Galileo's Dream

Her retainers helped him into the gondola. He sat next to the teletrasporta, Hera got in at the back, and after an acceleration so rapid the bow lifted out of the water, they threaded a course through slower boats and docked with a thump at a dead end in a side canal. Here another vertically sliding closet lifted them and the box right up to the ice ceiling and through it (in a brief burst of pure aquamarine) to the surface of Europa, under the huge sphere of Jupiter’s garish banded yellows. Hera then picked up the entangler and led Galileo to a craft shaped like a seedpod, no bigger than their gondola had been, but enclosed. She instructed him to strap himself into a large cushioned chair, snapping some of his restraints herself, then likewise strapping herself in. “One moment,” she said brusquely, and then he was pressed down into his chair, and they were slightly vibrating. Looking through a little window in their room he saw they were rising into space.

“Where are we going?”

“To Callisto, as I said. I have to attend the council meeting concerning this Europan creature, so I don’t really have time for you now, but when I heard what you were doing here it seemed all too possible you would wreck your life, and much that followed it as well. So right now it’s war on multiple fronts.”

She tapped at her console for a while, and suddenly their ship disappeared, so that it looked as if they sat in chairs on a small floor that was free-floating in space. They flew at great speed, judging by the shifting of Jupiter and the stars, although there was no other sensation of movement. Galileo, surprised by the view, observed the great gas giant with a new set of mathematical tools in his mind that allowed him to see the rich phyllotaxic folding of the convolutions at the band borders as illustrations of fluid dynamics in five dimensions at least, making the vast ball’s surface more textured than ever.

Hera too stared at it; the view seemed to calm her. Her breathing slowed, her cheeks and upper arms grew less red. Galileo, watching her as well as the Jovian system and the stars, thought about what he had learned during the math lesson.

He saw her fall asleep. She napped sitting up for quite a while. It was the first time Galileo had seen any of the Jovians asleep, and he watched her slack face with the same close attention he had given to the math tutorial. It was a human face, and as such, mesmerizing. For a while he too may have slept, because the next thing he knew she was tapping away at her console, and all the bands of the great planet had changed aspect. Its lit part was a crescent now, the terminator a clean curving line, the gibbous dark part very dark indeed. They were closer to it than Galileo could remember ever having been, so that it took up the space of perhaps a hundred Earthly moons, filling a big portion of the sky. The lit crescent, an astonishing arc of banded unctuous oranges, seemed to cut into the black sky from some more vivid universe.

“Are we nearing Callisto?” he asked, looking around in the black starry night. No moons were obvious to him.

“No,” she said. “It’s still out there a long way. A few hours.”

The crescent was becoming visibly more slender. They had to be moving at great speed.

“How is your ship invisible?”

“It’s not. The walls can be made into screens, and the image of what you would see if you were looking out through the ship is projected on them.”

Very great speed. The crescent became like an immense bow, about twice the size that Orion would need, narrow and richly colorful, laminated in the wrong direction, pulled back hard as if to let off a shot. It shrank toward darkness symmetrically from top and bottom. With a final blink it was gone. The sun was now completely eclipsed, and they were looking at the dark side of Jupiter. With none of the four Galileans in sight, it had to be that the dark side of the great planet was lit only by starlight, and perhaps Saturn if it were up there among the stars they could see. In any case it was a dim light—but not nothing, not blackness. He could still make out the latitudinal bands, even the taffeta folding of their borders. Now that the light was so subtle, he could see that the surface of the planet was not a solid liquid, like oil paint, but rather cloud tops of varying opacity or transparency, shaded a thousand different combinations of dim sulphur and orange, cream and brick. In places the surface was fluted like the underside of a cloud on certain windy days; elsewhere geysers spurted out into the space above the cloud tops, forming lines of puffs that paralleled the bands and were carried off east or west. He thought he could even see the movement of the clouds, the powerful winds of Jupiter.

Hera yawned; she had seen this marvel before. “We have time to do some work on you and your Italian existence. We might as well use it.”

“I don’t see why,” Galileo objected, feeling uneasy. “You didn’t want me learning more mathematics.”

“No, but now that you have, you should understand the context. You need to know your life. It doesn’t go away, so you either understand it or remain disabled by forgetfulness and repression.”

“So you are Mnemosyne,” Galileo said. “The muse of memory.”

“I was a mnemosyne.” She gave him a metallic helmet that resembled Aurora’s, or even his own celatone. “Here,” she said. “Put this on.”

Tentatively he placed it on his head. “What does this one do?”

“It helps you to return. Pay attention!”

And she tapped him on the head.

His mother was screaming at his father. Sunday morning, getting ready for church—a regular time for her to yell. Galileo was hiding his head under his Sunday shirt as he put it on. Not pulling it on, staying covered by it, apart.

“What do you mean be quiet? How can I be quiet when I have to go begging more credit from the landlord and the grocer and everyone? What would we do for a roof over our head if I didn’t spend every day spinning and carding and sewing until I go blind, while you moon over your lute!”

“I make a living,” Vincenzio protested. His defense was weak with long use: “I had an appointment at court, and may again soon. I teach classes, I have private students, commissions, articles, songs—”

“Songs? That’s right! You play your lute and I pay the bills. I work so you can strum your lute in the yard and dream about being a courtier. You dream and we suffer for it. Five children going ragged in the street, and you sit there playing your lute! I hate the sound of it!”

“It’s my living! What, would you steal my living? Would you steal my hands, my tongue?”

“A living you call this? Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio!”

Vincenzio sighed. He turned helplessly to his wide-eyed children, watching this scene as always. “Let’s go,” he begged her. “We’ll be late for mass.”

In the church, Galileo looked around. They did appear a bit shabbier than many of the others there. His uncle was a textile merchant, like so many in Florence, and provided his mother with piecework, and with his workers’ mistakes. While the priest sang the parts of the service set to music, his mother shot his father a black look that Vincenzio tried to ignore. It was not infrequent that she would loudly whisper something poisonously obscene right in church.

One of the acolytes lit a lantern suspended from the rafters overhead, and when he was done the lantern was slightly swinging on its chain. Back and forth, back and forth. Watching it closely, it seemed to Galileo that no matter how big or small an arc the lantern swung through, it took the same amount of time to do it. As the swings grew shorter, they seemed to slow down accordingly. He put his thumb to his other wrist, and pressed down on his pulse to count and see. Yes; no matter the size of the arc, the lantern took the same time to pass through it. That was interesting. There was a little ping in it that made him forget everything else.

He was in space, flying some distance from the dark banded ball that was the back side of Jupiter. He shuddered at the disorientation.

Hera had been studying her console, it appeared. Seeing his thoughts.

“Do you know what happens to a boy who sees his father consistently abused by his mother?” she said.

Galileo could not help but laugh. “Yes, I think I do.”

“I don’t mean, did you experience it. Obviously you did. I mean, did you ever consider what it did to you? How it impacted your later relations?”

“I don’t know.” Galileo turned his head away from her. The helmet was heavy on his head, and pricked at several places on his scalp. “Who can say? I never liked my mother, I know that. She was mean to all of us.”

“This has effects, of course. In a patriarchy, a woman dominating a man seems unnatural. A joke at best, at worst a crime. So, you disliked and feared your mother, and you lost respect for your father. You vowed it would never happen to you. You might even have wanted revenge. All the rest of your life was thereby affected. You were determined to be stronger than anyone. You were determined to stay clear of women, maybe hurt them if you could.”

“I had lots of women.”

“You had sex with lots of women. It’s not what I’m talking about. Sex can be a hostile act. How many women did you have sex with?”

“Two hundred and forty-eight.”

“And so you were free of them, you thought, while still having heterosexual sex. It was a common behavior, easy to see and understand. But the psychology of your time was even more primitive than your physics. Temperaments, the four humors—”

“Those are very evident,” Galileo objected. “You see them in people.”

“You do. Were you often melancholy?”

“I had all the humors in full. Sometimes overfull. The balance sloshed around, depending on my circumstances. As a result I often slept poorly. Sometimes not at all. Loss of sleep was my main problem.”

“And sometimes you were melancholy.”

“Yes, sometimes. Black melancholy. My vital spirits are strong, and sometimes the humors are overproduced, and some get burnt and ascend to the brain in a vapor, rather than a liquid as they should. It’s these catarrhs that lead to abnormal moods. Particularly burnt black bile, that’s the catarrh that leads to a melancholy adust.”

“Yes.” She regarded him. “But it had nothing to do with your mother.”

“No.”

“It had nothing to do with your fear of women.”

“Not at all. I loved women!”

“You had sex with women. It’s not the same thing.”

“There was Marina,” Galileo said, then, hesitating: “I loved Marina. At least at first.”

“Let’s see about that. Let’s see how it began, and how it ended.”

“No—”

But she touched the side of the helmet.

He was at Sagredo’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, waiting for the party girls to show. Sagredo always invited some. Galileo liked all the different girls. Their variety had become something he lusted after—how each was big or small, dark or light, bold or diffident—but mainly, just different. As difference was what he had, difference was what he liked; for when it came to sex, people learned to like what they had. He kept count of them in his head, and could remember them all. There were so many kinds of beauty. So now he listened to Valerio play the lute, full of Sagredo’s wine and the food from the feast, and waited to see what the world would bring to him.

Under the arch of the main door stepped a girl with black hair. In the first seconds of her appearance in the brilliant candlelight Galileo fell under a compulsion.

At first she did not see him. She was laughing at something one of the other girls had said.

What Galileo looked for in female company, beyond sheer difference, was some kind of liveliness. He liked laughing. There were some who were in high spirits during the sexual act, who made it a kind of child’s play, a dance that friends did that made them laugh as well as come—there was some dash to the act, so that the dust in the blood was sent flying, the lanterns sparked, the gilt flaked, the whole world shone as if wet.

Just so this girl seemed to his eye. She had that spark. Her features were not regular, her hair was black as a crow’s, and she had the classic Venice girl’s figure, fish-fed and lush, long-legged and strong. She laughed at her companion as Galileo crossed the room to get closer to her. She had thick eyebrows that almost met over her nose, and beneath them her eyes were a rich brown starred with black radial lines, like stones. Feline grace, high spirits, black hair—then also wide shoulders, a fine neck and collarbones, nice breasts, perfect brown skin, strong arms. Fluid in movement, dancing through the room.

He got in her orbit, among some of her friends that he knew from previous parties, and he was ready and waiting for their jokes about the crazy professor. As he made his sallies against her friends, she saw his regard for her and smiled. Then she reversed the flow of her movement in the room, and before long was at his side, where they could talk under the noise of everyone else. Marina Gamba, she said. Daughter of a merchant who worked on the Riva de’ Sette Martiri; a fish market owner, Galileo gathered. She had lots of sisters and brothers, and did not get along with her mother, so lived with cousins near her parents, on the Calle Pedrocchi, and enjoyed her evenings out. Galileo knew the type perfectly well—fish market girl by day, party girl by night. No doubt illiterate, possibly unable even to add, although if she helped in the market she may have learned that. But she had a shy, sly sideways glance that suggested a wit sharp but not mean. All good. He wanted her.

By the time the party moved upstairs to the palazzo’s altana she was behind him, shoving him up the stairs with friendly pokes to the butt, and at the turn in the stairs, where there was a long window embrasure overlooking the canal, he reached back and pulled her after him. They collided there in a quick groping embrace. She was as bold as one could want, and they never made it up the stairs, moving in stages out to the long gallery fronting the Grand Canal on the second floor, skipping along it to a somewhat private couch at its far end, a couch Galileo knew well, having used it for this purpose before. Possibly she had too. There they could lie together and kiss and fondle under their clothes, which came apart or down in just the right ways. The couch was not quite long enough, but its cushions could be thrown in the corner behind it, and they did that and rolled around on them in a wild tangle. She was good at that, and she laughed at his wild-eyed ardor.

So all was well and more than well, and he had her on his lap riding him naked and most rapturous, when he leaned back into one of Sagredo’s big pillows and encountered one of the many creatures of the house—something small and furry with needlelike teeth, which had been stirred from its sleep and now bit him on the left ear. He roared as quietly as he could, and tried to pull the thing off without losing his ear or the rhythm of the lovemaking with Marina, who it seemed to him had closed her eyes on his distress to focus on her pleasure, which looked to be in its final accelerando. From the corner of his left eye Galileo could not make out exactly what kind of creature it was—perhaps a weasel or fox or baby hedgehog, hopefully not just a rat, but no matter. He turned his head and buried the creature between Marina’s breasts, which were flying up and down so dramatically that he hoped the creature would become interested and transfer its toothy grip. Feeling the creature, Marina opened her eyes and yelped, then laughed and slapped at it, hitting his face instead. He grabbed a breast and pulled her back toward him, while with the other he pulled at the twitching body of the thing. All three of them rolled off the cushions onto the floor, but Marina kept the rhythm going and even redoubled the pace. They both came in the wildness of this, at which point Galileo shouted, “Giovan! Cesco! Come save me from your damned menagerie!”

He managed to detach the animal by holding its snout shut. Feeling this it convulsed free and instantly disappeared, and the two lovers lay there in the bloody afterglow.

“Giovanni! Francesco! Never mind.”

They lay there. Briefly she licked his blood from his neck. She teased him about being the mad professor, in the same way they all did, but then, when they started to make love again, she added a joke about how he might be able use his military compass to calculate the most pleasurable angles their bodies together might form, which made him hoot with laughter.

“Well, why not?” she said, grinning. “They say you have made it so complicated that anything can be calculated. Too many things.”

“What do you mean, too many?”

“That’s what they say, that you larded it down like your big belly here. They say you made it so hard no one can even understand it—”

“What!”

“That’s what they say! They say no one can even understand it, that you have to take a class at the university for a year to learn it, and even then you can’t.”

“That’s a lie! Who says these things?”

“Everyone, of course. They say it’s so complicated that on a battlefield it would be faster to pace out the distances in question than to calculate them using your thing. They say that to use it you’d have to be smarter than Galileo himself, so it’s totally useless.” And she hooted with laughter at his expression, which combined dismay with pride.

“Absurd!” Galileo protested, although it was pleasing to think that people were saying he was too smart for something, even if it was for being sensible. He was also charmed by her insolence, and her knowledge of him and his affairs, not to mention her breasts and her smiling look.

So they laughed as they made love, the finest combination of emotions possible. All without any talk of an arrangement: just laughter. That’s the way it was with a certain kind of Venice girl. At one point, kissing her in the ear, Galileo thought, this is number two hundred and forty-eight, if you have not lost count. Maybe it was a good number to stop at.

At dawn they lay in the window embrasure, looking out at the slightly misting surface of the Grand Canal, calm as a mirror, only creased by the wake of a single gondola; the world turning pink overhead, still dusky blue underneath. In the dawn light she was ravishing, disheveled, relaxed all through her body, which lay pressed against him like a cat’s. Young but not too young. Twenty-one, she said when he asked. Certainly under twenty-five, anyway; and maybe as young as she said.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you?”

“Not yet.”

“You look like you should be hungry all the time,” nudging her hip against his belly. “You’re like a bear.”

“Are bears hungry all the time?”

“I think they must be.”

When they dressed and joined those coming downstairs to break their fast he shoved a little purse of scudi down the front of her blouse and kissed her briefly, saying, “A gift till I see you again,” one of his usual lines, and she said, “Thanks, maestro,” with another little nudge of the hip and a toss of the head to indicate what fun she had had.

On the barge back to Padua, Sagredo and Mercuriale laughed at him. Sagredo, who was coming out to stay at his place for a week, said, “She’s pretty.” Galileo shrugged them off. She was a Venice party girl, a loose woman, but in a Venetian way that was not so much prostitution as it was a kind of extension of Carnivale, and who could object to that. Next time he was in the city he would drop by her neighborhood and look her up. That could be arranged to be sooner rather than later. He could go back in with Sagredo, who was looking amused—pleased on his behalf, pleased at the world and its conjunctions. Always sensitive to looks, Galileo now recalled several Marina had given him in the night, from her first glance at him, to her amazed laughter at the little beast attacking them, to her look at their parting—sweet and knowing, smart and kind. Something happened inside him then, something new, unfamiliar, strange. Love fell on him like a wall. Sagredo laughed; he saw it happening.