Part 103 (1/2)
Brahe laid back on his pillow, and did not seem to hear.
”Heaven is an observatory, Johannes.” Eyes that had surveyed the geometry of the Heavens with unheralded precision were blind now, feverbright. ”Listen to Mars.”
”Mars, master. I know. You must trust me.”
”Mars will tell you everything.”
Yes, Kepler thought. Eventually, he will.
”G.o.d will give you a star as well,” Brahe muttered. ”And I have given you Mars.”
Johannes Kepler nodded tolerantly-but he would think of those words again, three years later, when Brunowski's excited midnight pounding on Kepler's door drew his attention to his own Stella nova, lodged like a thorn in the belly of Ophiucus.
Brahe's impeccable Mars data-unheralded in its precision-stretched decades. In 1609, Kepler would find those meticulous data indispensable in proving that Mars traveled in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. In the process, he would establish that his mentor-and his own earlier theories, and those of Copernicus-had been totally, irrevocably wrong.
Brahe had shattered the universe once. Kepler would be among the first to build a new one from the shards.
Non videri sed est.
The answer lies with Mars. It has always lain with Mars. Mars and his odd, looping motion across the sky. And we will know his answer when Kepler finishes the maths. He estimates it will take some thousand pages of equations.
There is a simple answer, under G.o.d, and the simple answer is the best. If the Earth moved under our feet, how could we not feel it? If Copernicus were correct about the perfect solids of the heavens, then neither Mars nor my comet could move in such loops and ellipses as they do.
Previous data have been flawed, but mine are better, and they will show the truth of G.o.d's design.
Kepler must carry on. Sophie and I have proven it. The course of the Heavens is a changing thing.
I call for Kepler, and I hear his voice, shuffling footsteps across the dense hand-knotted carpets, but I do not understand what he says. The young German. Not G.o.dless, but outcast by Lutheran and Catholic alike. And brilliant, and if he will only see the truth of G.o.d's will, an astronomer.
A scientist.
Does he come? I know it not. The pain is very great. Some edge of my soul knows I am fevered, knows that I lie under linen, that sweet faithful Kirstine cools my brow and drips water down my throat. I know what they are giving me for the raging fever, then: salts of mercury, and other things. My own prescription for fever and vomiting, devised with clever Sophie so many years ago.
I am Tycho Brahe. I taste my own poison. The savor of metal locks my tongue. My commoner wife, whom I have never been forgiven for loving, holds my hand in slick fingers. My argumentative student sits by my bed. I am dying.
The rest of me soars. Build on my mistakes, Johannes. Non videri sed est.
”To be rather than to seem.” The voice is a darkness in me. There is something I know.
I am dying. Dying, like a star, and revelation comes to a dying man in a flare of inspiration, like the clarity when the fever at last breaks. Die Stella nova, my Sophie's bright discovery, was a star indeed. But not a new star.
It was a dead star.
A funeral pyre. I was right: the spheres in heaven are not immutable; I was wrong: this was not a birth.
It was an explosion.
Darkness swaddles me, cold as a Knudstrup balcony in November. Like the salmon that kills itself to breed, out of the old thing comes the next thing.
It is the advancement of the world: as Brahe gives birth to Kepler, the dead star hangs s.h.i.+ning in unfathomable darkness. I am dying, but my light will illumine my student, and the next, and the one after that.
The brightest star is a dying star.
Stella mortis. Stella nova.
Non videri sed est.
Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit.
Stella mortis. Stella nova.
Nefrustra vixisse videar.
Long Cold Day Remarkably, Christian Whittaker went to bed sober one cold Wednesday night, the last day of February, in 1976. Whittaker was a big, blunt man, broken-veined, with a habitual drunk's coa.r.s.eness of skin and voice. He wasn't astoundingly fat, but he had an astounding ring of fat around his neck: jowls and a double chin that fell over his throat and collar and two thick cus.h.i.+ons on either side of his spine below his ears, like the hams on a hog. He wore a wedding ring because his hands were spongy with retained fluid; he could never take it off.
Whittaker shuffled along Maple Street, careless of melt.w.a.ter rivulets frozen across the sidewalk. Clouds snagged like handfuls of cotton wool on the mountains bounding a vast, torn, oceanic sky. White on white on gray, snowcapped peaks sweeping down to snow-frosted foothills that cupped a low, cold valley.
His gloves were old; his hands were shoved into his pockets against the cold. There was a hole in the thumb of the right-hand one. He idly rasped the hair on his leg against the skin with his thumb as he walked. His legs burned with wind through the cloth of his jeans.
He was drunk. Not very drunk, not by Whittaker's standards, but enough that the cold didn't hurt as much as it should have. He saw a woman walk past, though, headed in the other direction, her child walking in front of her. The little boy's coat was threadbare corduroy, not warm enough for the iron of the day, and his mother had cupped her blue naked fingers over his ears.
Whittaker turned his head inside its ox-collar of flesh to watch them pa.s.s. The woman ducked her chin and wouldn't meet his eyes, her shoulders hunched toward her ears with cold or fear.
Whittaker thought of his own boy, Tony. He thought of Tony s.h.i.+vering in an apartment that went unheated half the time, and he stopped on the sidewalk, his hands knotting in his pockets. Cold. It was always cold; he couldn't remember when he'd last seen a b.u.t.tercup edging between sidewalk slabs or flicked the head off a dandelion with his thumbnail. He half-thought those things were fantasies, childhood fancies carried through to adulthood-the Easter bunny, Santa Claus.
But the warmth had to come and go, didn't it? Warmth enough to melt the snow where it lay against the earth, so it slumped in curves and hollows and sent trickles of melt.w.a.ter across the sidewalks to freeze in treacherous ridges. Warmth enough to drip icicles from eaves like accelerated stop-motion stalact.i.tes.
Whittaker wished he could remember the last time he'd seen the sun. He turned around his left foot, not a smooth pivot but a stumping spiral, and stared up at the mountains, the clouds bunched and tangled around their peaks. He s.h.i.+vered in his too-small coat.
Tony would be cold. Even colder. Whittaker ducked his head as he faced into the wind; it sheared into his sinuses like gla.s.s. His boots were scuffed, almost scoured across the toes. Fractal salt stains spidered up the leather like frost-flowers, grasping at his cuffs.
A white coupe sat by the curb, engine running. Long piratical plumes of exhaust curled from the tailpipe, whipped forward by the same wind that was suffocating Whittaker. He contemplated stealing the car, driving it home, piling Jessica into the pa.s.senger seat and Tony in back, and driving until they reached someplace warm.
He could hear her voice, almost, if he listened for it. Go ahead, Chris. Do what you have to do.
He heard things sometimes. He was used to it.
He waded through plowed snow to the car and pulled his gloved hand from his pocket. It took concentration to uncurl the fist. His entire body wanted to clench, tendon by tendon, bone by bone. He reached for the handle of the pa.s.senger-side door, the door against the curb. Chrome shocked through his gloves; when he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back his fingers caught, ice cracked off the handle, and the door swung open. The plow had scruffed snow into ice, big yellow-black chunks, and the door thumped solidly when it struck the s.m.u.t-marked bank.
It was warm in the car. Cigarette-scented air puffed past him, easing the ache in his sinuses, a breeze from a summer day. Whittaker bent forward, grunting, hands on his knees and then on the seat as he shoved his bulk inside, reaching out to brush the keys with a fingertip. He crawled across the pa.s.senger seat, a yellow patchwork quilt bunching under his knee, his pants riding up his calf and allowing an arctic gust to caress gooseflesh.
He didn't fit. The dashboard shoved against his hip. The stick s.h.i.+ft jabbed his thigh. He should have gone to the driver's side. He shouldn't be here at all.
”Hey!” The first cry tattered, but the second one strong. ”Hey, you son of a b.i.t.c.h.
Hey”
Whittaker flinched, shoved backward, boot slipping on rilled ice. He bruised hip and elbow, shoulder and a.s.s, on the doorframe while wriggling loose. He didn't fall, but he slipped, twisted, wrenching his knee. Something tangled his legs; his hands clenched in fear as he clawed at it. He didn't turn, didn't glance over his shoulder to see who had shouted.
Heaving, arms pumping, whatever was in his hand flapping behind him like Batman's cape, Whittaker ran. His knees stabbed and his ankles tw.a.n.ged, every step resonating through his body like a beating. He ducked down an alley, air scalding his throat as he gasped in huge, painful breaths. He fetched up inside an empty bus shelter three blocks away, slumped against splintered wood, snot and phlegm gliding from his nose to crackle on the sidewalk. Crimson flashes haunted the black tunnel closing over his vision; his heart pounded so hard it shook his hands in time. He heard the bus coming and couldn't look up.