Galileo’s Dream

This too would serve as a distraction from his fear, no doubt; and the calm part of him was curious. So Galileo said, ‘Yes, whatever you like.’ It felt like grasping at a branch from out of a whirlpool. ‘Lead on.’

Despite the effort to stay calm, his emotions blew through him like gusts in a storm. Fear, suspense-the terror underneath everything-but also a sharp exhilaration. The first man who could have understood this experience. Which was a voyage among the stars. I primi al mondo.

They approached the white towers, which still appeared to be made of ice. He and the stranger had walked for perhaps an hour, and the bottoms of the towers had appeared to him in half an hour, so Moon II was probably not as big as the Earth, perhaps more the size of the moon. The horizon looked very close by. The ice they crossed had been minutely pitted everywhere, also streaked by lighter or darker rays, and occasionally marked by very low circular hills. It seemed basically white, and only tinted yellow by the light of Jupiter.

To one side of the white towers an arc of pale aquamarine appeared across the whiteness. The stranger led him to this arc, which proved to be a broad rampway cut into the ice, dropping at a very slight angle, down to where it cut under an arch or doorway into a long wide chamber.

They descended; the chamber under the ice roof had broad white doors, like city gates. At the bottom of the ramp they waited before these. Then the gates went transparent, and a group of people dressed in blouses and pantaloons of Jovian hues stood before them, in what seemed a kind of vestibule. The stranger touched Galileo lightly on the back of the arm, led him into this antechamber. They passed under another arch. The group fell in behind them without a word. Their faces appeared old but young. The space of the room made a gentle curve to the left, and beyond that they came to a kind of overlook, with broad steps descending before them. From here they could see an entire cavern city stretching to the near horizon, all of it tinted a greenish blue, under a high ceiling of opaque ice of the same colour. The light was subdued, but more than enough to see by; it was quite a bit brighter than the light of the full moon on Earth. A hum or distant roar filled his ears.

‘Blue light goes furthest,’ Galileo ventured, thinking of the distant Alps on a clear day.

‘No,’ the stranger said. ‘The different colours are waves of different lengths, red longer, blue shorter. The shorter the wavelength, the more light tends to bounce off things, even ice or water, or air.’

‘A pretty colour.’

‘I suppose it is. Some spaces in here are illuminated with artificial light sources, to make things brighter and give them the full spectrum.’ He indicated a building that glowed like a yellow lantern in the distance. ‘But mostly they leave it like this.’

‘It makes you look like angels.’

‘We are only people, as I’m afraid you will soon learn.’

The stranger led him to an amphitheatre, sunk into the surface of the city floor so that it was not visible until they came to the curved rim of the highest seats. Looking down into it, Galileo saw resemblances to Roman theatres he had seen. The bottom dozen rows of seats were occupied, and in front of them other people were standing on a round stage. They all wore loose blouses and pantaloons that were blue, pale yellow, or the Jovian tones of Galileo’s group. At the centre of the stage stood a white glowing sphere on a pedestal. Faint black lines crisscrossing it gave Galileo the impression that it might be a globe representing the moon they stood on.

‘The council?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Speak as the first scientist. Tell them not to kill what they study. Nor to kill themselves by studying it.’

The stranger led Galileo down steps into the amphitheatre, now firmly holding him by the upper arm. Galileo felt again the strange lack of his proper weight; he bounced as he would have if standing neck-deep in a lake.

The stranger stopped several steps above the group and made a loud announcement in a language Galileo did not recognize. Only slightly delayed, he also heard the man’s voice say in Latin, ‘I present to you Galileo Galilei, the first scientist.’

Everyone looked up at him. For a moment they were motionless, and many of them looked startled, even disapproving.

‘They look surprised to see us,’ Galileo noted. ‘Perhaps a bit baffled, or abashed.’

The stranger nodded. ‘They want to be sheep, and so should be sheepish. Come on.’

As they descended further, some of the ones dressed in orange and yellow bowed. Galileo bowed in return, as he would have before the Venetian Senate, which this group somewhat resembled, in that they appeared elderly, and somehow used to authority. Many of them were women, however, or Galileo assumed so: they were dressed in the same kind of blouses and pantaloons as the men. If a monastery and convent had merged their populations, and could only express their wealth in the fine cloth of their simple habits, they might look like this.

Despite the scattering of respectful bows, several among the group were now objecting to the stranger’s interruption. One woman, wearing yellow, spoke in the language Galileo didn’t recognize, and again he heard a Latin translation in his ears-Latin in a man’s voice, accented like the stranger’s. It said, ‘This is another illegal incursion. You have no right to interrupt the council’s session, and such a dangerous prolepsis as this will not be allowed to change the debate. In fact it is a criminal action, as you know very well. Call the guards!’

The stranger continued to guide Galileo down the steps and onto the circular stage, until they were among the people standing there. Almost all of them were considerably taller than Galileo, and he looked up at them, amazed at their faces, so thin and pale-beautifully healthy, but manifesting signs of both youth and age in mixtures very strange to his eye.

Galileo’s guide loomed over the protesting woman, and he spoke down to her, but addressed the entire group, in their language, so that again Galileo heard a slightly delayed translation in his ear: ‘Who gets to speak is only contested by cowards. My people come from Ganymede, and we assert the right to speak for it, to help determine what people do in the Jovian system.’

‘You no longer represent Ganymede,’ the woman said.

‘I am the Ganymede, as my people will attest. I will speak. The prohibition against descending into the Europan ocean was made for very important reasons, and the Europans’ current push to rescind that prohibition ignores several different kinds of immense danger. We will not allow it to happen!’

‘Are you and your group part of the Jovian council or not?’ the woman shot back.

‘We are, of course.’

‘But the matter has been discussed and decided, and your position has lost to that of the majority.’

‘No!’ others around them cried.

Many there then spoke up at once, and the debate grew general, and quickly became a shouting match. People jostled around, contracting into knots like rival gangs in a piazza, growing red-faced with expostulation. The Latin in Galileo’s ear broke up into overlapping shouts: ‘Decided already-We asked him to speak!-We will have you removed!-Cowards! Anarchists!-We want the Galileo to speak to this matter!’

Galileo raised his hand like a student in a class. ‘What matter do you discuss?’ he said loudly. ‘Why have you brought me here?’

In the pause that followed, one of the Ganymedeans addressed him. ‘Most illustrious Galileo,’ the Latin in his ear exclaimed, as the man bowed to him respectfully. He continued in his own tongue, which was translated in Galileo’s ear as: ‘-first scientist, father of physics, we here among the moons of Jupiter have encountered a scientific problem so fundamental and important that some of us feel the need of a truly original mind, someone unprejudiced by all that has happened since your time, someone with your supreme intelligence and wisdom, to help us decide how to deal with it.’

‘Ah well,’ Galileo said. ‘There you have it then.’

One woman laughed at this. She was big and statuesque, dressed in yellow. In the midst of all the arguing, she looked partly irritated, partly amused. The others began their raucous debate again, many becoming vehement, and in the din of all the squabbling she circled around to his left side, opposite the stranger. She leaned down toward him (she stood almost a foot taller than he), and spoke rapidly in his ear, in her own language; but what he heard in his ear was Tuscan Italian, somewhat oldfashioned, like that of Machiavelli, or even Dante.

‘You don’t believe any of that shit, do you?’

‘Why should I not?’ Galileo replied sotto voce, in Tuscan.

‘Don’t be so sure your companion has your best interests in mind here, no matter that you are the great martyr to science.’

Galileo, not liking the sound of that, said quickly, ‘What do you think my interests here are?’

‘The same as anywhere,’ she said with a sly smile. ‘Your own advancement, right?’

In the midst of a fierce harangue at his foes, the stranger looked over and noticed the woman and Galileo in conversation. He stopped arguing with the others and wagged a finger at her. ‘Hera,’ he warned her, ‘leave him alone.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You are not the one to be telling people to leave Signor Galileo alone, it seems to me.’ This was still translated to Galileo in Tuscan.

The stranger frowned heavily, shook his head. ‘You have nothing at stake here. Leave us alone.’ He returned to addressing the entire group, which was now quieting to hear what was going on.

‘This is the one who began it all,’ the stranger boomed, while in his other ear Galileo heard the woman’s voice in Tuscan, saying, ‘He means, this is the one I chose to begin it all.’

The stranger continued without further sotto voce commentary from the woman he had called Hera: ‘This is the man who began the investigation of nature by means of experiment and mathematical analysis. From his time to ours, using this method, science has made us what we are. When we have ignored scientific methods and findings, when the archaic structures of fear and control have re-exerted themselves, stark disaster has followed. To abandon science now and risk a hasty destruction of the object of study would be stupid. And the result could be much worse than that-much worse than you imagine!’

‘You have already made this argument, and lost it,’ a redfaced man said firmly. ‘The Europan interior can be investigated using an improved clean protocol, and we will learn what we have wanted to learn for many years. Your view is antiquated, your fears unfounded. What you did on Ganymede has deranged your understanding.’

The stranger shook his head vehemently. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I am only affirming what the scientific committee assigned to the problem has already said. Who’s being unscientific now, them or you?’

A general debate erupted again, and under its noise Galileo said to the tall woman, ‘What is it that my patron and his allies want to forbid?’

She leaned into him to reply, in Italian again: ‘They don’t want anyone to dive into the ocean under the ice here. They fear what might be encountered there, if I understand the Ganymede correctly.’

Then a group of men dressed in the blue shade of clothing came bouncing down the steps on the other side of the amphitheatre. A senator dressed in the same colour gestured at them and cried at the stranger, ‘Your objection has already been overruled! And you are breaking the law with this incursion. It’s time to put a stop to it.’ He shouted up at the newcomers, ‘Eject these people!’

The stranger grabbed Galileo by the arm and hustled him in the other direction. His allies closed behind them, and they raced up the steps two at a time. Galileo almost tripped, then felt himself being lifted by the people on each side of him. They held him under the elbows and carried him.

At the top of the steps, out of the hole of the amphitheatre, they could suddenly see across the expanse of the blue city again, looking cold under its green-blue ceiling, the people on its broad strada so distant they were the size of mice. ‘To the ships,’ the stranger declared, and took Galileo by the arm. As he hustled Galileo away, he said to him, ‘It’s time to return you to your home, before they do something we will all regret. I’m sorry they would not listen to you, as I think if you had been able to judge the situation you would have sided with us and made our point clear. I’ll call on you again when I am more sure you will be listened to. You are not done here!’

They came to the broad ramp rising out of the city, through its gates and onto the yellowy surface. People dressed in blue stood in their way, and with a roar the stranger and his group rushed at them. A brisk fight ensued. Galileo, staggering in the absence of his proper weight, dodged around little knots of brawlers. If he had been dreaming he would have happily started throwing punches himself, for in his dreams he was much more audacious and violent than in life; so it was a measure of how real it was, how different from a dream, that he held back. He wasn’t even sure which side he should have been supporting. So he skidded through the fray as if on the frozen Arno, waving his arms as needed to restore his balance. Suddenly in his gyrations the stranger and another man snatched him up by the arms and hustled him away.

Some distance from the mêlée the stranger’s companions had set up the big spyglass, and were making final adjustments to it. It was either the same one that had stood on Galileo’s terrace, or one just like it.

‘Stand next to it, please,’ the stranger said. ‘Look into the eyepiece, please. Quickly. But before that-breathe this first-’

And he held a small censer up and sprayed a cold mist into Galileo’s face.

Chapter Four The Phases of Venus

In order not to burden too much the transmigrating souls, Fate interposes the drinking from the Lethean river in the midst of the mutations, so that through oblivion they may be protected in their affections and eager to preserve themselves in their new state.

-GIORDANO BRUNO, Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante,The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

He woke lying on the ground next to his spyglass, the stool tipped over beside him. The night sky was lightening in the east, and Mazzoleni was tugging at his shoulder.

‘Maestro, you should go to bed.’

‘What?’

‘You were in some kind of a trance. I came out before, but I couldn’t wake you.’

‘I-I had a dream, I think.’

‘It seemed more like a trance. One of your syncopes.’

‘Maybe so.’

On the long list of Galileo’s mysterious maladies, one of the most mysterious was a tendency to fall insensible for intervals that ranged from minutes to three or four hours, his muscles rigid the entire time. His physician friend, the famous Fabrizio d’Aquapendente, had been unable to treat these syncopes, which in most people were accompanied by fits or racking seizures. Only a few sufferers like Galileo became simply paralysed.

‘I feel strange,’ Galileo said now.

‘You’re probably sore.’

‘I had a dream, I think. I can’t quite remember! It was blue. I was talking with blue people. It was important somehow.’

‘Maybe you spotted angels through your glass.’

‘Maybe so.’

Galileo accepted the artisan’s hand, hauled himself up. He surveyed the house, the workshop, the garden, all turning blue in the dawn light. It was like something…

‘Marc’antonio, do you think it’s possible that we could be doing something important?’

Mazzoleni looked doubtful. ‘Nobody else does what you do,’ he admitted. ‘But of course it may just be that you’re crazy.’

Galileo said, ‘In my dream it was important.’

He stumped over to the couch under the portico and threw himself down on it, pulled a blanket over him. ‘I have to sleep.’

‘Sure, maestro. Those syncopes must be real tiring.’

‘Leave me instantly.’

‘Sure.’

Mazzoleni left and he drifted off to sleep. When he woke again it was the cool of early morning, sunlight hitting the top of the garden wall. The morning glory was a well-named flower. The blue of the sky had pale sheets of red and white pulsing inside it.

The stranger’s old servant stood there before him, holding out a cup of coffee.

Galileo jerked back. On his face one could see the fear. ‘What are you doing here?’ He began to remember the stranger’s appearance the night before. There had been a big heavy spyglass, that he had sat on his stool to look through…‘I thought you were part of the dream!’

‘I brought you some coffee,’ the ancient one said, looking down and to the side, as if to efface himself. ‘I heard you had a long night.’

‘But who are you?’

The old man shoved the cup even closer to Galileo’s face. ‘I serve people.’

‘You serve that man from Kepler! You came to me last night!’

The old one glanced at him, lifted the cup again.

Galileo took it, slurped down hot coffee. ‘What happened?’

‘I can’t say. You were struck by a syncope for an hour or two in the night.’

‘But only after I looked through your master’s spyglass?’

‘I can’t say.’

Galileo regarded him. ‘And your master, where is he?’

‘I don’t know. He’s gone.’

‘Will he return?’

‘I can’t say. I think he will.’

‘And you? Why are you here?’

‘I can serve you. Your housekeeper will hire me, if you tell her to.’

Galileo observed him closely, thinking it over. Something strange had happened the night before, he knew that for sure. Possibly this old geezer could help him remember. Or help him in whatever might come of it. Already it began to seem as if the ancient one had always been there.

‘All right. I’ll tell her. What’s your name?’

‘Cartophilus.’

‘Lover of maps?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you love maps?’

‘No. Nor was I ever a shoemaker.’

Galileo nodded, frowned, waved him away. ‘I’ll speak to her.’

And so Cartophilus came into the service of Galileo, intending (as always, and always with the same failure) to efface himself as much as possible.

In the days that followed Galileo slept in short snatches at dawn and after dinner, and every night stayed up to look through his spyglass at Jupiter and the little stars circling it, his typical intense curiosity now tweaked by an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. He marked the four moons’ positions each night using the notation I, II, III, and IV, with I being the closest in the orbits he was now untangling, IV the farthest away. Tracking and timing their movements gave him an increasingly confident sense of how long each took to circle Jupiter. All the expected signs of circular motion seen edge-on had manifested themselves. It was getting clearer what was going on up there.

Obviously he needed to publish these discoveries, to establish his precedence as discoverer. By now Mazzoleni and the artisans had made about a hundred spyglasses, and only ten of them were capable of seeing the new little planets; they became visible only through occhialini with magnifications of thirty times, sometimes twenty-five when the grinding was lucky. (What else had been twenty-five or thirty times larger?) The difficulties in making a device this powerful reassured him; it was unlikely someone else would see the Jovian stars and publish the news before him. Still, it was best not to be slow about it. There was no time to lose.

‘I’m going to make those bastard Venetians really regret their skinflint offer!’ he declared happily. He was still furious at the senators for questioning his honesty in representing the spyglass as his invention; he took pride in his honesty, a virtue he wielded so vigorously as to make it a fault. He also hated them for delaying their measly raise until the new year. And really, through all the years in Padua, eighteen now, he had kept in the back of his mind the possibility of a return to Florence. He had spent many recent summers back in his home city, some of them tutoring the young prince Cosimo, so he had laid the groundwork for a return.

Now it was time to build on that foundation. Ignoring the little awkwardness that had developed the year before with Belisario Vinta, he wrote another of his florid notes. It was to accompany the finest spyglass he had: a gift to his most beloved student ever, now the grandissimo Grand Duke Cosimo. The red leather was embossed in gold with typical Florentine and Medici figures; even the transport case was beautiful. In the letter Galileo described his new Jovian discoveries, and asked if it would be permissible to name his newly discovered little Jovian stars after Cosimo; and if so, if the Grand Duke would prefer him to name them the Cosmian Stars, which would merge Cosimo and Cosmic; or perhaps to apply to the four stars the names of Cosimo and his three brothers; or if they should together be named the Medicean Stars.

Vinta wrote back thanking him for the spyglass and informing him that the Grand Duke preferred the name Medicean Stars, as best honouring the family and the city it ruled.

‘He accepted the dedication!’ Galileo shouted to the household. This was a stupendous coup; Galileo hooted triumphantly as he charged around, rousing everyone and ordering that a fiasco of wine be opened to celebrate. He tossed a ceramic platter high in the air and enjoyed its shattering on the terrace, and the way it made the boys jump.

The best way to announce this dedication to the world was to insert it into the book he was finishing about all the discoveries he had made. He pressed hard to finish; the combination of work by both day and night left him irritable, but it had to be done. He had the spirit for it and more. At night, working by himself, he felt enormously enlarged by all that lay ahead. Sometimes he had to take a break and walk around in the garden to deal with the thoughts crowding his head, the various great futures looming ahead of him like visions. It was only during the day that he flagged, slept at odd hours, snarled at the household and all that it represented. Scribbled at great speed on his pages.

He wrote in Latin so that the book, titled Sidereus Nuncius, ‘The Starry Messenger’, would be immediately comprehensible across all the courts and universities of Europe. In it he described his astronomical findings in more or less chronological order, making it into a narrative of his discoveries. The longest and best passages were on the moon, which he augmented with fine etchings made from his drawings. Of the stars and the four moons of Jupiter he wrote briefly, only announcing his discoveries, which were startling enough not to need embellishment.

He told the story of his introduction to the idea of the occhialino with some circumspection: About ten months ago a rumour came to our ears that a spyglass had been made by a certain Dutchman by means of which visible objects, although far removed from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen, as though nearby. This caused me to apply myself totally to investigating the principles and figuring out the means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument, and I achieved that result shortly afterward on the basis of the science of refraction.

A few strategic opacities there, but that was all right. He arranged with a Venetian printer, Tomaso Baglioni, for an edition of five hundred and fifty copies. The first page, an illustrated frontispiece, said in Latin:

THE STARRY MESSENGER

Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles,

opening these to the consideration of every man,

and especially of philosophers and astronomers;

AS OBSERVED BY GALILEO GALILEI