[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Boy? What boy?” But of course I knew, I knew. Already light had begun to dawn upon me. Osiander sighed heavily. He said:

  “Very well, Herr von Lauchen, play the fool, if that is what you wish. You know who I mean—and I know you know. You think to win some manner of reprieve by playing on my discretion; you think that by pressing me to speak openly of these distasteful matters you will embarrass me, and force me to withdraw—is that it? You shall not succeed. The boy’s name is Raphaël. He is, or was, a servant in the household of the Bishop of Kulm, Tiedemann Giese, at Löbau, where you stayed for some time, did you not, in the company of Canon Koppernigk? You behaviour there, and your . . . your connection with this boy, was reported to us by the Bishop himself, who, I might add, was charitable enough to defend you (as did Canon Koppernigk himself!), even while you were spreading scandal and corruption throughout his household. But what I want to ask you, for my own benefit, you understand, so that I shall know—what I want to ask you is: why, why did you have this boy follow you across the length of Germany?”

  “He did not follow me,” I said. “He was sent.” I saw it all, yes, yes, I saw it all.

  “Sent?” Osiander bellowed, and his wasp’s wings buzzed and boomed in the gloom. “What do you mean, sent? The boy arrived in Wittenberg in rags, with his feet bandaged. His horse had died under him. He said you told him to come to you, that you would put him to schooling, that you would make a gentleman of him. Sent? Can you not spare even a grain of compassion for this unfortunate creature whom you have destroyed, whom you could not face, and fled before he came; and do you think to save yourself by this wild and evil accusation? Sent? Who sent him, pray?”

  I turned my face to the wall. “It’s no matter. You would not believe me, if I told you. I shall say only this, that I am not a sodomite, that I have been slandered and vilified, that you have been fed a pack of lies.”

  He began a kind of enraged dance then, and shrieked:

  “I will not listen to this! I will not listen! Do you want me to tell you what the child said, do you want to hear, do you? These are his very words, his very words, I cannot forget them, never; he said: Every morning I brought him his food, and he made me wank him tho’ I cried, and begged him to release me. A child, sir, a child! and you put such words into his mouth, and made him do such things, and God knows what else besides. May God forgive you. Now, enough of this, enough; I have said more than I intended, more than I should. If we were in Rome no doubt you would have been poisoned by now, and spirited away, but here in Germany we are more civilised than that. There is a post at Leipzig University, the chair of mathematics. It has been arranged that you will fill it. You will pack your bags today, now, this instant, and be gone. You may—silence!—you may not protest, it is too late for that: Melanchton himself has ordered your removal. It was he, I might add, who decided that you should be sent to Leipzig, which is no punishment at all. Had I my way, sir, you would be driven out of Germany. And now, prepare to depart. Whatever work of yours there is unfinished here, I shall take charge of it. I am told you are engaged in the printing of an astronomical work from the pen of Canon Koppernigk? He has asked that I should oversee the final stages of this venture. For the rest, we shall put it about that, for reasons of health, you felt you must abandon the task to my care. Now go.”

  “The boy,” I said, “Raphaël: what has become of him?” I remembered him in the courtyard at Heilsberg, in his cap and cape, mounted on his black horse; just thus must he have looked as he set out from Löbau to come to me at Wittenberg.

  “He was sent back to Löbau Castle, of course,” said Osiander. “What did you expect?”

  Do you know what they do to runaway servants up there in Prussia? They nail them by the ear to a pillory, and give them a knife with which to cut themselves free. I wonder what punishment worse than that did Giese threaten the child with, to force him to follow me and tell those lies, so as to destroy me?

  *

  I could not at first understand why they, I mean Koppernigk and Giese, had done this to me, and I went off to exile in Leipzig thinking that surely some terrible mistake had been made. Only later, when I saw the preface which Osiander added to the book (which, when he was finished with it, was called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium), only then did I see how they had used me, poor shambling clown, to smuggle the work into the heart of Lutheran Germany, to the best Lutheran printer, with the precious Lutheran letters of recommendation in my fist, and how, when all that was done, they had simply got rid of me, to make way for Osiander and the imprimatur of his preface, which made the book safe from the hounds of Rome and Wittenberg alike. They did not trust me, you see, except to do the hackwork.

  *

  Did I in some way, I asked myself then, merit this betrayal? For it seemed to me inconceivable that all my labours should have been rewarded thus without some terrible sin on my part; but I could not, try as I might, find myself guilty of any sin heinous enough to bring down such judgment on my head. Throughout the book, there is not one mention of my name. Schönberg is mentioned, and Giese, but not I. This omission affected me strangely. It was as if, somehow, I had not existed at all during those past years. Had this been my crime, I mean some essential lack of presence; had I not been there vividly enough? That may be it, for all I know. Frauenburg had been a kind of death, for death is the absence of faith, I hardly know what I am saying, yet I feel I am making sense. Christ! I have waited patiently for this moment when I would have my revenge, and now I am ruining it. Why must I blame myself, search for some sin within myself, all this nonsense, why? No need of that, no need—it was all his doing, his his his! Calm, Rheticus.

  Here is my revenge. Here it is, at last.

  *

  The Book of revolutions is a pack of lies from start to finish . . . No, that will not do, it is too, too something, I don’t know. Besides, it is not true, not entirely, and truth is the only weapon I have left with which to blast his cursed memory.

  The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, yes yes, that’s better.

  The Book of revolutions is an engine which destroys itself, which is to say that by the time its creator had completed it, by the time he had, so to speak, hammered home the last bolt, the thing was in bits around him. I admit, it took me some time to recognise this fact, or at least to recognise the full significance of it. How I swore and sweated during those summer nights at Löbau, striving to make sense of a theory wherein each succeeding conclusion or hypothesis seemed to throw doubt on those that had gone before! Where, I asked, where is the beauty and simplicity, the celestial order so confidently promised in the Commentariolus, where is the pure, the pristine thing? The book which I held in my hands was a shambles, a crippled, hopeless mishmash. But let me be specific, let me give some examples of where it went so violently wrong. It was, so Koppernigk tells us, a profound dissatisfaction with the theory of the motions of the planets put forward by Ptolemy in the Almagest which first sent him in search of some new system, one that would be mathematically correct, would agree with the rules of cosmic physics, and that would, most importantly of all, save the phenomena. O, the phenomena were saved, indeed—but at what cost! For in his calculations, not 34 epicycles were required to account for the entire structure of the universe, as the Commentariolus claimed, but 48—which is 8 more at least than Ptolemy had employed! This little trick, however, is nothing, a mere somersault, compared with the one of which I am now about to speak. You imagine that Koppernigk set the Sun at the centre of the universe, don’t you? He did not. The centre of the universe according to his theory is not the Sun, but the centre of Earth’s orbit, which, as the great, the mighty, the all-explaining Book of revolutions admits, is situated at a point in space some three times the Sun’s diameter distant from the Sun! All the hypotheses, all the calculations, the star tables, charts and diagrams, the entire ragbag of lies and half truths and self-deceptions which is De revolutionibus orbium mundi (or coelestium, as I suppo
se I must call it now), was assembled simply in order to prove that at the centre of all there is nothing, that the world turns upon chaos.

  *

  Are you stirring in your grave, Koppernigk? Are you writhing in cold clay?

  *

  When at last, one black night at Löbau Castle, the nature of the absurdity which he was propounding was borne in upon me, I laughed until I could laugh no more, and then I wept. Copernicus, the greatest astronomer of his age, so they said, was a fraud whose only desire was to save appearances. I laughed, I say, and then wept, and something died within me. I do not willingly grant him even this much, but grant it I must: that if his book possessed some power, it was the power to destroy. It destroyed my faith, in God and Man—but not in the Devil. Lucifer sits at the centre of that book, smiling a familiar cold grey smile. You were evil, Koppernigk, and you filled the world with despair.

  He knew it, of course, knew well how he had failed, and knew that I knew it. That was why he had to destroy me, he and Giese, the Devil’s disciple.

  If I saw all this, his failure and so forth, even so early as the Löbau period, why then did I continue to press him so doggedly to publish? But you see, I wanted him to make known his theory simply so that I could refute it. O, an ignoble desire, certainly; I admit, I admit it freely, that I planned to make my reputation on the ruins of his. Poor fool that I was. The world cannot abide truth: men remember heliocentricity (they are already talking of the Copernican revolution!), but forget the defective theory on which the concept of heliocentricity is founded. It is his name that is remembered and honoured, while I am forgotten, and left to rot here in this dreadful place. What was it he said to me?—first they will laugh, and then weep, seeing their Earth diminished, spinning upon the void . . . He knew, he knew. They are weeping now, bowed down under the burden of despair with which he loaded them. I am weeping. I believe in nothing. The mirror is shattered. The chaos

  Well I’ll be damned!

  -Freunde! What joy! The most extraordinary, the most extraordinary thing has happened: Otho has come! O God, I believe in You, I swear it. Forgive me for ever doubting You! A disciple, at last! He will spread my name throughout the world. Now I can return to that great work, which I planned so long ago: the formulation of a true system of the universe, based upon Ptolemaic principles. I shall not mention, I shall not even mention that other name. Or perhaps I shall? Perhaps I have been unjust to him? Did he not, in his own poor stumbling way, glimpse the majestic order of the universe which wheels and wheels in mysterious ways, bringing back the past again and again, as the past has been brought back here again today? Copernicus, Canon Nicolas, domine praeceptor, I forgive you: yes, even you I forgive. God, I believe: resurrection, redemption, the whole thing, I believe it all. Ah! The page shakes before my eyes. This joy!

  *

  Lucius Valentine Otho has this day come to me from Wittenberg, to be my amanuensis, my disciple. He fell to his knees before me. I behaved perfectly, as a great scientist should. I spoke to him kindly, enquiring how things stood at Wittenberg, and of his own work and ambitions. But behind my coolness and reserve, what a tangle of emotions! Of course, this joy I felt could not be contained, and when I had enquired his age, I could not keep myself from grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattled in his head, for just at that same age did I, so many years ago, come to Copernicus at Frauenburg. The past comes back, transfigured. Shall I also send a Raphaël to destroy Otho?—but come now, Rheticus, come clean. The fact is, there never was a Raphaël. I know, I know, it was dreadful of me to invent all that, but I had to find something, you see, some terrible tangible thing, to represent the great wrongs done me by Copernicus. Not a mention of my name in his book! Not a word! He would have done more for a dog. Well, I have forgiven him, and I have admitted my little joke about Raphaël and so forth. Now a new age dawns. I am no longer the old Rheticus, banished to Cassovia and gnawing his own liver in spite and impotent rage, no: I am an altogether finer thing—I am Doctor Rheticus! I am a believer. Lift your head, then, strange new glorious creature, incandescent angel, and gaze upon the world. It is not diminished! Even in that he failed. The sky is blue, and shall be forever blue, and the earth shall blossom forever in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe it, I think. Vale.

  IV

  Magnum Miraculum

  The sun at dawn, retrieving from the darkness the few remaining fragments of his life, summoned him back at last into the present. Warily he watched the room arrange itself around him: that return journey was so far, immeasurably far, that without proof he would not believe it was over. Outside, in the sky low in the east, a storm of fire raged amidst clouds, shedding light like a shower of burning arrows upon the great glittering steely arc of the Baltic. None of that was any longer wholly real, was mere melodrama, static and cold. The world had shrunk until his skull contained it entirely, and all without that shrivelled sphere was a changing series of superficial images in a void, utterly lacking in significance save on those rare occasions when a particular picture served to verify the moment, as now the fragments of his cell, picked out by the advancing dawn, were illuminated integers that traced on the surrounding gloom a constellation, a starry formula, expressing precisely, as no words could, all that was left of what he had once been, all that was left of his life. One morning, a morning much like this one, a fire fierce as the sun itself had exploded in his brain; when that dreadful glare faded everything was transfigured. Then had begun his final wanderings. It was into the past that he had travelled, for there was nowhere else to go. He was dying.

  *

  The sickness had come upon him stealthily. At first it had been no more than a faint dizziness at times, a step missed, a stumbling on the stairs. Then the megrims began, like claps of thunder trapped inside his skull, and for hours he was forced to lie prostrate in his shuttered cell with vinegar poultices pressed to his brow, as cascades of splintered multicoloured glass formed jagged images of agony behind his eyes. Still he persisted in denying what the physician in him knew beyond doubt to be the case, that the end had come. An attack of ague, nothing more, he told himself; I am seventy, it is to be expected. Then that morning, in the first week of April, as he had made to rise from his couch at dawn, his entire right side had pained him suddenly, terribly, as if a bag of shot, or pellets of hot quicksilver, had been emptied from his skull into his heart and pumped out from thence to clatter down the arteries of his arm, through the ribcage, into his leg. Moaning, he laid himself down again tenderly on the couch, with great solicitude, as a mother laying her child into its cradle. A spider in the dim dawnlight swarmed laboriously across the trampoline of its web strung between the ceiling beams. From without came the burgeoning clatter and crack of a horse and rider approaching. Poised on the rack of his pain he waited, calmly, almost in eagerness, for the advent of the black catastrophe. But the horseman did not stop, passed under the window, and then he understood, without surprise, but in something like disappointment, that he was not to be let go before suffering a final jest, and, instead of death, sleep, the ultimate banality, bundled him unceremoniously under its wing and bore him swiftly away.

  *

  It was sleep, yes, and yet more than that, an impassioned hearkening, a pausing upon a deserted shore at twilight, a last looking backward at the soon to be forsaken land, yes, yes: he was waiting yet. For what? He did not know. Mute and expectant, he peered anxiously into the sombre distance. They were all there, unseen yet palpable, all his discarded dead. A pang of longing pierced his heart. But why were they behind him? why not before? was he not on his way now at last to join that silent throng? And why did he tarry here, on this desolate brink? A brumous yellowy sky full of wreckage sank slowly afar, and the darkness welled up around him. Then he spied the figure approaching, the massive shoulders and great dark burnished face like polished stone, the wide-set eyes, the cruel mad mouth.

  Who are you? he cried, stri
ving in vain to lift his hands and fend off the apparition.

  I am he whom you seek.

  Tell me who you are!

  As my own father I am already dead, as my own mother I still live, and grow old. I come to take you on a journey. You have much to learn, and so little time.

  What? what would you teach me?

  How to die.

  Ah . . . Then you are Brother Death?

  No. He is not yet. I am the one that goes before. I am, you may say, the god of revels and oblivion. I make men mad. You are in my realm now, for a little while. Come with me. Here begins the descent into Hell. Come.