Now, the astronomer went on, the Court Chamberlain approached the Emperor—who was listening halfheartedly to a German mathematician demonstrating with obsequious gestures and honeyed words the inner workings of the largest and most sophisticated of the contraptions, the brass one whose groans sounded as far as the Jewish Quarter—and whispered into the Emperor’s ear while pointing at his father’s former Imperial Sculptor, who stood as broad-chested as he could at the far end of the Great Hall. The Emperor raised his head a half inch off his palm and said, just loud enough for the astronomer to hear it over the din of “zenith”s and “azimuthal”s and the whistle of the cold wind coursing through the open windows and spewing snow on the floor, “My father’s what?,” in a tone—was it wistfulness? disgust?—which the astronomer could not decipher, “nor, of course, owing to the strange acoustics of that vaulted hall, was the tone of those words as they reached my ears necessarily that with which they resounded in the Emperor’s head.” The Court Chamberlain whispered once again in his ear and the Emperor, with eyes fixed gravely on the astronomer’s father, said something in response, and then let his head sink back onto his palm. The Court Chamberlain made his way toward them. “I assumed we were about to get thrown out, or locked up, or worse.” Everything depended now on the exact nature of the Emperor’s attitude toward his father, and by extension his father’s representatives, several decades after his father’s death, and this, to his subjects, was notoriously inscrutable. On the one hand, as you know, said the astronomer, the Emperor had forsaken his father’s palace in Vienna for his own Castle in Prague, but on the other hand, and this I may not have mentioned yet, he filled Prague with hundreds of statues of his father. Hundreds of statues! However, the astronomer added, each statue portrayed his father at only three-quarter size. In other words, he populated Prague with innumerable, slightly smaller-than-life representations of his father. What should one make of this? “What does it mean? Was it merely parodic?” the astronomer wondered as the Court Chamberlain approached them. But if it were merely to parody his father, why would the Emperor have chosen as the moment to memorialize his father’s greatest triumph, when he rode his steed into Transylvania after conquering it from the Turks? Innumerable, slightly too-small fathers riding victoriously into Transylvania, the astronomer thought as the Court Chamberlain strode swiftly toward them, a territorial inheritance which, as it happens, Emperor Rudolf would later relinquish back to the Turks in a series of skirmishes he hardly contested. What does this mean? The statues are too small, yes, he thought, but they are triumphant, as indisputably triumphant as they are self-evidently too small. And parody, anyway, needless to say, is always implicitly reverential of what it parodies, it always takes most seriously precisely that which it mocks most ruthlessly, this paradox is well-known, so even if these statues were intended not as tribute but as parody, perhaps especially if they were intended as parody, they still reveal the high esteem in which the Emperor held his father, the astronomer thought, with the Court Chamberlain now no more than a dozen paces away. Yet how high could that esteem really be, he thought, given that the steed in these statues was full-size, not three-quarters, so that the father actually looked extra small compared to his horse? “How, Herr Leibniz, would you characterize this relationship? He commissions hundreds of statues of his father, yet each is slightly smaller than life, although also quite regal in bearing, and at a moment of military triumph, yet dwarfed by his horse? What kind of relationship is that? What is the nature of it? Which sentiments are involved?” The number of statues indicates one thing, the size of them another, the air of them another still, and the size of the horse in them quite another, “and of course that is only four of the infinite attributes of these statues!” One could not escape the conclusion that the Emperor’s filial sentiments were, correspondingly, infinitely complex. On the other hand, the Emperor would either receive his father’s sculptor or he would not. The most multifarious phenomena are always being boiled down to the most ridiculous dualisms, said the astronomer—“just as, tomorrow, you will remember only that the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon, or that it was not.”