Galileo’s Dream

It was all part of the ongoing war between Venice and the Vatican, which was partly a public war of words, a matter of curses and imprecations so angry that at one point Pope Paul V had excommunicated the entire population of the Serenissima; but at the same time it was a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counsellor. When Sarpi had announced to the world his intention to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, Paul was alarmed as well as angered. The files were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. It would be an exposé, in short. Assassins were authorized by the Pope to go to Venice to murder Sarpi; but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard of the plan in advance, with some of the assassins even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them in prison.

After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.

Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough.

The attack took place on the night of 7th October, 1607. A fire broke out near San Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco; whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi’s fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied only by an elderly servant and a Venetian senator, also elderly. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo’s palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de’ Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk’s cell.

They jumped him on the north side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him and ran-later we counted fifteen wounds, but it took only a couple of seconds and they were off into the night.

Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could only shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. A stiletto had been left in his right temple, apparently bent on his upper jawbone, re-emerging from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.

But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. When others arrived beside us, all we could do was help to lift him up, help to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.

There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. The doctor worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too.

So now Sarpi could sit with Galileo, and warn him, with an ironic smile given an extra twist by his scars: ‘Rome can be dangerous.’

‘Yes yes.’ Galileo nodded unhappily. He had visited Sarpi often as he hovered between life and death, he had even helped Acquapendente to extract the stiletto from his poor face. The pink scars were still livid. That Pope Paul had given the assailants a pension to reward them, even though they had been unsuccessful, both Galileo and Sarpi had found funny. Of course what Sarpi was pointing out now was true: Florence was under the thumb of Rome in a way Venice never had been. If Galileo ever offended the Church, as seemed quite possible, Sarpi reminded him, given his new astronomical discoveries and some priestly objections to them, not to mention Kepler’s ravings-then Florence might not be far enough away from the long reach of the Dogs of God.

‘I know,’ Galileo said. But he was already committed to the move; and Sarpi’s example cut both ways, so to speak: Florence was an ally of Rome’s, Venice a fierce opponent, excommunicated en masse. Moving to Florence might give him some cover.

Sarpi seemed to read these thoughts on his face. ‘A patron is never as secure as a contract with the Senate,’ he said. ‘You know what always happens to a patron’s favoured ones: they fall. Sooner or later it always happens.’

‘Yes yes.’ They had both read their Machiavelli and Castiglione, and the fall of the favourite was a standard trope in poetry and song. It was one of the ways that patrons showed their power, and stirred the pot, and kept those on the rise hopeful.

‘So that’s another way you will not be as safe.’

‘I know. But I have to be able to do my work. I have to be able to make ends meet. Neither has been possible for me in Padua. The Senate could have made it possible, but they didn’t. They paid me poorly, and worked me like a donkey. And they were never going to pay me just to do my own work.’

‘No.’ Sarpi smiled at him affectionately. ‘You need a patron to be able to get money without working for it.’

‘I work hard!’

‘I know you do.’

‘And it will be useful work, to Cosimo and to everyone!’

‘I know it will. I want you to do your work, you know that. May God bless you for it, I’m sure He will. But you will have to take care what you say.’

‘I know.’

Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. People were always giving in to his superior logic and his intense style of disputation. In debate he was boastful and sarcastic, funny and smart-really smart, in that he was not just quick, though he was that, but penetrating. No one liked arguing with Galileo.

But with Sarpi it was not like that. For many years Sarpi had been a kind of patron to him, but also much more: a mentor, a confessor, a fellow scientist, a father figure; and above all, a close friend, even now when Galileo was leaving Sarpi’s beloved Venice. His scarred face, ruined by the Pope’s murderous functionaries, held now an expression of grave concern, and of love and indulgent affection-amorevolezza. He did not agree with Galileo, but he was proud of him. It was the look you wanted your father to have when he looked at you. It could not be gainsaid. Galileo could only bow his head and dash the tears from his eyes. For he had to go.

So, after months of preparations, Galileo moved to Florence, leaving behind not only Marina and little Vincenzio, but also all his private students, and most of the servants and artisans as well, even Mazzoleni and his family. ‘I won’t be needing a workshop anymore,’ Galileo explained brusquely. ‘I’m a philosopher now.’ This sounded so ridiculous that he added, ‘The grand duke’s mechanicians will be available to me if I need anything.’

No more compasses, in other words. No more Padua. He was saying good-bye to all of it, and didn’t want any part coming with him. ‘You can keep making the compasses here,’ he told Mazzoleni, then turned his back and left the workshop. The compasses were what Mazzoleni had been hired to manufacture in the first place. Of course they wouldn’t sell very well without the course Galileo gave in their use, but there were some instruction manuals left, and it was better than nothing. Besides there was artisanal work all over Padua.

The big house on Via Vignoli was emptied, its people dispersed. One day in the fall it was handed back over to the landlord, and that whole little world was gone.

In Florence Galileo had hastily rented a house that was a bit too near the Arno, but it had a little roof terrace for his night viewing, what the Venetians called an altana, and he figured he could find a more suitable establishment later. And a new acquaintance, a beautiful young Florentine nobleman named Filippo Salviati, assured him that during the year of his lease he could spend as much time as he liked at Salviati’s palazzo in town and at his villa, the Villa delle Selve, in the hills west of Florence. Galileo was pleased; he found the river vapours in Florence unpleasant, also the nearby presence of his mother. Since his father’s death he had kept the old washtub in a house in a poor part of the city, but he never visited her, and didn’t want to now. Better to spend his time out at Salviati’s, writing books and discussing philosophical matters with his new friend and his friend’s circle of acquaintances, men of high quality. When Cosimo wanted him, he could ride into the city quickly; and there would be no need to fear running into his mother by accident. Fra Sarpi, who knew of this fear, had suggested that Galileo try to effect a reconciliation with her, but he didn’t know the half of it; indeed, he didn’t know the hundredth part of it. Galileo had recently received a letter from her welcoming him back to ‘his home town’, and asking him to drop by and visit her, who was so lonely for him. Galileo snorted as he read this; along with everything else stuck in his memory, in his pin cushion of a brain, there was something new to add: in their departure from Via Vignali the cook had found a letter left behind by a servant she had fired, one Alessandro Piersanti, who had earlier worked in Florence for the old firedog. Giulia had written to him,

Since your master is so ungrateful to you and to everyone, and as he has so many lenses, you could very easily take three or four and put them at the bottom of a small box, and fill it up with d’A’quapendente’s pills, and then send it to me. Then, she went on, she would sell them and share the proceeds with him.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Galileo had shouted. ‘Thief on the cross!’ He had thrown the letter down in disgust. Then he picked it up and saved it in his files, just in case it might be useful someday. It was dated 9th January of that year-which meant that the very week that Galileo was discovering the Medicean Stars and changing the skies forever, his own mother was conspiring to steal his spyglass lenses out of his house and sell them for her own profit. ‘Jesus son of Mary. Why not just steal the eyes out of my head.’

That was his mother for you. Giulia Galilei, suborner of servants, thief of the heart of his work. He would reside out at Salviati’s villa as much as he could.

Florentine nights were at first smokier than in Padua, but as the fall of his anno mirabilis moved toward winter, they turned cold enough to clarify the air, and keeping track of Jupiter’s four moons became easier. In December one of his former students, Benedetto Castelli, now a priest, wrote to suggest that if the Copernican explanation were indeed correct, then Venus was orbiting the Sun also, in an orbit closer to the Sun than Earth’s, so that one might therefore be able through an occhialino to see it go through phases like the moon’s, as one would be seeing either the side facing the sun or the dark side, or in between.

This thought had already occurred to Galileo, and he was irritated that he had forgotten to write it down in the Sidereus Nuncius. Then he remembered: Venus had been behind the sun the previous winter when he was writing the book, so he had been unable to check to see if the idea was right, and had thought it better to keep the notion to himself.

Now he turned his best occhialino toward Venus as it appeared in the sky after sunset. In the first days of viewing it was low, a small full disc; then as the weeks passed it rose higher and became larger, but was misshapen-possibly gibbous. Finally it was revealed in the glass to have the shape of a little half-moon, and Galileo wrote Castelli to tell him so. Eventually, when it began to sink again toward the horizon at its first twilight appearance, it was clearly horned. Galileo’s latest spyglass had a very fine objective lens that he had ground himself, and in the eyepiece the image of Venus gleamed, distinctly crescent, a miniature of the new moon that had set just an hour before.

Standing up straight, looking at the brilliant white point, feeling the moon just under the horizon and still shedding its light into the night air, suddenly it all fell into place for him. Copernicus was right; the ball of Venus and the ball of the Earth both rolled around the sun; the ball of the moon rolled around the Earth; the balls of Jupiter’s four moons circled the ball of Jupiter, which slowly circled the sun. Saturn was further out and slower, Mercury quickest of all, there inside Venus, where it was difficult to spot. Perhaps a good enough glass would see its horns as well, for certainly it too would go through phases. So close to the sun, when visible at all it would have to be pretty near quarter phase. Farther out from Earth, Mars rolled between Earth and Jupiter, close enough to Earth to explain the strange back-and-forth aspects of its movement, a shift of perspective created by the two orbits.

The whole system was a matter of circles going around other circles. Copernicus had been right. His system had called for Venus to have phases, and there they were; while the Ptolemaic theory, advocated by the Peripatetics, would specifically reject these phases, as Venus was supposed to be going around the Earth, like the sun and everything else in the sky. Venus’s phases were a kind of proof, or at least a very suggestive piece of evidence. Tycho Brahe’s weird and unwieldy formulation, which had the planets circling the sun but the sun circling the Earth, would also save these particular appearances, but it was a ridiculous explanation in all other respects, in particular simple parsimony. No, these phases of Venus were best explained by Copernicus. They were the strongest indication Galileo had seen-not exactly proof, but powerfully suggestive. All those years in Padua he had taught both Aristotle and Copernicus, and even Tycho, thinking that all of them merely saved the appearances without in any sense explaining what was going on. The Copernican explanation required that the Earth be moving, after all, which seemed wrong-an idea only, not a sensible reality. And the foremost advocate of Copernicanism, Kepler, had been so long-winded and incomprehensible that no one could be convinced by him. And yet here it was, the truth of the situation-the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun. Circles in circles.

Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang. He danced. He circled his occhialino like the Earth circling the sun, spinning in a slow four-step as he made his little orbit on the altana, arms swinging, fingers directing the music of the spheres, which despite Kepler’s craziness seemed suddenly plausible; indeed an audible chord was now ringing silently in his ears.

Then came a knock on the door below. He halted his dance with a jerk, looked down the staircase on the outside of the house.

Cartophilus was there inside the gate, holding a shuttered lantern, looking up at him. Galileo rushed down the stairs and raised a fist as if to strike him. ‘What is this?’ he exclaimed in a low furious voice. ‘Is he here again?’

Cartophilus nodded. ‘He’s here.’

Chapter Five The Other

When she saw that it was not that I would not speak, but that, dumbstruck, I could not, she gently laid her hand on my breast and said, ‘It is nothing serious, only a touch of amnesia, the common disease of deluded minds. He has forgotten for a while who he is, but he will soon remember once he has recognized me. To make it easier for him I will wipe a little of the blinding cloud of the world from his eyes.’

-BOETHIUS, The Consolation of Philosophy

Galileo strode to the gate and hauled it open just as another knock pounded it. The tall stranger stood there looking down at him, his massive perspicillum case in a heap at his feet. He looked flushed, and his eyes were like black fire.

Galileo felt his blood pound in his head. ‘Already you have found me.’

‘Yes,’ the man said.

‘Did this servant you foisted on me tell you where I was?’ Galileo demanded, jerking a thumb toward the hangdog Cartophilus.

‘I knew where you were. Are you willing to make another night journey?’

Galileo’s mouth was dry. He struggled to remember more than that flicker of blue. Blue people-‘Yes,’ he said, before knowing he would.

The stranger nodded dourly and glanced over at Cartophilus, who trudged out the gate and hauled the case over the paving stones into the courtyard. Jupiter lay low in the sky above Scorpio, still tangled with the trees.

The man’s heavy perspicillum seemed more than a spyglass. Galileo helped Cartophilus set up the tripod and to lift the fat tube, which looked to be made of something like pewter, but felt heavier than gold. When they had the device set on its stand and pointed toward Jupiter, which aiming it seemed to do on its own, Galileo swallowed hard, feeling again his dry mouth, his nameless apprehension. He sat on his stool, looked into the strangely luminous glass of the eyepiece. He fell up into it.

Around him lofted a transparent glow, like talcum in sunlight. What is it, he tried to say, and must have succeeded; the stranger replied in his crow’s Latin, ‘Around Jupiter hums a magnetic field so strong that people would die of it, if unprotected. It has to be held off by a similar field of our own creation, a counterforce. The glow marks an interference of the two forces.’

‘I see,’ Galileo murmured.

So he stood on the surface of Europa-again. Some memory of his previous visit had come back to him, though vaguely. The stars trembled overhead as if he were still looking at them through his occhialino, the bigger ones fulgurous, shedding flakes and threads of light into the blackness around them.

The surface of Europa, on the other hand, was exceptionally sharp and clear. The flat ice extended to the horizon that circled them so tightly, opaque white tinted the colour of Jupiter, and stained blue or ochre in some areas; sometimes pocked or chewed at the surface, sometimes deeply cracked in radial patterns; elsewhere smooth as glass. Everywhere it was littered with small rocks, and here and there stood a few housesized boulders, pitted with holes and depressions. Most of the rocks were almost as black as the sky, but a few were metallic grey, or red, the same shade as the red spot low on the banded immense surface of Jupiter. That awesome globe loomed directly overhead, huge in the starry night sky even though only half lit. That was the thing that was twenty-five or thirty times bigger which he had been trying to remember. Its dark half was very dark.

Possibly the tight horizon and the thin air gave the landscape its unreal clarity. The thin air was cool, the sun nowhere to be seen. The two men cast sharp shadows on the ice under them. Galileo, constantly troubled at home by fogged or ringed vision, stared around avidly. Here everyone had hawks’ eyes.

‘This is a hot spot, in local terms,’ the stranger said in the breathy silence. To Galileo the ice looked everywhere the same, and cold. Their feet crunched as the stranger led him to one of the biggest boulders.

There proved to be a door in this rock, which was not a rock, but rather some kind of carriage or ship, roughly ovoid in shape, lying on the ice like a great black egg. Its surface was smooth, not rocky or metallic, but more like horn or ebony.

A door in this surface opened by sliding sideways in the wall, revealing a flight of low black steps. The stranger gestured to Galileo, indicating the entry.

‘This is our vessel. We have learned that the Europans are going to stage an illegal incursion into the ocean under this ice. They have ignored our warnings, and the relevant authorities in the Jovian system have declined to interfere, so we are taking it on ourselves to stop them. We think any incursion will be potentially disastrous in ways these people haven’t even considered. We want to intercept them if we can, and keep them from doing harm. And at the very least, see what they do down there. If what happens is as bad as I fear it could be, they will not tell the truth about it. So we must follow them in. With luck we will get down there first, and can stop them when they break through the layer of ice into the water below.’

‘And you want me to go with you?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes.’ Ganymede hesitated, then said, ‘You should know the nature of the threat.’

Then something caught his attention over Galileo’s shoulder, and he looked startled; Galileo turned and saw a silver object on a tripod, like the perspicillum only bigger, coming down on a pillar of white fire, roaring faintly in the thin air.

The tall man put a hand to Galileo’s shoulder. ‘If there is danger, I will transport you back to your own time. The transition may be abrupt.’

A slit in the silver craft opened and a figure in white emerged.

‘Do you know who this is?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes, I think so. You met her before, when we spoke to the council.’

‘Ah yes. Hera, she said. Jupiter’s wife?’

‘She thinks she’s that big,’ the stranger said sourly; then added under his breath, ‘It’s almost true.’

The woman was indeed large: tall, broad-shouldered, widehipped, thick-armed, deep-chested. She approached and stopped before them, looking down at the stranger with her ironic smile. ‘Ganymede, I know you hate what they plan to do here,’ she said. ‘And yet here you are. What’s going on? Are you planning to hurt them?’

The stranger, who did not look like Galileo’s idea of Ganymede, faced her like an upright axe. ‘You know what they’ll say about this on Callisto if they hear about it. We hold the same view they do. The only difference is that we’re willing to do something about it.’

‘And so you bring this Galileo along with you?’

‘He is the first scientist, he will be our witness to the council, and speak for us later.’

She did not think much of this, Galileo saw. ‘You use him as a human shield, I think. While you have him with you, the Europans won’t attack you.’

‘They won’t in any case.’

She shrugged. ‘I want to be a witness too. I want to see what happens, and I am your appointed mnemosyne, whether you acknowledge that or not. Let me join you, or my people will alert the Europans that you are here.’

Ganymede stepped to the side, gestured at the door of the ovoid vessel. ‘Be my guest. I want everyone to see just how irresponsible their incursion is.’

Inside the vessel a few people huddled over banks of glass instruments and glowing squares of jewel colour. Their faces, lit from below by the glowing desk tops, looked monstrous. The livid glare of Jupiter seemed to leak out of their eyes.

Standing beside Galileo, Hera leaned over to speak in his ear; again her words came to him in a rustic Tuscan Italian, like something from Ruzante. ‘You understand that they’re using you?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Do you know where you are?’

‘This is one of the four moons orbiting Jupiter. I named them myself; they are called the Medicean Stars.’

Her smile was wicked. ‘That name didn’t stick. It’s only remembered now by historians, as a notorious example of science kissing the ass of power.’