Suddenly a storm of blue flashes exploded in the window, and all the screens lit up as if with torn rainbows. The visual chaos was split by black lightning that somehow was just as devastating to the eyes as white lightning. Cries of alarm filled the air. Then the vessel lurched down and began to spin. Everyone had to hold on to something to stay upright. Galileo clutched Hera by the elbow, as high as his shoulder, and she held him up with that same arm while grasping a chair back with her other hand. One of the crew clutched her desk while pointing at her screen with the other hand. Ganymede moved like an acrobat across the bucking deck, inspecting one screen and then another. The officers shouted at him over a high ringing tone. On the screens, Galileo caught sight of a swirl of a steep conic spiral rising from the depths, now revealed to be immense—a matter of many miles. The blue light flashed in their chamber again.
“It doesn’t want us here,” Ganymede said. “Pauline, open radio contact with those ships. Send this: Get out! Get out! Get out!”
A high moan lofted up Galileo’s spine, leaving his short hairs as erect as a hedgehog’s. The sound resembled wolves howling at the moon. Often Galileo had heard them in the distance, late at night, when the rest of the world slept. But the sound filling him now was to wolves’ howls as wolves’ howls were to human speech—a sound so uncanny that actual wolves would surely have run away whimpering. Fear turned his bowels watery, and he saw all the others in the craft were just as afraid. He clutched Hera’s thick biceps, felt himself moaning involuntarily. It was too loud now for anyone to hear him; the super-lupine howls became a keening shriek that seemed everywhere at once, both inside and outside him. The blue flashes were now inside the vessel, even inside his eyes, though they were squeezed shut.
“Go!” Hera shouted. Galileo wondered if anyone else could hear her. In any case the vessel was spiraling upward now, so forcefully that Galileo was knocked to his knees. Hera swung him up and around the way he would have swung a child, and plopped him into a chair. She staggered, almost landed on him, then sat hard on the floor beside him. Black flashes still shot through them like lightning, through floor to ceiling, as if carrying them along in some stupendous explosion, aquatic but incorporeal, everything spiraling in a dizzying rise. It was like being in the grip of a living Archimedes screw. Up and up again, until there was an enormous crash, casting everyone up onto the ceiling, after which they flailed awkwardly down and thumped to the floor. They had struck the shell of ice capping the ocean, Galileo presumed, and it seemed the vessel might have cracked and everyone would soon drown. Then Galileo felt shoved toward the floor, indicating a new acceleration, as when rocked back on a bolting horse. The vessel itself now creaked and squealed, while the eerie shriek was muffled. The chamber was still bathed in flickers of blue fire. Ganymede, propped on both arms before the biggest table of screen and instruments, conferred in sharp tones with crew members holding on beside him. It seemed they were still trying to steer the thing.
Up they tumbled, turning and spinning this way and that, pitching and yawing but always moving up.
Ganymede said loudly, “Are the Europans ahead of us?”
“There’s no sign of them.” Pauline’s voice was small under the muffled shriek.
The shriek shot up the scale in a rising glissando, until it was no longer audible, but immediately a violent earache and headache assaulted Galileo. He shouted up at Ganymede. “Won’t we emerge too quickly, if we don’t slow down?”
Ganymede glanced at him, started tapping again on one of the desks.
Then the black on the screens turned blue, an indigo that lightened abruptly, and they shot up in a violent turquoise acceleration. Galileo’s head banged the floor of the vessel and he thrust an arm under Hera. The back of her head smacked his forearm, and it hurt, but she turned and saw he had saved her a knock.
On one screen splayed the starry black sky, under it the shattered white plain of Europa’s surface.
“We’re going to fall!”
But they didn’t. The column of water under them had fountained out of its hole and then quickly frozen in place, so that it stood there as ice, supporting their vessel just as certain sandstone columns held up schist boulders in an area of the Alps. Icicles broke and clattered away from the vessel’s sides, shattering on the low frozen waves now surrounding the column. Black sky, white ice, tinted the oranges of Jupiter; their vessel, like a roc’s egg on a plinth.
“How will we get down?” Galileo inquired in the sudden silence. His ears buzzed and hurt, and he could see crew members holding their heads.
“Something will come to us,” said Ganymede.
Hera laughed just a touch wildly, detached Galileo’s fingers from her arm. “The Europans will come for us. The council will come for us.”
“I don’t care, if they get the others too.”
“The others may have died inside.”
“So be it. We’ll tell the council what we did, and tell them they should have done it.” He turned to one of his crew. “Prepare the entan-gler to send Signor Galileo back.”
The crewman, one of the pilots, bustled out of the chamber through a low door. Ganymede turned to speak to another of them.
Hera leaned over and said quickly in Galileo’s ear, “They will give you an amnestic, and you won’t remember any of this. Drink salt water the moment you wake. Do your alchemists have magnesium sulfate? Well, shit—you won’t remember this either. Here—” she reached inside her tunic, pulled out a small tablet, gave it to him. “This is better than nothing. Hide it on you, and when you see it again, eat it!” She glared at him, her nose inches from his, and pinched his arm hard. “Eat this! Remember!”
“I’ll try,” Galileo promised, slipping the pill into his sleeve and feeling his arm throb.
Ganymede towered over him. “Come, signor. There is no time to lose, we will soon be apprehended. The other ships may not have made it, in which case good riddance to them, but we will have a lot of explaining to do. Let me convey you back to your home.”
Galileo stood. As he passed Hera she pinched him again, this time on the butt. Eat the pill, he thought, ignoring her, and walked with Ganymede to the side of his thick perspicillum. Eat the pill.
“Here,” Ganymede said, and a mist from his hand hit Galileo’s face.
CHAPTER SIX
A Statue Would Have Been Erected
These confused and intermittent mental struggles slip through one’s fingers and escape by their subtleties and slitherings, not hesitating to produce a thousand chimeras and fantastic caprices little understood by themselves and not at all by their listeners. By these fancies the bewildered mind is bandied about from one phantasm to another, just as in a dream one passes from a palace to a ship and then to a grotto or beach, and finally, when one awakes and the dream vanishes (and for the most part all memory of it also), one finds that one has been idly sleeping and has passed the hours without profit of any sort.
—GALILEO, letter to COSIMO, 1611
HE CAME OUT OF THIS SYNCOPE AS one wakes from a dream, agitated, gasping, struggling to remember as it squirted away; you could see it in his face. “No,” he moaned, “come back … don’t forget….”
This time it was his newly hired housekeeper who discovered him: La Piera had arrived at last. “Maestro!” she cried, leaning over to peer into his staring eyes. “Wake up!”
He groaned, looked at her without recognition. She gave him a hand and hauled him to his feet. Though a braccio shorter, she was about as heavy as he was.
“They told me you suffer from syncopes.”
“I was dreaming.”
“You were paralyzed. I shouted, I pinched you, nothing. You were gone.”
“I was gone.” He shuddered like a horse. “I had a dream, or something. A vision. But I can’t remember it!”
“That’s all right. You’re better off without dreams.”
He regarded her curiously. “Why do you say that?”
She shrugged her broad sh
oulders as she tugged his clothes into position, holding up a little pellet she pulled from his jacket and then pocketing it. “My dreams are crazy, that’s all. Burning things in the oven while all the fish on the table come to life and start biting me, or sliding out the door like eels. They’re always the same. Rubbish I say! Life is crazy enough as it is.”
“Maybe so.”
Then Cartophilus hustled onto the altana and came up short at the sight of them. Galileo shuddered again, pointed a finger at him. “You!” he exclaimed.
“Me,” the ancient one admitted cautiously. “What is it, maestro? Why are you up?”
“You know why!” Galileo roared. Then, piteously: “Don’t you?”
“Not I,” Cartophilus said, shifty as always. “I heard voices and came out to see what was up.”
“You let someone in. At the gate?”
“Not I, maestro. Did you fall into one of your syncopes again?”
“No.”
“Yes,” La Piera confirmed.
Galileo heaved a huge sigh. Clearly he could remember nothing, or next to nothing. He glanced up; Jupiter was nearly overhead. He was cold, he slapped his arms to warm himself. “Were the wolves in the hills howling earlier?” he asked suddenly.
“Not that I heard.”
“I think they were.” He sat there thinking about it. “To bed,” he muttered, and stood. “I can’t do it tonight.” He glanced up again, hesitated. “Ah, damn.” He plopped down again on his stool. “I have to check them, at least. What time is it? Midnight? Bring me some mulled wine. And stay out here with me.”
Salviati was out of town, and Galileo was therefore stuck in his rented house in Florence. He found himself in a strange mood, distracted and pensive. He made it known to Vinta, in the most obsequious and flowery language he could manage, which was saying a lot, that he wanted to go to Rome to promote his new discoveries—or, as he admitted in a meeting with the grand duke’s secretary, to defend them. For there were a lot of serious people who simply didn’t have spyglasses good enough to see the moons of Jupiter, and even well-meaning parties like the Jesuits—the best astronomers in Europe aside from Kepler—were having trouble making the observations. And in Tuscany, a new thing had happened. A philosopher named Ludovico delle Colombe was circulating a manuscript that not only ridiculed the notion that the Earth might move, but displayed a long list of quotes from the Bible to back his argument that Galileo’s idea was contrary to Scripture. These quotes included “You fixed the earth on its foundation” (Psalms 104:5), “God made the orb immobile” (1 Chronicles 16:30), “He suspended the earth above nothingness, that is, above the center” (Job 26:7), “The heaviness of stone, the weight of sand” (Proverbs 27:3), “Heaven is up, the earth is down.” (Proverbs 30:3), “The sun rises, and sets, and returns to its place, from which, reborn, it revolves through the meridian, and is curved toward the North” (Ecclesiastes 1:5), “God made two lights, i.e., a greater light and a smaller light, and the stars, to shine above the earth” (Genesis 1:17).
Galileo read a manuscript of this letter, given to him by Salviati, and cursed at every sentence. “The heaviness of stone! This is stupid!”
Who wants the human mind put to death?he wrote angrily to Salviati. Who is going to claim that everything in the world which is observable and knowable has already been seen and discovered?
People were afraid of change. They seized on Aristotle because he said that above the sky there was no change; thus, if you died and went there, you would not change either. He wrote to the astronomer Mark Welser:
I suspect that our wanting to measure the universe by our own little yardstick makes us fall into strange fantasies, and that our particular hatred of death makes us hate fragility. If that which we call corruption were annihilation, the Peripatetics would have some reason for being such staunch enemies of it. But if it is nothing else than a mutation, it does not merit so much hatred. I don’t think anyone would complain about the corruption of the egg if what results from it is a chick.
Change could be growth, in other words. It was intrinsic to life. And so these religious objections to the changes he saw in the sky were stupid. But they were also dangerous.
So he wrote weekly to Vinta, asking him to ask the bighearted brilliant splendiferous grandissimo grand duke to send him to Rome, so he could explain his discoveries. Eventually Galileo convinced Vinta that a visit could do no harm; indeed, could add to the luster of his prince’s reputation. The trip was therefore approved, but then Galileo fell ill again. For two months he suffered such headaches and fevers that there was no question of travel.
He recuperated at Salviati’s villa. “I’m embroiled in something strange,” he confided to his young friend from out of a fever. “Lady Fortuna has grabbed me by the arm, she has tossed me over her shoulder. God knows where I’m headed.”
Salviati did not know what to make of this, but he was a good friend to have in a crisis. He held your hand, he looked at you and understood what you said; his liquid eyes and quick smile were the very picture of intelligent goodness. He laughed a lot, and he made Galileo laugh, and there was no one quicker to point out a bird or a cloud, or to propose a conundrum about negative numbers or the like. A sweet soul, and smart. “Maybe it’s La Vicuna who has taken you by the hand, the muse of justice.”
“I wish it, but no,” Galileo said, looking inward. “Lady Fortuna is the one deciding my fate. The capricious one. A big woman.”
“But you have always been avventurato.”
“But with luck of all kinds,” Galileo groused. “Good luck and bad.”
“But the good has been so good, my friend. Think of your gifts, your genius. That too is Fortuna making her dispensations.”
“Maybe so. May it continue that way, then.”
Finally, impatient at the delay forced on him by his body, he wrote to Vinta asking if a ducal litter could be provided for his travel. By this time, it was becoming clear that the Sidereus Nuncius had made Galileo famous all over Europe. In the courts lucky enough to have been sent one of Galileo’s spyglasses, star parties were being held, ranging from Bavaria and Bohemia to France and England. Vinta decided that Galileo’s presence in Rome could only bring honor and prestige to the Medici, and so the use of the ducal litter was approved.
On March 23, 1611, Galileo left with his servants Cartophilus and Giuseppe, and a little group of the grand duke’s horsemen. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, written by an old acquaintance of his, Michelangelo Buonarroti, nephew of Florence’s most famous artist, who had died the day before Galileo was born, causing talk (by Galileo’s father anyway) of a transmigration of souls.
The roads between Florence and Rome were as good as any in Italy, but they were still slow, even in the best stretches, which were much abbreviated by winter damage. In a litter the trip took six days. By day, Galileo sat on pillows inside the carriage, enduring the jouncing of the iron-rimmed wooden wheels into potholes and over stones, and also the steady grind over cobbles or beds of gravel. Sometimes he rode a horse to give his kidneys and back a rest, but this meant a different kind of hammering. He hated to travel. Rome was as far away from Florence as he had ever been, and his only previous trip had occurred twenty-four years earlier, before the terrible incident in the cellar at Costozza had wrecked his health.
The towns they stopped in along the way—San Casciano, Siena, San Quirico, Acquapendente, Viterbo, and Monterosi—all had a row of roadside inns at both ends of town, offering beds battered and flea-bit, in rooms crowded with all the usual snoring and hacking. It was better to spend the night out in his coat, under a cape and a blanket, watching the sky. Jupiter was high, and every night he could log the positions of the four Jovian moons early and late, looking for the moments when a moon slowed and reached the outer point of its orbit, or the moments when it touched the lambent side of Jupiter itself. He was intent on being the first to determine their exact orbital times, which even Kepler had wri
tten would be hard to do. He felt a strong bond with the moons, as if being their discoverer he somehow possessed them. One night he heard wolves howling and the bond seemed stronger than ever, as if wolves came from Jupiter. The white disk in his glass seemed to quiver with life, and he felt full of a feeling he couldn’t name.
So the damp spring nights would pass, and he would collapse into the litter as the grand duke’s men prepared for departure, hoping for sleep through the jouncing day on the road. Many mornings he succeeded in this, and was insensible to some hours of travel. But both his night and day routines were hard on his back, and he arrived in Rome exhausted.
On Holy Tuesday, the litter ground its way through the immense shabby outskirts of Rome. The broad road was flanked hard on each side by innumerable shacks made of sticks, as if built by magpies. Once inside the ancient wall, which was easy to miss, Galileo’s party clopped slowly through packed paved streets from the Tiber to the Palazzo Firenze, near the old Pantheon in the middle of the city. Rome was now as big as ten Florences, and the tightly packed buildings were often three and even four stories tall, overhanging streets that narrowed as they aged. People lived their lives and dried their laundry on the balconies, commenting freely on the passersby below.
The tight streets opened up near the river, where there were flood fields and orchards. There they came to the Palazzo Firenze, which overlooked a small campo. This was where Galileo was to be hosted by Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome, one Giovanni Niccolini, a lifelong diplomat near the end of a long career in the Medici service. This worthy appeared in the entryway of the palazzo and greeted Galileo rather coolly. Vinta had written Niccolini to say that Galileo would be accompanied by a single servant, and here were two, Cartophilus having insinuated himself at the last minute. Financial arrangements between the grand duke and his ambassador were meticulously kept, so perhaps it was not clear to Niccolini that he would be reimbursed for the keep of this extra servant. In any case, he was distinctly reserved as he led Galileo and his little retinue into a big suite of rooms at the back of the ground floor, looking out onto the formal garden. This elaborate green space was dotted with ancient Roman statues whose marble faces had melted away. Something about the look of them caught Galileo’s eye and disturbed him.