Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The pope was indeed fat—an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him.

  “Rise,” Paul said gruffly, interrupting him. “Speak to us standing.”

  This was a great honor. Holding his features steady, Galileo got to his feet with the least clumsiness he could manage, then bowed his head.

  “Walk with us,” Paul said. “We wish to take a turn in the garden.”

  Galileo followed the pope and walked with him, with Niccolini and a clutch of papal assistants and servants trailing behind. They wandered through the hilltop’s vineyard, already well known to Galileo from the many banquets of the previous weeks, and as he grew used to the big man’s blunt manner, and his slow gait, he grew more comfortable. He seemed to forget the stiletto sticking in and out of Paolo Sarpi’s head, and spoke as if to God Himself. Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

  “Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries,” Galileo said calmly, “but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God’s world and God’s word are necessarily the same, both being God’s. Any apparent discrepancies are only a matter of human misunderstanding.”

  “Of course,” Paul said shortly. He did not like theology. He waved these problems aside as if they were the bees humming in the vineyard. “You have our support in this.”

  After that, Galileo spoke of other things, billowing on this pronouncement like a sail filled with the wind. He became less serious, more his usual courtier persona. Then, after three quarters of an hour of this slow stroll through the vines, Paul glanced back at his secretaries and simply walked away, down to his litter at the front of the villa.

  Startled by this abrupt departure, Galileo stood with his mouth hanging open, wondering if he had said something to offend. But Nic-colini assured him that this was Paul’s way—that given the frequency of his audiences, the time he saved by dispensing with the always-lengthy farewells added up to an hour or more a day. “The amazing thing is that he stayed as long as he did. If he had not been truly interested he would have left much earlier.” In truth the audience had gone wonderfully well, and Galileo had been shown great favor by being commanded to walk with the pope. It had been one of the friendliest audiences the ambassador had ever witnessed. A triumph for both Galileo and for Florence. Coming from Niccolini, who was suddenly enthusiastic, Galileo knew it must be so.

  After that Galileo lost his head; everyone around him saw it. The endless parade of banquets at which he was the center of all attention and praise; the rich food; the balthazars and fiascos of wine; the long nights, when despite all the revelry he would stay up afterward to get some more sightings of Jupiter and its moons, so that even in the midst of everything else he was homing in on good orbital times for I, II, III, and IV—and yet still had to rise early on the mornings after to prepare for yet another feast. All these began to take their toll on him. The idea that he would keep his mouth shut during a banquet discussion, be it on pride or anything else, became laughable. He discoursed, he lectured, he conversed, he boasted. He had always known that he was smarter than other people, but in the years when that had not actually seemed to benefit him, he had not been so impressed by it. Now, as he became ever more full of himself, he began to use his wit like a sword, or to be more accurate, given the rough buffo tenor of his humor, like a club. Buffo became buffare as he swelled up.

  Speaking one night on the uneven surface of the moon, for instance, revealed so clearly by his telescope, he reminded everyone that this was a big problem for the poor Peripatetics, as the Aristotelian orthodoxy was that everything in the heavens was perfectly geometrical, and the moon therefore a perfect sphere. Even Father Clavius, he said, had ventured, and in print, that although the visible surface of the moon was uneven, this could be illusory, and all its mountains and plains could be encased in a clear crystal shell that constituted its perfect sphericality. Galileo’s tone of voice expressed his incredulity at this opinion, and as the audience chuckled they also grew more attentive; this was treading a little close to the edge. Cartophilus had joined some of the other servants in borrowing a pillow and a bottle of wine and lying out in the vineyard, outside the cast of the torchlight bathing the long banquet table, there to watch and listen, the guests in their bejeweled finery like a tableau vivant come to life and performing for them alone. But he sat up and put the bottle down as Galileo began to poke fun at the famous old Jesuit:

  “If anyone is allowed to imagine whatever he pleases, then of course someone can say that the moon is surrounded by a crystalline substance that is transparent and invisible! Who can deny it? I will grant it without objection, provided that, with equal courtesy, I be allowed to say that the crystal has on its outer surface a large number of huge mountains, thirty times as high as terrestrial ones, but invisible because they are diaphanous. Thus I can picture to myself another moon ten times as mountainous as I said in the first place!” The guests at the table laughed. “The hypothesis is pretty,” Galileo went on, goaded by their amusement, “but its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable! Who does not see that this is a purely arbitrary fiction? Why, if you counted the Earth’s atmosphere as a similar kind of clear shell, then the Earth too would be perfectly spherical!”

  And of course they all laughed. Galileo’s signature mix of wit and sarcasm had been making people laugh for years. But Christopher Clavius had always been friendly to him; and more generally, it was never good to make fun of the Jesuits. Especially publicly, in Rome, and right before the Jesuits were to host a lavish feast at the College of Rome to celebrate your accomplishments. Yet here he was. Cartophilus could only groan and have another swig from his bottle. From the darkness of the vineyard, the sight of Galileo standing in the torchlight over the long table of seated revelers was like a tableau vivant illustrating Pride before its Fall.

  But he did not notice. He ate, he talked, he boasted. He trained his telescope on the sun, using a method suggested by Castelli to look at it. The sun’s light was directed through the tube onto a sheet of paper, where one could look at the big lit circle at one’s ease and with no danger to one’s eyes. And immediately it became apparent to any viewer that the lit image of the sun was dotted by small indistinct dark patches. Over the course of days, these dark spots moved across the sun’s face in a manner that suggested to Galileo that the sun too was rotating, at a speed that he calculated made its day about a month long. Rotating at about the same speed as the moon in its course around the Earth, therefore; and they were the same size in the sky. It was odd. He made sketches each day of the sun spots’ patterns, and placed the sketches side by side to show the sequence of movement.

  Galileo claimed this discovery of the sun’s rotation for himself, though there were astronomers—Jesuits again—who had been tracking the sunspots for some time. He proclaimed his discovery far and wide, pretending to be unaware that it was another inconvenient finding for the Peripatetics, and also that it contradicted certain astronomical statements in the Bible. He didn’t care; if he noticed such problems for his opponents, he would only make another sharp heavy joke about them.

  For now, none of these indiscretions seemed to be having any bad effect. At the Jesuit banquet in his honor, no one spoke of his jape at Clavius’s expense, and the Dutch Jesuit astronomer whom Galileo had met earlier, Odo Maelcote, read a learned commentary on Sidereus Nuncius that confirmed every discovery Galileo had reported. It appeared he did not have to care.

  Then the newly enthusiastic Niccolini was replaced as Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome by Piero Guicciardini, who, finding Galileo at the height of his magniloquence, did not like him. And back home, Belis-ario Vinta was replaced as
secretary to Cosimo by Curzio Picchena, who shared with Guicciardini a more jaundiced view of Galileo’s loud advocacy of the Copernican position. They saw no reason why the Medici should be drawn into such a potentially awkward controversy. But if Galileo noticed these new men and their attitude toward him, again, he did not seem to care.

  Meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmino, Pope Paul’s closest advisor, also a Jesuit, and the inquisitor who had handled the case of Giordano Bruno, initiated an investigation into Galileo’s theories. This was probably on Paul’s instruction, but the spies within the Vatican who had found out about it could not be sure of that. Bellarmino, they said, had looked through a Jesuit telescope himself; he had asked his Jesuit colleagues for an opinion; he had attended a meeting of the Holy Office of the Congregation, which after that began to look into the case. Bellarmino seemed to have been the one to order the investigation.

  But no one told Galileo about this troubling development, being not quite sure what it meant. And because of his meeting with the pope, and everything else that had happened, he was still full of himself, bumptious and grand. The visit to Rome was accomplishing even more than he had hoped; it was a triumph in every way, even if Guicciardini was now hinting that it might be best to leave while he was still being lionized. The ambassador stayed just on the right side of politeness about this, but if Galileo had sneaked into his office and looked at the letters on his desk, as proved fairly easy to do, he would have gotten a truer sense of the ambassador’s mind:

  Galileo has little strength of judgment wherewith to control himself, so that he makes the climate of Rome extremely dangerous to himself, particularly in these times, when we have a Pope who hates geniuses.

  Eventually Galileo took the ambassador’s hint, or decided on his own, and announced he was returning to Florence. Cardinal Farnese hosted the farewell banquet in his honor, and accompanied him in his trip north as far as Caprarola, the country villa of the Farnese, where Galileo was invited to rest a night in luxury. Galileo carried with him a written report he had requested and received from Cardinal del Monte, addressed to Cosimo and Picchena. The cardinal had finished his tribute with the words, Were we still living under the ancient republic of Rome, I am certain that a statue would have been erected in his honor on the Capitol—perhaps next to the statue of Marcus Aurelius, still located there. Not a bad companion in fame. No wonder Galileo’s head had been turned. The visit to Rome was a complete success, as far as he knew.

  Things continued that way after he got back to Florence. He was feted in fine style by Cosimo and his court, and it was clear that Cosimo was extremely pleased with him. His Roman performance had made Cosimo’s patronage look very discriminating indeed.

  The Medici youth was no longer so young; he sat at the head of his table like a man used to command, and the boy Galileo remembered so well was no longer evident. He looked quite a bit the same, physically: slight, a bit pale, very like his father in his features, which was to say long-nosed and narrow headed, with a noble forehead. Not a robust youth, but now much more sure of himself, as only made sense: he was a prince. And he, like everyone else, had read his Machiavelli. He had given hard commands, and the whole duchy had obeyed them.

  “Maestro, you have set the Romans on their heels,” he said complacently, offering a toast to the room. “To my old teacher, the wonder of the age!”

  And the Florentines cheered even louder than the Romans had.

  Soon after his return, Galileo got involved in a debate concerning hydrostatics: why did ice float? His opponent was his old foe Colombe, the malevolent shit who had tried to hang scriptural objections around his neck and thus cast him into hell. Galileo was anxious to stick the knives into this man while his Roman victories were fresh in everyone’s mind, and went at the contest like a bull seeing red, yes. But then he was frustrated by Cosimo, who ordered him to debate such insignificant enemies in writing only, speaking over such a gadfly’s head to the world at large. When Galileo did that, writing at great length as usual with him, Cosimo followed up by ordering him to debate the issue orally with a Bolognan professor named Pappazoni, whom Galileo had just helped to get his teaching position at Il Bo. This was like staking down a lamb to be killed and eaten by a lion, but Galileo and Pappazoni could only play their parts, and Galileo could not help enjoying it, as it was only a verbal killing.

  Then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came through Florence on his way to Bologna. Cardinal Gonzaga also happened to be in the city, and so Cosimo invited both of them to attend a repeat performance of Galileo’s debate on floating bodies, to be held at a court dinner on October 2. Pappazoni again made a reluctant appearance, and after a feast and a concert, and much drinking, Galileo again slaughtered him to the roaring laughter of the audience. Then Cardinal Gonzaga stood and surprised everyone by supporting Pappazoni. But Barberini, smiling appreciatively, perhaps remembering their warm meeting back in the spring in Rome, took Galileo’s side.

  It was therefore another triumphant evening for Galileo. As he left the banquet, well after midnight, and long after the sacrifice of Pappazoni, Cardinal Barberini took him by the hand, hugged him, bade him farewell, and promised they would meet again.

  The next morning, when Barberini was to leave for Bologna, Galileo did not show up to see him off, having been unexpectedly detained by an illness he had suffered in the night. From the road, Barberini wrote a note to him:

  I am very sorry that you were unable to see me before I left the city. It is not that I consider a sign of your friendship as necessary, for it is well known to me, but because you were ill. May God keep you not only because outstanding persons such as yourself deserve a long life of public service, but because of the particular affection that I have and always will have for you. I am happy to be able to say this, and to thank you for the time that you spent with me.

  Your affectionate brother,

  Cardinal Barberini

  Your affectionate brother! Talk about friends in high places. To a certain extent, it seemed he had a Roman patron now to add to his Florentine one.

  All was triumph. Indeed it would be hard to imagine how things could have gone better in the previous two years for Galileo and his telescope: scientific standing, social standing, patronage in both Florence and Rome—all were at their peak, and Galileo stood slightly stunned on top of what had proved a double anno mirabilis.

  Why, then, was he back in Rome less than four years later?

  Because there were undercurrents, and counterforces; people out to interfere. Things occurred, even on that very morning that Galileo did not show up to see off Cardinal Barberini. Galileo had been ill, yes, because a syncope had struck him as he got home from the banquet. Cartophilus had hopped down from the trap in front of the rented house in Florence, had stilled the horse, and opened the gate; and there in the little yard stood the stranger, his massive telescope already placed on its thick tripod.

  In his crow’s Latin, the stranger said to Galileo, “Are you ready?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Other Galileo

  You are given a light to know evil from good,

  And free will, which, if it can endure

  Without weakening after its first bout with fixed Heaven,

  If it is believed in, will conquer all it meets later.

  So if the present world strays from its course,

  The cause is in you; look for it in yourself.

  —DANTE, Purgatorio, CANTO XVI

  “YES, I’M READY,” GALILEO REPLIED, his blood jolting through him so that his fingers throbbed. He was afraid. But he was curious too. He said to the stranger, “Let’s go up to the altana.”

  Cartophilus carried the massive telescope up the outside stairs, bent double under the load. “Local gravity getting to you at last?” the stranger asked acerbically.

  “Someone has to carry the load,” Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. “Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, Signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fu
cking dilettante.”

  The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt a jolt of the sensation that this had happened before—what the French would later name déjà vu.

  And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.

  Jupiter was a big banded ball near the center of the glass, strikingly handsome, colorful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis—and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.

  But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.

  Who was frowning heavily. “Let me check it.” He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.

  “Not good,” Cartophilus said.

  “Maybe it’s Hera,” the stranger said darkly.

  Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.

  They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked at Jupiter again. It was still in the middle of the lens. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. “This is not just a telescopio,” he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels … “It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.”