Read Kepler’s Dream Online

Authors: Juliet Bell

Kepler’s Dream (8 page)

“I think you'll like her,” Joan said, pointing at one author's toothy photo. “She's feisty. She's got spunk. Like you, Violet.”

This wasn't what I was used to in a bookstore. The place my mom and I usually went was one of those vast mall-type places that sells music and movies and candy and, by the way, books, with a line of cash registers up front like at a supermarket.


Ah!” My grandmother brightened at the sight of one book Joan had shown her. “A new history of the Waughs! What fun.”

“Which wars?” I tried to sound interested.

“Oh, Ella.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Don't be such a philistine. The
Waughs
… Evelyn, Alec, Auberon … You sound just like your father.”

I had no idea who Phyllis Stine was or how Dad managed to be like her, too, but clearly it meant something like “idiot.” My eyes stung with the insult. The GM was oblivious, but Joan saw. She led me over by the shoulders to a different part of the store.

“Now, don't let your grandmother get to you,” she said quietly. “Just come right back at Violet if she says something like that. Show her you've got spunk, too.” Then Joan helped me toward the time-tested solution to bad feelings: reading. “Look here, hon—we've got some great new titles for juveniles …”

Juvenile
made me think of the kids' jail again, but Joan did pick out some good books—not just the nutritious ones we'd had to read at school and then write reports about in the form of a board game or cookbook recipe. (Some teacher's idea of how to make homework more interesting.) And it was good that she did, because reading turned out to be one of the biggest entertainment features of the Good Grammar Correctional Facility. Other than books, and birds, fun activities were pretty thin on the ground.

One afternoon, about four or five days after I arrived, Miguel was out teaching me how to make a silly clucking sound the
peacocks seemed to love that he called his “pea-call.” It involved cupping your hands and blowing on them, like you do when you're trying to get warm, but I hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.

“You see that old hen there?” Miguel jutted his chin toward one of the brown lady birds and blew a soft little call with his hands. “That one's Carmen. She's my favorite.” I nodded, though how he could tell them apart was a mystery. Carmen started to wander over to a broad, hollowed-out area behind the cluster of cottonwood trees that looked like a place an asteroid had once landed. Miguel told me that many years before, this scooped-out area had been a pond, with ducks and fish and an elegant pair of swans that swam around it. It was hard to imagine that dustbowl filled with water now.

“And you know those empty fields, out behind where the Library is … ,” Miguel went on. “That's where the Mackenzies used to keep their horses.”


Horses
?” I said. “Who rode them?”

“Who?” Miguel grinned. “Your grandparents, of course. And Walt.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, sure. A long time ago, when your grandfather was still alive.” Miguel got a storybook look in his coffee-bean eyes. “This place was real different then, Ella. I wish you could have seen it. There were living things everywhere—it was a magical place.”

I tried to picture living things around, other than peacocks and guys with delivery trucks. It was tough. It was like Miguel had this old silent movie and was putting music and color back
into it. “How do you know?” I asked him. “Did you come here back then?”

“Come here?” He smiled. “My dad worked here. For your grandparents. Looking after their horses and the rest of the livestock. Oscar Aguilar.” So Rosie's grandfather had worked for mine? This was news to me. “That's how come I knew your dad.”

“You knew my dad as a kid?”

“Of course!” He smiled. “Walt was a little older than me, I was the kid brother in our family, you know, but—sure I knew your dad. He taught me how to bait a hook. He's the first guy I ever fished with.”

Here was something Miguel and I had in common: “Walt” was the first guy I ever fished with, too.

“That was before the accident, of course. After that, everything changed. They got rid of all the animals, and—our family moved away.” A cloud darkened Miguel's usually clear-skied face. “I didn't see much of your dad after that, or Mrs. Von Stern either. For a long time. It was a surprise when she got in touch after all these years and asked me to work for her.” He sighed. “Rosie's mom wasn't too happy when I said yes.”

I wondered if it was something they had argued about. “Why not?”

“Oh—she thinks there are bad bad spirits around the place. Because of the unhappy history.”

Great. Now I was going to find it even easier to sleep at night.

I still didn't even know what had happened to my grandfather, exactly. No one ever seemed to think they needed to tell
me that, or other important things. I figured Miguel might actually spill the beans at last, but before I could find out, my cell phone suddenly came alive in my back jeans pocket. “Nowhere Man,” that old Beatles song.

“It's my dad,” I told Miguel, like I'd forgotten I even had a dad.

“He knew we were talking about him,” he said, smiling. Then he waved me to answer it and wandered off to get some real work done.

“Belle, old girl!”

Yeah, that was my dad all right. He sounded mighty cheerful for a guy who had abandoned his daughter in her hour of need. “Sorry I didn't call earlier. We were on a three-day float and there wasn't great cell coverage—”

“Uh-huh.” There was always some version of this story. The exact details didn't much matter.

“—a group of businessmen from Southern California. They couldn't tie a fly to save their lives. We'd have starved if it hadn't been for the powdered eggs.”

There were things I wanted to ask my dad once he quit the fisher-talk, but before I had the chance, he dropped the hearty act for a second. “So, Ella, how are you holding up? Are you and the Old Dragon getting along OK?”

“Yeah.” Though
OK
seemed an exaggeration. “I mean—it depends.”

“But she hasn't thrown you in the slawer yet?” I couldn't believe he had thought of that, too.


Not yet.” Then again, I'd been there less than a week. There was plenty of time.

“Well, that's a good sign.” He chuckled. He always found his own jokes pretty funny.

“Dad—” I blurted. I couldn't hold back anymore. “There's nothing to
do
around here. The only game she has is Boggle. I mean, there's no Internet, there's no TV—”

“Internet?” He chuckled again. “No. Violet Von Stern is
not
wired. (Expletive deleted), Ella, you're lucky you've got a signal on your cell phone.” Him and his expletives. I wondered what the GM had to say about
those
. “Listen, Belle, I understand what you're saying. Absolute. That house—I mean, I haven't been there for a long while, but it's not set up for kids. I know that much. It's an unweeded garden and all that.” He paused. “Has she shown you the
Librerery
yet?” He pronounced the word with a silly snobbish accent that did sound a bit like Grandmother.

“Nope.”

“Well, I'll tell you. It's kind of amazing. My mother has a thing about books.”

“I noticed.”

“Yeah, well, the
Librerery
has some pretty remarkable specimens, and though that may not sound very exciting—”

“It doesn't.”

“OK, but I'm just saying there are some things in there worth paying attention to. You won't see them anywhere else, that's for sure. Tell her to show you Kepler's
Dream
—she has the Morris
edition, Belle, and there are only a dozen copies in the whole
world
.” That didn't make any sense. What sort of book only has twelve copies? “That book—well, I've had mixed feelings about it over the years, to put it mildly, but you should still see it.”

“Sounds great. I can hardly wait.” I hoped the sarcasm made it through the phone line. “So … when are you coming to visit, Dad? You said you would.”

“Yeah—right. Uh—there's a chance I might be able to stop through Albujerk on a layover, on my way to Colorado. It's complicated. You know, Ella, as I think I explained to you, Mother and I don't get along too well. That is—”

I let a thick silence fill up the phone.

“Well, anyway. I'll—I'll try to figure that out, Belle. OK?”

OK, Dad, but you better mean it this time. You can't flake out on me this summer, you know? Not
this
summer.
I wondered if there was anyone around who could explain that to him. Where was the (expletive deleted) dad manual when you really needed it?

That night, maybe even the GM was tired of mushy broccoli, so after a game of Boggle—it really was what passed for entertainment at the GGCF—she took me out to dinner at a French place called Chez Albertine. There was something about going to a French restaurant when I knew there had to be great Mexican food all around that felt kind of like going to Paris and ordering tacos, but whatever. At least we were
out
.

My grandmother ordered snails from the menu, “One of my favorite dishes!” I had to just pretend not to see them or I would get seriously grossed out. So over my steak and fries, for a
distraction, I asked about her
Librerery
. I copied Dad's goofy pronunciation, but she didn't seem to notice.

“The Library?” Her face came into focus. “Would that interest you, Ella?”

“Sure.” I mean, not as much as going
online,
or watching a
movie,
or talking to one of my actual
friends,
but … compared with feeding peacocks all day, yeah.
Yesssss.

“I have to open the place up soon in any case, as two boys are coming to help me begin cataloging the collection. High schoolers.” She didn't sound thrilled about this. “They come—ahem!—recommended, but I find it impossible to tell them apart or remember their names, so I think of them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

She said this as though it were a perfectly sensible thing to say, so I nodded, to be a good sport. “And Dad said there's some amazing book you have by, uh—Kepler?”

“Kepler's
Dream
?” My grandmother's voice was sharp as a knife edge. “Your father told you about that?”

“Well, he mentioned it …” I got all mumbly again. “I don't know …”

She looked out the window. “I thought your father found the purchase of that book extravagant,” she said stiffly, but she wasn't talking to me so much as addressing the Sandias in the distance. Then she turned back. “The Morris Kepler, Ella, is an extremely rare book, the most valuable in my collection. It is a remarkable artifact. Have you ever heard of the Kelmscott Chaucer?”

“No.” It sounded like the name of a racehorse. Or maybe a
famous murderer.
Did you hear that creepy story about the dude in Kelmscott? He chauced ten people before they caught him.

“Ah. Well, it is a masterpiece of book art, and the Morris Kepler is a similarly rare volume. Your grandfather always dreamed of owning a copy one day, and some years ago—when you were a very little girl—I had the chance to realize his dream.”

I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, except that he had died when my dad was a kid. I always found it weird to think of him being dead so long before I was even born. It was like thinking about infinity, or black holes—it made my brain curdle.

“Was he a collector too?”

“Edward? Edward was an astronomer.” The GM's face shone with an unfamiliar light. “He loved looking at the stars. It would be fair to say he liked stars better than he liked people.”

Like you and books,
I thought, but kept quiet.

“He knew all their names, as if they were his friends, and he knew when they were planning to be where, in the sky. He had all their paths in his head, memorized.”

“Like a travel agent,” I said.

My grandmother laughed. At something
I
said! I almost choked on my steak.

“I like that, Ella. Quite right.” She looked at me, seeing something she hadn't before. “Your grandfather was a travel agent to the stars. Plotting their itineraries. That's very clever.”

I felt a flutter of pride.

“Edward loved Kepler,” she continued in a low, almost dreamy voice. “Kepler was one of the great early astronomers
and mathematicians, Ella—like Galileo. He worked out many important things, such as the paths of planetary orbits, but what Edward revered about Kepler was his wild imagination. Kepler believed the Earth had a soul, and that God shaped the planets in accordance with mathematical laws.” I didn't really understand what she was talking about, but I nodded anyway. I am pretty good at math—much better at math than at making a board game or recipe about some Roald Dahl book I've read—but I had never considered God in the equation. And I had barely heard of Kepler. (Scientist? Inventor? Bookstore owner?)

“Edward used to love to tell me about the strangest and least known of Kepler's works—his
Somnium,
or
Dream.
It is Kepler's fanciful account of what the Earth might look like if we traveled to the moon. Kepler imagined moon travel more than three hundred years before it happened! Edward used to say the
Somnium
was man's first work of science fiction. Kepler brought out several crucial works in his lifetime, but the
Somnium
was only published in 1634. Posthumously.”

I looked blank.

“Which means, after he died.”

“Oh.”

“So when, thanks to an antiquarian book dealer Edward and I had known named Christopher Abercrombie—whom you will meet next week, Ella, as he is coming to visit—the opportunity came up to buy this book, years after Edward had passed away, I leapt at the chance. Building the Library, and our collection, was my way of honoring Edward's memory. That volume is the
centerpiece of a collection that Edward and I started together, while he was still alive.” She looked down at her snail shells for a minute. I did not want to think about what had been inside them. “To your father, I believe, the entire project was frivolous. We have very different opinions on the subject.” She looked back up at me. “In any case, Ella. Would you like to see it?”

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