Doctor Copernicus (6 page)

He hurried down the corridor, following the mirror’s burning gaze, and turned a corner to find no girl, only the black stooped figure of the Professor tapping his way toward him.

“Ah, you!” the old man said peevishly. “Where have you been?” He frowned. “Were there not two of you? Well, no matter.”

Nicolas launched forth at once upon the speech that for days he had been preparing. He stammered and sweated, beside himself in his eagerness to impress. Pythagoras! Plato! Nicolas Cusanus! The
names of the glorious dead rolled out of his mouth and crashed together in the narrow corridor like great solid stone spheres. He hardly knew what he was saying. He felt that he had become
entangled in the works of some dreadful yet farcical, inexorable engine. Herakleides! Aristotle! Regiomontanus! Bang! Crash! Clank! The Professor watched him carefully, as if studying a novel and
possibly snappish species of rodent.

“Ptolemy, young man—you make no mention of Ptolemy, who has after all, as is well known, resolved for us the mysteries of the universe.”

“Yes but but but
magister
, if I may say, is it not true, has it not been suggested, that there are certain, how shall I say, certain dispositions of the phenomena that nothing in
Ptolemy will explain?”

The Professor smiled a wan and wintry smile, and tapped on the oaken tiles with his stick as if searching for a flaw in the floor.

“And what,” he murmured, “might these inexplicable phenomena be?”

“O but I do not say that there are such mysteries, no no,” Nicolas answered hastily. “I am asking rather.”

This would not do, this faint-heartedness, it would not do at all. What was required now was a clear and fearless exposition of his views. But what were his views? And could they be spoken? It
was one thing to know that Ptolemy had erred, and that planetary science since his time had been a vast conspiracy aimed at saving the phenomena, but it was quite another to put that knowledge into
words, especially in the presence of a prime conspirator.

The orbit of the afternoon had brought him back to his starting point in the hall. He was confused, and growing desperate. Things were not at all as he had imagined they would be. The little man
with the feather in his cap, scourge of the Chaldeans, passed them by with a fierce look.

He could only say what was not, and not what was; he could only say: this is false, and that is false, ergo that other must be true of which as yet I can discern only the blurred outline.

“It seems to me,
magister
, that we must revise our notions of the nature of things. For thirteen hundred years astronomers have been content to follow Ptolemy without question,
like credulous women
, as Regiomontanus says, but in all that time they have not been able to discern or deduce the principal thing, namely the shape of the universe and the unchanging
symmetry of its parts.”

The Professor said: “Hum!” and flung open the door on the sunlit room and the high window. This time there was alas no green girl, only the ubiquitous trio of conspirators, each with
a hand on another’s shoulder—
Soft! See who comes
!—watching. The Professor advanced, shaking his head.

“I fail to understand you,” he growled. “The principal thing, you claim, is to, what was it? to discern the shape of the universe and its parts. I do not understand that. How
is it to be done? We are here and the universe, so to speak, is there, and between the two there is no sensible connection, surely?”

The room was high and wide, with rough white walls above half panelling, a ceiling with arched black beams and a checkered stone floor. There was a table and four severe chairs, and on the table
a burnished copper bowl brimming with rose petals. A plaster relief on one wall depicted three naked women joined hand to shoulder in a sinuous circular dance of giving, receiving and returning.
Below them on the floor a pearwood chest stood smugly shut, opposite an antique hourglass-shaped iron stove with a brass canopy. The conspirators began imperceptibly to advance. The window’s
stippled diamond panes gave on to a little courtyard and a stunted cherry tree in bloom. Suddenly Nicolas was appalled by the blank anonymity of surfaces, the sullen, somehow resentful
secretiveness of unfamiliar things whose contours have been rubbed and shaped by the action of unknown lives. Doubtless for others this room was strung with a shimmering web of exquisitely exact
significances, perhaps it was so even for these three peculiar persons edging stealthily forward; but not for Nicolas. He thought: what can we know that is not of ourselves?

“Paracelsus says,” he said, “that in the scale of things man occupies the centre, that he is the measure of all things, being the point of equilibrium between that which is
great and that which is small.”

Professor Brudzewski was staring at him.

“Paracelsus? Who is this? He is mad, surely.
God
is the measure of all things, and only
God
can comprehend the world. What you seem to suggest, young man, with your
principal thing
, smacks of blasphemy therefore.”

“Blablablasphemy?” Nicolas bleated. “Surely not. Did you yourself not say that in Ptolemy we find the solution to the mysteries of the universe?”

“That was a manner of speaking, no more.”

The door behind them opened and Andreas entered softly. Nicolas squirmed, drenched with sweat. The conspirators, without seeming to move, were yet bearing down upon him inexorably. He felt a
dismayed sense of doom, like one who hears the ice shattering behind him as he careers with slow, mad inevitability out into the frozen lake.

“But
magister
, you said—!”

“Yes yes yes yes, quite—I know what I said.” The old man glared at the floor, and gave it a whack with his stick—take
that
, you! “Listen to me: you are
confusing astronomy with philosophy, or rather that which is called philosophy today, by that Dutchman, and the Italians and their like. You are asking our science to perform tasks which it is
incapable of performing. Astronomy does not describe the universe as it is, but only as we observe it. That theory is correct, therefore, which accounts for our observations. Ptolemy’s theory
is perfectly, almost perfectly valid insofar as pure astronomy is concerned,
because it saves the phenomena.
This is all that is asked of it, and all that can be asked, in reason. It does
not discern your principal thing, for that is not to be discerned, and the astronomer who claims otherwise will be hissed off the stage!”

“Are we to be content then,” Nicolas cried, “are we to be content with mere abstractions? Columbus has proved that Ptolemy was mistaken as to the dimensions of the Earth; shall
we ignore Columbus?”

“An ignorant sailor, and a Spaniard. Pah!”

“He has
proved
it, sir—!” He lifted a hand to his burning brow; calm, he must keep calm. The room seemed full of turbulence and uproar, but it was only the tumult within
him dinning in his ears. Those three were still advancing steadily, and Andreas was at his back doing he did not wish to imagine what. The Professor swung himself on his stick in a furious circle
around the table, so stooped now that it appeared he might soon, like some fabulous serpent, clamp his teeth upon his own nether regions and begin to devour himself in his rage. Nicolas, gobbling
and clucking excitedly, pursued him at a hesitant hop.

“Proof?” the old man snapped. “Proof? A ship sails a certain distance and returns, and the captain comes ashore and agitates the air briefly with words; you call this
proof
? By what immutable standards is this a refutation of Ptolemy? You are a nominalist, young man, and you do not even know it.”

“I a nominalist—
I
? Do you not merely say the name of Ptolemy and imagine that all contrary arguments are thus refuted? No no,
magister
; I believe not in names, but in
things. I believe that the physical world is amenable to physical investigation, and if astronomers will do no more than sit in their cells counting upon their fingers then they are shirking their
responsibility!”

The Professor halted. He was pale, and his head trembled alarmingly on its frail stalk of neck, yet he sounded more puzzled than enraged when he said:

“Ptolemy’s theory saves the phenomena, I have said so already; what other responsibility should it have?”

Tell him.
Tell him.

“Knowledge,
magister
, must become perception. The only acceptable theory is that one which
explains
the phenomena, which explains . . . which . . .” He stared at the
Professor, who had begun to shake all over, while out of his pinched nostrils there came little puffs of an extraordinary harsh dry noise: he was laughing! Suddenly he turned, and pointed with his
stick and asked:

“What do you say, young fellow? Let us hear your views.”

Andreas leaned at ease by the window with his arms folded and his face lifted up to the light. A handful of rain glistened on the glass, and a breeze in silence shook the blossoms of the cherry
tree. The unutterable beauty of the world pierced Nicolas’s sinking heart. His brother pondered a moment, and then with the faintest of smiles said lightly:

“I say,
magister
, that we must hold fast to sanity and Aristotle.”

It meant nothing, of course, but it sounded well; O yes, it sounded well. Professor Brudzewski nodded his approval.

“Ah yes,” he murmured. “Just so.” He turned again to Nicolas. “I think you have been too much influenced by our latterday upstarts, who imagine that they can
unravel the intricacies of God’s all-good creation. You spoke of Regiomontanus: I studied under that great man, and I can assure you that he would have scorned these wild notions you have put
forth today. You question Ptolemy? Mark this: to him who thinks that the ancients are not to be entirely trusted, the gates of our science are certainly closed. He will lie before those gates and
spin the dreams of the deranged about the motion of the eighth sphere, and he will get what he deserves for believing that he can lend support to his own hallucinations by slandering the ancients.
Therefore take this young man’s sound advice, and hold fast to sanity.”

Nicolas in his dismay felt that he must be emitting a noise, a thin piercing shriek like that of chalk on slate. There was a distinct sensation of shock at the base of his spine, as if he had
sat down suddenly without looking on the spot from whence a chair had been briskly removed. The three conspirators, crowding at his shoulder, regarded him with deep sadness. They were at once
solicitous and sinister. The one with the warts kept his face turned away, unable to look full upon such folly. Andreas, laughing silently, said softly in his brother’s ear:

“
Bruder, du hast in der Scheisse getreppen
.”

And the fat conspirator giggled. Behind the screens in the hall the secret watcher waited. It was of course—of course!—the green girl. The Professor peered at her balefully, and
turning to the brothers he sighed and said:

“Gentlemen, you must forgive me my daughter. The wench is mad.”

He shook his stick at her and she retreated, harlequinned by crisscross shadows, pursued by the conspirators scurrying on tiptoe, twittering, to the stairs, where the little man in the plumed
hat waited among other, vaguer enigmas. All bowed and turned, ascended slowly into the gloom, and vanished.

Professor Brudzewski impatiently bade the brothers good day—but not before he had invited Andreas to attend his lectures. Grey rain was falling on Cracow.

“What?—spend my mornings listening to that old cockerel droning on about the planets and all that? Not likely, brother; I have better things to do.”

*

Nicolas arrived in Torun at September’s end. The house in St Anne’s Lane received him silently, solicitously, like a fellow mourner. Old Anna and the other servants
were gone now, and there was a new steward in charge, a surly fellow, one of the Bishop’s men. He followed Nicolas about the house with a watchful suspicious eye. The sunny autumn day outside
was all light and distance, and above the roofs and spires a cloud, a ship in air, sailed gravely at the wind’s pace across a sky immensely high and blue. The leaves of the linden were
turning.

“Build a fire, will you. I am cold.”

“Yes, master. His Grace your uncle gave me to understand that you would not be staying?”

“No, I shall not be staying.”

Uncle Lucas came that evening, in a black rage. He greeted Nicolas with a glare. The Frauenburg Precentor had been crass enough to die in an uneven-numbered month, when the privilege of filling
Church appointments in the See of Ermland passed by Church law from the Bishop to the Pope.

“So we may forget it, nephew: I am not loved at Rome. Ach!” He beat the air vainly with his fists. “Another week, that was all! However, we must be charitable. God rest his
soul.” He fastened his little black eyes on Nicolas. “Well, have you lost your tongue?”

“My Lord—”

“Pray, do not grovel! You took no degree at Cracow. Four years.”

“It was you that summoned me away, my Lord. I had not completed my studies.”

“Ah.” The Bishop paced about a moment, nodding rapidly, with his hands clasped behind his back. “Hmm. Yes.” He halted. “Let me give you some advice, nephew. Rid
yourself of this rebellious streak, if you wish to remain in my favour.
I will not have it
! Do you understand?” Nicolas bowed his head meekly, and the Bishop grunted and turned away,
disappointed it seemed with so easy a victory. He hoisted up his robe and thrust his backside to the fire. “Steward! Where is the whoreson? Which reminds me: I suppose your wastrel brother is
also kicking his heels in Poland waiting for me to find him a soft post? What a family, dear God! It is from the father, of course. Bad blood there. And you, wretch, look at you, cowering like a
kicked dog. You hate me, but you have not the courage to say it—O yes, it’s true, I know. Well, you will be rid of me soon enough. There will be other posts at Frauenburg. Once I have
secured you a prebend you will be off my hands, and my accounts, and after that I care not a whit what you do, I shall have fulfilled my responsibility. Take my advice and go to Italy.”