The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone

by Tony Abbott

  Lily turned to the others. “No, sir. I’m Lily and this is—”

  “Yes, Americans,” said Darrell.

  “As I say.” The man stood and bowed. “You love stairs?”

  “Stars,” said Wade. “Yes, we love stars.”

  “But we don’t have much money,” Becca added.

  He laughed a fluttery laugh. “No, no. The museo is freezing for children under seven ton!”

  That took a while. It was finally Lily who broke the silence. “Seventeen!” she said. “No, we’re all younger.”

  “As I say,” he said, and gave them a printed guide. “Forgive his translation. I did it yourself. Congratulations to visit our smell museo. But even with the smellness of us, we are flooded with, how you say, de-feces . . . ?”

  “Devices?” said Becca.

  “Sì, thems. So, get out of here. Make your house inside. Enjoy myself!”

  “Thank you very much,” said Wade.

  As they entered a high-ceilinged, paneled room, Darrell whispered, “I can no longer remember a time when that man wasn’t talking.”

  “In my head, he still is,” said Lily. “Now let’s keep our eyes open for a public computer.”

  Arranged in display cases lining the walls were a series of old globes and antique instruments. There were several simple machines made of brass—Wade remembered his father explaining that these were called sextants and were used by sailors to navigate their ships by the positions of the stars.

  “Celestial maps,” said Becca, nodding at the wall. “Like yours, Wade.”

  He glanced over a dozen variations of the Ptolemaic cosmos. Some were quite fine, but none were as beautiful as the one Uncle Henry had given him. He took a moment to check the sheath and his backpack again. The dagger and the map were both safe.

  In the middle of the room stood a wooden sky globe on which were painted the forty-eight constellations cataloged by Ptolemy in the second century. Next to the globe were several small orbs. Some had interlocking and concentric ribbons of iron or brass, each band representing the orbital path of one of the planets. Becca translated the exhibition notes and told them the orbs were called “armillary spheres.”

  “Dad has a book about them,” Wade said.

  “They’re beautiful,” Lily said.

  “But inaccurate,” Wade added, “because the bands are circular instead of elliptical, which they didn’t figure out until later.”

  “Thank you, Professor,” said Lily.

  It was the series of objects they saw next that stopped them cold.

  On a raised platform the wall was arrayed in a variety of what were called astrolabes—ancient devices to detect the distance and movement of stars. All had sliding arcs of brass or iron, and levers marked with measurements, and some were as simple as two pieces of brass mounted to each other and sitting as flat as a dinner plate.

  The larger ones, however, were complex machines—machinas—that combined both the concentric bands of the armillary spheres and a complicated arrangement of sliding levers and moving wheels connected to automatic or spring-wound clocks. They looked just this side of being motorized. These were the first items they had seen that could by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as advanced devices and reminded Wade of the Painter Hall telescope in Austin.

  “This is steampunk before they had steam,” Darrell said.

  “The sketch . . . ,” Becca whispered. She opened her bag and flipped the diary pages to the picture she had found earlier. “What if Copernicus reworked Ptolemy’s device and invented one of these machines? But a big one. One you could sit inside? Some of the ones here have twelve parts, more than twelve parts. Gears and wheels and things.”

  She turned several pages. “Listen to this again.”

  Nicolaus makes a decision.

  From the machine’s giant frame, its grand armature, he will withdraw its twelve constellated parts—without which the device is inoperable.

  Wade closed his eyes. “Constellated parts . . .”

  “Except that the diary also talks about traveling and a voyage,” Darrell said. “Astrolabes aren’t vehicles. They don’t go anywhere. They just sit there, and you make calculations from them.”

  “We might need to think out of the box,” said Lily.

  “I agree,” said Becca “Let’s keep looking for information.”

  They entered a fourth room, where a number of books and scrolls were exhibited in display cases.

  “Computers,” said Lily, heading for a bank of monitors at a long table. “I’m going to see what I can find out about Via Rice-A-Roni.” She sat herself down at the computer table and began keying furiously.

  Becca bent low over a display case and tapped the glass. “One of these is said to be the first biography of Copernicus, written only twenty years after he died. I wish I could take a look at the whole book. Maybe it says something about the journey of 1514 . . .”

  “We have a pepper bag,” said the white-haired man, who was strolling through the rooms. “Please wet yourselves here.” He spun quickly on his heels and was gone.

  Wade laughed. “He wants us to wait, but what are we going to do with a pepper bag?” But as soon as he heard the words aloud, he realized. “Paperback.”

  “If I’m right,” Becca whispered, “the biography might help me translate more of the diary.”

  The short man returned with a large paperback volume and offered it to Becca with a bow. As the museum was slowly filling with visitors, she settled at the computer table across from Lily and started to read the book and the diary side by side.

  Wade sat next to her. “I’m really glad . . .” he started. She looked up. Those green eyes, still a little sleepy.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “. . . that you can read this stuff. We’d be so lost. Without you and your brain.”

  Her eyes sparkled for a moment, then her face frowned to the text again. “Except it’s really hard, and some stuff I think I’m translating right doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. I wish your brain and my brain could read it together.”

  Seriously? “Me, too,” he said lamely, aware that Lily had just flicked her eyes at him before returning to her screen.

  Becca flipped pages back and forth in both books, her fingers acting as bookmarks in several places at once.

  “Find anything?” asked Darrell, returning from the astrolabes in the other room.

  “I don’t know,” Becca said. “I’m trying to match up dates and things, and in one part both the diary and the bio seem to talk about the same strange thing that happened when Copernicus and Hans returned from their voyage.”

  Darrell frowned. “Strange like what?”

  Becca shifted the paperback in front of her. “This biography refers to ‘l’incidente dei due dottori identici.’ The incident of the two identical doctors. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In the diary, Hans goes into Italian and writes, ‘il momento favoloso dei due Nicolaus,’ which is something like ‘the magical moment of two Nicolauses.’ Finally, Hans writes this.”

  In five days, the second Nicolaus was gone, and there was only one of him again.

  “What does that mean?” said Lily.

  Wade’s temples throbbed and he held his head as if it were going to explode. So this was it. The real problem. The thing he’d been dreading ever since he saw the modern formula in the old diary.

  “Two at the same time . . . traversable wormhole . . . I think I know what they’re trying to say, and it’s not really possible,” he said.

  Darrell cocked his head to the side. “What’s not possible? People trying to kill us?”

  “No, but look,” said Wade. “What we’re guessing is that Copernicus discovered some kind of big amazing astrolabe that could travel. Look, maybe I got the whole wormhole thing wrong, but I don’t think I did—” His brain pounded. “I mean, it all makes sense except that it doesn’t make sense, and I’m a scientist, so . . .”

  Which sounded
lamer than lame.

  Becca shook her head. “Copernicus was a scientist, too. So was Uncle Henry. So is your dad. And Kip Thorne, the wormhole guy.”

  Wade grumbled. “I know, but—”

  “Look at this,” Lily said from the computer. “It took me forever, and I tried a bunch of city maps, even old ones, but there was never a Via Rasagnole in Rome. So, okay, like I said, there’s this anagram site. I type in the letters of the whole address, using the Roman numeral, V.”

  Darrell smiled. “Rome being where they invented Roman numerals.”

  “So I type in all the letters,” she said, “and—boom!—we get a bunch of different words, most of which aren’t even real words. But that’s English. So I switch to Italian. I couldn’t make sense of anything there, either. Then I get this brilliant Becca-like idea that maybe I should switch to Latin, and the list is so much shorter—”

  They all hovered over her shoulders.

  “Wait!” said Wade, his brain tingling. “Go back up the list.”

  Lily scrolled up a few lines.

  “Stop,” he said. “ARGO . . . Argo . . .”

  “The ship in Greek mythology,” Becca said quietly. “Jason was the pilot. Lily, remember we learned the story in Mrs. Peterson’s class?”

  She glanced up. “Sure.”

  “There’s also this movie. Jason and the Argonauts,” Darrell said. “Jason fights the skeleton warriors. It’s a classic. I’m just saying.”

  “Lily, take those letters out and see what’s left,” said Becca.

  She did. “It leaves V VI ASANLE. Unscrambling those, we get . . .”

  A smaller list of words came up.

  Becca grumbled. “Maybe it’s not Latin, after all.”

  Wade practically exploded when a second familiar word appeared on the screen. “NAVIS! That’s it! Constellated parts! Holy cow—”

  He scrambled in his backpack for the star chart.

  “What’s navis, the Latin for the plural of navy?” asked Darrell.

  “No, no, it’s on here, the constellation.” Wade traced his fingers over Uncle Henry’s map. “Argo Navis is the name of one of Ptolemy’s original constellations! It represents the ship Argo. Here!”

  He showed them a cluster of stars near the bottom of the map. They were vaguely in the shape of a sailing ship.

  Darrell leaned over Lily’s shoulder. “What letters are left?”

  Only V, A, L, and E remained.

  Even as Lily entered them into the unscrambler, Wade worked the four letters over in his head and felt them shift into position as the letters of blau stern had days before.

  Shifting, shifting, click.

  “Vela,” he said, standing up straight. “Argo Navis Vela.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Wade stood over his celestial map.

  “Vela,” he said slowly, “is this smaller cluster of stars in Argo Navis. It’s kind of a triangle, kind of a rectangle. Vela is Latin for ‘sail.’ I remember Dad taught me the parts of the constellations. Vela is the sail of the ship Argo Navis. The address V, Via Rasagnole is code for this part of this constellation.”

  “So,” said Becca, “out of the whole sky, we get down to one constellation.”

  Darrell breathed in a long breath. “Wade, you said you can only see some constellations from certain places. How about this one?”

  He shook his head. “We can’t see it so well from Texas. Or even from Rome. It’s best seen south of the equator. The Southern Cross is another one only visible from the southern hemisphere. There are a bunch of them.”

  As everyone examined the map, the sunlight fell lazily across the floor, moving slowly, infinitesimally across the tiles.

  Becca stood and stared past them at the astrolabes. “Guys, I’m going to make a leap here and say that if each relic is named after a constellation, maybe it’s hidden where the constellation is best seen.”

  Darrell wagged his head from side to side. “Okay, but this is a huge world. I mean, look at the globes. Even if we say that the relic is somewhere where you can see the constellation of it, we’re still talking millions of square miles, and a lot of it is water.”

  “Which is why we have to narrow it down,” said Lily. “If we figure out who the Guardian is, maybe it’ll be obvious. We need to learn about his or her life to find out where he or she might have hidden the relic.”

  “Good idea,” Wade said. “So . . . back to the diary?”

  Becca closed her eyes for a moment, then opened the diary to halfway, then beyond. “It’s got to be after what I already read.”

  Minutes went by as she flipped over more pages, both forward and back. From the look on her face, Wade knew the words were giving her trouble.

  “Okay,” she said. “The diary says, ‘la reliquia prima,’ the first relic, “è stata presentata ad un legal man.’ It says that in English, ‘legal man.’”

  Wade bit his lip. “Legal man. Seriously. In English.”

  “Yeah,” Becca said, still reading.

  “I’m writing this down, too.” Wade copied these new words into his father’s notebook. He looked at the list of clues.

  The first will circle to the last

  The world known and unknown

  A hole in the sky

  —The first relic will be presented to a man above all men who will raise it as if it were his own child

  Darrell set his finger on the list. “Wade, one thing, if it’s not too weird. You said vela means ‘sail,’ right? Well, don’t you ‘raise’ a sail when you go sailing? The diary talks about a voyage. Maybe Copernicus’s making a pun.”

  Becca looked up from the paperback. “I like that, Darrell. It fits, right? Puns, I mean. Plus, the early sixteenth century was the age of discovery, so there were lots of sailors. Vela’s Guardian might be a sailor or a captain of a sailing ship.”

  Wade closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Out of the whole sky, one constellation. Out of one constellation, one part. If the first relic is Vela,” he said, “and it’s hidden in the southern hemisphere, which is mostly water, then Darrell, I think you’ve got something. ‘A man above all men who will raise it as if it were his own child.’ It really does point to a sailor.”

  “Then what about ‘legal man’?” said Lily. “Why say that in English unless that means something? What does a lawyer have to do with raising sails on boats and oceans and water anyway?”

  “Copernicus studied law,” said Darrell. “Dad told us that. Maybe he hung out with lawyers who liked to sail boats, and he gave the relic to one of them.”

  Wade wandered away from the rest of them. It was that too-many-heads thing again. But something else, too. With every word he read, or thought of, or heard, he couldn’t help but wonder what other words could be spelled with its letters, and even talking began to seem like code.

  He stopped at a large, flat display case. Under the glass was a map of the world in Copernicus’s time.

  The world known and unknown, the diary had said.

  Naturally, much of the map was wrong. The shapes of the continents were not the shapes they are now known to be.

  It was that thing Wade loved. Looking at charts and maps and notebooks, you could almost see how people figured things out. What were maps but pictures sketched by people trying to understand the world around them? These days, all that understanding was hidden inside computer hard drives or in wireless radio waves. If you hit the right buttons and clicked the keyboard, it all came out for you, all done. You didn’t have to do much at all.

  But this stuff. It was human and it was science. It was discovery. It was history that you could touch. Sure, it was brilliance and genius and imagination, but it was people, too.

  Nicolaus Copernicus. Hans Novak.

  On the map before him, a slender gold line was drawn across the seas, looping from what he knew was Spain, across the Atlantic Ocean to a blobby-looking New World, down the coast of South America, around its tip, and up along the western coast to the Pa
cific Ocean.

  Next to the line across the deep blue of the South Seas were tiny letters handwritten in gold ink.

  Magellan.

  His brain sparked. Constellations, ships, voyages. Letters began to shift places, combining, separating, recombining . . . click.

  He turned to the others and he spoke the name aloud. “Magellan.”

  Darrell narrowed his eyes. “Magellan? The explorer?”

  Wade followed the line from Europe to the New World to the Pacific Islands and back to Europe again. “Magellan was the first to sail around the world. Lily, key in ‘Magellan,’ please?”

  She clacked away at the keyboard. The results came up quickly. “First circumnavigation of the globe, left Spain in 1519, made it halfway, died in the Philippines in 1521.”

  “So he was around at the same time as Copernicus,” Darrell said. “But what makes you think—”

  “Lily, I meant type Magellan into the anagram site,” Wade said. ”For English language results.”

  She gave him a look, but typed in the name anyway. She scrolled slowly down the list of nonsense words, then gasped. “Wade, you are a total genius.”

  Becca leaned over the screen. “Oh man. You so are.”

  “Why’s he so great?” said Darrell, trying to squeeze in.

  Becca laughed softly. “‘Magellan.’ ‘Legal man.’ Same letters.”

  There was a hushed moment. Longer than a moment. The sun bathed the wide wooden floorboards of the museum gallery.

  Then Darrell spoke. “If no one else is going to say it, I will. People, let me be the first to announce that Magellan was the first member of the GAC, the twelve Guardians of the Astrolabe of Copernicus!”

  Lily sat back from the computer screen. “That’s it,” she said softly. “We’ve figured it out.”

  The sun was moving higher in the sky. It would soon be time to meet Dr. Kaplan at the Castel Sant’Angelo.

  Wade so wanted to tell his father everything they had discovered, but he also found he didn’t really want to leave the museum. Not yet.

  Neither, it seemed, did the others. They had discovered so much there, just the four of them. They’d been lucky, but most of what they deduced was by using their own intelligence and imagination.