Free Kepler’s Dream by Juliet Bell Page A

a perfectly sensible thing to say, so I nodded, to be a good sport. “And Dad said there’s some amazing book you have by, uh—Kepler?”
    â€œKepler’s
Dream
?” My grandmother’s voice was sharp as a knife edge. “Your father told you about that?”
    â€œWell, he mentioned it …” I got all mumbly again. “I don’t know …”
    She looked out the window. “I thought your father found the purchase of that book extravagant,” she said stiffly, but she wasn’t talking to me so much as addressing the Sandias in the distance. Then she turned back. “The Morris Kepler, Ella, is an extremely rare book, the most valuable in my collection. It is a remarkable artifact. Have you ever heard of the Kelmscott Chaucer?”
    â€œNo.” It sounded like the name of a racehorse. Or maybe afamous murderer.
Did you hear that creepy story about the dude in Kelmscott? He chauced ten people before they caught him.
    â€œAh. Well, it is a masterpiece of book art, and the Morris Kepler is a similarly rare volume. Your grandfather always dreamed of owning a copy one day, and some years ago—when you were a very little girl—I had the chance to realize his dream.”
    I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, except that he had died when my dad was a kid. I always found it weird to think of him being dead so long before I was even born. It was like thinking about infinity, or black holes—it made my brain curdle.
    â€œWas he a collector too?”
    â€œEdward? Edward was an astronomer.” The GM’s face shone with an unfamiliar light. “He loved looking at the stars. It would be fair to say he liked stars better than he liked people.”
    Like you and books,
I thought, but kept quiet.
    â€œHe knew all their names, as if they were his friends, and he knew when they were planning to be where, in the sky. He had all their paths in his head, memorized.”
    â€œLike a travel agent,” I said.
    My grandmother laughed. At something
I
said! I almost choked on my steak.
    â€œI like that, Ella. Quite right.” She looked at me, seeing something she hadn’t before. “Your grandfather was a travel agent to the stars. Plotting their itineraries. That’s very clever.”
    I felt a flutter of pride.
    â€œEdward loved Kepler,” she continued in a low, almost dreamy voice. “Kepler was one of the great early astronomersand mathematicians, Ella—like Galileo. He worked out many important things, such as the paths of planetary orbits, but what Edward revered about Kepler was his wild imagination. Kepler believed the Earth had a soul, and that God shaped the planets in accordance with mathematical laws.” I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but I nodded anyway. I am pretty good at math—much better at math than at making a board game or recipe about some Roald Dahl book I’ve read—but I had never considered God in the equation. And I had barely heard of Kepler. (Scientist? Inventor? Bookstore owner?)
    â€œEdward used to love to tell me about the strangest and least known of Kepler’s works—his
Somnium,
or
Dream.
It is Kepler’s fanciful account of what the Earth might look like if we traveled to the moon. Kepler imagined moon travel more than three hundred years before it happened! Edward used to say the
Somnium
was man’s first work of science fiction. Kepler brought out several crucial works in his lifetime, but the
Somnium
was only published in 1634. Posthumously.”
    I looked blank.
    â€œWhich means, after he died.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSo when, thanks to an antiquarian book dealer Edward and I had known named Christopher Abercrombie—whom you will meet next week, Ella, as he is coming to visit—the opportunity came up to buy this book, years after Edward had passed away, I leapt at the chance. Building the Library, and our