Kepler (22 page)

It was sixteen years since they had last met, at Tycho's funeral in Prague. Jeppe had not aged. The blinding had drained his face of everything save a kind of childlike attentive-ness, so that he seemed to be listening constantly past the immediate to something far away. He was dressed in beggar's rig. "A disguise, of course, " he said, and snickered. He was on his way to Prague. He showed no sign of surprise at their meeting.

Perhaps for him, Kepler thought, in that changeless dark, time operated differently, and sixteen years was as nothing.

They went to a tavern on the wharf. Kepler chose one where he was not known. He gave it out that he also was passing through on his way elsewhere. He was not sure why he felt the need to dissemble. Jeppe's blank face was bent upon him intently, smiling at the lie, and he blushed, as if those puckered wounds were seeing him. It was quiet in the tavern. In a corner two old men sat playing a decrepit game of dominoes. The taverner brought two mugs of ale. He looked at the dwarf with curiosity and faint disgust. Kepler's shame increased. He should have invited the creature home.

"Tengnagel is dead, you knew that?" Jeppe said. "He did you some wrong, I think."

"Yes, we had differences. I did not hear he had died. What of his wife, the Dane's daughter?"

The dwarf smiled and shook his head, savouring a secret joke. "And Mistress Christine too, dead. So many of them dead, and only you and I still here, sir. " In the tavern window suddenly there loomed the rust-red sail of a schooner plying upriver. The dominoes clattered, and one of the old men mumbled an oath.

"And what of the Italian?" Kepler asked.

It seemed for a moment the dwarf had not heard, but then he said:

"I have not seen him for many years. He took me to Rome when Master Tycho was dead. What times!" It was a garish tale. Kepler saw the pines and the pillars and the stone lions, the sunlight on marble, heard the laughter of painted whores. "He was a hard man in those days, given to duels and scuffles, a great gambler at the dice, spinning from one game to another with a sword at his side and his fool, your humble servant, sir, behind him." He reached out a hand, groping for his mug; Kepler stealthily slid it into his grasp. "You remember when we nursed him, sir, in the Dane's house? That wound never fully healed. He swore he could tell coming changes in the weather by it."

"We thought he would die," Kepler said.

The dwarf nodded. "You had regard for him, sir, you saw his worth, as I did. "

Kepler was startled. Was it true? "There was much life in him," he said. "But he is a scoundrel, for all that."

"O yes!" There was a pause, and Jeppe suddenly laughed. "I will tell you something to cheer you, all the same. You knew the Dane let Tengnagel marry his daughter because the wench was with child? But the brat was none of Tengnagel's doing. Felix had been there before him. "

"And did the Junker know?"

"Surely. But he would not care. His only interest was to share in the Brahe fortune. You above all, though, sir, should appreciate thejoke. What Tengnagel cheated you of is now inherited by the Italian's bastard."

"Yes," Kepler said, "it is a pretty notion, " and laughed, but uneasily; between the cuckold and the cuckoo there was not much to choose. He felt a familiar unease; the dwarf knew too much. "Where is the Italian now?" he asked. "In prison, or on the run again?"

Jeppe called for more ale, and left Kepler to pay for it.

"Why, both, in a manner of speaking," he said. "He could never be at peace, that one. In Rome he might have been a gentleman, for he had friends and patrons, and was favoured even by the Pope, Her Holiness Clement, as he would have it. But he drank too much and diced too much, and spoke too freely, and made enemies. In a brawl one day over the score in a game of racquets he ran a player through the throat and killed him. We fled the city, and took sail for Malta, where he thought the Knights would give us shelter. They put him in prison. He was a turbulent guest, though, as you may imagine, and after a week they were glad to let him escape. " A cat leaped with swift grace on to the counter where the taverner leaned, listening. Jeppe took a drink of ale and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "For months we wandered through the Mediterranean ports, with the Vatican 's spies on our heels. Then we heard talk of a papal pardon, and though I warned him it was a trick he would have nothing but to return to Rome. At Port' Ercole the customs men, Spanish louts, took him for a smuggler and threw him in the cells. When they let him go at last, our ship for Rome had sailed. He stood on the beach and watched it depart, the red sail, I remember it. He wept for rage and for himself, beaten at last. His baggage had been already put aboard, and he had nothing left. "

They left the tavern. A raw wind was blowing off the river, and snowflakes whirled in the air. Kepler helped the dwarf to mount up. "Farewell," Jeppe said, "we shall not meet again, I think." The pony stamped and snuffled nervously, smelling the impending storm. Jeppe smiled, the blind face puckering. "He died, you know, sir, on that beach at Port' Ercole, cursing God and all Spaniards. Old wounds had opened, and he had the fever. I held his hand at the end. He gave me a ducat to buy a Mass for him."

Kepler looked away. Sorrow welled up in him, intense and amazing as tears in sleep, and as brief. "There was much life in him," he said.

Jeppe nodded. "I think you envied him that, sir?"

"Yes," with mild surprise, "yes, I envied him that. "He gave the dwarf a florin.

"Another Mass? You are kind, sir."

"How will you live in Prague? Will you find a position?"

"O but I have a position. "

"Yes?"

"Yes," and smiled again. As he watched him ride slowly away through the snow, Kepler realised that he had not thought to ask who it was had blinded him. Maybe it was better not to know.

That night he had a dream, one of those involuntary great dark plots that now and then the sleeping mind will hatch, elaborate and enigmatic and full of inexplicable significance. Familiar figures appeared, sheepish and a little crazed, dream actors who had not had time to learn their parts. The Italian came forward, clad as a knight of the Rosy Cross. In his arm he carried a little gilded statue, which sprang alive suddenly and spoke. It had Regina 's face. A solemn and complex ceremony was being celebrated, and Kepler understood that this was the alchemical wedding of darkness and light. He woke into the dim glow of a winter dawn. The snow was falling fast outside, the vague shadow of it moved on the wall by his bed. A strange happiness reigned in his heart, as if a problem that had been with him all his life had at last been decided; a happiness so firm and fine it was not dispelled even when he remembered that, six months before, in her twenty-seventh year, in the Palatinate, of a fever of the brain, Regina had died.

The after-image of that dream never entirely faded. Its silvery glimmer was mysteriously present in every page of his book of the harmony of the world, which he finished in a sudden frenzy in the spring of 1618. The empire was charging headlong into war, but he hardly noticed. For thirty years he had been accumulating the material and the tools for this, the final synthesis. Now, like a demented fisherman, he hauled in the lines of his net from all directions. He was entranced. Times he found himself at table, or walking the city wall in the rain, with only the vaguest recollection of how he had come there. Answering a remark of Susanna's, it would dawn on him that an hour had passed since she had spoken. At night the spinning coils of his brain blundered into a sack of sleep, and in the morning struggled out again enmeshed in the same thoughts, as if there had been no interruption. He was no longer a young man, his health was poor, and sometimes he pictured himself a thing of rags and straw dangling limply from a huge bulbous head, like those puppets he had coveted as a child, strung up by their hair in the dollmaker's shop.

The
Harmonia mundi
was for him a new kind of labour. Before, he had voyaged into the unknown, and the books he brought back were fragmentary and enigmatic charts apparently unconnected with each other. Now he understood that they were not maps of the islands of an Indies, but of different stretches of the shore of one great world. The
Harmonia
was their synthesis. The net that he was drawing in became the grid-lines of a globe. It seemed to him an apt image, for were not the sphere and the circle the very bases of the laws of world harmony? Years before, he had defined harmony as that which the soul creates by perceiving how certain proportions in the world correspond to prototypes existing in the soul. The proportions everywhere abound, in music and the movements of the planets, in human and vegetable forms, in men's fortunes even, but they are all relation merely, and inexistent without the perceiving soul. How is such perception possible? Peasants and children, barbarians, animals even, feel the harmony of the tone. Therefore the perceiving must be instinct in the soul, based in a profound and essential geometry, that geometry which is derived from the simple divisioning of circles. All that he had for long held to be the case. Now he took the short step to the fusion of symbol and object. The circle is the bearer of pure harmonies, pure harmonies are innate in the soul, and so the soul and the circle are one.

Such simplicity, such beauty. These were the qualities which sustained him through exhaustion and the periodic bouts of rage before the intractability of the material. The ancients had sought to explain harmony by the mysticism of numbers, and had foundered in complexity and worthless magic. The reason why certain ratios produce a concord and others discord is not to be found in arithmetic, however, but in geometry, and specifically in the divisioning of the circle by means of the regular polygons. There was the beauty. And the simplicity was that harmonious results are produced only by those polygons which can be constructed with the compass and ruler alone, the tools of classical geometry.

Man he would show to be truly the
magnum miraculum.
The priests and the astrologers would have it that we are nothing, clay and ash and humours. But God had created the world according to the same laws of harmony which the swineherd holds in his heart. Do the planetary aspects influence us? Yes, but the Zodiac is no truly existing arc, only an image of the soul projected upon the sky. We do not suffer, but act, are not influenced but are ourselves the influences.

These were airy heights in which he moved. He grew dizzy. His eyesight was worsening, everything he looked on trembled as if under water or smoke. Sleep became a kind of helpless tumbling through black space. Alighting from some high leap of thought, he would find Susanna shaking him in alarm, as if he were a night-walker whom she had saved from the brink.

"What is it, what?" he mumbled, thinking of fire and flood, the children dead, his papers stolen. She held his face in her hands.

"Kepler, Kepler…"

Now he went all the way back to the
Mysterium,
and the theory which through the years had been his happiness and his constant hope, the incorporation of the five regular solids within the intervals of the planets. His discovery of the ellipse law in the
Astronomia noua
had dealt a blow to that idea, but a blow not heavy enough to destroy his faith. Somehow the rules of plane harmony must be made to account for the irregularities in this model of the world. The problem delighted him. The new astronomy which he had invented had destroyed the old symmetries; then he must find new and finer ones.

He began by seeking to assign to the periods of revolution of the planets the harmonic ratios dictated by musical measurement. It would not work. Next he tried to discern a harmonic series in the sizes or volumes of the planets. Again he failed. Then he sought to fit the least and greatest solar distances into a scale, examined the ratios of the extreme velocities, and of the variable periods required by each planet to rotate through a unit length of its orbit. And then at last, by the nice trick of siting the position of observation not on earth but in the sun, and from there computing the variations in angular velocities which the watcher from the sun could be expected to see, he found it. For in setting the two extremes of velocity thus observed against each other, and in combined pairs among the other planets, he derived the intervals of the complete scale, both the major and the minor keys. The heavenly motions, he could then write, are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.

He was not finished yet, not by a long way. In the
Mysterium
he had asked what is the connection between the time a planet takes to complete its orbit, and its distance from the sun, and had not found a satisfactory answer. Now the question came back more urgent than ever. Since the sun governs planetary motion, as he held to be the case, then that motion must be connected with the solar distances, or else the universe is a senseless and arbitrary structure. This was the darkest hour of his long night. For months he laboured over the problem, wielding the Tychonic observations like the enormous letter-wheels of a cabalist. When the solution came, it came, as always, through a back door of the mind, hesitating shyly, an announcing angel dazed by the immensity of its journey. One morning in the middle of May, while Europe was buckling on its sword, he felt the wing-tip touch him, and heard the mild voice say
I
am
here.

It seemed a nothing, the merest trifle. It sat on the page with no more remarkable an air than if it had been, why, anything, a footnote in Euclid, one of Galileo's anagrams, a scrap of nonsense out of a schoolboy's bad dream, and yet it was the third of his eternal laws, and the supporting bridge between the harmonic ratios and the regular solids. It said that the squares of the periods of evolution of any two planets are to each other as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. It was his triumph. It showed him that the discrepancies in distance which were left over after the insertion of the regular polygons between the orbits of the planets were not a defect of his calculations, but the necessary consequences of the dominant principle of harmony. The world, he understood at last, is an infinitely more complex and subtle construct than he or anyone else had imagined. He had listened for a tune, but here were symphonies. How mistaken he had been to seek a geometrically perfected, closed cosmos! A mere clockwork could be nothing beside the reality, which is the most harmonic possible. The regular solids are material, but harmony is form. The solids describe the raw masses, harmony prescribes the fine structure, by which the whole becomes that which it is, a perfected work of art.