Since that time he had lived alone apart from the company of cats, of Linus now—“Where are you, Linus, old friend, the world is drawing to a close,” said the astronomer on his hands and knees beneath the armillary sphere, where he found Linus lazily sprawled out to maximal length and buried his face briefly in what he identified as “the softest part of the cat,” his underbelly—and before Linus Linus’s mother, Urania, in whose sensory organs, so different from his own, he developed a keen interest. “Forty-five seconds!” He in his newfound blindness had bumped into things all the time, she even at night never did, she smelled him all the time, he smelled her almost never. “It is the same with Linus: he is always smelling me, I almost never him.” It was considerations such as these that moved him, one night, years after his son had torn out his eyes and torn down the enormous tapestry and returned to Vienna, to peer once again, without quite knowing why, into his tube. And what the astronomer saw there astonished him. For he saw not his usual blackness but actually the very same stars he had seen back before he’d been blinded. Through the tube, the night sky looked as it always had! The astronomer said: “And I realize: from deep down inside my head I am peering out at the inner surface of the outer wall of my head, if that makes sense. Of my head, I mean, not yours, and not anyone else’s either. I realize: Aristotle was not wrong to posit his celestial spheres, it is true we are not in the infinite cosmos of Democritus, we are bound, it is true, by something, but in positing fifty-five spheres Aristotle posited fifty-four too many of them! In my much simpler system there is only one sphere. The curvature of the sky is the curvature of my skull. Ten seconds.” He stood now beside his telescope with one arm resting upon it. He said: “And as for the stars in the sky, Herr Leibniz, basically I had blasted them up there myself, onto the inner wall of my own skull, boom, boom, if that makes sense. That is why in my heart of hearts I call this instrument of mine neither the telescope nor even the astral tube but actually the astral cannon…”

Then he cried: “Now! Now! Look! Look!”

It was noon.