At a gesture from the Emperor, von Ulm unscrewed a portion of the globe, lowered the bird into it on one finger, and screwed the globe shut again. The bird hopped to its left, hopped to its right, cocked its head, and sang its song. Von Ulm began to work the foot treadle, and the bird, according to the Prince, continued to sing. “You see, you silly child!” said Margaretha, bouncing Katharina on her knee, and Katharina laughed through her tears. Soon thereafter however the bird began to suffer. First it ceased to sing. Next it started to wither and droop, and after that to convulse. Now Katharina began to scream. But not only she, for “what surprised me more, Father,” Heinrich told the astronomer, “is that Ludmila—who before our walks in the menagerie had shown no affinity for animals, for she, like so many of her class, for whom privation instrumentalizes the relationship with animals, had seen animals as potential resources rather than potential friends—had also begun to scream, and to scream, moreover, the same scream Katharina was screaming. I thought: The sound coming out of them is the same! Katharina was shaking me, I think she wanted me to stop von Ulm’s experiment, and Ludmila was shaking me, too, for the same reason, but I was too consumed by their startling similitude, not only externally—for Ludmila was wearing, as she had been from her third evening in the Castle, one of Katharina’s gowns—but also internally, to intervene. And then I realized: The scream they are screaming about the bird is the scream I, too, would have screamed about the bird had I not been able to achieve, via thought, a philosophical distance from the bird. The scream they’re screaming is my scream, the emotions inducing it are my emotions, I taught them this scream, I inculcated in them these emotions, one is not born feeling bad for a bird.”

Von Ulm, smiling, being pummeled now by Katharina’s little fists: “As you can plainly see, Your Majesty, the little bird, who cannot live in the absence of air, has been deprived of it. That the globe now contains nothing, a void, is beyond all doubt, I am sure even Lady Margaretha would agree! Shall I now open it up again and rejuvenate our little ornithological colleague here so we can thank her for her contribution to science?”

Margaretha scoffed. “It is no bird, this bird is no bird, it’s a mechanism, an automaton, a clever facsimile. He takes you for a fool, Father.”

Von Ulm, nervous: “Your Majesty, may I open the globe? If I do not open it now the bird will surely die.”

Margaretha: “Look at him squirm, he knows that thing won’t die, he knows it cannot die, something that does not live cannot die!”

“Father,” whispered Katharina, recalled the Prince, having reached beyond her delirium a mad sort of stillness, “please save the bird.”