[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus Page 28

  No, my friend, you did not mention that, as I recall; but it is no matter now.

  “Also, of course, I have attached a preface, as we agreed. It was a wise move, I believe. As I have said to you in my various letters, the Aristotelians and theologians will easily be placated if they are told that several hypotheses can be used to explain the same apparent motions, and that the present hypotheses are not proposed because they are in reality true, but because they are the most convenient to calculate the apparent composite motions.” He lifted his bland face dreamily to the window, with a smug little smile of admiration at the precision and style of his delivery. Just thus did he pose, the Canon knew, when lecturing his slack-jawed classes at Nuremberg. “For my part,” the Lutheran went on, “I have always felt about hypotheses that they are not articles of faith, but bases of computation, so that even if they are false it does not matter, provided that they save the phenomena . . . And in the light of this belief have I composed the preface.”

  “It must not be,” the Canon said, his dull gaze turned upward toward the ceiling. Osiander stared at him.

  “What?”

  “It must not be: I do not wish the book to be published.”

  “But . . . but it is already published, my dear sir. See, I have a copy here, printed and bound. Petreius has made an edition of one thousand, as you agreed. It is even now being distributed.”

  “It must not be, I say!”

  Osiander, quite baffled, pondered a moment in silence, then came and sat down slowly on a chair beside the couch and peered at the Canon with an uncertain smile. “Are you unwell, my friend?”

  The Canon, had he been able, would have laughed.

  “I am dying, man!” he cried. “Have I not told you so already? But I am not raving. I want this book suppressed. Go to Petreius, have him recall whatever volumes he has sent out. Do you understand? It must not be!”

  “Calm yourself, Doctor, please,” said Osiander, alarmed by the paralytic’s pent-up vehemence, the straining jaw and wild anguished stare. “Do you require assistance? Shall I call the woman?”

  “No no no, do nothing.” The Canon relaxed somewhat, and the trembling in his limbs subsided. There was a fever coming on, and a pain the like of which he had not known before was crashing and booming in his skull. Terror extended a thin dark tentacle within him. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “Is there water? Let me drink. Thank you, you are most kind. Ah.”

  Frowning, Osiander set down the water jug. He had a look now of mingled embarrassment and curiosity: he wanted to escape from the presence of this undignified dying, yet also he wished to know the reason for the old man’s extraordinary change of mind. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “I may return later in the day, when you are less wrought, and discuss then this matter of your book?”

  But the Canon was not listening. “Tell me, Osiander,” he said, “tell me truly, is it too late to halt publication? For I would halt it.”

  “Why, Doctor?”

  “You have read the book? Then you must know why. It is a failure. I failed in that which I set out to do: to discern truth, the significance of things.”

  “Truth? I do not understand, Doctor. Your theory is not without flaws, I agree, but—”

  “It is not the mechanics of the theory that interest me.” He closed his eyes. O burning, burning! “The project itself, the totality . . . Do you understand? A hundred thousand words I used, charts, star tables, formulae, and yet I said nothing . . .”

  He could not go on. What did it matter now, anyway? Osiander sighed.

  “You should not trouble yourself thus, Doctor,” he said. “These are scruples merely, and, if more than that, then you must realise that the manner of success you sought—or now believe that you sought!—is not to be attained. Your work, however flawed, shall be a basis for others to build upon, of this you may be assured. As to your failure to discern the true nature of things, as you put it, I think you will agree that I have accounted for such failing in my preface. Shall you hear what I have written?”

  Plainly he was proud of his work, and, a born preacher, was eager to descant it. The Canon panicked: he did not want to hear, no! but he was sinking, and could no longer speak, could only growl and gnash his teeth in a frenzy of refusal. Osiander, however, took these efforts for a sign of pleased anticipation. He laid down the book, and, with the ghastly excruciated smile of one obliged to deal with a cretin, rose and thrust his hands under the Canon’s armpits, and hauled him up and propped him carefully against the bank of soiled pillows as if he were setting up a target. Then, commencing his stately pacing once more, he held the book open before him at arm’s length and began to read aloud in a booming pulpit voice.

  “Since the novelty of the hypotheses of this work—which sets the Earth in motion and puts an immovable Sun at the centre of the universe—has already received great attention, I have no doubt that certain learned men have taken grave offence and think it wrong thus to raise disturbance among liberal disciplines, which were established long ago on a correct basis. If, however, they are willing to weigh the matter scrupulously, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing which merits blame. For it is the task of the astronomer to use painstaking and skilled observation in gathering together the history of celestial movements, and then—since he cannot by any line of reasoning discover the true causes of these movements (you mark that, Doctor?)—to conceive and devise whatever causes and hypotheses he pleases, such that, by the assumption of these causes, those same movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry for the past and for the future also. The present artist is markedly outstanding in both these respects: for it is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probable; it is enough if they provide a calculus which is consistent with the observations . . .”

  The Canon listened in wonder: was it valid, this denial, this spitting-upon of his life’s work? Truth or fiction . . . ritual . . . necessary. He could not concentrate. He was in flames. Andreas Osiander, marching into windowlight and out again, was transformed at each turn into a walking darkness, a cloud of fire, a phantom, and outside too all was strangely changing, and not the sun was light and heat, the world inert, but rather the world was a nimbus of searing fire and the sun no more than a dead frozen globe dangling in the western sky.

  “. . . For it is sufficiently clear that this art is profoundly ignorant of causes of the apparent movements. And if it constructs and invents causes—and certainly it has invented very many—nevertheless these causes are not advanced in order to convince anyone that they are true but only in order that they may posit a correct basis for calculation. But since one and the same movement may take varying hypotheses from time to time—as eccentricity and an epicycle for the motion of the Sun—the astronomer will accept above all others the one easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of truth. Neither, however, will understand or set down anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him . . .”

  The walls of the tower had lost all solidity, were planes of darkness out of which there came now soaring on terrible wings the great steel bird, trailing flames in its wake and bearing in its beak the fiery sphere, no longer alone, but flying before a flock of others of its kind, all aflame, all gleaming and terrible and magnificent, rising out of darkness, shrieking.

  “And so far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy—since astronomy can offer us nothing certain—lest he mistake for truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he came to it!”

  No! O no. He flung his mute denial into the burning world. You, Andreas, have betrayed me, you . . .

  Andreas?

  The pacing figure drew near, and swooping suddenly down pressed its terrible ruined face close to his.

  You!

  Yes, brother: I. We meet again.

  *

  Andreas laughed then, and seated himself on t
he chair beside the couch, laying the book on his lap under the black wing of his cloak. He was as he had been when the Canon had seen him last, a walking corpse on which the premature maggots were at work.

  You are dead, Andreas, I am dreaming you.

  Yes, brother, but it is I nevertheless. I am as real as you, now, for in this final place where we meet I am precisely as close to life as you are to death, and it is the same thing. I must thank you for this brief reincarnation.

  What are you?

  Why, I am Andreas! You have yourself addressed me thus. However, if you must have significance in all things, then we may say that I am the angel of redemption—an unlikely angel, I grant you, with dreadfully damaged wings, yet a redeemer, for all that.

  You are death.

  Andreas smiled, that familiar anguished smile.

  O that too, brother, that too, but that’s of secondary importance. But now, enough of this metaphysical quibbling, you know it always bored me. Let us speak instead, calmly, while there is still time, of the things that matter. See, I have your book . . .

  Behind the dark seated smiling figure great light throbbed in the arched window, where the steel-blue Baltic’s back rose like the back of some vast waterborne brute, ubiquitous and menacing. Above in the darkness under the ceiling the metal birds soared and swooped, flying on invisible struts and wires, filling the sombre air with their fierce clamour. The fever climbed inexorably upward along his veins, a molten tide. He clutched with his fingernails at the chill damp sheets under him, striving to keep hold of the world. He was afraid. This was dying, yes, this was unmistakably the distinguished thing. Minute fragments of the past assailed him: a deserted street in Cracow on a black midwinter night, an idiot child watching him from the doorway of a hovel outside the walls of Padua, a ruined tower somewhere in Poland inhabited by a flock of plumed white doves. These had been death’s secret signals. Andreas, with his faint and sardonic, yet not unsympathetic smile, was watching him.

  Wait, brother, it is not yet time, not quite yet. Shall we speak of your book, the reasons for your failure? For I will not dispute with you that you did fail. Unable to discern the thing itself, you would settle for nothing less; in your pride you preferred heroic failure to prosaic success.

  I will accept none of this! What, anyway, do you know of these matters, you who had nothing but contempt for science, the products of the mind, all that, which I loved?

  Come come: you have said that you are dreaming me, therefore you must accept what I say, since, if I am lying, it is your lies, in my mouth. And you have finished with lying, haven’t you? Yes. The lies are all done with. That is why I am here, because at last you are prepared to be . . . honest. See, for example: you are no longer embarrassed in my presence. It was always your stormiest emotion, that fastidious, that panic-stricken embarrassment in the face of the disorder and vulgarity of the commonplace, which you despised.

  There was movement in the room now, and the pale flickering incongruity of candles lit in daylight. Dim faceless figures approached him, mumbling. A ceremony was being enacted, a ritual at once familiar to him and strange, and then with a shock, like the shock of falling in a dream, he understood that he was being prepared for the last rites.

  Do not heed it, brother, Andreas said. All that is a myth, your faith in which you relinquished long ago. There is no comfort there for you.

  I want to believe.

  But you may not.

  Then I am lost.

  No, you are not lost, for I have come to redeem you.

  Tell me, then. My book . . ? my work . . ?

  You thought to discern the thing itself, the eternal truths, the pure forms that lie behind the chaos of the world. You looked into the sky: what did you see?

  I saw . . . the planets dancing, and heard them singing in their courses.

  O no, no brother. These things you imagined. Let me tell you how it was. You set the sights of the triquetrum upon a light shining in the sky, believing that you thus beheld a fragment of reality, inviolate, unmistakable, enduring, but that was not the case. What you saw was a light shining in the sky; whatever it was more than that it was so only by virtue of your faith, your belief in the possibility of apprehending reality.

  What nonsense is this? How else may we live, if not in the belief that we can know?

  It is the manner of knowing that is important. We know the meaning of the singular thing only so long as we content ourselves with knowing it in the midst of other meanings: isolate it, and all meaning drains away. It is not the thing that counts, you see, only the interaction of things; and, of course, the names . . .

  You are preaching despair.

  Yes? Call it, rather, redemptive despair, or, better still, call it acceptance. The world will not bear anything other than acceptance. Look at this chair: there is the wood, the splinters, then the fibres, then the particles into which the fibres may be broken, and then the smaller particles of these particles, and then, eventually, nothing, a confluence of aetherial stresses, a kind of vivid involuntary dreaming in a vacuum. You see? the world simply will not bear it, this impassioned scrutiny.

  You would seduce me with this philosophy of happy ignorance, of slavery, abject acceptance of a filthy world? I will have none of it!

  You will have none of it . . .

  You laugh, but tell me this, in your wisdom: how are we to perceive the truth if we do not attempt to discover it, and to understand our discoveries?

  There is no need to search for the truth. We know it already, before ever we think of setting out on our quests.

  How do we know it?

  Why, simple, brother: we are the truth. The world, and ourselves, this is the truth. There is no other, or, if there is, it is of use to us only as an ideal, that brings us a little comfort, a little consolation, now and then.

  And this truth that we are, how may we speak it?

  It may not be spoken, brother, but perhaps it may be . . . shown.

  How? tell me how?

  By accepting what there is.

  And then?

  There is no more; that is all.

  O no, Andreas, you will not trick me. If what you say were true, I should have had to sell my soul to a vicious world, to embrace meekly the hideousness, yes—but I would not do it! This much at least I can say, that I did not sell—

  —Your soul? Ah, but you did sell it, to the highest bidder. What shall we call it?—science? the quest for truth? transcendent knowledge? Vanity, all vanity, and something more, a kind of cowardice, the cowardice that comes from the refusal to accept that the names are all there is that matter, the cowardice that is true and irredeemable despair. With great courage and great effort you might have succeeded, in the only way it is possible to succeed, by disposing the commonplace, the names, in a beautiful and orderly pattern that would show, by its very beauty and order, the action in our poor world of the otherworldly truths. But you tried to discard the commonplace truths for the transcendent ideals, and so failed.

  I do not understand.

  But you do. We say only those things that we have the words to express: it is enough.

  No!

  It is sufficient. We must be content with that much.

  The candleflames like burning blades pierced his sight, and the grave voice intoning the final benediction stormed above him.

  Too late!—

  You thought to transcend the world, but before you could aspire to that loftiness your needs must have contended with . . . well, brother, with what?

  Too late!—Death’s burning seal was graven upon his brow, and all that he had discarded was gone beyond retrieving. The light, O! and the terrible birds! the great burning arc beyond the window!

  With me, brother! I was that which you must contend with.

  You, Andreas? What was there in you? You despised and betrayed me, made my life a misery. Wherever I turned you were there, blighting my life, my work.

  Just so. I was the one absolutely necessary thing,
for I was there always to remind you of what you must transcend. I was the bent bow from which you propelled yourself beyond the filthy world.

  I did not hate you!

  There had to be a little regard, yes, the regard which the arrow bears for the bow, but never the other, the thing itself, the vivid thing, which is not to be found in any book, nor in the firmament, nor in the absolute forms. You know what I mean, brother. It is that thing, passionate and yet calm, fierce and coming from far away, fabulous and yet ordinary, that thing which is all that matters, which is the great miracle. You glimpsed it briefly in our father, in sister Barbara, in Fracastoro, in Anna Schillings, in all the others, and even, yes, in me, glimpsed it, and turned away, appalled and . . . embarrassed. Call it acceptance, call it love if you wish, but these are poor words, and express nothing of the enormity.

  Too late!—For he had sold his soul, and now payment would be exacted in full. The voice of the priest engulfed him.

  “Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and eternal!”

  Andreas slowly shook his head.

  No, brother, do not heed that voice out of the past. Redemption is not to be found in the Empyrean.

  Too late!—

  No, Nicolas, not too late. It is not I who have said all these things today, but you.

  He was smiling, and his face was healed, the terrible scars had faded, and he was again as he had once been, and rising now he laid his hand upon his brother’s burning brow. The terrible birds sailed in silence into the dark, the harsh light grew soft, and the stone walls of the tower rose up again. The Baltic shone, a bright sea bearing away a ship with a black sail. Andreas brought out the book from beneath his cloak, and placing it on the couch he guided his brother’s hand until the slack fingers touched the unquiet pages.