Free Doctor Copernicus by John Banville Page A

that you have been putting about some, how
shall I say, some curious ideas. Is it so, hmm?”
    “Forgive me, maestro , I do not understand.”
    “No?” Novara smiled thinly. They walked together down a sunlit corridor. Narrow stone arches to their right gave on to a paved courtyard and a marble statue with one arm raised in
mysterious hieratic greeting; jagged shadows bristled under their feet. The Professor went on: “I mean of course astronomical ideas, speculations on the shape and size of the universe, that
kind of thing. I am interested, you understand. They tell me that you have expressed doubts on certain parts of the Ptolemaic doctrine of planetary motion?”
    “I have taken part, it is true, in some discussions, in the taverns, but I have done no more than echo what has been said already, many times, by you yourself among others.” Novara
pursed his lips and nodded. Something seemed to amuse him. Nicolas said: “I do not believe that I have anything original to say. I am a dabbler. And I am not well this morning,” he
finished wanly.
    They strolled in silence for a time. The corridor was loud with the tramp of students, who eyed with furtive speculation this ill-assorted pair. Novara brooded. Presently he said:
    “But your ideas on the dimensions of the universe, the intervals between planets, these seem to me original, or at least to promise great originality.” Nicolas wondered uneasily how
the man could have come to hear of these things. His encounter with Brudzewski in Cracow had taught him discretion. He had admitted taking part in tavern talk, but surely he had never been more
than a silent sharer? Who then knew enough of his thinking to betray him? The Professor watched him sidelong with a calculating look. “What interests me,” he said, “is whether or
not you have the mathematics to support your theories?” There was of course one only who could have betrayed him; well, no matter. He was both pained and pleased, as if he had been caught in
the commission of a clever crime. The few notions he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly travesties of the inexpressibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain, were suddenly made to seem
far finer things than he had imagined by the attentions of the authoritative Novara.
    “ Maestro , I am no astronomer, nor a mathematician either.”
    “Yes.” The Professor smiled again. “You are a dabbler, as you say.” He seemed to think that he had made a joke. Nicolas grinned greyly. They came out on the steps above
the sunny piazza. The bells of San Pietro began to ring, a great bronze booming high in the air, and flocks of pigeons blossomed into the blue above the golden domes. Novara mused dreamily on the
crowds below in the square, and then abruptly turned and with what passed in him for animation said:
    “Come to my house, will you? Come today. There are some people I think you might be interested to meet. Shall we say at noon? Until noon, then. Vale. ” And he went off quickly
down the steps.
    Well what—?
    *
    “Well, what happened?” Andreas asked.
    “Where?”
    “At Novara’s!”
    “O, that.” They sat in the dining-hall of the German natio , where they lodged; it was evening, and beyond the grimy windows the Palazzo Communale brooded in late sunlight. The
hall was crowded with crop-headed Germans at feed. Nicolas’s head pained him. “I do not know what Novara wants with me, I am not his kind at all. There were some others there, Luca
Guarico, Jacob Ziegler, Calcagnini the poet—”
    Andreas whistled softly. “Well well, I am impressed. The cream of Italy’s intellectuals, eh?” He smirked. “—And you, brother.”
    “And I, as you say. Andreas, have you been putting about those few things I told you of my ideas on astronomy?”
    “Tell me what happened at Novara’s.”
    “—Because I wish you would not; I would rather you would not do that.”
    “Tell me.”
    *
    He was shown into a courtyard with orange