Galileo’s Dream
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But on Earth, he wrote, no mountains exist that reach even to a perpendicular height of one mile. The mountains on the moon were taller than the Alps!
He spotted a perfectly round shape right in the middle of the terminator, and very near the equator. He drew it a bit bigger than he saw it, to emphasize how prominent it was to the eye, and how clearly it stood out from its surroundings. A good astronomical drawing, he decided, had to evoke the sight that subsequent viewers would look for, rather than represent it to perfect scale, which in the diminution of the drawing simply made it too small. Paying attention was itself a kind of magnification.
Drawing the constellations with their new host of companion stars was a different kind of problem, easier in some ways, as being mostly a schematic, but much harder too, in that there was no chance of representing what the view through the glass actually looked like. He altered sizes far beyond what he saw, to give an impression of the different brightnesses; but using black on white to represent white on black would never be satisfactory. White marks on black, as in an etching, would be better.
He drew till his fingers got too cold. He made fair copies in the mornings, exaggerating to make the impressions bolder than ever. He made ink washes, very delicate; also bold schematics that would serve as guides to an engraver, because already he had plans for a book to accompany the spyglasses, just as an instruction manual had accompanied his military compass. Although here it really came down to seeing for oneself. The Milky Way, for instance; he could see that it was composed of a vast number of stars granulated together, a truly astonishing finding; but there was no way at all to draw that. People would have to see for themselves.
He fell deeply into his new routine. He had always been an insomniac, and now there was a useful way to spend those sleepless hours. He simply did not go to bed, but stayed out on the terrace by the occhialino, looking through it and jotting down notes, comfortable in the solitary silence of the sleeping town. He had not known how much he enjoyed being alone. He wrote up what he had observed at dawn, and then slept through many a bright cool morning, wrapped in a blanket against a sunny wall in the corner, under the gnomon of the house’s big L.
With the shorter days of November came winter, and clouds. On those nights he read, or caught up on his sleep, if he could; but on many a night he woke every hour or two, his brain full of stars, and went out to check the sky. If it had cleared he would stir the coals of the kitchen fire and put a pot of mulled wine on the grate, add a few sticks and go out to set up the glass, feeling that swirl of dust in the blood that he loved so much. He was on the hunt all right! And never had he had such a quarry! Nothing could keep him from looking when the night was clear. If his work in the daytime had to suffer-and it did-so be it. Those bastard pregadi didn’t deserve his work anyway.
He had ordered one of the work tables moved onto the terrace, placed under a table umbrella, next to a couch. He had a lantern that could be shuttered, and workbooks, inkpots, quills; and three spyglasses on tripods, each with different powers and occlusions. Lastly, blankets to throw over his shoulders. Mazzoleni and the cook kept the household running in the mornings while he slept, and stocked the supplies for his nighttime needs; both were the kind of person who falls asleep at sunset, so they didn’t see him at work unless he forced them to. After a while, he never did; he liked being by himself through the frosty nights, looking at first one thing and then another.
On the night of 7th January, 1610, he was out looking at the planets. As he had written in a letter he was composing for young Antonio Medici, The planets are seen very rotund, like little full moons, and of a roundness bounded and without rays. But the fixed stars do not appear so; rather they are seen fulgurous and trembling, much more with the glass than without, and so irradiated that what shape they possess is not revealed.
So the planets, being obvious little disks, were interesting. And Jupiter was now in the west after sunset. It was the biggest of the planets in the glass, no surprise to anyone used to the way it dominated the night sky whenever it was visible.
Galileo got it in the middle of the eyepiece, and then saw that there were three bright stars to left and right of it, aligned with it in the plane of the ecliptic. He marked their positions on a new sheet of his letter to Antonio, and looked at them for a long time. They did not twinkle like the stars, but gleamed steadily. They were almost perfectly in a line with each other. They were almost as bright as Jupiter, or even brighter, although smaller. Jupiter itself was a very distinct disc.
The next night he looked at Jupiter again, and was shocked to find that the three stars were still there, but this time all to the west of the great planet, whereas on the previous night two of them had been to its east. He wondered if the ephemerides was wrong about Jupiter’s current movement.
On 9th January it was cloudy, and nothing could be seen. But the night of the tenth was clear again.
This time only two of the bright stars were there, both to the east of Jupiter. One was slightly less bright than the other, though on the previous nights they had all been the same.
Mystified, intrigued to the point of obsession, Galileo started a new sheet in his workbook, and copied there the diagrams he had already written in at the end of the letter to Antonio. The letter itself he put aside, as being premature.
In his new desire for night, the days themselves passed slowly, and he did the necessary work without paying the slightest attention to it, as if dreaming on his feet. This was a sign, wellrecognized by the household: he was on the hunt. And just as they never woke sleepwalkers for fear of damaging their sanity, they left him alone at these times, and kept the boys quiet and the students at bay, and put food in him almost as if spoon-feeding a baby. Of course it was true he would beat them if they distracted him, but they enjoyed the craft of it too.
On the night of 12th January, Galileo trained the glass on Jupiter in the last moments of twilight. At first he could see again only two of the little bright stars; but an hour later when it was fully dark he checked again, and one more had become visible, very close to Jupiter’s eastern side.
He drew arrows trying to clarify to himself how they were moving, shifting his attention between the view through the glass and his sketches on the page. Suddenly it became clear, there in the reiterated sketches: the four stars were moving around Jupiter, orbiting it in the same way the moon orbited the Earth. He was seeing circular orbits edge-on; they lay nearly in a single plane, which was also very close to the plane of the ecliptic, in which the planets themselves moved.
He felt the ringing in him. He straightened up, blinking away the tears in his eyes that always came from looking too long, and that this time came also from the sudden surge of an emotion he couldn’t give a name to, a kind of joy that was also shot with fear. ‘Ah,’ he said. A touch of the sacred, right on the back of his neck: God had tapped him. He was ringing.
No one had ever seen this before. People had seen the moon, had seen the stars; they had never seen this. I primi al mondo! The first man to see Jupiter’s four moons, which had been circling it since the creation.
Everything he had seen over the last week fell into place. He stood, staggering a little under the impact of the idea, and circled the work table as if imitating a moon. When there had been only two dots, the others could have been behind the big planet-or before it. And he saw also that the orbiting moon now outermost could perhaps have moved so far away from Jupiter as to be outside his eyepiece’s little circle. The shifts in position suggested they were moving fairly quickly. Earth’s moon took only twentyeight and a half days for its orbit. These four seemed faster still, and perhaps could be moving at differing speeds, just as the planets moved at differing speeds in the sky.
If he was right, then he could expect to see several more things. Seeing the orbits side-on, the moons would appear to slow down as they approached their maximum distance from Jupiter, and be fastest when right next to it. They would also disappear when behind it (or before it) in a regular pattern, and always reappear on the other side, never on the same side. Repeated observations should make it possible to sort out which moon was which, and determine which orbited closest to Jupiter and which farthest away. Knowing that would help him to calculate each orbital period, and that would allow him to keep steady track of them, and even predict where they would be, in a Jovian ephemerides of his own devise.
‘My God,’ he said, overwhelmed at these thoughts, suddenly weeping, feeling he should fall to his knees to say a prayer in thanks to God, only his knees were too stiff, he was too cold. Anyway it was looking through the glass that was the prayer. ‘I’m the first in the world!’
Which-when he recovered from the awe of it-really should be something he could turn to advantage. A truly new thing in the world-how could it not be useful? He had to hop about in the frigid night air to express his happiness. Mazzoleni and the rest would have laughed to see it, as they had laughed all the times they had seen it, after one good discovery or another: but none so good as this! He chortled, he shuffled around the terrace in a dance with the spyglass as his partner. He felt an urge to ring the workshop bell; he even began to walk toward the workshop, to wake Mazzoleni and the rest, and share the news with somebody. But he was the bell he wanted to ring, and if he woke the others, Mazzoleni would just nod and grin his gap-toothed grin, and be pleased that the new instrument was working better than the previous one. What went on in the sky did not matter to him.
Galileo stopped in his tracks and returned to the terrace. He recommenced his little contradance around the tripod and work table, singing nonsense words to himself under his breath. An old man dancing at midnight. Tomorrow he would write up his news, and publish it as soon as possible after that, to share it with the world. Everyone would know, everyone would look and see. But only he would be first, first always, first forever. This night was his. Feeling warm in his cloak, he settled on the stool under the tripod to look some more.
Then there came a knock at the garden gate. And he knew who it was.
Chapter Three Entangled
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.
I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived
The transmogrifications in the stuff of life.
Reveal, now, exactly how they were performed
From the beginning up to this moment.
-OVID, The Metamorphoses
Galileo walked stiffly toward the gate, feeling his heart pound. The knock came again, a steady tap tap tap. He reached the gate and pulled up the crossbar, feeling a sweat of trepidation.
It was indeed the stranger, tall and gaunt in a black cloak. Behind him hunched a short gnarled old man, carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder.
The stranger bowed. ‘You said you would enjoy to look through a spyglass of my own.’
‘Yes, I remember-but that was months ago! Where have you been?’
‘Now I am here.’
‘I’ve seen some amazing things!’ Galileo could not help saying.
‘You still wish to look through what I have?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He let the stranger and his servant in the gate, his unease written all over his face. ‘Come out to the terrace. I was there when you knocked, looking at Jupiter. Jupiter has four stars orbiting it, did you know that?’
‘Four moons. Yes.’
Galileo looked disappointed, also disturbed; how had the stranger been able to see them?
The stranger said, ‘Perhaps you would enjoy to see them through my instrument.’
‘Yes, of course. What is its power of magnification?’
‘It varies.’ He gestured at his servant. ‘Let me show you.’
The man’s ancient servant looked familiar. He wheezed unhappily under his load. On the terrace Galileo reached out to help him lower the satchel, briefly holding him above the elbow and against the back; under his coat the man felt like nothing but skin and bone. He slipped out from under the strap of the long bag carelessly, before Galileo had quite gotten hold of it, and it hit the tiles with a thump.
‘It’s heavy!’ Galileo said.
The two visitors pulled a massive tripod from the satchel, and arranged it next to Galileo’s instrument; then they drew a big spyglass out of the case. Its tube was made of a dull grey metal, like pewter, and they held it by both ends to lift it. It was about twice the length of Galileo’s tube, and three times the diameter, and clicked onto the top of its tripod with a distinct snap.
‘Where did you get that thing?’ Galileo asked.
The stranger shrugged. He glanced at Galileo’s tube, then spun his on its tripod with a light flick of the wrist. It stopped moving when it came to much the same angle as Galileo’s, and with a small smile the stranger gestured at the instrument.
‘Be my guest, please. Have a look.’
‘You don’t want to sight it?’
‘It is aimed at Jupiter. At the moon that you will call Number Two.’
Galileo stared at him, confused and a little afraid. Was the thing supposed to be self-sighting? The man’s claim made no sense.
‘Take a look and see,’ the stranger suggested.
There was no reply to that: it was what he had been saying himself, to Cremonini and everyone. Just look! Galileo moved his stool over to the new device, sat down, leaned forward. He looked into the eyepiece.
The thing’s field of vision was packed with stars, and seemed large, perhaps twenty or thirty times what Galileo saw through his glass. At its centre what he took to be one of the moons of Jupiter gleamed like a round white ball, marked by faint lines. It was bigger than Jupiter itself was in Galileo’s glass. The harder Galileo looked, the more obviously spheroid the white moon became, and its striations more visible. It stood out like a snowball against the stars, which burned in their various intensities against a depth of velvet black.
It appeared that the white ball, clearer than ever to his sight, had faintly darker areas, somewhat like Earth’s moon; but more prominent by far was its broken network of intersecting lines, like the craquelure on an old painting, or the ice on the Venetian lagoon in cold winters after several tides had cracked it. Galileo’s fingers reached for a quill that was not there, wanting to draw what he saw. In some places the lines appeared in parallel clusters, in others they rayed out like fireworks, and these two patterns overlapped and shattered each other repeatedly.
One crackle pattern clarified for him, gleamed in exquisite detail. Focusing on it appeared to increase the enlargement accordingly, until it filled the lens of the eyepiece. A wave of dizziness passed through his whole body; it felt like he was falling up toward the white moon. He lost his balance. He felt himself pitch forward, head first into the device.
Things fall in parabolic arcs: but he wasn’t falling. He flew, up and forward-outward-head tilted back to see where he was going. The plain of shattered white ice bloomed right before his eyes. Or below him-maybe he was falling. His stomach flipflopped as his sense of up and down reversed itself.
He didn’t know where he was.
He gasped for air. He was drifting downward, now; he was upright again; his sense of balance returned just as distinctly as sight returned when you closed and then opened your eyes-something definitive. It was an immense relief, the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.
He stood on ice. The ice was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows; sunset colours, autumn colours. He looked up-
A giant banded orange moon loomed in a black starry sky. It was many times bigger than the moon in Earth’s sky, and its horizontal bands were various pale oranges and yellows, umbers and creams. The borders of the bands curled over and into each other. On the moon’s lower quarter a brick red oval swirl marred the border of a terra cotta band and a cream band. The opaque plain of ice he stood on was picking up these colours. He put his fist up with his thumb stuck out: at home his thumb covered the moon; this one was seven or eight times that wide. Suddenly he understood it was Jupiter itself up there. He was standing on the surface of the moon he had been looking at.
Behind him someone politely cleared his throat. Galileo turned; it was the stranger, standing beside a spyglass like the one he had invited Galileo to look through. Perhaps it was the same one. The air was cool and thin-bracing somehow, like a wine or even a brandy. Galileo’s balance was uncertain, and he felt oddly light on his feet.
The stranger was looking curiously at Galileo. Beyond him on the nearby horizon stood a cluster of tall slender white towers, like a collection of campaniles. They looked to be made of the same ice as the moon’s surface.
‘Where are we?’ Galileo demanded.
‘We are on the second moon of Jupiter, which we call Europa.’
‘How came we here?’
‘What I told you was my spyglass is actually a kind of portal system. A transference device.’
Galileo’s thoughts darted about in rushes faster than he could register. Bruno’s idea that all the stars were inhabited-the steel machinery in the Arsenale-
‘Why?’ he said, trying to conceal his fear.
The stranger swallowed; his Adam’s apple, like another great nose he had ingested, bobbed under the shaved skin of his neck. ‘I am acting for a group here that would like you to speak to the council of moons. A group like the Venetian Senate, you might say. Pregadi, you call those senators. Invitees. Here you are a pregadi. My group, which was originally from Ganymede, would like to meet you, and they would like you to speak to the general council of Jovian moons. We feel it is important enough that we were willing to disturb you like this. I offered to be your escort.’
‘My Virgil,’ Galileo said. He could feel his heart pounding in him.
The stranger did not seem to catch the reference. ‘I am sorry to startle you in this manner. I did not feel that I could explain it to you in Italy. I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of snatching you away like this. And the shock of it. You are looking rather amazed.’
Galileo shut his mouth, which had in fact been hanging open. He felt his dry tongue stick to the dry roof of his mouth. His feet and hands were cold. He recalled suddenly that in his dreams his feet were often cold, even to the point that sometimes he stumped about in boots of ice, and woke to find his blankets had ridden up. Now he looked at his feet, shuddering. They were still in their ordinary leather shoes, looking incongruous on the tinted ice of this world. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger, bit the inside of his lip: he certainly seemed awake. And usually the thought that he might be dreaming was enough to wake him, if dreaming he was. But here he stood, in crisp thin air, breathing fast, heart thumping as it rarely did any more-as it used to when he was young, and frightened by something. Now he did not feel the fear, exactly, but only his body’s response to it. His mind perhaps did not quite believe all this, but his body had to. Maybe he had died and this was heaven, or purgatory. Maybe purgatory orbited Jupiter. He recalled his facetious lecture on the geography of Dante, in which he had calculated the size of Hell by the ratio of Lucifer’s arm to the height of Virgil-
‘But this is too strange!’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry for the shock it must have caused you. It was felt that your recent observations through your spyglass would help you to understand and accept this experience. It was felt that you might be the first human capable of understanding the experience.’
‘But I don’t understand it,’ Galileo had to admit, pleased though he was to be considered first at anything.
The stranger regarded him. ‘A lack of understanding must be a feeling you are used to,’ he suggested, ‘given the state of your research into physical forces.’
‘That’s different,’ Galileo said.
But it was a little bit true, when he thought about it: not understanding was a familiar sensation. At home he never had any trouble admitting it, no matter what people said to the contrary. In fact he was the only one bold enough to admit how little he understood! He had insisted on it!
But here there was no need to insist. He was flummoxed. He looked up again at Jupiter, wondered how far away they were from it. There were too many unknowns to be able to figure it out. Its dark part, a thin crescent, was very dark. The gibbous part, well-lit by the distant sun, was strongly marked by its fat horizontal bands. The borders looked like viscous pours of oil paint, curling and overlapping but never quite mixing. It almost seemed he could see the colours move.
In the sky over his right shoulder gleamed what he took to be the sun-a chip of the utmost brilliance, like fifty stars clumped together into a space not much bigger than the other stars. As on Earth, one could not look at it for long. The sight of it so small made it evident that all the stars could be suns, maybe each with its own set of planets, just as the misfortunate Bruno had claimed. World upon world, each with its own people, like the stranger here, a Jovian it seemed. It was an astounding thought. The memory of Bruno, on the other hand, gave everything he saw a faint undercurrent of terror. He did not want to know these things.
‘Is the Earth visible from here?’ he asked, scanning the stars around the sun, looking for something like a blue Venus, or perhaps from out here it would be more like a blue Mercury, small and very near the sun…Many of the stars overhead, however, were tinted red or blue, sometimes yellow, even green; what might have been Mars could have been Arcturus-no, there was Arcturus, beyond the curve of the Big Dipper. The constellations, he noted, were all the same from this vantage, as they would be only if the stars were very much further away than the planets.
The stranger was also scanning the sky; but then he shrugged. ‘Maybe there,’ he said, pointing at a bright white star. ‘I am not sure. The sky here changes fast, as you know.’
‘How long is the day here?’
‘The rotation is eighty-eight hours, the same as its orbital time around Jupiter, which you are on the verge of determining. Like Earth’s moon, it is tidally locked.’
‘Tides?’
‘Gravitational tides. There is a-a tidal force exerted by every mass. A bending of space, rather. It is difficult to explain. It would go better if other things were explained to you first.’
‘No doubt,’ Galileo said shortly. He was struggling to keep his mind empty of fear by focusing on these questions, because underneath his studied (or stunned) calm, there swelled something very like terror. Perhaps it was only the memory of Bruno.
‘You appear to be cold,’ the stranger noted. ‘You are shivering. Perhaps I can lead you to the city?’ Pointing at the white towers.
‘I will be missed at home.’ Perhaps. It sounded feeble.
‘When you return, only a short time will have passed. It will look like what you call a syncope, or a catalepsy. Cartophilus will take care of that end. Don’t worry about that now. Since I have disturbed you by bringing you this far, we might as well accomplish what was intended, and bring you to the council.’