?

COPERNICUS. It’s as though they draw some kind of motive force from the Sun’s light.

RHETICUS. What could it be? What kind of force?

COPERNICUS. I don’t know. I am still in the dark on that matter. But it’s there. And that’s why all their motions are interrelated, as though linked together by a golden chain. You could not alter a single one, even so much as a fraction of an inch, without upsetting all the rest.

RHETICUS. The way you talk. It’s as though you know God’s plan.

COPERNICUS. Why else would you study mathematics? If not to discover that?

Beat.

RHETICUS. And the stars?

COPERNICUS. The sphere of the stars, like the Sun, also holds still. It cannot spin around the Earth every day. It’s too big.

RHETICUS. I’m trying to see it your way. Really, I am. But if the Earth moves around the Sun … Shouldn’t we see some change in the stars?

Wouldn’t some of them look … I don’t know … closer together sometimes, or farther apart? There should be a change, from spring to fall, that people who paid attention would notice.

COPERNICUS. You would think that would happen.

RHETICUS. I don’t know what to think.

COPERNICUS. But no. You don’t see any seasonal difference. Because the stars are so much farther away than anyone has imagined. The scale of the universe is all but inconceivable. The distance to the stars is so tremendous that it dwarfs the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Compared to the distance from Saturn to the stars? The distance from the Earth to the Sun is … negligible.

RHETICUS. Negligible?

COPERNICUS. It shrinks to just a point, really.

RHETICUS. You’re making this up. It’s your own fantasy. The stars get in your way? You just wave them off to some other place.

COPERNICUS. Don’t impose any puny, human limits on Creation. As though the whole cosmos were just a crystal ball for your own little personal affairs.

RHETICUS. In the name of the Creator, then: What is the use of all that empty space between Saturn and the stars?

COPERNICUS. The use ?

RHETICUS. Yes.

COPERNICUS. What is the use of grandeur? Of splendor? Of glory? Thus vast, I tell you, is the divine handiwork of the one Almighty God!

Brief blackout in which the planetarium effect returns, spins, then disappears. End of Act I.