Galileo's Dream
Then the Europan imago pulsed and went semitransparent, which made visible within it clouds of tiny spinning lights, like a glass jar filled with fireflies. The moon Ganymede also clarified to transparency, and it too had fireflies in it. Galileo wondered again what Ganymede had found in Ganymede to frighten him so, to put him under such a compulsion to stop the Europans’ descent into Europa. Had he already hurt one child of Jove, or been hurt by it? Had he seen the connection to Jupiter and beyond, seen a Jovian doom that would fall on them all?
Part of the lapidary imago of Jupiter then became transparent, revealing within it many darting flocks of lights—flocks infinitely more various and layered than Europa’s or Ganymede’s. The points of light inside the giant were as numerous as all the stars in the rest of the sky. Their swirling filled the great sphere so completely that its outer surface was visible as an interweaving of horizontal currents of light, banded in ways similar to the gas clouds they usually saw.
Aurora’s voice was somewhere in him, whispering to itself about belts and zones, the meaningful patterns in the south equatorial belt plumes, the inexplicable way that alternating latitude bands of wind could hold firm in both directions over years and even centuries. So strange, Aurora said, to think that one could have said, I live on Jupiter at forty degrees north, therefore I will have winds of two hundred miles an hour from the east, as I did yesterday, and a thousand years ago. And this all a matter of gas clouds. It never seemed right. It makes sense that it was organized, that it was mentation.
But there were storms too, Galileo said to her in his mind. And pulsing spurts, and festoons and barges, and all the other patterned movements we saw.
Yes, she said, and spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling.
The woodwind glissando of the whale’s cry.
Then time seemed to shatter, and the whale’s eerie cry rasped through him in reverse, setting his nerves all ashudder. He heard a hundred whale songs offset each from the next, forward in time, backward, sideways. He was floating out into the other unperceivable spatial dimensions, becoming larger as he also subtilized and made inward spiral turns into himself. An abrupt inflation, as if he were three seconds into his own new universe—
The light-fizzing imago of Jupiter had shrunk to the size of a pearl, its satellites like pinheads.
“Look,” Hera said aloud. “The solar system. The galaxy. We move out logarithmically.”
A swirl of stars lay in a spiral swath before them. There was a polyphonic singing, mostly lower than he could usually hear, but he heard now many octaves lower than he was used to. The Milky Way was now granulated star by star, like a fling of crystal sand across the black. Millions of white dots, foam racing up a beach in moonlight—a broken wave of stars, tossed on the beach of the cosmos. Still expanding into both the big and small, Galileo saw with utmost atomic clarity that each star was its own flock of bright swirling points, pulsing inside its burning sphere. Wherever Galileo directed his attention, the stars in that field resolved into clouds of minute firefly lights, spinning in complex patterns. Together they sailed majestically in a galactic weave that also seemed to pulse and blink. He was in all ten dimensions now, in the manifold of manifolds, as he always had been; but now he sensed all of them at once, and yet could still make a clear gestalt of the whole. The pulsing lights were the thoughts of thinking beings, and together they made a larger mind, the great chain of being scaling up to the cosmos itself. A living cosmos, singing something in concert. The wolf’s howl in the night.
As Galileo regarded what he could only think was the mind of God, he lost all sense of his three-dimensional space and felt himself spinning and spiraling in the manifold of manifolds, spanning all times. Every fire from the tiniest chip of firefly light to the blazing pebbles of the galaxies bloomed a trail and arced forward, so that he saw lines rather than points, and felt rather than saw a densely woven latticework into which he too was woven, like a cosmic chrysanthemum of white lines filling a blackness felt rather than seen, heard in a song beyond hearing. Still watching the lines, he felt and heard the ways in which the ten dimensions warped, stretched, bowed, and shrunk, the whole breathing in and out and also almost holding still, all at once. His sight was whole, his touch-immersion whole, his hearing whole, while also coextensive with the ten dimensions. The manifold of manifolds moved, breathed, sideways or at an angle to time, singing a fugue with parts out of different dimensions. All the temporal isotopes were flickering in and out of their braids of potentiality, blooming and collapsing, systole and diastole. At the merging with this he rose into an existential sublime, a true ecstasy or ex stasis blooming in his consciousness, and he felt the familiar ringing, always before so faint, now all in all, the culmination of the fugue. All things remain in God, he said, but no one heard. He understood then the solitary nature of transcendence, since wholeness was one. He was entirely alone and by himself, he realized: the manifold of manifolds was another one of the secret lives. It was some kind of moving eternity, encompassing an infinity of universes. Everything was always changing, always: so it was change itself that was eternal. Eternity too had a history, eternity too evolved, strove to change and even to improve, in some sense beyond human comprehension—in growth, complexification, metamorphosis. In any case, eternal change. A ten-dimensional organism, pulsing with granular light like the finest snow, everywhere entangled, all points both discrete like the points in Euclid’s definition and yet also part of a whole plenum, flowing in curves, in glissandi still audible in him, a majestic dense chorus of whales and wolves and heartbroken souls, louder and louder, a kind of red loon’s cry—
GALILEO FOUND HIMSELF sitting on the floor. Hera was still standing, although she was holding on to her chair like a sailor holding a plank after the ship has gone down. The terror in her eyes was new to Galileo; he was shocked to see it. He felt that he could not speak, that a spike had stabbed up through his tongue—or worse, speared down through his skull and pricked just that part of the mind that initiated speech. There was a roaring in his ears. He looked at her console screen, trying to think, trying to remember. What had happened? He held on to her thick leg like a child clutching its mother.
Spun gold went white. Shapes coalesced in the unspeakable glare: eyes, tumbling bodies, whole worlds or something more. Spinning whorls of stars, fireworks in his head, pain in every nerve at once—or had it been joy? Ex stasis. Rushing up, out, in. Into a center that was a pinprick of the most fulgurous black, piercing his eye, mind, and soul, sucking him into it. Then a syncope; all was still, cold, dead. Was that how it had ended? What came before was a blur, a dizzy feeling. There had been an awesome roar of the sublime; within it, the tiny ringing of a bell. He had been the bell. Then something had pricked, like a pin through a castle wall, and no more Galileo. A syncope came like sleep, like blessed sleep.
Then Galileo was gone again, but a consciousness remained, cosmic and manifold. The sun was a star, the stars all suns. Each held a mind that was as vast and bright as the sun in the noonday sky. You could not look at it, but saw only its light on paper. A kind of angel—or the being, ever so much greater than an angel, that the idea of an angel had been invented to suggest. The sky was filled with trillions of such minds, and clusters of them swirled in whirlpools of their own weight, were drawn down into themselves continuously. At their centers they compressed to nothing, and their substance was sucked away, into other universes in other dimensions. They were all entangled throughout the manifolds. Present, past, future, eternity, all became one and then transmuted elsewhen. Which meant …
A wolf’s mournful howl, a whale’s eerie glissando. Time splintered and Galileo was back again in the midst of it. An eddy in time; Jupiter reiterating a point, in a loop of grief, an ecstasy, another entangled moment. Which meant …
He stopped trying to understan
d. This took an immense effort, it was utterly contrary to him, the hardest thing he had ever done. The work of Oelilag: give up trying. Folding inside out. Just exist, he commanded himself, just see. But it was too big to see, too bright, it blinded him to try. A whirlpool of infinite minds, an infinity of whirlpools. One could not compare infinities, he felt that clearly. There were an infinite number of starry whirlpools, and in each an infinite number of minds. Kepler had suggested this was the case, and Bruno had claimed it outright. Bruno had died for saying it. Galileo did not want to die. The world was too astonishing to die for saying something, no matter what it was.
Although it was also true that there was a sort of universal syncope, in which death did not obtain. It was not heaven, but ecstasy, ex stasis, out of one’s tiny individual body into the universal body, the manifold of manifolds. All the possibilities came true. All things remained in God—he sang this phrase, held to it in his mind. It became all he had to hold on to, his floating plank in the tossing sea of stars. All things remain in God.
And yet decisions are made, the wave functions collapse. Consciousness and the manifold are entangled. There was a voice, like a pin through a castle wall. Release me, oh Jove.
Then another return to the consciousness of being Galileo. He struggled in his head, completely exhausted, thinking, Hello! I’m here! Let me go! Where are you? Who are you?
It was his faithful dog, nuzzling his face.
No, it was Hera. She held his face in her big hands.
“What happened?” Galileo croaked. Something filled him—an ocean of clouds inside his chest, stuffing him with a feeling he did not recognize. A feeling that made him want to weep, for what he did not know, and yet he was too confused even for tears. But it had to do with her presence. If he had gone through this without her, if she hadn’t been there at his side, it would have been insupportable. It was too much to bear alone.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking him in the eye. There was a tenderness in her look, an amorevolezza, as Maria Celeste was always putting it, that he had not known existed in her. Perhaps she had been going through something similar in the period of ex stasis. No doubt she had. We all go through the same things! Her face was streaked with tears. She leaned in toward him until their faces were aligned nose to nose. The tips of their noses touched as if kissing, their eyes were as mirrors to the complementary other, her irises a deep living field of flecks and streaks, like rounds of polished jasper or the insides of two flowers, the black holes of her pupils lightly pulsing in and out, reminding him of something just seen in his recent shattering. Her eyes floated in toward his until they were as big as the surface of Jupiter, filled with warmth, their affection coursing into him.
Then her eyes simply moved into his eyes. They merged as if touching in a mirror, two as one. Jove will be jealous, Galileo tried to say, but her eyes stopped him, and he yielded to her, falling up as in the nights of his youth, into the wild girls of Venice. Her fractured stone irises bloomed like emblems of his feelings. This was the entangled cosmos they always inhabited, but now felt. Amorevolezza, eros, agape—one made love the way one pronounced a word, the way one made a sentence. He had never made love with someone he knew to be his equal, someone as strong and as full and as smart as he, and that thought pierced him, swept him away on such a wave of grief and love that he might have felt fear, if it were not for her eyes, telling him all was perfectly well. Their eyes merged entirely and he saw what she saw, and felt their ex tasis as a tall thick chord, a harmonic. The mother goddess inside him.
All these things happen in the mind. Imagination creates events. What matters is something that happens in the mind.
They sat on the floor of her little spaceship, confused. A conjunction of spirits. It was all meant to be something that equals did together. Remembering this, Galileo found he was weeping again. When he blinked, tears detached from his face and floated down like little moons of Jupiter. Lazily Hera stuck her tongue out and licked one into her mouth. No wonder he had been so lusty in his wasted youth, no wonder he had jumped at Marina. No wonder his mother had been so angry. Everything in his life had been based on a misunderstanding—a base fear, a refusal to see the other, similar in its cowardice and malignity to the absurd misreadings that his enemies had applied to his theories. Men in his time had been furiously afraid of whatever was other; and thought women were other; and thought it adequate justification of their fear to invoke the dead past, the authority of all the stupid popes. As if might made right. But it wasn’t so. He wept with regret for his wasted life and world and time. What a crazy thing to be human.
They sat side by side on the floor, arm touching arm, leg touching leg. She was bigger than he was, even around the torso, though he was a barrel-chested and pot-bellied man. He was completely relaxed. He could feel she was too. They were entangled. This was only a moment, it would pass: a fragment of time to which clung a fragment of space, in which two minds joined and were whole.
We all have our seven secret lives. Transcendence is solitary, daily life is solitary. Consciousness is solitary. And yet sometimes we sit together with a friend, and the secret lives don’t matter, they’re even part of it, and a dual world is created, a shared reality. Then we are entangled and one, transitory but imperishable.
The light in her ship’s cabin grew. They were no longer alone. They became aware of Aurora, of Ganymede locked in his space suit, of the crew of the ship, all scattered on the floor of the cabin like ninepins, stirring now like the dead come to life. Looking out of their transparent cocoon, their little platform in space, Galileo saw that they had emerged from the upper clouds of Jupiter, and were shooting up into space like a hummingbird. They were just over the dome of the Great Red Spot; it spun up under them at great speed as they rose, the beveled ruddy bands tumbling over themselves, brick on orange on umber on tan on sienna on yellow on bronze on copper on white on mud on hazel on gold on cinnabar on cinnamon, on and on and on, round and round and round. A thought, or a dance, or a life.
Hera stood up and walked to her chair, as free in her movements as a dancer. Galileo watched her, transfixed. She was big and muscular, her female curves parabolic volumes in space, an ultimate reality. Everything he had thought he had known was wrong, and as when it happened to him in the workshop, that realization made him happy. The proof of his wrongness stood there before him, tapping at her keyboards—the goddess animal that humans could be. In his time such a person wasn’t even possible. Force constrained by pale freckled skin. Dark auburn hair suffused with black, wild from her head like Medusa’s snakes. All this talk of gods: he saw that it really had been a prolepsis all along, that they had dreamed of human potential and spoken of it as if already achieved in the sky. The gods were future humans imagined, the gods were our children. “Ahh,” he said.
She glanced over her shoulder, smiled a tiny smile. She saw him.
Then she saw Ganymede, and her look turned serious. “We need to talk to Ganymede.”
“Yes.” He considered it, looked at the locked space suit. “I wonder what he saw in there.”
“Me too.” She walked over to Galileo, and he took her in like a drink of cold water, tears starting again in his eyes, obscuring the sight of her, and he blinked and smiled helplessly as the tears spilled down his cheeks into his beard. There was nothing left to hide at this point. He was what he was, and felt content. She extended a hand to help him up. He took it and rose. Possibly the high point of all his lives was now come to an end. Even so, he was content. All things remain.
“I know what his punishment should be,” Galileo said.
She shook her head. “Later,” she said. “That’s our business. You have your own trial to deal with.” And she pushed a tab on the pewter box next to him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Trial
“I want what Fate wants,” said Jove.
—GIORDANO BRUNO, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
THE HOLY OFFICE OF THE INDEX
’S BAN on Galileo’s Dialogo, and the papal order commanding him to present himself to the Holy Office in Rome for examination in the month of October 1632, came as great shocks to Galileo. His book had been approved by all the relevant authorities, and its very title announced its impartiality:
DIALOGUE
Of
Galileo Galilei, Lyncean
Outstanding Mathematician
Of the University of Pisa
And Philosopher and Chief Mathematician
Of the Most Serene
GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY
Where, in the course of four days, are discussed
The Two
CHIEF SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD,
PTOLEMAIC AND COPERNICAN
Propounding inconclusively the philosophical and natural reasons
As much for one side as for the other.
Florence: Giovan Battista Landini, MDCXXXII
With the permission of the authorities
He found out by way of a letter from the grand duke’s new secretary Cioli, sent to him at Arcetri by a single courier. You are hereby commanded by the Holy Congregation of the Church to account for your book in person in Rome. The book itself is banned. Just as flat as that. No one wanted to know him now. Despite all the warning signs and struggles and premonitions, he still couldn’t believe it.