The Court Chamberlain was upon them.

Emperor Rudolf, he declared, with a smile that to the astronomer seemed simpering and suspicious, would be honored to receive a gift from Emperor Maximilian’s illustrious former court sculptor. The latter nodded, straightened with a licked finger the refractory feather on his cap, clutched to his chest the knapsack containing the mechanical human head, shot his son a proud impish gleeful glance—eyebrows arched, lower lip bit—and then followed the Court Chamberlain across the Great Hall, past a withered old Paduan declaiming energetically from Aristotle’s On Coming-to-Be and Passing Away, between a trio of Jesuits scribbling figures and formulas on their slates, around a rotund Oxford bishop and oculist examining in the flickering light of a waxy candelabra a human eyeball seemingly astonished at its own state (and taken as it happens from the same young thief whose thick hair now festooned the Head of Phalaris), and at last, at long last, to the foot of the Emperor’s throne. And the Emperor, in whom the German mathematician’s monologue on his large, infinitely sophisticated, infinitely hopeless instrument had appeared to induce a state close to death, for his chin had fallen to his chest, and his eyes had closed, now opened them again, sat bolt upright, clapped his hands, and murmured something to the Court Chamberlain, who cried out to the crowd, in a manner that filled the astronomer with filial dread, “An artistic interlude!”

The chatter stopped at once.

The wind died down also.

Even the logs in the fireplaces ceased to crackle.

The hall was silent now save for the lamentations of the instruments.

And the Court Chamberlain, as far as the astronomer could recollect, per Leibniz, declaimed: “This gentleman, who served His Majesty’s father in Vienna, and fashioned that splendiferous city, as well as the Hofburg within it, so precisely according to His Majesty’s father’s whims and wishes that whenever he stands in the Hofburg, in Vienna, His Majesty feels, as he has often expressed it to me, that he is standing inside his father’s head, inside his father’s head, that is, inside his father’s head twice over”—inside his father’s head, the astronomer told Leibniz, not mine!—“has fashioned for His Majesty, we are given to understand, a marvelous self-moving art head.” And the words “marvelous self-moving art head,” with their farcical ring, made the astronomer tremble. He told Leibniz: “Perhaps to exact revenge on his father by means of mine, perhaps to divert himself from the seemingly insoluble problem of the nature of the new object in the night sky, the Emperor, I realized, was about to turn my father and his work of art into an object of ridicule.”

The Court Chamberlain said: “Please, sir, the moving art head, the moving art head!”

The astronomer peered into his telescope.

There were titters—“genuine titters!”—as his father delicately removed the lead head from its sack and held it in his hands.