And he thought cheerfully: I have now seen more stars than Piccolomini, if not yet Tycho or Bayer.

THE NEXT MORNING, having sent word to his metallurgists and lens-grinders that he desired now a tube of fifteen inches, forged not of brass but of bronze, and with the power to magnify things threefold, the astronomer, careful not to neglect his other duties, wrote and dispatched by messenger a horoscope for the Emperor “consisting of course of utter nonsense but of utterly rigorous utter nonsense, and which brought His Majesty good tidings.” It is in dealing with the nonsensical, he noted, that we must be most rigorous, for sense itself is always by definition quite rigorous, the requisite rigor has already been provided by reason working hand in hand with reality, it is precisely by its stiffness and structure that we identify it as sense, if it’s very stiff and very structured we tend to say: That is, or makes, sense, whereas nonsense must be structured and stiffened from without, i.e., given form, which is why writing the Emperor’s horoscope, insofar as it entailed writing an absolutely nonsensical document, was no easy task, it was harder even than his scientific labor of the night before, a fact which, the astronomer added, might have suggested to him now what he realized only much later—namely, that there was something awry with his science. Then, with a Latin edition of Sacrobosco’s Algorismus vulgaris in one hand and a German vernacular version in the other, he set out for the turret in which he’d been told that the bastard prince dwelled, on the southernmost corner of the Castle complex, antipodal to the North Wing and overlooking the Imperial Menagerie, where imported beasts with eccentric stripes stood shivering in the snow; but after knocking three times on the thick wooden door with no answer, and observing only blackness between the bars of its little iron-grated aperture, and extracting from the four palace guards playing cards on the floor of the corridor nothing but shrugs, smirks, sexual innuendo, and sarcastic asides, the astronomer, “without, as I realized only later, asking myself why Prince Heinrich if indeed he did dwell there dwelled in such a turret, behind such a thick wooden door, with such a small iron-grated aperture, minded by so many armed guards,” went off to look for one of the princesses.