Galileo's Dream

Chapter fourteen Fear of the Other

Black space, the dense spangle of stars. The great bulk of Jupiter, almost entirely sunlit, surreally present to the eye, crawling phyllotaxically with its hundreds of colors and thousands of convolutions—

He was sitting in his chair in Hera’s little space boat, which was again rendered invisible—a kind of Plato’s cave through which the cosmos poured in. Below and behind them, the virulent ball that was Io jumped out of the starry blackness.

“You’re back,” she noted. Her teletrasporta lay on the floor beside his chair. “Good.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Europa, of course.” She looked at him. “We’re still trying to keep Ganymede and his people away.”

“You got off the melting land, I see.”

“Yes, I was picked up by my people pretty soon after you left. Good that you did leave, though. It was touch and go.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know, a few hours maybe.”

Galileo blew out through his lips. “Pah.”

“What?”

“For me that was a few years ago.”

She laughed. “Proof again that time is not a steady progression, that it fluctuates and eddies, and we are in different channels. I hope you have been well?”

“Not at all!”

“How so?”

“I was sick. And I remembered what was happening here, and also what will happen to me there. It was all in me at once. Not only what you showed me, the fire I mean, but also, I have to confess—I used Aurora’s tutorial to take a look at my life, the last time I was with her. To see the science. I didn’t know it would be so—comprehensive. It wasn’t just someone’s account. I was there. Only it was all at once.”

“Ah.”

“I didn’t think it would matter, but when I went back home, I seemed to be dislocated somehow. Not in the moment, but a bit behind it, or before. I knew what was going to happen. It was bad. Unsustainable. Can you—can you help me with that, lady?”

“Maybe.”

He shuddered, remembering, then brightened. “On the other hand, there’s a new pope, a man who has been like a patron to me. I think I can get him to lift the ban on discussing Copernicus. I think it’s even possible to persuade him to approve the Copernican view, to make it the Church’s understanding, so that the Church itself will support it. And then I’ll be safe.”

She stared at him, shaking her head. “You still don’t get it.”

“Things at home aren’t so good,” Galileo went on, ignoring her. “But maybe His Holiness can help there too.”

She sighed. “What do you mean?”

“Well—my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I’m hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it’s bad for my daughters.”

“You are the one who put them in their situation, right?”

“Yes yes.” Then, trying to distract her: “What will you do when we get to Europa?”

She saw through him. “Distract me or not, you are still stuck in a situation you don’t understand.”

There was nothing he could say to that. “I don’t see that I’m much different than you,” he parried lamely.

She brushed that aside. “It has always been the same pope in charge when you are condemned to be burnt at the stake.”

This startled Galileo. “Of course,” he temporized. “But, if I could convince him to support the Copernican view, then surely …”

She only stared at him.

“I think it can work,” Galileo ventured. Then: “You said you would help.”

She only shook her head.

They seemed to float without moving. The great banded giant stood off to one side, impossible to believe. The whorls and eddies within each tawny band moved, slightly but visibly, and the imbricating borders where band met band moved even faster, their viscous colors crawling over each other like snakes. Hera’s transparent bubble of a craft only just shifted over this massive spectacle, such that its terminator, that smooth border of sunlight and shadow, rolled westward at a speed they barely could see. With close attention, one could spot the progressive illumination of new embroideries in the bands.

But all these stately contradances were as motions in some syrupy dream, and Galileo could see that Hera was impatient for action. She tapped at her console in her usual way, had several fraught conversations with absent colleagues he could not hear; then she fell silent, brooding over problems Galileo was not privy to.

“How long till we get there?” he asked.

“Hours. Europa is on the other side of Jupiter right now, unfortunately.”

“I see.”

Time passed; seconds, minutes: it became tangible, like something you could hold in your hands, or weigh on a scale. Protraction.

Finally she sighed. “Put the mnemonic back on. We might as well keep working. I can perhaps also block some of your memories from the life lesson you so rashly entered. So there are things you need to forget, and things you need to remember. Because you are still misunderstanding your situation at home.”

Galileo regarded her memory celatone uneasily. Mostly he feared what another immersion would reveal to him, but there was an awful fascination in it too. That the mind held within it such vivid scraps of the past—there was a majesty to that, full of pain and remorse—and a desire, despite all, for all the lost time somehow to come back. I want my life back! I want life back. And then also, to lay down so many memories so fully in the mind, and yet be unable ever to call them back—what were they, to be so oddly made? What could God have been thinking?

“Where will you send me?” he asked apprehensively. “What knowledge will you flay me with this time?”

“I don’t know. There’s so much to choose from, maybe we’ll just go spelunking. Your brain is full of trauma nodes.” She scanned her console screen, now apparently displaying maps of his brain, there visible to his sidelong glance in virulent pulsing rainbows. “Maybe we should continue with your relations with the women in your life.”

“No!”

“But yes. You don’t want to be one of those supposed scientific geniuses who is also in domestic life a jerk and a fool. There are enough of those already, or more than enough. It would be a shame if the first scientist were to be also the first of that crowd of assholes.”

This was interesting news, but also offensive. “I did my duty,” Galileo objected. “I took care of my family, I supported my sisters and my brother and their families, and my mother and my children, all the servants, all the artisans, all the students and hangers-on—the whole damned menagerie! I worked like a donkey! I wasted my life paying for my wastrel family.”

“Please. Self-pity is simply the reverse side of bravado, and just as unconvincing. That’s something you never seemed to learn. You lived a life of privilege that you took for granted. You started with a little bit of privilege and leveraged it upward, that’s all.”

“I worked like a donkey!”

“Not really. There were people who worked like donkeys—literally, in that they were porters and carried burdens for their living—but you weren’t one of them. Let’s see what your own mind tells you about that.”

Roughly she put the helmet on his head, and he did not really resist her. Where in his lost life would he return to?

With an odd look, perhaps of pity, almost of affection, a kind of indulgent amorevolezza that was very affecting to see in someone so amore-vole, so lovely, she reached out to touch him on the side of the head.

It was midsummer, very hot and humid, and the Count da Trento had invited Galileo’s colleague Bedini to his villa in Costozza, in the hills above Vincenza. Galileo, recently arrived in Padua with the entirety of his worldly possessions in a single trunk, had been introduced to everyone by Pinelli, over wine in Pinelli’s library of eighty thousand volumes. Bedini and Pintard were two of these new friends, and now, courtesy of Bedini’s noble friend, they were off to the hills together.

At the Villa Costozza, they joined their convivial host and did just what they would have done at home—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, while the count opened bigger and bigger bottles of wine, until they were hoisting fiascos and balthazars and small casks, and had eaten most of three geese, along with condiments, fruits, cheeses, and a great number of pies. And all on a day so hot that even here in the hills they were sweating greasily.

Finally the count was overcome, and staggered off to vomit like a Roman. The young professors groaned at the prospect, feeling stronger than that. It seemed if they jumped in one of the villa’s fountains or pools, they could immerse themselves to cool their stomachs and slow their bile. When he returned, the Count shook his head groggily as they proposed this. “I have something even better,” he said, and led them to a back room on the ground floor, where the villa had been dug into the hillside. In this room, the plaster wall did not meet the marble floor, and out of the black gap between wall and floor flowed a cold humid breeze, making the whole room as cool as an ice pantry. “It’s always like this,” the count mumbled, still gasping a little from his vomiting. “There’s a little spring somewhere down there. Please, be my guest. On days like this I simply lie on the floor. See, here are some pillows. I would join you, but I fear I must retire again,” and he stumbled off.

Laughing at him, the three drunk young men pulled off their clothes, groaning and joking and elbowing each other, and arranged the pillows as bedding and fell on them with happy moans and snorts. And there in the cool relief, after sliding right onto the marble and oohing and aahing like pigs in mud, all three of them fell asleep.

Galileo was hauled out of an ugly red dream by the count and his servants. “Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please! Wake up!”

“Qua—? Qua—?”

His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else’s groans. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t. The groans were his. Looking up as if from the bottom of a well, he felt a nausea so deep that it seemed if he vomited he would throw up his bones. Someone nearby was groaning in a truly heartrending way. Ah—he himself again. It was frigidly cold….

When he came to again, the anxious count and his retainers surrounded him as if looking down into his grave. “Signor, it’s good to have you back,” the count said solemnly. “Something made you three very sick. I have no idea what it could have been. The air out of the hill is usually very fresh, and all the food and wine was checked, and seemed fine to the servants. I don’t know what could have happened. I’m so sorry!”

“Bedini?” Galileo said. “Pintard?”

“Bedini has died. I’m so sorry to tell you. It’s really a mystery. Pintard is in a state like yours. He has roused a couple of times, but is now fallen into a catalepsy again. We are keeping him warm and dripping some spirits into his mouth, as we did with you.”

Galileo could only gag. He too could have died. Death, the fundamental nausea. He felt the horror of it, then the terror.

Hera’s big white face. She stared into his eyes. “You could have died right there.”

“I almost did. I was never right again.”

“Yes. Almost died of an excess of privilege.”

“Of poisoned air!”

“The poisoned air of a rich man’s villa. You ate yourself sick, you drank yourself into a stupor. And it wasn’t the first time, or even the hundredth. While your women drudged and starved, had the babies and raised the children and did all the real work, the work that’s work. Your own partner, the one you had children with, she didn’t even know how to read, isn’t that what you said? Didn’t know how to add or subtract? What kind of a life is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You did know.”

She reached out. Touched him on the forehead.

When Marina told him she was pregnant he first only stared at her, looking like one of the boxed fish in the market. Part of him was pleased; he was thirty-six years old, and had been with 248 women, if his count was right, and none had ever reported to him that he had gotten her pregnant. Of course they had their ways, and some of the regulars made you hood the rooster, but still he had had reason to wonder if he were sterile. It could make sense that he was like a mule, in that his father had mated with some kind of gorgon. Not that the lack of children bothered him, given the women and children already underfoot everywhere in his household, screeching for his attention. But it was nice to know one was normal, like any other healthy animal or plant. In his garden everything flourished, and so he should too in his way.

But it was a bit of an embarrassment as well. Here he was angling to become the tutor of the little Medici, one of his best chances of improving his patronage and getting back to Florence, and yet nothing had proceeded there yet, and it was not going to be any kind of help if people said Oh Galilei, he got his Venice girl pregnant, a fishmarket puttella, a Carnivale puttana who can’t even read. Her fine qualities would only make them nod their heads knowingly and conclude Galileo had lost his head—that his cock led his fate, that he was not really a courtier, that he was a bit of a drunken obnoxious fool. And of course his enemies said that every time his name came up. It was not that hard of a case to make.

All this passed through his mind in less than a second. He sat her down on the edge of the Grand Canal, on the steps of the Riva de’ Sette Martiri, and said, “I’ll care for the child, and for you too, of course. La Collina will be made the godmother, and Mazzoleni the godfather, and I’ll set you all up in a house near mine in Padua. You’ll move there.”

“Ah yeah.”

Her mouth had turned down into a bitter cast that he had never seen before. It had a swoop like a gull’s wing. He was leaving her, so she was leaving him—this was what her look said.

She sat there holding her belly. She was (he suddenly saw) starting to show. A bit pale and sweaty, perhaps with morning sickness. She nodded, looking down at the trash floating on the canal, thinking her own thoughts. She gave him another sidelong look, sharp as glass under a fingernail.

Then she looked away, roused herself. She was realistic, a smart girl. She knew how things went. That he was going to support her and the child was perhaps even as much as she had been hoping for. Although one always hopes for more than one hopes for, as he well knew. And they had been in love. So he felt a little flash of vertigo as he watched her slip away. Things would never be the same, he could see that already. But there was no other choice for him. He had to get patronage, he had to work. So this was the way it had to be. He would have to cheer her up.

But that look. In his voluminous Catalogue of Bad Looks, this one was perhaps the worst. A whole life ended there.

“It all could have been different,” Hera said. Black space, her white face, bilious Jupiter crawling above them. The stars.

“I know,” Galileo said, subdued. Marina was dead now, a ghost from his past, and yet there she had sat, on the fondamente in his mind, as vivid as Hera herself. The two were not that dissimilar in some ways.

“You made your children illegitimate. The son without prospects, the girls unable to marry.”

“I knew I could put the girls in a convent. They’re better off there.”

She merely looked at him.

“All right, then,” Galileo said, “send me back earlier than that! You want me to change the, the fire—let me change this too!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because you need my science! You don’t want me to go back and change my life in a way that will damage my work. You see? I had to do it!”

“You could have done both.”

He held his head in his hands, felt the celatone on him like a condemned man’s hood. “So what’s the point? Why do you torture me like this?”

“You need to understand.”

He snorted. “You mean I need to have my nose rubbed in my mistakes. I lived with a prostitute, it wrecked everything. You make me feel like shit! How does that help me?”

“You need to understand,” she repeated, relentless as Atropos. “Look again. You have to keep looking. This is the essence of Mnemosyne’s physic. In the nothingness which extends behind you, the blackness that you call the past, there are certain luminous points, isolated and discrete. Fragments of your former life that have survived the loss of the rest. Behind you then is not blackness, but a starlit blackness, constellated into a meaning. Without that constellation, there is no chance of a meaningful reality in your present. The living force of those small fires you are discovering make you whatever you are. They constitute a sort of continuous creation of yourself, of the being you are by way of the being you have been. Those crucial moments, unachieved in their time, are entangled with the present always, and when you remember them, they give birth to something that is then achieved, that is your only reality. So look now. Look at your work. First—hmmm—let us look at it in the light of your relations with Marina.”

She touched his head.

Belasario Vinta came to him and asked him to do a horoscope for the Grand Duke Ferdinando, who was sick. Galileo was both pleased and nervous. The gratuity would come in handy, and the Medicis were his best chance for patronage. Grand Duchess Christina was already almost in hand, having asked him to teach mathematics to her son Cosimo, Ferdinando’s heir. Galileo was not surprised when Vinta told him she was also the source of this new request. She was frightened.

Galileo had studied astrology, and it was precisely this that made him uneasy. Vinta stood there regarding him, waiting for his response.

“Of course,” he said. It wasn’t a request one could refuse, as they both knew. “Tell His Serenity the meraviglioso that I am most deeply honored, obbligatissimo, and that I will attend to the matter directly. And give him my best wishes concerning his health. Has he considered consulting Acquapendente? I have been cured many times by that great doctor.”

“The Grand Duke has his own doctors, but thank you. How soon can he expect your horoscope?”

“Oh, let us say a week, or perhaps ten days—” As it was not the kind of thing that should be performed too quickly. “But in any case, as fast as I can.”

When Vinta was gone, without discussing remuneration at all, Galileo sat down heavily on a bench in his workshop.

It was a system that could be defended, if you granted its premises, which were probably true. Every event was the effect of some prior cause, everything moved in a woven tangle of cause and effect, which included of course the stars and planets. But unweaving the tangle was very difficult, and in that sense astrology was a doomed project, or at least quite radically premature, no matter its antiquity. But he could not say that to the Medici. And one could at least calculate the positions of the planets at the time of the subject’s birth. Do what everyone else did.

He groaned and called out for a new folio, quills, ink, a dusty old ephemerides. Vinta had left a big packet of papers containing the grand duke’s birth information.

For a long time he stared at all these things. He had paid sixty lire each for birth charts for the girls when they were born. He had only passed on one for Vincenzio because by then he could not afford it. He pulled the relevant tomes from the dusty top shelf on the back wall of the workshop. The basic text was Ptolemy himself: just as his Almagest covered all Greek astronomy, his Tetrabiblios described all their astrology. His description of celestial influences was derived from a mix of philosophers: Zeno, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus … Archimedes made no appearance. There was no way to apply to this problem the mechanics of Galileo’s hero.

In the more typical Greek way, Ptolemy and most of his sources saw the idios cosmos in the koinos kosmos, and vice versa; they spiritualized matter, materialized spirit. Fine; no doubt true. But the action at a distance! The unsupported assertions! Galileo cursed aloud as he read. The Tetrabiblios was simply an endless string of assertions. To use that as a basis for genethlialogy, the construction of individual horoscopes …

Well, Kepler had done it, and was still doing it. His Latin was so weird (if the problem did not reside in Kepler’s thinking itself), that Galileo was not sure what his books said; he had only paged around in them trying to find things he could understand. The astrological sections were worst of all in that regard. There Kepler was even more confusing than Ptolemy.

For one thing, Kepler called himself a Copernican, and Galileo tended to agree with him on that; but astrology was Ptolemaic. Perhaps Kepler’s incomprehensibility had to do with his attempt to make his astrology as Copernican as his astronomy, to save the appearances there as well as in the sky. St. Augustine had reconciled astrology with Christianity; perhaps Kepler felt he could reconcile it with Coperni-canism.

But there wasn’t the time to work through Kepler to find out. He had to set all the foundational issues aside and focus on Ferdinando. His chart marked the locations of all the planets at his birth moment, either square, oppositional, sextile, or in conjunction. Jupiter had been in the strong ascendant at his birth, Venus in conjunction. Consult the Tetrabiblios for the main significations for these luminaries. For Jupiter these were expansion, increase, honor, advancement, enjoyment of patronage, financial gain, joy, charitable instincts, travel, legal matters, religion, and philosophy. All these qualities suggested that Galileo himself must be a Jovian, but he knew already that Jupiter was not his Great Benefic, but rather Mercury. The slippery go-between; it didn’t seem right. Possibly he needed to make for himself a prosthaphaeresis, which was that correction necessary to find the “true” place of a planet, as opposed to its apparent or “mean” place.

But Ferdinando seemed to have been born under a good description. Good, good, and more good. Of course, almost everywhere in the sky was good. Clearly, no matter which benefic was in the ascendant, astrology focused on what good could be found in it. Ptolemy himself had noted this in the introduction to the Tetrabiblios—”one looks to the stars for the good that can be seen,” he had written—which was very convenient. Jupiter was definitely good. Enjoyment of patronage? Financial gain? Who wouldn’t want to be born under Jupiter!

He shrugged away his unruly thoughts and worked through the querents, the aspects and ceremonies, the conjunctions retrograde and indulgent, the oppositions and squares, houses and cusps, sextiles and tines. He applied the simpleton mathematics, so basic that he wondered if he could perhaps construct an astrological compass like his military one—or if perhaps his military compass already had the capacity to calculate horoscopes. He would have shared this joke with Marina had she been there. One more thing it could do.

It took two days to complete the work. Happily the horoscope genuinely predicted for Ferdinando long life and good health—both much in the ascendant, in fact, because of the current position of Jupiter in the zodiac. His death was most likely to fall twenty-two years in the future, at a square conjunction of quick Mercury and dour Saturn—not that ordinary horoscopes traditionally sought out such information, but Galileo had run the calculations through to their end, just out of curiosity. Astrology, he understood as he did this, was an articulated structure of hope. One never looked for ends of lives, even though the calculations could be made.

He wrote it all up, not including the end calculations of course, and had the finished drawings done by Arrigheti. He took the handsome foursquare charts and a fair copy of his calculations to the palace, and gave them in person to Vinta, who unceremoniously broke the seal on the leather case, which Mazzoleni had embossed with a gilt version of the Medici arms. Quickly he read the main page, nodding as he did so.

“Jove, Venus and the Sun, all in the ascendant. Good. His Highness and the grand duchess will be very pleased, I am sure.” A sudden piercing glance: “You’re sure about this?”

“The signs are very strong. His subjects can rejoice to know that their most benevolent grand duke is favored by Fortune and the stars.”

Vinta said, “God be thanked. For he complains of a gnawing inside him.”

Galileo nodded; he too was afflicted with such pains. He went home with the gift of a gold cup that could be sold for a decent sum to the goldsmiths.

Twenty-two days later, Ferdinando died.

When Galileo heard the news, his face burned. He cursed the servants scurrying away from his heavy hand. He stormed out of the house and wandered the streets of Padua, glumly imagining the next time he saw Vinta. For a moment he was even afraid; perhaps he would be blamed.

But given this world, in which all prediction eventually proved wrong, in which death touched down anytime, anywhere, such blame was unlikely. There was no reason to be more than embarrassed. He sent a long letter of condolences to the Grand Duchess Christina, and to Cosimo, with also a cover note of bafflement to Vinta—one which even delicately suggested the possibility of poison as an explanation for the discrepancy between Ferdinando’s stars and his actual fate. The celestial influence, he wrote, had somehow been overruled by a mundane cause.

And in the hubbub of the succession, no one actually seemed to remember Galileo’s most inaccurate horoscope. It was the kind of thing people forgot to remember. And it was also true that the new grand duke, Cosimo II, was an ex-student of his. The prospects for patronage were probably enhanced.

Still, the moment he had imagined finally came. Galileo visited the court in Florence to pay his respects, and was welcomed into the room by Vinta. Galileo entered already talking. “So sorry to hear of the grand duke’s unexpected and untimely death,” he began, but Vinta dismissed these sentiments with a flick of the hand—and with it a look of contempt, and even of a kind of unctuous complicity, as if Vinta was now in on a secret truth, which was that all Galileo’s mathematics were as fraudulent as astrology.

That look cut Galileo’s mind. It never left him, he could always see it, and it always brought the same hot flush of shame and defilement. He tried to banish the memory of it, but sometimes he even dreamed it; it jumped out of other faces and stabbed him. One of the Bad Looks of his life, for sure; one of the ever-growing collection of terrible looks that haunted him in the sleepless hours.

No one else remembered the horoscope at all, as far as he could tell. That was the way it was with astrological pronouncements; they were meant for the moment, and no one expected anything more of them. Even if they proved right, no one remembered them. People were so scared.

It did not follow, of course, that because one horoscope was wrong, all astrology was wrong; nor that if astrology were wrong, all Ptolemy was wrong; nor that if all Ptolemy were wrong, all Aristotle was wrong; nor even that if Aristotle was wrong, Copernicus was therefore right. Those were bad syllogisms; and even good syllogisms were not for Galileo conclusive.

But that look!

After that he had tried to restrict himself to making only those assertions he could demonstrate the truth of. He tried not to speak of causes. Probably the Copernican explanation was correct, but he would not speak of it. He could not see the proof for it. Kepler obviously believed it, but Kepler was crazy. Although even Kepler had said it: “Astrology is the prostitution of mathematics.”

The look always remained in him, stuck in his mind like poor Fra Sarpi’s face. In the pursuit of patronage, he had prostituted his mathematics.

“So you knew you were a hypocrite,” Hera said to him. Under the ghastly yellow light of Jupiter, her broad face before him was as big and cruel as one of the Fates. Mnemosyne had metamorphosed, as she so often did, into dire Atropos, chopping into his brain with her scissors—a pair of scissors injected from the inside of the helmet on his head, scissors made of mirrors that reflected broken images of his staring face, his misspent life. He shut his eyes, but Mnemosyne lived there too, on the inside of his eyelids.

“You refused to marry the woman who was the mother of your three children,” she said, “precisely because she was like you, in that she had sold access to herself to better her position. It was the same thing you did with the horoscope, and so you knew you were wrong about her. But by then it was too late.”

“I wasn’t wrong!” Galileo said. “And it wasn’t just that. We didn’t get along. Even so, I kept her in a house and took care of her and the kids. I found her a husband.”

“But you wouldn’t marry her yourself. That’s why the two of you didn’t get along.”

“Not so! I didn’t want it to be the way it was. She was a bitch. She laughed at my work and tried to wreck it. If she had been different I would have married her; she wasn’t any different from the servant girls that professors marry, that old widowers marry.”

“But you had pretensions to higher things. You wanted a patron, and you thought a wife from a low background would hurt the effort.”

“That’s true. But that’s just the way it was. I needed to do my work.”

“So then maybe you shouldn’t have had any conjugal associations at all.”

“I’m not a saint. I just need to do my work.”

“Work. How many banquets a week? How much time at Salviati’s? You feasted while your people starved.”

He heaved a big sigh, tried to take the helmet off his head. “You’re just torturing me,” he said. “Everyone makes mistakes, everyone commits crimes! Why do you shove my face in it?”

Very slowly, emphasizing each word, she said, “You need to know your life.” She stared at his face for a while. “Do you know what you did that really mattered to you?”

“No.”

“And do you know what you did that really matters to us?”

“No!”

“Look.” And she touched him.

Mazzoleni had planed the edge of a long board of fine-grained hardwood, then cut a smooth groove in it, so that they had as perfect a Euclidean plane and line as they could make in this world. He pegged this board into a big L-shaped framework of boards with holes drilled into them at different heights, so the plane’s inclination could be adjusted at will. The balls to be rolled down the plane were iron musket balls, ground and polished and dropped time after time through circular holes just big enough to fit them, until Galileo was convinced they were as close to geometrical spheres as humans could achieve. When they were done, they had a really interesting apparatus.

After that they spent hours and hours, day after day, in the workshop running tests of different kinds. Balls that were dropped through the air fell faster than Galileo and Mazzoleni could time them, so now they tilted their plane sufficiently to slow balls in their descent. By altering the angle of inclination in a regular way, and comparing times of descent for the same balls over and over again, Galileo came to see that the tilt of the plane made a proportional ratio with the speed of the descents—a relationship so clear that he could conclude that balls in free fall would accelerate in the same proportion, as an end case; so the inclined plane was teaching them things about free fall as well.

Even given this gift of stretched time, their clocks were not good enough. Galileo muttered about a pendulum clock, remembering the observation of periodicity that had come to him when he was a boy; but he had not figured out how to keep the pendulum swinging without disturbing it, and meanwhile the balls were ready to roll.

Finally it came to him, right out there in the workshop staring at the inclined plane apparatus. “Mat-zo-len-iiiiiii!”

“Maestro?”

“We will weigh time.”

Mazzoleni laughed. “Maestro, you’re funny.”

“No, it’s perfect. We can weigh time easier than we can mark its passing, in fact we can weigh differences very closely! Ha!”

He did his little jig and kick, a sign that he was feeling the rung-bell feeling, which he described as being like sexual afterglow, only better.

“It’s just what Archimedes would have done. It’s like his weighing density, more or less. Here’s how we’ll do it. We’ll make a kind of clepsydra. When the balls drop, have a mechanism also open the stopper on a jug of water.”

Mazzoleni frowned. “How about just put your thumb on the stopper and do it yourself when you see the ball start,” he suggested. “Your eye would be more accurate than any gate I can make. Water is slippery stuff.”

“All right, that’s fine. That being the case, I’ll also stop the water by eye and by thumb. The water that has been released will have run into a flask. We can then weigh the water to within a featherweight! A featherweight of time, in this case, because the weights will always be proportional to the times we were letting the water flow. We’ll be accurate to the speed of our eyes and thumbs, which means a tenth of a pulse, or even better!”

“Good idea.”

Mazzoleni’s gap-toothed grin: this was the sigil of the rung-bell feeling. When his bell was rung, he was always seeing Mazzoleni’s battered face. The face of God in an old man’s face. It made Galileo laugh.

So they weighed time, and continued the work of investigating falling bodies. He tried all kinds of things. He dropped balls down one inclined plane and watched them roll up another, and found that no matter how the two planes were inclined inward to each other, the balls always rolled back up to the same height they had been dropped from. Preservation of momentum: this fit well with Galileo’s earlier studies of balance and leverage. It also shattered the Aristotelian notion that things wanted to be one place or another, but by now he was far beyond mere refutation of Aristotle; there were new things to discover. A ball returned to the height it was dropped from, no matter the shape of the V: so what happened if they set the second plane horizontally? The ball would roll forever, it seemed, neither accelerating nor decelerating, except that the resistance of wood and the air itself finally stopped it. If not for friction, in other words, it would roll forever. So it seemed, though that was rather amazing. Of course any supposedly perfect plane set on Earth was actually covering a part of a large sphere, so that one might say the tendency of things to move in circles, as the stars did, was an appearance saved even here. But in principle, on a true plane, motion would continue. Once something started to move, it would continue moving until something changed it.

Again, this was contra Aristotle, but that was no surprise anymore. More important, it was interesting in its own right.

There was so much that was interesting in what they could see with this apparatus. They started dropping balls freely and letting them hit an inclined plane, then a horizontal plane. Other times they sent balls rolling off the end of a horizontal plane, and watched them fall in a quick curve to a bed of sand they had set on the floor, so the balls would leave a mark that could be measured precisely. Very interesting! Different distances, angles, therefore speeds, and all of them timed proportionally, by the weight of water. These various setups divided motion into parts of different kinds, when before motion had been all mixed together in nature, and thus difficult to study. He had been working on these problems for almost twenty years, and never had he been able to articulate differences like he could now. By manipulating the variables one could measure different things, and establish that there were relations—just as one would have expected, but could never before create and measure. Relations of past speed, present speed, future speed.

And so now they were sure, at last, after twenty years of various formulations that had not worked, that the downward acceleration of a ball increased as the square of the time elapsed in its fall. It was as simple as that.

Galileo showed the equations to Mazzoleni: “See? See? Acceleration is a very simple ratio! Why should it be true? Why? God made it that, that’s why! God likes mathematical ratios. He must! He puts them there for all to see.”

“For you to see, maestro. Has anyone else ever seen this?”

“Of course not. Archimedes would have seen it, if he had had such a fine apparatus. But no. I am the first in the world.”

The gap-toothed grin. When God created the cosmos, He had had just that grin. He had put it on Mazzoleni to show Galileo how He had felt.

Combined results began to accrue. When a rolling ball fell off a horizontal plane into the air, the curve of its fall was a mix of two motions—first, the uniform speed of the horizontal motion, which did not diminish just because the ball left the tabletop, and second, the accelerating speed of its vertical fall, which was precisely the same as if it were falling without any horizontal motion—something they established by repeated testing. So the horizontal speed was uniform, while the downward speed was increasing as the square of the time elapsed, as already demonstrated. And the combination of those two was, by definition, half of a parabola. One could therefore describe the motion with a simple parabolic equation.

He stood looking at these equations he had written down, and at the numbers and sketched diagrams on the pages before it. His 116th work folio was almost completely filled.

“MAT-ZO-LEN-IIIIIIIIIII!”

The simian face of the ancient one. “Something good?”

“PAR-A-BO-LAAAAAA! Let me show you. This is something even you can understand.”

But first he had to dance around the table, out into the garden and back again, feeling bell-struck. All the world struck, all the world ringing inside him. Gong! Gong! Gong!

Black space; Hera’s face.

“So. Do you see what you did?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Do you understand the power of your apparatus, of your method?”

“You could seek the mathematics inside nature, and find it.”

“Yes. This is what you loved. This is what gave you joy.”

She sat back, watching him closely. “The inclined plane apparatus,” she went on, “allowed you to create events that in nature were compound, but now were teased apart. You had independent variables under your control. Each experiment was unique, but when the variables were the same, the results were the same. It was as if you were enacting the calculus in advance of the mathematics of the calculus—doing calculus as if it were geometry, or even mobile sculpture.

“And these events you staged—if anyone else were to stage them in the same way, they could not help but get the same results. You could take the various descriptions of motion that were competing in your time, and put them to the test, and the event itself would determine which of the explanations matched the results. Then, with your mathematical description in hand, you could predict what would happen in new situations. When you were right, this was something no one could ever revise. If we were to do it here and now, it would be just the same.”

“Well, but there is no pull downward here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes yes. It was a way of seeing the truth.”

“Not so fast. It was an accurate description of events at that scale. It was an abstraction with a concrete referent, which meant that no one could logically deny it. If someone were to assert that there was a different description for motion, then you could put it to the test, and show that they were wrong and you were right. You could in fact withdraw, and let motion speak for itself. Motion then speaks, and your rivals in explanation are silenced, without you having to say a word.”

“I liked that,” Galileo admitted. “I liked that very much.”

“Everyone does. And so we still speak of Galilean motion. We still have inclined planes in physics classrooms.”

“I like that too.”

“It was your chief joy.”

“Well, maybe,” Galileo temporized, thinking of all the other things he had enjoyed. He realized that he had loved his life.

“No. It was your chief joy, as revealed by your own mind. Remember that the mnemonic is a brain scanner that locates your most powerful memories by identifying and stimulating the largest coordinating clusters in the amygdala. The strongest memories make the biggest clumps, and they are always entrained with the strongest emotions, in particular the strongest pleasures and the strongest pains. The emotional component is determinative for intensity and permanence of memory. Thus, sexual release can be memorable or forgettable, depending on if it is attached to more complex feelings. To joy, for instance—that feeling you describe as being rung by a bell. And then physical pain, all your many ailments, most of which originated with the poisoned cellar that killed your weaker companions—pain leaves a mark, especially at first, when accompanied by dismay and fear. But much more powerful is shame—perhaps the strongest of the negative emotions. Although fear, humiliation … well. The point is, we have very emotional memories. So I have just been visiting your strongest memories, that’s all. This is what we find among the most pleasurable of your memories.”

“Not the telescope?”

“Of course not! That’s just the thing that Ganymede gave you. And by so doing, he bent your whole life in a new direction, until what you were martyred for and remembered for was a drama that overshadowed your real contribution, which was the inclined plane work. Your telescopic discoveries were just what anybody would see when they look through such a glass. And your astronomical theories were usually wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Galileo demanded.

“Your explanation of the comets? Your theory of the tides?”

“Well, but that isn’t fair,” Galileo objected. “The real explanation for the tides is ridiculous. That the Earth’s water moves because space itself is bending? It’s inexcusable.”

“And yet real.”

Gallileo sighed. “Maybe we need to be able to forget more than we need to remember,” he said, thinking of what she had said about emotions. About shame, and his catalog of bad looks.

“You need to remember what helps you, and forget things that don’t help you. But you have not achieved that. Few people have, I’ve found.”

“You did this to many people, I take it?”

“It was my work.” She shook her head unhappily. “It’s what I did, before this thing in Europa drew us all down into its maelstrom.”

“Is the creature really such a problem?”

She looked grim. “The debate over what to do about it is the problem. We are the problem. But the problem is tearing us apart.”

“As bad as that?”

She gave him one of her sharp looks. “You know better than most how people can fight over an idea.”

“Indeed. That’s what Aurora said too.”

“Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic. The results can be deadly. The Thirty Years’ War, isn’t that what they called the religious war that Europe was fighting during your time?”

“Thirty years?” Galileo exclaimed, dismayed.

“So I seem to remember. And here, now, it may be happening again.”

For a while they flew to Europa in silence, both of them locked in their thoughts. By now the equivalence of change of speed and the physical sensation of weight was firmly established in Galileo’s body and mind, so when he felt pressed back into his chair, he came out of his reverie.

“You’re speeding up?”

“Yes.” She was grim again. “Apparently Ganymede and his group are already there. Four ships in a tight orbit, just over the ice. There’s no good way to stop them now.”

Ahead of them bulked the white ball of Europa. Hera muttered viciously in a language he did not know, tapping hard at her control pad. “Come on!” she complained.

You must be patient, Galileo prevented himself from saying. Instead he asked, “Why does Ganymede want me to be burned at the stake, do you think? What difference would it make? Aren’t there so many potentialities that they all happen or not, cancel each other out or not, so that any one doesn’t matter?”

She looked at him with the expression he had seen before that he could not decipher. Pity? Affection? “All the temporal isotopes have effects downstream. Think again of the braided channels of a river. Say you kick the bank of one stream so hard it crumbles, and the stream wears away the bank until it breaks into a nearby channel, and they both become so strong together that they cut a straighter line, take water from some channels, reroute others…. Well, so, Ganymede thinks you are at a crucial point, a big bend. He’s been obsessed with changing that bend for a long time. He keeps going back to it, I think. And I wonder if he doesn’t want the change he causes to be so profound it alters things even in our time too. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But say I am burned—what’s different?”

“Maybe the more accurate question would be, what would be different if you weren’t burned?” She glanced at him, sensing his shudder. “After you, there is a deep divide between science and religion. A war of two cultures, two worldviews. And with you burned at the stake for stating an obvious physical fact, religion is thereafter discredited, even disgraced. The intellectual innovators of the world are secularized, science rises to dominate human culture, religion is seen as an archaic power system, like astrology, and it fades away.”

“But that’s not good. Why would anyone want that? That’s no different than these bastard priests who are attacking me!”

She regarded him carefully. “Interesting to see again the structure of feeling you grew up in. To us it seems clear that your religion was a kind of mass delusion, serving the powerful by justifying their hierarchy.”

Galileo shook his head. “The world is sacred. God made it all, as an expression of mathematical playfulness, perhaps, but however that may be, He did it.” She shrugged at this and he went on. “Besides, how can you say that science dominating civilization is such a good thing? Didn’t you tell me that your histories have been nightmares, that most cultures in most times, including your own, have been to one degree or another insane? Where’s the great advantage in that?”

“The question,” she said carefully, “is whether the alternatives are not even worse.”

This was sobering. Galileo thought it over. “Do you have a tutorial for the history of human affairs between my time and yours, like the one Aurora had for mathematics?”

“Of course,” Hera said, still brooding. “There are many. They describe different potentialities, or attempt to show the whole wave function. But there’s no time for that now. We’re approaching Europa.”

And in fact Europa stood directly before them, growing rapidly larger, blossoming like a white rose, its surface crackled like the ice on the Po just before it broke up in the spring. It was striking how for the longest time in their flights, their objectives remained at the same small size, only growing incrementally, and then in a final rush bloomed to the size of an entire world.

Now Hera was cursing again.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“They’re landing,” she said, and pointed. “Just over the north pole.”

Galileo did not have a sense of orientation to apply to this. “You can see them?”

“Yes. There.” She pointed, and Galileo saw a cluster of tiny stars, very close to Europa’s white surface, swirling down toward it. “They’re landing, and the Europans are trying to stop them, but …”

“They don’t have cannons to fire at them?”

“Weapons have been forbidden, as I told you, but there are things that can be used as weapons, of course. Power systems, construction tools, field generators …” She shook her head as she watched her screen and listened to her interlocutors. “I wish they would generate a small black hole in their midst and suck them out of existence!” She cursed in the language that didn’t get translated.

A streak of brilliant white light shot down out of the quartet of firefly ships onto the surface of Europa, and she stopped in her tirade.

“What was that?” Galileo said.

“I don’t know. Possibly one of their ships flew right into the moon, like a meteorite. I don’t know how that could have happened, though. The pilot systems wouldn’t have allowed it, so there must have been an override, or …”

“What?”

She hissed. “Whatever hit the surface just exploded again. Maybe its a reactor. There’s an electromagnetic pulse that has registered that is—ah! See that bright white spot?” She tapped away quickly, then began cursing again. “A lot of them are in trouble now, on both sides. Hold on,” she ordered. “I’m taking us down fast.”

Their ship tilted forward, rocketed down toward the shattered icescape. Only in the last seconds before they would have impacted like a meteor did the invisible ship tilt and shudder and roar, throwing Galileo against his restraints.

Then they thumped down on the tawny ice. Hera began rattling out a long list of instructions to the ship and the various machine intelligences among its crew.

“Shouldn’t you get the rest of your grand council involved in this?” Galileo asked.

“Yes.” She gave him a look. “But we’ll meet with the Europan council for now.”

“Oh I see. Very good.”

“Very bad. We’ve failed to stop Ganymede. I don’t know what he’s done, but that was a big explosion. Possibly one of their ship engines.”

“When they crashed in?”

“Ordinarily that wouldn’t be enough to do it. The engines are secured against almost any accident. But with some time and effort, it might be possible to override the protection.”

They disembarked from the ship, and he soon found out that she had landed them very close to an entry ramp into Rhadamanthys, the under-ice Venice. Down a broad white entrance, through a diaphanous barrier and into a broad ice gallery, where the pulsing blues interlocked in their patterns overhead. Soon they reached the edge of the canal they had taken before, and beside it was a sunken amphitheater where a small crowd of people gathered. This too looked familiar, and though he couldn’t recall the specifics of any previous incident, he assumed there had been one, there on the far side of some amnestic he had ingested. Already seen …

“You have to give me something so I don’t remember so much of my life,” he reminded her.

“I tried a few things with the mnemonic, while you were remembering. I hope certain parts will be occluded for you now.”

People in the crowd saw Hera descending the stairs toward them. Some threw up their hands as if to say What next! or What have you done! or We already have enough problems! But Galileo saw that was a pretense; he saw that they were afraid. Some were chewing on knuckles; others were weeping without knowing it. Even in the ubiquitous green-blue light of the vast articulated cavern, most of them were white-faced with fear.

Watching Hera confer with them, Galileo heard snatches of a debate over who had the right to land or to forbid landing on Europa. He wandered down to the floating transparent globe that modeled the icy moon. The dark gray rocky core of the globe was surrounded by a transparent blue gel representing the ocean, all of which was held in a thin white shell that tinted the ocean below it to a pastel shade somewhat like the Earth’s sky. The outer shell was scored by faint lines representing the crack systems on the surface.

Inside this globe, the creature of the ocean was not rendered visible, although Galileo thought that tiny fluctuations in the blueness of the blue light might be intended to represent some manifestation of it. Down there under their feet—a mile down, a hundred miles down … He wanted to talk to Aurora, to see if anything new had come of the mathematical conversation with the sentience. The listening devices they had emplaced in the ocean were connected to sound repeaters within this floating globe, he assumed, as emanating from it he could hear, at a much reduced volume, the uncanny singing he remembered so well. The lowest sounds appeared to match the little shifts in blueness of the model’s ocean. He wondered if the color changes marked the spatial origin of the sounds.

“Why didn’t you stop him? You failed!” one of the locals was complaining to Hera. “You were supposed to keep him sequestered on Io!”

“We tried,” she countered, “unlike you. Where were you? It might have helped to have some numbers there, if you really wanted a quarantine.”

The argument persisted, grew louder—

Then the blue in the floating globe turned white at a point under the surface, near the upper part of it. That would be its north pole, no doubt. The blossom of incandescence propagated away from it in waves; they struck the solid mass of the core and rebounded toward the surface. Threads of white light coursed through the interior like lightning.

Then there was a tremble underfoot, and the ice around them groaned, sounding much like the creature within had sounded during their incursion. Perhaps the sentience had learned to sing by mimicking the natural creaks of its moon’s ice.

Then the sounds coming from the globe changed. The clustering glissandi coalesced to a single dissonant chord. The pitch dropped abruptly, down to a basso profundo so profound that Galileo heard it more in the gut than the ear. It groaned. As the awful sound lifted back into the range of the audible, it seemed to lift Galileo’s body with it, chelating him with a thousand claw tips, so that his skin crawled and the hair rose on his forearms and the back of his neck. He recalled the cries that had driven them up through the ice shell of the moon to the safety of the surface. That, however, had been an angry sound, like the roar of a lion. This one was pain and confusion. Then in a brief crescendo that spiked into his head just above his eyes, it changed to raw fear.

This lasted only a moment, thank God, for everything it felt Galileo felt. But it seemed the machine transferring the sound had damped the volume, reducing it to a lunatic whimper. That hurt in a different way—the sound of it too high, and somehow broken. The anguish pierced him right to the heart. He felt it fully himself, anguish like something he somehow recognized, something he had already felt …

Galileo found he had his nose to the floating globe, that he was embracing it and whimpering himself, muttering desolately, “No, no, no, no, no.” The pain in him was unbearable, like the stab of a cry of grief.

“What happened?” he said, wiping his face as Hera approached. “Has it changed?”

“Yes.” Her expression was grim.

“Has it been wounded?”

“Yes. As you can hear. Aurora tells me its messages have gone away.”

“Is she here in this quarter of the city? Can you take me to her?”

Hera nodded. “She’ll send an avatar.”

The people standing in the amphitheater looked crushed, heartbroken. Clearly the painful sounds affected everyone. Aurora herself suddenly appeared before them, also stricken, her nose to a screen before her as she tapped at the buttons on her table, muttering to herself, or to the alien beneath them.

“What’s happened?” Galileo exclaimed to her.

“Here—ohhh—”

“What?”

“Can’t you see? Look there!” Tapping at the screen at her hands, without ever moving her face. It looked like she wanted to dive through the screen. She held on to her desk’s edge as if to the railing of a ship. She moaned, oblivious of those around her.

“Its articulation is bad, the signals off sequence,” she whispered. “The equations are wrong. It’s as if it’s been drugged, or …”

“Or injured,” Galileo said. “Damaged.”

“Yes. It must be. The explosion included a big electromagnetic pulse, very powerful, especially in the area just under the blast. What did they do? And why did they do it?”

Galileo turned away. He had met a man once who had been struck on the left side of the head by a falling hoist beam in the Venetian Arsenale. The beam had sheared off; this was one of the incidents that had made him interested in strength of materials. The man had recovered in most senses, and been able to speak, but his speech was slurred, and he stuttered, babbled, forgot himself, repeated himself; and all with a huge grin, rendered horrible by his babble.

Behind them the meeting of Europans was ongoing, and the argument had become ferocious, with several people shouting at once. Gali leo saw again that through the centuries people had never gotten less emotional. Hera was one of the shouters. “I’m going to kill them,” she was insisting furiously. “The first mind we have ever encountered, and they attacked it!”

Chirrups and oscillating moans now came from the globe. The faces of the Europan councilors blanched or reddened, according to their humors. Too many people were shouting at once. In the cacophony nothing could be distinguished.

Then the gallery turned purple. The transparent aquamarine tones, so green in their blue, all shifted through aquamarine to a dusky purple.

Everyone stopped talking and stared around. Hera’s gaze fixed on Galileo: “What’s this?” she said.

A part of him warmed to see that out of all of them she had asked him, but the cold dread in his heart was not touched. “Let’s go outside and see,” he suggested, gesturing at their ceiling, which now pulsed through various shades of grape. He took her by the hand, pulled her toward the broad opening that led up to the surface.

In Europa’s light pull, she was quickly moving faster than he could go. After a moment they ran side by side. Then she took his hand again and pulled him along, and he could do nothing but focus on keeping his feet. She dragged him along as his mother had once dragged him out of church, after he had started to laugh at the sight of a swinging lamp. They burst through the diaphanous air barrier and ran up the broad ramp, out from under its ceiling and into the black night of the world. Overhead hung giant gibbous Jupiter—

But it was not the Jupiter he had grown used to during their flights among the Galileans. The Great Red Spot had been joined by scores more red spots, spinning in every band, from pole to pole. Most of the spots were horizontally linked, like bloodstones in necklaces. It was as if the planet had caught a pox, each of the new spots a livid brick red oval, spinning slowly but distinctly, squiggling like wet paint. Some spots straddled bands, and threw their convoluted boundaries into wild spurts and splashes of ruddy color. The dominant color of the stupendous planet had shifted from yellow to a plague of various reds, ranging from brick to blood. The light in the city below had therefore shifted from greens to purples.

Hera, head canted back, staggered and cried out at the sight. She grasped his shoulder to keep on her feet.

“What is it?” she cried.

“It’s Jupiter,” Galileo said stupidly, but then clarified what he meant. “It’s Jupiter itself, thinking. Like the thing underneath us, you see? The bands and the swirls have always been its thoughts. Now it’s angry. Or grieving.”

“But why?”

“Because!” Galileo glanced at her in surprise; she was staring wildly at him. “Because we killed its daughter,” he suggested.