Kepler

"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?"

Joha

"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, " Joha

"Your what?" his neighbour grunted, turning abruptly, a swarthy saturnine fellow with a peasant's head-Joha

"Latin," the periwig said shortly. "He means invention," and bent on Kepler a look of inordinately stern rebuke.

"I mean, yes, invention…" Joha

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 cha

He was received in a vast and splendid hall. The fireplace of Italian marble was taller than he. A gauze of pale light flowed down from enormous windows. On the ceiling, itself a pendant miracle of plaster garlands and moulded heads, an oval painting depicted a vertiginous scene of angels ascending about an angry bearded god enthroned on dark air. The room was crowded, the milling courtiers at once aimless and intent, as if performing an intricate dance the pattern of which could be perceived only from above. A flunkey touched Kepler's elbow, he turned, and a delicate little man stepped up to him and said:

"You are Repleus?"

"No, yes, I-"

"Quite so. We have studied your model of the world," smiling tenderly; "it makes no sense."

Duke Frederick was marvellously got up in a cloth-of-gold tunic and velvet breeches. Jewels glittered on his tiny hands. He had close-cut grey curls like many small springs and on his chin a little horn of hair. He was smooth, soft, andjoha

The paper model stood upon a lacquered table. Two of the orbits had come unstuck. Kepler suspected a ducal finger had been dabbling in its i

"There are, sir," he said, "only five regular perfect solids. also called the Platonic forms. They are perfect because all their sides are identical." Rector Papius would be impressed with his patience. "Of the countless forms in the world of three dimensions, only these five figures are perfect: the tetrahedron or pyramid, bounded by four equilateral triangles, the cube, with six squares, the octohedron with eight equilaterals, the dodecahedron, bounded by twelve pentagons, and the icosahedron, which has twenty equilateral triangles. "

"Twenty," the Duke said, nodding.

"Yes. Î hold, as you see here illustrated, that into the five intervals between the six planets of the world, these five regular solids may be…" He was jostled. It was the mercurial madman from the trippeltisch, trying to get past him to the Duke, laughing still and pursing his lips in silent apology. Joha

The loony was pawing him again, and now he noticed that they were all here, the venereal lady, and Meister Tellus, Kaspar the soldier, and of course the periwig, and, way out at the edge of the dance, the gloomy baron. Well, what of it? He was putting them in their places. He was suddenly intensely aware of himself, young, brilliant, and somehow wonderfully fragile. "And so, as may be seen," he said airily, "between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter I have placed the cube, between those of Jupiter and Mars the tetrahedron, Mars and earth the dodecahedron, earth and Venus the icosahedron, and, look, let me show you-" pulling the model asunder like a fruit to reveal its secret core: "between Venus and Mercury the octahedron. So!"

The Duke frowned.

"That is clear, yes, "he said, "what you have done, and how; but, forgive me, may we ask why?"

"Why?" looking from the dismembered model to the little man before him; "well… well because…"

A froth of crazy laughter bubbled at his ear.

Nothing came of the project. The Duke did agree that the cup might be cast, but promptly lost interest. The court silversmith was sceptical, and there were cries of dismay from the Treasury. Joha