The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (20 page)

A policeman appeared out of nowhere, shining his flashlight over them.
“Va tutto bene?”

“Sì,”
said Becca.
“Sì, sì. Grazie!”
The policeman nodded and walked away. “Guys, guess what I just found on the map the totally old-fashioned way?”

“With light from Carlo’s phone?” Lily added.

“That we’re lost?” said Darrell.

“Nope. A museum!”

Wade laughed. “Becca, this is Rome. The whole city’s a museum.”

She grinned from ear to ear. “But I found a museum called . . . wait for it . . . the Museo Astronomico e Copernicano.”

“Seriously?” Darrell said, standing up.

“Uh-huh! And I’m pretty sure it’s all about you know what and you know who!”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“O
ur luck just changed!” Lily squealed. “Becca, take us there this instant!”

“Follow me this instant!” Becca laughed, and she marched out of the Forum. “The museum is in the middle of a park a few miles from here. We can walk it.”

A Copernicus museum?

Their luck was changing, all right. And now that his father was on his way, Wade was surprised at how incredibly beautiful Rome was turning out to be. The old city, its winding streets, the comfortable temperature, his awesome friends, the innumerable cars—little Fiats and Alfas buzzing around like mice in a maze—everything was suddenly and astoundingly and unbelievably . . .
right
.

Becca’s ponytail bounced and spun as she forged ahead, acting as tour guide, tracing her fingers animatedly on the map.

“Right here. Left. Now straight on.”

For the next two hours, they made their way across the city. Streets twisted and crisscrossed one another in a careless manner. Nearly every corner they came to offered a view of some piazza or fountain or church or monument. Lily was chattering again. Darrell bounced on his heels, humming a riff from Gary Clark Jr.

Everything was good.

Even the killers don’t know exactly where we are.

A slow hour after that they found themselves meandering up a series of inclined roads into a quiet, forested park that might have been what was left of one of Rome’s ancient hills, or maybe not, it didn’t matter. What mattered was perched at the top of the park and lit with floodlights—a large villa with three observatory domes on its roof.

“The Museo Astronomico e Copernicano,” Becca said when they drew close to a high wrought-iron fence surrounding it. “We could climb over and peek in the windows. Or just wait for the place to open in the morning. Any ideas?”

“Yeah. No more climbing,” Lily said. “My legs won’t stand for it. Get it?
Stand
. Never mind. I’m done.” She sat on a low wall bordering the road, kicked off her shoes, and rubbed her feet.

The park behind them was heavily treed, quiet, and sheltered, and the night air was still temperate.

“If we have to spend the next few hours outside, this isn’t a bad place,” Wade said. “One of us could stay awake. We can take shifts.”

“It’s pretty quiet up here, and warm,” Darrell said. “It’s after eleven. If we’re lucky, the museum will open at nine. Ten hours? I could totally sleep that long.”

“Fine,” Wade said. “Let’s find a quiet spot in the park and hang out until morning. Sleep. Whatever. We need to get in there, but I’m tired of breaking laws.”

“Good call,” said Becca. “We must have a rap sheet a mile long.”

Lily tramped among the trees and staked out an area of trim grass beneath a low-hanging tree. She rested her head on her bag. “Good night.”

Each of them picked a grassy patch—not too far from the others—and settled in. Wade’s bones ached from the inside out, but his mind was racing. No way could he sleep. “I’ll take first watch.”

“Me, second,” said Darrell.

They were suddenly quiet, which was fine with Wade.

For the first hour, he found his thoughts returning to the first pages Becca had translated. Nicolaus in his tower, looking at the sky with Hans.

Copernicus dealt with all the regular stuff people in his time had to deal with—lousy medicine, smelly houses, weird food, long travel, no plumbing—but he still needed to discover things.

That’s what really got Wade. That one man had an idea, and it changed the world. It meant that anyone could have an idea that could change the world too. He remembered what his father had told him Einstein said:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Right? Nobody told Copernicus to study the stars. No one made him discover a new theory about the sun, but he did. He used his imagination, and he discovered new things.

I must know more!

And then the legacy. What device had he invented? What did the
A
of GAC mean? What were the relics? Even if everyone was convinced the diary was genuine, how could Copernicus ever have come up with the wormhole metric?

Over and over the same questions, over and over the same no answers. His thoughts were like waves crashing against rocks that refused to change their shape.

I, too, must know more.

By the time he finally gave up cogitating, Darrell was snoring like a bass woofer, and he couldn’t bear to wake him. Lily, it turned out, talked in her sleep as much as she did when she was awake. Right now she was muttering a long story about an internet link that led to another and another and never stopped.

Becca didn’t make a peep other than her slow, measured breathing, which was just shy of snoring, until sometime past two a.m, when she bolted straight up from what must have been a coma-like slumber and said, “It’s time!” And then fell instantly back, falling into the same breathing rhythm as Darrell’s.

It wasn’t time yet. Not with the sky still sprinkled with stars. But Wade was forced to admit that if he couldn’t sleep, at least he had his friends to listen to, and he may as well finish his stint as lookout.

“I’ll sleep after Dad comes,” he whispered to himself.

He watched the slow turning of the dome of stars and imagined Copernicus studying the same stars five hundred years ago. People and science and history. Wade loved the old stuff more than he had before they began this crazy adventure. He imagined the vague machine in the sketch, its giant frame, the odd notations. Did the device really have levers and gears, leather straps, hinges, wheels, pulleys? And seats? What about the
hole in the sky . . .
what was that . . .
a hole . . .

It was only later when he felt someone nudge his arm over and over that he realized he had fallen asleep. He sat up to see Becca on her feet watching the road. There came the sound of an approaching car.

“Everybody wake up,” she said. “The museum is open. It’s time!”

Chapter Forty

A
fter tramping up the long driveway to the parking lot, they found the villa’s doors—flanked by a pair of giant palms—already open.

A little white-haired man in a rumpled suit sat at a small desk inside. He looked them up and down, ran his fingers along his thin white mustache, and smiled.

What began then was a strange, slow conversation in English.

A kind of English.

“You are Mary Cans?” he asked, smiling, inscribing the number 4 on a sheet of paper at the desk.

Lily turned to the others. “No, sir. I’m Lily and this is—”

“Yes, Americans,” said Darrell.

“As I say.” The man stood and bowed. “You love stairs?”

“Stars,” said Wade. “Yes, we love stars.”

“But we don’t have much money,” Becca added.

He laughed a fluttery laugh. “No, no. The
museo
is freezing for children under seven ton!”

That took a while. It was finally Lily who broke the silence. “Seventeen!” she said. “No, we’re all younger.”

“As I say,” he said, and gave them a printed guide. “Forgive his translation. I did it yourself. Congratulations to visit our smell
museo
. But even with the smellness of us, we are flooded with, how you say,
de-feces
. . . ?”

“Devices?” said Becca.

“
Sì,
thems. So, get out of here. Make your house inside. Enjoy myself!”

“Thank you very much,” said Wade.

As they entered a high-ceilinged, paneled room, Darrell whispered, “I can no longer remember a time when that man wasn’t talking.”

“In my head, he still is,” said Lily. “Now let’s keep our eyes open for a public computer.”

Arranged in display cases lining the walls were a series of old globes and antique instruments. There were several simple machines made of brass—Wade remembered his father explaining that these were called sextants and were used by sailors to navigate their ships by the positions of the stars.

“Celestial maps,” said Becca, nodding at the wall. “Like yours, Wade.”

He glanced over a dozen variations of the Ptolemaic cosmos. Some were quite fine, but none were as beautiful as the one Uncle Henry had given him. He took a moment to check the sheath and his backpack again. The dagger and the map were both safe.

In the middle of the room stood a wooden sky globe on which were painted the forty-eight constellations cataloged by Ptolemy in the second century. Next to the globe were several small orbs. Some had interlocking and concentric ribbons of iron or brass, each band representing the orbital path of one of the planets. Becca translated the exhibition notes and told them the orbs were called “armillary spheres.”

“Dad has a book about them,” Wade said.

“They’re beautiful,” Lily said.

“But inaccurate,” Wade added, “because the bands are circular instead of elliptical, which they didn’t figure out until later.”

“Thank you, Professor,” said Lily.

It was the series of objects they saw next that stopped them cold.

On a raised platform the wall was arrayed in a variety of what were called astrolabes—ancient devices to detect the distance and movement of stars. All had sliding arcs of brass or iron, and levers marked with measurements, and some were as simple as two pieces of brass mounted to each other and sitting as flat as a dinner plate.

The larger ones, however, were complex machines—
machinas—
that combined both the concentric bands of the armillary spheres and a complicated arrangement of sliding levers and moving wheels connected to automatic or spring-wound clocks. They looked just this side of being motorized. These were the first items they had seen that could by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as advanced devices and reminded Wade of the Painter Hall telescope in Austin.

“This is steampunk before they had steam,” Darrell said.

“The sketch . . . ,” Becca whispered. She opened her bag and flipped the diary pages to the picture she had found earlier. “What if Copernicus reworked Ptolemy’s device and invented one of these machines? But a big one. One you could sit inside? Some of the ones here have twelve parts, more than twelve parts. Gears and wheels and things.”

She turned several pages. “Listen to this again.”

Nicolaus makes a decision.

From the machine’s giant frame, its grand armature, he will withdraw its twelve constellated parts—without which the device is inoperable.

Wade closed his eyes. “Constellated parts . . .”

“Except that the diary also talks about traveling and a voyage,” Darrell said. “Astrolabes aren’t vehicles. They don’t
go
anywhere. They just sit there, and you make calculations from them.”

“We might need to think out of the box,” said Lily.

“I agree,” said Becca “Let’s keep looking for information.”

They entered a fourth room, where a number of books and scrolls were exhibited in display cases.

“Computers,” said Lily, heading for a bank of monitors at a long table. “I’m going to see what I can find out about Via Rice-A-Roni.” She sat herself down at the computer table and began keying furiously.

Becca bent low over a display case and tapped the glass. “One of these is said to be the first biography of Copernicus, written only twenty years after he died. I wish I could take a look at the whole book. Maybe it says something about the journey of 1514 . . .”

“We have a pepper bag,” said the white-haired man, who was strolling through the rooms. “Please wet yourselves here.” He spun quickly on his heels and was gone.

Wade laughed. “He wants us to wait, but what are we going to do with a pepper bag?” But as soon as he heard the words aloud, he realized. “Paperback.”

“If I’m right,” Becca whispered, “the biography might help me translate more of the diary.”

The short man returned with a large paperback volume and offered it to Becca with a bow. As the museum was slowly filling with visitors, she settled at the computer table across from Lily and started to read the book and the diary side by side.

Wade sat next to her. “I’m really glad . . .” he started. She looked up. Those green eyes, still a little sleepy.

“Yes?” she said.

“. . . that you can read this stuff. We’d be so lost. Without you and your brain.”

Her eyes sparkled for a moment, then her face frowned to the text again. “Except it’s really hard, and some stuff I think I’m translating right doesn’t make any kind of sense to me. I wish your brain and my brain could read it together.”

Seriously?
“Me, too,” he said lamely, aware that Lily had just flicked her eyes at him before returning to her screen.

Becca flipped pages back and forth in both books, her fingers acting as bookmarks in several places at once.

“Find anything?” asked Darrell, returning from the astrolabes in the other room.

“I don’t know,” Becca said. “I’m trying to match up dates and things, and in one part both the diary and the bio seem to talk about the same strange thing that happened when Copernicus and Hans returned from their voyage.”

Darrell frowned. “Strange like what?”

Becca shifted the paperback in front of her. “This biography refers to ‘
l’incidente dei due dottori identici
.’ The incident of the two identical doctors. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In the diary, Hans goes into Italian and writes, ‘
il momento favoloso dei due Nicolaus
,’ which is something like ‘the magical moment of two Nicolauses.’ Finally, Hans writes this.”

In five days, the second Nicolaus was gone, and there was only one of him again.

“What does
that
mean?” said Lily.

Wade’s temples throbbed and he held his head as if it were going to explode. So this was it. The real problem. The thing he’d been dreading ever since he saw the modern formula in the old diary.

“Two at the same time . . . traversable wormhole . . . I think I know what they’re trying to say, and it’s not really possible,” he said.

Darrell cocked his head to the side. “What’s not possible? People trying to kill us?”

“No, but look,” said Wade. “What we’re guessing is that Copernicus discovered some kind of big amazing astrolabe that could travel. Look, maybe I got the whole wormhole thing wrong, but I don’t think I did—” His brain pounded. “I mean, it all makes sense except that it doesn’t make sense, and I’m a scientist, so . . .”

Which sounded lamer than lame.

Becca shook her head. “Copernicus was a scientist, too. So was Uncle Henry. So is your dad. And Kip Thorne, the wormhole guy.”

Wade grumbled. “I know, but—”

“Look at this,” Lily said from the computer. “It took me forever, and I tried a bunch of city maps, even old ones, but there was never a Via Rasagnole in Rome. So, okay, like I said, there’s this anagram site. I type in the letters of the whole address, using the Roman numeral, V.”

Darrell smiled. “Rome being where they
invented
Roman numerals.”

“So I type in all the letters,” she said, “and—boom!—we get a bunch of different words, most of which aren’t even real words. But that’s English. So I switch to Italian. I couldn’t make sense of anything there, either. Then I get this brilliant Becca-like idea that maybe I should switch to Latin, and the list is
so
much shorter—”

They all hovered over her shoulders.

“Wait!” said Wade, his brain tingling. “Go back up the list.”

Lily scrolled up a few lines.

“Stop,” he said. “
ARGO
. . . Argo . . .”

“The ship in Greek mythology,” Becca said quietly. “Jason was the pilot. Lily, remember we learned the story in Mrs. Peterson’s class?”

She glanced up. “Sure.”

“There’s also this movie.
Jason and the Argonauts
,” Darrell said. “Jason fights the skeleton warriors. It’s a classic. I’m just saying.”

“Lily, take those letters out and see what’s left,” said Becca.

She did. “It leaves
V VI ASANLE
. Unscrambling those, we get . . .”

A smaller list of words came up.

Becca grumbled. “Maybe it’s not Latin, after all.”

Wade practically exploded when a second familiar word appeared on the screen. “NAVIS! That’s it! Constellated parts! Holy cow—”

He scrambled in his backpack for the star chart.

“What’s
navis
, the Latin for the plural of navy?” asked Darrell.

“No, no, it’s on here, the constellation.” Wade traced his fingers over Uncle Henry’s map. “
Argo Navis
is the name of one of Ptolemy’s original constellations! It represents the ship
Argo
. Here!”

He showed them a cluster of stars near the bottom of the map. They were vaguely in the shape of a sailing ship.

Darrell leaned over Lily’s shoulder. “What letters are left?”

Only
V, A, L,
and
E
remained.

Even as Lily entered them into the unscrambler, Wade worked the four letters over in his head and felt them shift into position as the letters of
blau stern
had days before.

Shifting, shifting,
click.

“Vela,” he said, standing up straight. “Argo Navis Vela.”