Chapter 1
My name is Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician. The incident that I am going to narrate to you occurred at the time of my exile. I had received an invitation from the famous observer of planets, Tycho Brahe. Conditions at home prompted me to leave home, and after thorough deliberation with myself, I had chosen to accept Brahe’s invitation.
Throughout the arduous journey, I meticulously presented to paper, the questions that I had been grappling with for years then. The night before I reached Brahe’s home, I consulted my watch for one last time as the sun lazily ducked behind the great spread of wet lands. The cart’s wheels skidded occasionally as the tired oxen teetered. From the dark, arose pairs of eyes; they embraced the sides of the wet muddy road and glistened like festoons of bulbs. The sky was cloudless and with squinted eyes, I think I spotted Jupiter without the aid of telescope. Since the time of Copernicus, nations obsessively pursued observations on planetary motions. But the data only rested with the noblemen. Brahe was one of the noblemen and an astronomer. What more could I ask for.
But, Brahe turned out to be something altogether different from the image my mind had formed of him. He indulged himself in the most voracious of appetites. His entourage consisted of a dozen men and women who did nothing more than eat and drink. He dressed his ladies in fur coats and sat them up on sequin divans.
Before I accepted Brahe’s invitation, I was working out the model of solar system. The six planets, I believed, formed the vertices of invisible space geometry. I was working on the possibility of all the planets embedded inside three fundamental geometrical objects: a triangle, square and a pentagon. But I had little data to make progress. I accepted Brahe’s invitation, for I believed that sifting through the archives of his observations, I might find an evidence for my theory.
Cosmos fascinated me. I longed for answers: what were the twinkling stars made of? Why were they utterly stable? Save for the six planets and an occasional flare that runs across the sky and vanishes from one’s sight around the horizon, the night sky was constant and unchanging. The planets however, shifted in their orbits; they seemed to exhibit a pattern. While my peers celebrated their own mediocre tastes in theater, I shut myself off the vulgar display of earthly indulgence. I invested my adolescence in observing the planetary motions.
But as days passed, I grew increasingly disconcerted with Tycho Brahe. He seemed indifferent to my concerns. I was an intuitive mathematician. I reveled in Geometry. But I desperately needed Brahe’s observations to make progress in the field. He seemed to distrust me; he occasionally, as a passing comment, mentioned the angular change in the motion of Jupiter for instance. On dinner table, between gulps of red wine, with his fingers dipped in mayonnaise, he would mention a thing or two about the progress he seemed to make in his observations. The tantalizing details stirred me up, but he would evade me for the rest of the day and whisk away any requests that I made.
Often times, I would lend my head skywards and gape intently as though I wished to summon geometrical patterns in the sky. I was feeling lonely and hopeless. It is at a time like this that I met Rani.
Chapter 2
When I first met Kepler, he was so devoid of joy and utterly dejected. I parked my time machine in the woods near Brahe’s home, cleverly camouflaged it to look like a thatched roof hut, and slipped into the garden. It was a tall mansion with windows that overlooked miles and miles of wet lands. 17th century mosquitoes were the first species to greet me. The timing could not have been perfect. I chose the evening of Brahe’s death. A glutton: tonight, he would feed himself like a pig, and die a sad death. But Kepler was not aware of this.
I waited in the orange curtain of dusk for the right moment. Around me were mellifluous flowers, violet, pink and yellow. Before me, past the hedgerow, was a well. A pale brown mesh was draped over the mouth of the well. To one side was the battered end of the rope that ran over a pulley and to the other side was a copper lantern.
About an hour later, the door opened, and a bearded old man stepped out of the gargoyle clad thick lintels of the portico, into the garden. He approached the well, squatted before the lantern, and proceeded to daub the wick with a greasy smelling liquid from a tumbler in his lap. I carefully, crouched low, stepped over the rope, and made my way into the house. To avoid casting a shadow that stretched beneath my feet like a ghoulish creature, I stuck to the shadows. Through the great door that seemed to heave as I stepped inside, and kneeling under the ornamental window sills, I tiptoed with my suede shoes in one hand and the printout of the house’s blue print in other hand.
The wide wooden staircase creaked softly as I stepped over it. I paused, held my breath and listened for anything suspicious. I wrapped my palm over the burnished globe that bound the entrance of the railing. The dusty mauve carpet lounged on the stairs like the thick tongue of a creature whose lips were ornamented with lanterns on both the ends. The mouth, as I rolled my eyes over the printout, turned out to be Kepler’s room.
The room was empty. Strewn on the table by the bedside, were what seemed to me as the patient underpinnings of complex Geometry. Cold breeze was flowing in through the windows; with my pointed fingers, I cautiously pulled the transparent blinds apart. Outside, washed linen billowed on the ropes, tut, tut... the washing issued a familiar sound with such regularity that it mesmerized me. Beyond the garden, dark horizon was spotted with yellow flickering lamps here and there. In the slave quarters before the garden, moths were knocking their heads into the glass head of the lanterns; a fluffy dog was licking its paws and a man and woman were tending to the horses in the shed.
Sound of broad heels digging into the dusty carpet on the stairs awoke me from my musing. I snuggled my back into space between the turquoise coated cupboard’s cheek and the side of the wall. From this vantage point I noticed two identical shadows crowned with felt hat shapes cast on the carpet-less floor of the room. The shadows stretched across the length of the room till they met the base of the divan on the other end of the room, climbed as two lithe bodied flat creatures would, and coalesced into one. And the man stepped inside. He was in no hurry.
Kepler seemed thoughtful and melancholic. He held the tip of his flat rimmed chair, leaned it and dragged on its hind legs to rest his stout shouldered back on it. This is when I surveyed the surroundings and mustered the courage to approach him. I was still wearing my blue denim trousers and a tight V neck pullover.
As if to reconsider, I looked about me and noticed on the hanger by the door, a gilded corset. Beside it, suspended on a metal crook was a dry petticoat, nicely hemmed and beautiful. It was only two paces ahead of me. As if Kepler had read my thoughts, he rose and left the room leaving behind his quilt that now wept ink onto the floor.
I waited for the twin shadows to retreat into their hideouts and quickly changed into the 17th century gilded corset, petticoat and a stole. About half an hour later, the twin shadows leapt up as a flame over the divan, flickered and united to drag behind them, the source, Kepler. He found me leaning before his table. On the floor where the quilt had dripped a smudge, I rested my newly acquired gilt sandals, and greeted him in my learned English. I introduced myself as a traveller from India.
At first, he was flummoxed. He seemed disoriented and sluggish. He raised his voice to call for the servant. This is when I heard myself say “I can help you with the observations on planetary motions.” This calmed him. He reluctantly nodded his head, collapsed into his flat rimmed chair and peered through the lolling opening left by the melodious movement of the transparent window blinds. For a moment, he said nothing and I stood there with cold breeze slipping into my bare back that was rested against the raised column of his divan. The corset was tricky to wear; I needed a second pair of hands to pull the slit tight on my back. So after wrestling with it for a while, I left my back bare. I had just the broad stole around my shoulders to protect my modesty. And, the cold breeze was stirring goosebumps on my skin.
After what seemed like an eternity, Kepler faced me and said “who are you? How can you help me?” To this, I shrugged and explained that I was a lone astronomer like him. I told him a plausible story about how the meager resources in India did not allow me to pursue my interests. How deplorable the civilisation was and how utterly disinteresting a large section of the society was. My tirade seemed to elevate him. He wore an expression of interested face as I continued to entertain him with my story. I told him that I had archives of data hidden in the attic of my vehicle which I had parked outside.
Without a moment’s thought, he accepted, kissed my right hand and we both stepped out into the garden. Outside, a sudden chill gripped me as I pinched the corset’s slit tight with the back of my left hand. A rare moment of quiet swaddled us both as the pellets of rock rattled under my gilt sandals and his suede brogues. It was perhaps the quiet that provoked the thought, for he noticed the thatch roof hut and threw his head back. He said skeptically “why do you need me if you have the observational data with you?” To this, I replied calmly “I am merely an observer of cosmos. A passionate astronomer! But alas, I am not a mathematician. I cannot logically deduce patterns from the data. That task is yours and yours alone.”
Kepler eyed the slanted roof hut with an eye of disdain but I implored for him to step inside. Ducks were crackling outside in the pond, swallows were dipping their beaks into the water and a sparrow flitted its wings in a night yawn. I closed the door of my time machine.
Chapter 3
The vehicle whirred like the coo of a cuckoo. Nothing that I had ever seen in my life could explain the interiors. The thatch hut was a camouflage. The machine had a central hub and spiral arms. Rani, as the traveller identified herself, was dressed in such a manner that a thought hurried across my mind and escaped my lips as a chuckle. It startled her. She was holding the back of her blouse with her left hand and the corset was not drawn tight. Over the rich petticoat that luxuriated around her, she had wrapped her shoulders with a broad scarf, a mink stole.
She was a foreigner to our land and it was only conceivable that she was alien to our women and their dresses. She prodded her manicured fingers into a glistening rubbery sheet. She did not pay much attention to me. After a while she excused herself, slipped into a decorated room and closed the door behind her. This gave me time to rethink. The interior was well lit up with globular lamps overhead that seemed to burn without a hint of flicker. I walked around the central spherical piece that was flanked with square sheaths of confounding machinery. The square sheaths had oblong bases and a dozen of them were connected on their rears with running coils. The coils themselves seemed unfamiliar to me. The floor was stubborn to my heels; it did not creak under my weight, instead, it bore my reflection.
In this strange place, the only solace that I had was the near geometrical shapes of all the objects. Whatever this vehicle was, and whoever Rani was, the symmetry of geometry seemed to me the only connection to my origins.
Sliding her rolled palm over shining water coloured rail, Rani approached me. She had completely transformed herself into an effeminate boy. Tight trousers that left no hint of a pleat, as though they had never seen the prick of tailor’s sewing needle. And a shirt that looked like no shirt at all; it folded itself around her bosom like a piece of blanket with no work of embroidery. The swell of her bosom, the bump of her pelvis and the straight long hair that sprawled on her shoulders were the only hints that I could gather of her sex. All in all, Rani looked like a wingless butterfly.
“You have been fascinated with the cosmos all your life,” Rani said. She leaned before one of the square sheaths and tapped on its face with her fingers. The guts of this sheath were in a flux, they responded to her every single tap. “You always wondered how the planets looked from close range.” Rani knew a great deal about me. She prodded the sheath with her tapping to produce from an aquarium shaped blue box, three columns with numbers. The numbers rolled along the spine of the column as Rani delicately swished them. “Now, I shall take you to Venus.”
“It will be a while before we get there. I will take this time to introduce to you, the place I come from.” She had a sweet mellowed voice just like the women of my time and place. But, a hint of authority beseeched her person to be let out. She somehow seemed to hold back her authoritative demeanour beneath the veneer of her lovely pink cheeks. She proceeded with much calm, a bit pedantic, like a churchman. “I come from the 23rd century. I hail from a time when vehicles are built to travel in time. India is largely an isolated place for trade and commerce in your time. But where I come from, we are the hub of intelligence. Germany and Italy, two of your time greats are no more than smoldering pits full of grate. Ashen debris is what is left of the splendor and grandeur that you so dearly preserve today. “
“A long range comet hurtled into our solar system. The observatory in Hyderabad, capital city of India, in the present day serves intellectual discourse to the rest of the planet just as the Greece and Rome of ancient times did. Here, we located the comet when it neared Jupiter. Our calculations showed that the comet would eventually exit the solar system without actually distressing the orbital sanctity of any planets. However, the plume of the comet which was emitted when the icy frozen mountainous comet neared the sun blew up to engulf Venus. The plume splashed strange mixture of elements onto the floor of Venus which stirred its atmosphere and produced nuclear emissions.”
“The outcome was that when the comet returned past the spiral kerb of the sun’s gravitation, Venus whisked it so powerfully that the comet trapped itself in our solar system. The broken carbon rich, stony, metallic pieces of the comet struck the planet and engulfed it in flames.”
“A major portion of western Europe is lost. From Holland to Italy and from England to the borders of Russia”
It was not a time for someone to lose calm and run around hysterically. My initial reaction was to laugh it up. But the complex machinery before me was anything but laughing matter. Rani had come all the way from Hyderabad. More importantly, she visited me from a different time. If this was to be believed, I needed a bit more convincing than a morbid tale.
Chapter 4
Kepler had taken it in his own stride. He had been calm throughout. Now and then, he seemed to dig his knuckles into the dashboard of one of the computer screens. One of the wires of the motherboard had been torn when Kepler ran to squeeze himself tight in a lonely corner of the ship. He sank his head into the collars of his two piece suit like a schoolboy. He seemed very different from what I had imagined him to be. Our school textbooks, mainly rolled out by Hyderabad school board, had preserved the first two chapters for ancient cosmology. Most of the school textbooks elsewhere, stripped cosmology to the beginning of 21st century. They began with Einstein. It always bothered me that someone like Kepler should not be given his due share.
He seemed ready. He was convinced. I just needed to prove it to him that I was a traveller of time and space. I punched in the coordinates of space and time for planet Venus. When we reached there, I took Kepler by his arm like a teacher does a school kid and implored for him to witness firsthand, the planet Venus. Back in Hyderabad, recently Kepler’s diaries were retrieved. From them, I learnt that Kepler had written about the planets in his diaries. More than any other planet, he romanticized about planet Venus. He imagined it to be like a mountainous plane which was shrouded with a mystic evening breeze all through.
I knew that nothing could equal the feeling of Kepler; a lonely astronomer, the pioneer of the planetary model, was presently witnessing the heavenly body of his romance, planet Venus, at the time of its apocalyptic monstrous stage.
On the planet, a new species was taking form. The floor of Venus was covered with sulphuric acid. The temperature on Venus had raised fast post the collision with the pluming comet. Rocks on its surface were amorphous to the eye, for they were more fluid than solid. The atmosphere was so thick that any life form, as one of my colleagues observed, back at the observatory in Hyderabad, to survive, should be equipped with hundred times the lung size of a mammal on planet earth.
Here, life took a bizarre form. Shrouded with the dry orange clouds of ashen sulphur, away from the inhospitable floor, mushroom shaped floaters rose out of a series of selective, gradual and incremental process of evolution. These floaters sprouted out of seeds that must have lain dormant for a long time. Our studies never indicated life on Venus. These floaters stayed afloat in the atmosphere of the planet. Although atmosphere on Venus reeled with violent bursts of whirling suplurous winds, these floaters had found a niche of their own. They had made Venus home, much like the jelly fish of our primeval oceans back on Earth.
Venus had been stripped of life for a long time. Its surface pitted with bulb shaped craters; and its mountains melting away under the pressure that amounts to ninety times as much as on our planet. New life on Venus only meant that life was coming back to the planet.
About an hour later, my nervously fidgeting travel partner came to grips with the situation. And he said “What about Saturn rings. Do tell me?” What a relief it was. Kepler was beginning to like the trip. “No,” he said, nodding his head “don’t’ tell me. Take me there.”
Oh. How I wish I could indulge Kepler. It is not that I had no time, but the constraint was deeply rooted in evolution. “Saturn, at the moment is spouting venom. Its rings are….” No. he was not listening. Like a school kid, he shrugged off, threw his head back, and went towards one of the computer consoles. Pointing to one of them, he said “you just roll the numbers on this. Why don’t you?”
I felt miserable. From where I stood, I could only see the back of his neck. With his lips pinched tight, from under the furrowed forehead, he squinted at the dashboard curiously. This was a wonderland to him. But I soon realised that I had to bring his attention to the fact that it was no wonderland.
“Evolution is not yet known in your time. It would take another two centuries for this” he seemed indifferent. “Living beings on planet earth, in our time, have been identified to have evolved from replicating themselves. The process of natural selection required that beings store up information regarding the replication in unchanging, rigid and ageless format. This, they did in the form of genes.”
By now Kepler was eyeing me like a child would an unpleasant lizard. “However, with the passage of time, natural selection favoured those beings that in addition to ageless rigid memories, possessed a flexible accessory that handled a single life’s memories. This resulted in the development of Brains.”
I paused for a while but Kepler was, as they say, speechless. So I continued “Our brains access memories by storing them up in storehouses of subconscious mind and forking them out when required. Brains have evolved to communicate in the form of electrical impulses between neurons. The floaters on planet Venus…” I waited for an indication, a sign, a gesture perhaps. But Kepler gave none. I waited. After a long pause, Kepler replied “Yes. Floaters on Venus”
“Yes”, I proceeded calmly “these floaters seemed to have evolved developing brains that communicate not via electrical impulses but by radio waves. In effect the floaters on Venus are merely an arm of a brain which must have communicated via radio waves to the other arms on each of the other planets. This marvelous evolution of brain to luxuriate on different planets and communicate via radio waves, essentially, disallows us, to visit any other planet. Because, we have been tagged; if this planetary brain notices our ship again, it will grow suspicious and try to annihilate us.”
Chapter 5
Nothing mattered anymore. Some of what Rani said made sense to me. Mostly it was all portentous talk. The romantic ideation of planetary models on my drawing table now seemed infinitely childish. Something did not fit right. Why would this astronaut from an advanced technological time, scoop me out of my humble abode and dish me the portent filled scientific fodder.
The last two days that I spent with Rani had made me more receptive to her ideas. I was beginning to find her attractive. The curl of hair that she tucked behind her ears; the thin gap that wallowed between her lips when she mused; the faint hiss of a snore that escaped her breath at night; and oh! How smilingly she pinched the blanket tightly around her.
On the third morning, I confronted her. “What do you need me for?”
Rani replied promptly “your second law of planetary motion. You said that every planet sweeps equal areas of arcs in a given time period as it goes round the sun”
“But I said no such thing,” I retorted “Brahe won’t let me. The observed data of planetary motions is tantalizingly close to me. But Brahe reveals only bits and pieces. I will never be able to prove anything substantial without the data.”
I had actually made up my mind to commit suicide two nights earlier. It was an awkward moment. I could not reveal such intimate details to a woman from far-far land. That night, if not for Rani’s intervention, if not for this cosmic trip, I would have hanged myself to death.
“Yes,” Rani concluded as if she read my thoughts “Future of science rests on your planetary model. You will be the first astronomer to have mathematically proved the planetary motions.” Here she seemed to hesitate. “We had recently come across your diaries. Apparently, they were written in the name of a pseudo astronomer who never existed. In the archives located in the central library of Hyderabad, one of my colleagues, sifting through the archives of the library as a part of the program aimed at reconstituting ancient cosmology, noticed that the diaries of the pseudo astronomer fitted no chronology.”
“This is when a committee was formed to look into the when-abouts and whereabouts of the author. And it was conclusively proved to be your diary. On the night of my arrival, you had scribbled in your diary, that you would be hanging yourself to the rafters of your rooftop wooden bedroom.”
“However, you will find it amusing to learn that you struck it off two days later. Three years hence, you had discovered the planetary model that would be called ‘Kepler’s laws of planetary motion’.”
Tears rolled in my eyes. I was close to sobbing. From a state of desolation, Rani had lifted my up and when she left me back at home, I was reeling in a state of elevation. Euphoria of science, of cosmos, and of never ending life, of evolution, and of many things that were yet to be discovered! And I had seen them all.
When I returned home, I found Brahe dead. Apparently, he had overfed himself and died last night. Now suddenly, the archives of data rose before my eyes like festoons of paper garlands. How tantalizingly close I was to death. And now, all the archives were accessible. And now, how freely I could gorge myself in the details of observations….Ah! I can’t wait.
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