Galileo's Dream

  Now Galileo wrote to Picchena. I can show that my behavior in this affair has been such that a saint would not have handled it either with greater reverence or with greater zeal toward the Holy Church. My enemies have not been so fine, having used every machination, calumny and diabolical suggestion anyone could possibly imagine.

  That was a bit of an exaggeration, but typical of Galileo’s bitter rants against his enemies.

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, Galileo managed to obtain another audience with the pope himself. This was a real coup, and, given Paul’s part in instigating the actions against the Copernican view, difficult to account for. Young Cardinal Antonio Orsini was said to have interceded on his behalf, although even this did not seem like it should have worked. Nevertheless, Tuesday March 11, 1616, found them strolling in the Papal Garden of the Vatican, just as they had in the vineyards of the Villa Malvasia in 1611.

  They walked ahead of their retinue, but spoke freely enough that trailing servants could hear most of their conversation. Galileo complained freely about the malice of his persecutors. He swore that he was as good a Catholic as anyone, that everything he had ever done or said was designed to help the Church avoid an unfortunate error that would later embarrass her.

  Paul nodded as he spoke, and answered that he was well aware of Galileo’s uprightness and sincerity.

  Galileo bowed deeply, then hurried to catch up to the immensely rotund pontiff. “Thank you, Sanctissimus, thank you ever so much, but I find I am still somewhat anxious about the future, because of the fear of being pursued with implacable hate by my enemies.”

  Paul cheered him up brusquely: “You can put all care away, because you are held in such esteem by me, and the whole Congregation. They will not lightly lend their ears to calumnious reports. You can feel safe as long as I am alive.”

  “Thank you, Holiest One,” Galileo said, seizing the pontiff abruptly by the hand and kissing his ring with many enthusiastic whiskery kisses. Paul endured this for a while with a noble look into the distance, and then indicated it was time to leave and headed back toward his chambers like a great ship in a light wind, with Galileo trailing him and expressing his thanks in the floweriest terms. Never had anyone heard Galileo speak with such obsequious gratitude, except perhaps those who had seen him in the Medici’s presence in the early years of the century.

  After that, Galileo returned to the Hill of Gardens in infinitely better spirits. He renewed his efforts to be allowed to see Bellarmino a second time, which turned out to be a long campaign. But several weeks later, again to everyone’s surprise, an audience there too was granted. One morning near the end of May he returned to the little lord cardinal’s house in the Vatican, and told him of the rumors being reported back to him from all over Italy, and how badly they were harming his reputation and his health. He didn’t mention Segizzi’s unexpected appearance during his last visit, but he did assure Bellarmino that he had said nothing about that meeting afterward to anyone (an incredible lie), adding that he was sure Bellarmino had been perfectly discreet as well. The implication was clear: Segizzi and his companions must therefore be responsible for the rumors.

  Bellarmino’s eye twinkled a little as he listened to all this. There was no doubt at all that he took the implication. He nodded, looking around his study as if he had lost something in it; perhaps he was remembering Segizzi’s little invasion. Finally, with a small smile, he called in a secretary, and had him write out a certificate for Galileo that he dictated on the spot.

  We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having heard that it is calum-niously reported that Signor Galileo Galilei has in our hand abjured and has also been punished with salutary penance, and being requested to state the truth as to this, declare that the said Galileo has not abjured, either in our hand, or the hand of any other person here in Rome, or anywhere else, so far as we know, any opinion or doctrine held by him. Neither has any salutary penance been imposed on him, but that only the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index was notified to him, which says that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that the Earth moves around the Sun and that the Sun is stationary in the center of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy Scriptures, and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and subscribed the present document with our own hand this twenty-sixth day of May 1616.

  Still smiling his small ironic smile, Bellarmino signed the document, and when it was sanded and dried, gave it to Galileo, nodding at it as if to indicate that this was the warning he had meant to convey all along: no holding of the opinion, or defending it—but no ban on discussing it. This document would always exist to make that clear.

  Guicciardini made his semiannual review of the Villa Medici’s accounts and went through the roof. He dictated at nearly the top of his lungs a letter to Piccena:

  Strange and scandalous were the goings-on in the garden during Galileo’s long sojourn in the company and under the administration of Annibale Primi, who has been fired by the Cardinal. Annibale says that he had huge expenses. In any case, anyone can see that they led a riotous life. The accounts are attached. I hope this will be enough to get your philosopher ordered home, so that he will end his campaign to castrate the friars.

  It was enough. The same courier brought back Cosimo’s order to Galileo, which was to return to Florence immediately.

  During the week of the journey back to Florence, Galileo spoke to no one about what had happened. He looked exhausted and pensive. At night he got out his telescope again, and made his usual viewings of Jupiter. By day he brooded in silence. It was pretty obvious to all of us that his effort had rebounded on him, that by going to Rome to strengthen his position, he had forced the issue in a way that blocked his work entirely, and indeed brought him very close to Inquisitorial danger. And by no means was that over. From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.

  No doubt it occurred to him often that if he had just stayed in Florence and continued his work without drawing any attention to it, the storm from the clerics might have blown over. Cesi might have been able to campaign gradually on his behalf in Rome, at the level of the cardinals and the College of Rome. It might have worked. Instead Galileo had, in his usual pigheaded way, decided to reason with the pope—to bombard him so suasively that that ultimate arbiter of the situation would be convinced to support him. He couldn’t imagine things turning out any other way.

  Either that, or else, as some of us said when he was asleep, he had seen a danger and run straight at it, attacking it in the hope of killing it when it was young. It was quite possible he had made an accurate estimate of the danger, had calculated the odds and made his best attempt. But failed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Aurora

  Then it seemed to me, that time is nothing else but protraction; but of what, I know not; and I marvel, if it be not of the mind itself?

  —ST. AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS, BOOK XI

  ON HIS UNEASY JOURNEY BACK TO FLORENCE, Galileo wrote letters to all his correspondents, explaining to them why his visit had been such a success, even more so than in 1611. All of them had already heard the story from faster sources, and so did not believe his account, but many wrote back to him reassuringly. A success, no doubt about it.

  Every night he complained about the inn food, the flea-bitten beds, the creaky floors, and the endless snoring of the other wayfarers (he himself was a prodigious snorer), so that rather than retire he went out to sleep on the cushioned seat of his litter, or on his telescope stool under a blanket.

  One night, at the inn on the road below Montepulciano, he could not sleep at all, and so he sat wrapped in his blanket by his telescope. He crouched to look through it at Jupiter, his own little emblem and clock, and in so many ways the home of his troubles. At this moment it was near the zenith. He marked down the positions of its moons in the chart in his workboo
k.

  After staring at the little orrery of white points for a long time, he got up and went into the stables, where he knew Cartophilus preferred to sleep. He thumped him ungently on the back.

  “What?” the ancient one croaked.

  “Bring me your master,” Galileo demanded fiercely.

  “What, now?”

  “Now.”

  “Why now?”

  Galileo seized the man by his scrawny throat. “I want to talk to him. I have questions for him. Now.”

  “Gah,” Cartophilus croaked. Galileo let go of him and he rubbed his neck, frowning resentfully. “Whatever you say, maestro, your wish is my demand, as always, but I cannot produce him immediately.” He reached for a jug of water he kept by his bed at night, took a pull and offered it to Galileo, who waved it off. “I will as soon as I can. It may take a day or two. It would be easiest back in Florence.”

  “Quickly,” Galileo ordered. “I’m sick of this. I have some questions.”

  The old one gave him a brief glance and looked into his jug. “This trip to Rome was perhaps in reference to him?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Galileo put his big right fist under the man’s nose. “You know more about it than I, I’m sure.”

  Cartophilus shook his head unconvincingly.

  Galileo humphed. “Of course not. Are you really the Wandering Jew?”

  The old one waggled his head equivocally. “The story isn’t really right. Although I do feel cursed. And I’m old. And I have wandered.”

  “And are you a Jew?”

  “No.”

  “Did you mock Christ as he carried the cross to Golgotha?”

  “Definitely not. Huh! That’s a story the Gypsies used to tell. A band of them would come into a town, a couple of centuries ago, and explain that they had been made immortal penitents, because they had accidentally insulted Jesus. Practically every town we told the story to opened their gates and treated us like royalty. After that it was a case of transference.”

  “So the Wandering Jew came from Jupiter.”

  The old man’s eyebrows arced high on his forehead. He took another pull before replying. “You remember something from your last syncope, I take it.”

  Galileo growled. “You know better than I.”

  “I don’t. But I could see that you wanted to get to Rome to defend yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it didn’t work as you had hoped.”

  “No.”

  Cartophilus hesitated for a long time. Just as Galileo thought he had fallen back asleep, he ventured, “Often it seems to me that when one tries to do something based on … knowledge—or even let us say foreknowledge, or a premonition, what the Germans call Schwanung—that whatever you do, it … rebounds. Instead of forestalling it, or fulfilling it, your action has the effect of bringing about exactly the opposite of whatever you might have been trying for. A complementary action, so to speak.”

  “You would know better than I, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t.”

  Galileo lifted his fist again. “Just get your master to me.”

  “As soon as I can. In Florence. I promise you.”

  Back in Florence, Galileo moved into his newly rented house in Bel-losguardo, the Villa del Segui, a fine establishment overlooking Florence from a hill to the south of the river. He had a real home again, for the first time since Hostel Galilei in Padua. Here he was, back in his gardens, back in La Piera’s care, back in the arms of his girls (or Virginia’s anyway).

  He was barely settled in, and had gone out into the garden one night to complete his ablutions, when a movement against the stable wall caused him to flinch.

  A black figure emerged from the murk, and he was about to cry out when he saw that it was the stranger. At the sight of that narrow face, the unganymedean face of Ganymede, he experienced a big if vague abreaction; all of the blurred uncertain memories of what had happened to him on the Jovian moons came back to him in force. The memories of his earlier night voyages were like dream memories, with certain moments sticking out more distinctly even than events of the present moment—in particular, in this case, the fire—but the rest fuzzy beyond what was usual for his memory, perhaps because of the dreamy content. They had done things to his mind, he knew that; the woman Hera had helped him to counteract one preparation with another, he recalled. So odd effects were not surprising. In any case, now the earlier voyages had bloomed in him, and all from the sight of the stranger’s hatchet face. Galileo’s heart beat in his chest at the vivid memory of the fire, which had never really left him. “I want to go back,” he demanded. “I have questions to ask.”

  “I know,” Ganymede said. “There are questions for you there as well. I have taken steps to secure the device at the other end.”

  Galileo snorted. “You hope you have. But I want to see Hera in any case.”

  Ganymede frowned. “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  “Wisdom has nothing to do with it.”

  This time Ganymede merely twisted a knob on a pewter box he was carrying crooked in his elbow, and there they stood, inside one of the green-blue ice caves of Europa.

  “Hey,” Galileo said, shocked. “What happened to your teletrasporta?”

  Ganymede tilted his head. “All that was done to give you a way to comprehend what was happening. It was felt that if you were bilocated without some way to explain the prolepsis to yourself from within your own frame of reference, you might be excessively disoriented. Some feared you would experience a mental breakdown, or otherwise fail to accept the reality of the prolepsis. Perhaps assume you were dreaming a dream. So we constructed a simulacrum of a translation that would make sense in local terms—in your case, a flight through space. We made the entangler look like something that could cast your vision to us. Then the experience of flight was given to you after you had already been bilocated.”

  “You can do that?”

  The stranger gave Galileo a pitying look. “Simulated experiences can sometimes be distinguished from real ones, but in data-poor environments, like space, it’s hard to do.”

  Galileo gestured at the great ice cavern extending away from them in every direction, its aquamarine roof starred by cracks. “If this cave were not real, how would I tell?”

  Ganymede shrugged. “Maybe you couldn’t.”

  “I thought not,” Galileo muttered. “These are all dreamscapes.” He thought again of his immolation at the stake. More loudly: “What keeps us warm?”

  “Heat.”

  “Bah. Where comes the heat? Where comes the air?”

  “There are engines creating them.”

  “Engines?”

  “Machines. Devices.”

  “So illuminating!”

  “Sorry. The details would mean nothing to you. Very few people here understand them. The heat and air are simple, in any case. It’s protection from Jupiter’s radiation that is difficult. That’s why we stay below the surface most of the time when on Europa. One of the reasons they’ve gone mad, if you ask me. On Ganymede we were out under the sky. On Io, we take advantage of the new bubble fields. But here they have older structures for dealing with the problem.”

  “Radiation? Isn’t that another name for heat?”

  “Well, but there are vibrations along a spectrum of sizes. What our eyes see are wavelengths of a certain size, but that band of the visible is just part of a range that extends far to either side. Shortest are gamma waves, then longer wavelengths range from braccia to the width of the universe, more or less.”

  Galileo stared at him. “And these other waves manifest as?”

  “Heat, sometimes. Damage to flesh that can’t be felt. I don’t know exactly how to explain it to you.”

  Galileo rolled his eyes. “Then take me to someone who can.”

  “We don’t actually have time for that, sorry—”

  “Take me to someone who knows! Because you are an idiot.”

  Ganymede rolled his eyes. ?
??I forbear—”

  “Take me!” Galileo shouted, and shoved the man hard in the chest. At home he would have beat him, so why not here? He wasn’t convinced any of it was real. He kicked Ganymede in the shins, yelling fit to turn all the blues of the place red. “Come on! Someone who knows something. Surely there must be someone who knows something!” He raised his big fist.

  “Stop it,” Ganymede complained. He was wispy despite his height, and looked confused to be assaulted. “Quit trying to bully me. We aren’t in one of your downriver alleys here. People will notice what you do, and conclude you aren’t really civilized.”

  “Me? It’s you who are uncivilized. You don’t know even the basics of how your machines work.”

  “Spare me. No one knows all these things. Could you tell me how every machine of your time worked?”

  “Yes, of course. Why not?”

  Ganymede pursed his lips. “Well, it is no longer possible.”

  “I don’t accept that. The principles at least must be clear, if you make the attempt to understand.”

  “You’ll see.” And he muttered to the side, as if to an invisible angel.

  “Take me.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  The gallery they were in was a kind of giant open antechamber to another under-ice city. Broad spaces extended so many miles away from them that in the distance the blue ceiling curved down and met the floor, cutting off any farther sight. Picking out one particular bright silver building ahead of them, just where the ceiling appeared to meet the floor, Galileo found it took only about fifteen or twenty minutes to walk to it. A close horizon. The alleys and strada of this cold town were sometimes crowded with tall graceful people, moving as if in water; at other times the streets were nearly empty. The people wore clothing like Ganymede’s, simple but fine, warm pastel tones making them appear illuminated in the green light.