Galileo's Dream

Hera approached him wearing white. They were back at her Ionian temple, high above the sulphurous landscape of her volcano moon. Galileo’s heart leaped to see her. He extended his arms, but she stopped short of them, looking down at him with her amused expression. His heart knocked inside him like a child trying to escape.

“So,” she said, “you escaped your fiery alternative.”

“I did,” he said. “That time, anyway.” A flash of anger shocked him: “I never deserved it!”

“No.”

“And you—you’re still here!”

“I’m still here. Of course.”

“But what about that Galileo who burned? You sent me back to the fire, and it had already happened to me, even though when you sent me back I was younger than that.”

She shook her head. “You still don’t understand. All the potentialities are entangled. They are all vibrating in and out of each other, all the time. In the e time they resonate. We saw that for a time, when we were in Jupiter. I did anyway.”

“I did too.”

“So there you have it.”

Galileo threw up his hands. “So what did Ganymede think he was doing, then? Why did he want me to burn?”

She led him to a bench and they sat on it side by side, overlooking the slaggy downslope of the yellow mountain. She took his hand. “Ganymede has an idea about time that he insists on even now. Whether he comes from our future or not is unclear. I took your suggestion and had a look at him with the mnemonic, and I think it may be true. I don’t recognize much that I saw from his childhood. The Ganymede period, however, was clear. It was as I suspected. He made an incursion into the Ganymedean ocean with a small group of supporters, and there he learned of the Jovian mind and the minds beyond. How he learned so much more than the Europans I don’t know, and maybe that’s another confirmation that he came back to us from a future time. But at that point he began making analepses using one of the entanglers, focusing on the beginning of science. He sees that start and the encounter with the alien consciousness as parts of a single whole, a situation that he has been trying for centuries to alter in both our times. These he believes are crux points in the organism—sensitivities where small changes can have big effects. I think his working theory is that the more scientific culture becomes, the better chance it will have to survive first contact with an alien consciousness. Anyway, what is certain is that he has made more analepses than anyone else. His brain is simply stuffed with these events, which are often traumas to him. He must think they help. He must think that since each one collapses the wave function of potentialities, it changes the sum over histories and therefore the main flow of events. So he made scores of bilocations—hundreds of them. It’s like he’s kicking the bank of the stream over and over again, trying to carve a new channel.”

“And has he succeeded?” Galileo asked. “And—are the years that follow really worse if I am spared? Have billions really died because of it?”

“Not necessarily.” She took his hand in hers. “There are more than two alternatives here, as everywhere. Every analepsis creates a new one, so there is a sense in which we can’t be sure what Ganymede has done, because we can’t see it. There are times where you are martyred. But we know there is also a stream of potentialities in which you succeeded in convincing the pope to your point of view, and the Church then took science under its wing and blessed it, even made it a tool of the Church.”

“There is such a time?” Galileo asked, amazed.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to know. I thought if you knew, you would try for that outcome no matter what.”

“Well of course! I did anyway!”

“I know. But I didn’t want you to have any extra encouragement. Because that’s the potentiality cluster with the worst outcomes of all.”

“No!”

“Yes. When you succeed in a reconciliation, and religion dominates science in its earliest phase, you get the deepest and most violent low points in the subsequent histories. This is what Ganymede saw, and this is what he has insisted ever since. When you are burned and become a martyr to science, science more quickly dominates religion, and the subsequent low point is much reduced. It’s bad, but not as bad.”

Galileo thought it over, confused by this newly proliferating vision of the past. “And so,” he said, “what happened after this time, then? This one I am in now?”

“This time is an alternative, as they all are in their time. But this is what you and I, and everyone else in our strand, managed together. An analeptic introjection that made a big change.”

“And is it better?”

She looked him in the eye, smiled very slightly. “I think so.”

Again Galileo considered it. “What happens to the me who burned, then? What happens to that Galileo now?”

She said slowly, explaining again, “All the potentialities exist. When an analepsis creates a new temporal isotopy, it coexists with the others, all of them entangled. All together they make up the manifold, which shifts under the impact of the new potential, and changes, but continues too. Whether we can oxbow a channel and cause it to disappear entirely is an open question. Conceivable in theory, something people claim to have seen, but in practice hard to do. As you might know better than I, I suppose, because of your sessions with Aurora.”

Galileo shook his head doubtfully. “So there is still a world in which Galileo is burned as a heretic?”

“Yes.”

“But no!” Galileo said, rising from the bench to his feet. “I refuse to accept that. I am the sum of all possible Galileos, and all I ever did was say what I saw. None of us should burn for that!”

She regarded him. “It has already happened. What would you do?”

He considered, then said, “Your teletrasporta: I must beg you the use of it. The other box must be there in Rome on that day, I know that already.”

She stood herself and looked down on him, her gaze serious. “You could die there. Both of you.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “All of us are one. I can feel it, they’re in my mind. In my mind I’m burning at the stake. You have the means for a return. So I have to do this.”

Smoke had filled his lungs and was choking him by the time the fire reached his feet. Pain stuffed his consciousness, blasted it until there was nothing but it, and he almost swooned. If he could hold his breath he would faint, but he couldn’t. His feet were catching fire.

Then through the smoke he saw the mass of distended faces break apart at the impact of a man on horseback riding through, his charge smashing people aside so that their roar panicked to a scream. The ring of Dominicans guarding the pyre bunched to repel this helmeted invader, but they all knew what happened when a horse struck men on foot, and before it reached them they broke and ran. The horse reared and twisted before the fire, disappeared behind Galileo. There was a slashing at the chains holding him that made their iron instantly hotter; then he was grabbed around the waist by the horseman, yanked up onto the bucking horse and thrown before the saddle. His ankles were apparently still chained to the stake, so that his feet twisted almost out of their sockets. But then they came free, and he bounced like a long sack on the horse’s flexing shoulders. Everything around him jumbled into a slurry of curses and screams, of a horse’s twisting flank and a sword flashing in smoke. His rescuer roared louder than all of them together as he mastered the horse and charged away. He caught a glimpse of a bearded lower face under the helmet, square mouth red with fury. As he lost consciousness he thought, at least I died dreaming that I saved myself.

And came to in Count da Trento’s cellar in Costozza, moaning. He hurt all over. His companions were still on the stone floor.

“Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please, 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 the flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else’s groans, muffled as if through a wall. He wanted to speak but couldn’t. The groans were his.

Hera’s voice, then, in his ear, as he looked down the blasted mountainside of Io, clutching her arm, laid out on the bench.

“You died on the floor of the cellar, that first time, along with your two companions. Now we’ll take the dead body from there and put it back on the stake, to fill your absence in the fiery alternative. Here in Costozza, the rescued one will survive his trauma, and live on. But understand: there will always be this little whirlpool in you, between the worlds.”

“So I live it all again?”

“Yes.”

Galileo groaned. “Do I have to know it?” he asked. “Can you let me forget?”

“Yes, of course. But it will be in you anyway. The potentiality is always there. And sometimes therefore you will remember it, despite the amnestics. Because memory is deep, and always entangled, and while you live, it lives.”

“That’s fine, as long as I don’t remember it.”

“Yes. But even when you don’t, you do. It lies below your feelings.”

“And the others? The other Galileos, in the other potentialities?”

“Please understand. They are always there. There are so many.”

“Will they end? Will it ever end?”

“End? Do things end?”

Galileo groaned again. “So,” he said, “even if I saved myself an infinite number of times, there would still be an infinite number of me that I hadn’t saved. I will live through them again and again. Make the same discoveries and the same mistakes. Suffer the same deaths.”

“Yes. And sometimes you’ll know that. Sometimes you’ll feel it. This is your paradox of the infinities within infinities, which you will have discovered by feeling it in yourself. You live in Galileo’s paradox. You’ll hold your wife and mother apart as they try to kill each other, and it will strike you as horrible, then ridiculous, then beautiful. Something to love. This is the gift of the paradox, the gift of memory’s spiral return.”

“Always in me. Even if I forget.”

“Yes.”

“Then let me forget. Give me the amnestic.”

“Is that what you want? It will mean losing your conscious memory of a lot of this that you have seen out here.” Gesturing at Io’s slaggy grandeur, and at Jupiter’s enormity. And at herself.

“But not really,” Galileo said, “as you have just told me. It will still be in me. So, yes. I have to. I can’t stand to know about the others. I would have to keep going back and trying to change things, like Ganymede. I can’t face that. But I can’t face the bad alternatives either—all the deaths, all the burning. It isn’t right. So—so I need to forget, to go on.”

“As you wish.”

She gave him a pill. He swallowed it. She had slipped another one in the mouth of the Galileo there on the floor of the poisonous cellar, he was sure; a Galileo who would therefore live through all that followed that moment again, in ignorance, just as he had already; or at least until the stranger arrived. When it would all begin again.

“So I didn’t really do anything by rescuing him,” he said. “I didn’t change anything.”

“We made this eddy in time,” she said gently, and touched him.

In Siena, when he came out of his syncope, he was shaking and white-faced. He stared up at Cartophilus, clutching him by the arm.

“I had a dream,” he gasped, confused. Trying to hold on to it. “I was stuck!” He stared up at Cartophilus as if from out of a deep well. From the bottom of that depth he said, “I am the sum of all possible Galileos.”

“No doubt of that,” the old servant said. “Here, maestro, drink a bit of this mulled wine. That was a hard one, I could tell.”

Galileo gulped down the wine. Then he fell asleep, and when he came to, he had forgotten that he had even experienced a syncope that night.

He was left with a very strange feeling, however. In his weekly letter to Maria Celeste he tried to describe it: I am caught in the loops of these events, and thus crossed out of the book of the living.

She replied in her usual encouraging way: I take endless pleasure in hearing how ardently the Monsignor Archbishop perseveres in loving you and favoring you. Nor do I suspect in the slightest that you are crossed out, as you say, de libro vivendum. No one is a prophet in his own country.

Galileo shook his head as he read this. “No one is a prophet anywhere,” he said, looking out his window to the north, toward San Matteo. “And thank God for that. To see the future would be a most horrible curse, I am quite sure. Let me be not a prophet in my own country, but a scientist. I only want to be a scientist.”

But that was no longer possible. All that life was gone. He sat in the gardens in Siena now, but did not see anything. Piccolomini tried to interest him in more problems of motion and strength, but even those old friends did little to rouse him. He sat waiting for his mail. If Maria Celeste’s letters didn’t arrive when he expected them, he would cry. Some days he could barely be persuaded out of bed.

Around that same time, some of the Venetian spies reported that Piccolomini had been anonymously denounced to the pope. It was all still happening. The letter received at the Vatican said: The Archbishop has been telling many people that Galileo was unjustly sentenced by this Holy Congregation, that he is the first man in the world, that he will live forever in his writings, even if they are prohibited, and that he is followed by all the best modern minds. And since such seeds sown by a prelate might bear pernicious fruit, I hereby report them.

The identity of this Siena informer was never found out, although the priest Pelagi would have been a good guess. In any case, the campaign against Galileo clearly had not ended. Cartophilus, hearing of this secret denunciation when Buonamici came up from Rome to tell him about it, went that evening to Archbishop Piccolomini, and asked him in a shy way if the time might have come when Galileo could hope to be remanded to Arcetri. Piccolomini thought it might indeed be possible, and he took the old servant’s hint that it could be a case of getting the old man home before he died. And Buonamici made sure that same night to convey his news of the secret denunciation to the archbishop’s confessor, so that soon afterward Piccolomini would know of that danger too.

So he began to campaign for Galileo’s return to Arcetri. This was the start of October 1633. He pretended not to know he himself had been denounced, of course, and intimated, in letters to people outside the Vatican who would take the idea into the fortress, that confining Galileo to house arrest in Arcetri would be a more severe punishment than his relatively lavish and public situation in the archbishop’s palazzo in Siena.

When Urban heard it put this way, people said, he agreed to the plan. In early December a papal order came to Siena: Galileo was to be removed to Arcetri, there to be confined to house arrest.

Piccolomini himself took this news to Galileo, beaming with pleasure for his old teacher, whom he feared had gone a long way toward permanently losing his mind. A reunion with his girls would surely help. “Teacher, the news has come from Rome, the Sanctissimus has blessed you with permission to return to your home and family, God be praised.”

Galileo was truly startled. He sat down on his bed and wept, then stood and embraced Piccolomini. “You saved me,” he said. “Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them.”

He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look at it—that’s the sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.

On the day of his departure from Siena, a strong wind poured over them from the hills to the west, tossing the last leaves on the trees in a wild flight. Galileo was hugged by several well-wishers, and when he finally embraced the little archbishop, he lifted him up. When he set him down and stepped back, wiping his eyes and shaking his head, Piccolomini held him by the arm to help him up into the carriage. Galileo’s gray hair and beard streamed in the wind, as did the banners over the palace, and the clouds. Birds wheeled overhead. Galileo stopped to look around, gestured at the spectacle, stomped on the ground. “It still moves!” he said. “Eppur si muove!”

Later Piccolomini told the story of Galileo’s parting remark to his brother, Ottavio Piccolomini; who, later still, when living in Spain, commissioned the painter Murillo to paint a painting to commemorate his brother’s tale. Murillo depicted the scene as taking place before the Inquisition itself, Galileo pointing at the wall over the congregation, where fiery letters spelled out Eppur si muove. In this way, and by word of mouth, the story was passed on. At some point the painting’s story became the one people told, and later still it must have been regarded as too blasphemous to show, and its canvas was folded and reframed so that the inscribed wall was hidden from view. It only came back to light when the painting was cleaned, many years later. But all the while people kept telling the tale, of Galileo’s sidelong defiance of his persecutors, his muttered riposte to the ages. It was true even though it wasn’t.

The carriage took only two days to bring Galileo to Arcetri and the gates of Il Gioièllo. All the household was standing there to greet him, with Geppo jumping in front and La Piera standing impassively at the rear. He had been gone eleven months.

He levered himself out of the carriage, stood with the help of a hand on Geppo’s shoulder, groaned as he straightened up. “Take me to San Matteo,” he said.