Kepler by John Banville Read Free Book Online

suddenly showed, like a seal of office, a mouthful of gold teeth.
    "Duke Frederick, young sir," he said, "let me assure you, is careful with his money."
    They all laughed, as at a familiar joke, and returned to their plates. A young soldier with a moustache, dismembering a piece of chicken, eyed him thoughtfully. "Seven different kinds of beverage, you say?"
    Johannes ignored the martial manner.
    "Seven, yes, " he said:
"aqua vitae
from the sun, brandy from Mercury, Venus mead, and water from the moon," busily ticking them off on his fingers, "Mars a vermouth, Jupiter a white wine, and from Saturn-" he tittered "-from Saturn will come only a bad old wine or beer, so that those ignorant of astronomy may be exposed to ridicule. "
    "How?" The chicken leg came asunder with a thwack. Kepler's answer was a smug smile. Tellus, the Duke's chief gardener, a jolly fat fellow with a smooth bald skull whose presence at this travellers' table was the result of a recent upheaval in protocol, laughed and said: "Caught, caught!" and the soldier reddened. He had oily brown curls that fell to the collar of his velvet surcoat. A bird-like person stuck his head on its stalk of neck from behind the shoulder of Kepler's neighbour and quacked: "O but, you mean to say, do you, do I understand you, that we are not to be as it were, not to be told your wonderful, ah, theory? Eh?" He laughed and laughed, mercurial and mad, waving his little hands.
    "I intend, " Johannes confided, "to recommend secrecy to the Duke. Each of the different parts of the cup shall be made by different silversmiths, and assembled later, ensuring that my
inventum
is not revealed before the proper time."
    "Your what?" his neighbour grunted, turning abruptly, a swarthy saturnine fellow with a peasant's head-Johannes later learned he was a baron-who until now had sat as if deaf, consuming indiscriminately plate after plate of food.
    "Latin," the periwig said shortly. "He means invention," and bent on Kepler a look of inordinately stern rebuke.
    "I mean, yes, invention…" Johannes said meekly. All at once he was filled with misgiving. The table and these people, and the hall behind him with its jumbled hierarchy of other tables, the scurrying servants and the uproar of the crowd at feed, all of it was suddenly a manifestation of irremediable disorder. His heart sank. A breezy request for an audience with the Duke, dashed off on the day he arrived at court, had not been replied to; now, fully a week later, the icy blast of that silence struck him for the first time. How could he have been such a fool, and entertain such high hopes?
    He packed up his designs for the cosmic cup and prepared to depart for Graz immediately. Mästlin, however, calling up a last reserve of patience, held him back, urging him to draft another, more carefully considered plea. Preening, he allowed himself to be convinced. His second letter came back with eerie promptness that same evening, bearing in the margin in a broad childish hand a note inviting him to make a model of his cup,
and when we see it and decide that it is worth being made in silver, the means shall not want.
Mästlin squeezed his arm, and he, beside himself, could only smile for bliss and breathe:
"We…!"
    It took him a week to build the model, sitting on the cold floor of his room at the top of a windy turret with scissors and paste and strips of coloured paper. It was a pretty thing, he thought, with the planets marked in red upon sky-blue orbits. He placed it lovingly into the complex channels that would carry it to the Duke and settled down to wait. More weeks went past, a month, another and yet another. Mästlin had long since returned to Tübingen to oversee the printing of the
Mysterium.
Johannes became a familiar figure in the dull life of the court, another of those poor demented supplicants who wandered like a belt of satellites around the invisible presence of the Duke. Then a letter came from Mästlin: Frederick had requested