The astronomer put an eye socket to his telescope. He told Leibniz: “That instant kinship I had felt with the Emperor upon first gazing at his face, and which I thought far more profound than any kinship I had ever felt with my own father, had now, retrospectively, to be called into question, I thought.” He picked up his quill. “We begin to see the virtues of our birth fathers only after the fathers we thought would replace them have disappointed us in turn. By then of course it is too late, our birth fathers are dead, the little playlets of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation we stage with them in our heads are performed entirely for our own gratification.” And he wrote down a long string of numbers.

The Emperor, gesturing to one eye: “For two months the Devil himself has tugged at my left eyelid. A two-month eyelid twitch, inflicted by the Devil himself, at my brother Matthias’s bidding.”

The Chamberlain turned to the astronomer and said: “Now what, you may be asking, has all this palace intrigue to do with you?”

And the astronomer had replied: “Indeed, I was wondering.”

“You who are no diplomat but are rather a hunter of the secrets of nature. One of those very valiant truth-seekers who intends to put nature on the rack till she reveals to you in her screams what she has so cunningly concealed from your eyes, right? Whose head belongs not in parlor rooms but among the stars, right? You, the Imperial Astronomer—what has all of this to do with you?”

“What indeed,” said the astronomer, he told Leibniz. “And with my tubes.”

The Court Chamberlain said: “That is the question you are asking yourself. The question we are asking ourselves is: Why has our new mathematics tutor not so much as stepped foot in Prince Heinrich’s turret? Despite our explicit directive that the mathematical edification of the Prince ranked among the most important of his duties? Why instead has this purported mathematics tutor spent hour upon hour in the privacy of the Small Dining Room conferring in hushed tones with the very lady whom Archduke Matthias conspires to install on the throne? If an agent of Matthias’s had infiltrated our Castle armed with a gadget stolen from the pages of a Neapolitan sage”—and he flung at the astronomer’s feet a copy of Giambattista della Porta’s Magia naturalis, which, with a smack, landed open to a diagram of a tube—“and under the pretense of creating a star catalogue had sought to inform the Princess of her uncle’s plot, would that agent have acted any differently than you did, any differently at all? That’s the question we are asking ourselves.”

“An absurd allegation,” sputtered the astronomer, so astonished that he was not yet alarmed, and the Court Chamberlain said, “Absurd, not impossible,” and the astronomer took a step forward, intending to pick up Della Porta’s book so he could illustrate the countless ways in which his own tube differed from the tube pictured within, but the imperial guards evidently interpreted his motion in another way for he swiftly found himself restrained by three of them.