Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  But he wasn’t. His sleep was frequently broken by nightmares, and his days were irritable to him. “Something bad is going to happen,” he kept saying, looking through his telescope at Jupiter like a soothsayer. “Something monstrous wants to be born.”

  One night he called Cartophilus to him. Staring at the old man over a cup of warmed milk brought to him to ward off the chill, he said suddenly, “Where is your master?”

  “You are my master, maestro.”

  “You know who I mean!”

  “… He’s not here.”

  Galileo contemplated this, frowning. Finally he said, “When I want him again, can you call him here?”

  After another pause the old man nodded.

  “Be ready,” Galileo warned him.

  The ancient one slunk away. He knew why Galileo was afraid, better than Galileo himself. He bowed under the weight of it.

  Galileo often wrote to Picchena asking for Cosimo’s permission to go to Rome. By the middle of 1613, the reasons for these requests became more evident. His detractors had grown more vehement in direct proportion to his growing fame. A good deal of this Galileo had brought on himself. A lot of people hated him for what they called his arrogance.

  To his household that wasn’t quite right. They spent a fair amount of time discussing him, as one does any great power in one’s life. “He’s very defensive,” La Piera would say. “So defensive that he attacks people in self-defense, and thus he becomes offensive.”

  To the other servants it was simpler than that: he was Pulcinella. All over Italy the figure of Pulcinella had begun appearing in the festivals and buffa plays, a loud fool constantly lying, cheating, fornicating and beating on people—in short, the very image of a certain kind of master, which every servant in the land recognized and laughed to see. Once when Galileo was snoring in his chair while wearing a white shirt, someone had put a black cloth over his head and the typical costume was thereby hilariously complete, and they all tiptoed in to look and treasure this knowledge ever after: they worked for the greatest Pulcinella of all.

  Now this ham-fisted tendency was catching up to him, and his enemies were becoming remarkably numerous. Colombe for one had never slackened in his assault. Previously this Bible-quoting malevolence could be ignored or used as a foil, as he had had no patrons. But now he was being used by figures much higher than he, who were interested in the success of his tactic of accusing Galileo of contradicting Scripture. Joshua, these figures were now murmuring into higher ears, had ordered the sun to come to a halt, not the Earth. It was as clear as could be. Surely the Church had to respond? They could beat Galileo with this kind of stick forever, because no one outside the Church should have been talking about scriptural interpretation at all.

  Galileo ignored that and tried to respond directly to his assailants. He pointed out that God stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua would entail stopping the celestial vault and all the stars as well, as Ptolemy said they were all affixed to each other, whereas if Copernicus were right, then all God would have had to do to fix the sun in the midday sky would be to stop the Earth’s rotation, a much easier task, as could be easily seen. That this was ingeniously argued did not keep it from being also ridiculous—so much so that some people took it to be a mockery of the very idea of biblical explanations of the skies. It was hard to tell; a deadpan sarcasm was one arrow in Galileo’s sling. But either way it would have been wiser not to venture into such territory at all.

  Still, he persisted in doing so. He wrote a long “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” explaining to her and to the letter’s wider readership the principles he thought should rule science’s relation to theology. In discussion of physical questions, we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstration. God is known first through Nature, and then by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.

  “And God would not lie to us!” This was what he said over and over, from the very first moment of the controversy, when out in the workshop he had shouted it while striking the anvil with a long pair of tongs. “God would not lie to us!”

  This was logically and perhaps even theologically sound, but it didn’t matter. The attacks continued, and many of them sounded like the kind of thing that might be accompanied by a secret denunciation to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. There were rumors that had already happened.

  Galileo kept defending himself, in print and in person, but he fell ill more and more often, with rheumatism, bleeding hernias, shaking spells, blinding headaches, insomnia, syncopes and catalepsies, hypochondria, and bouts of irrational fear. Whenever he was healthy, he begged Cosimo’s secretary Curzio Picchena to be allowed to go to Rome so he could defend himself. He was still confident he could demonstrate the truth of the Copernican hypothesis to anyone he spoke to in person. Picchena was not the only one who doubted this. Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.

  Galileo also was ignoring new complications that mattered. The general of the Jesuits, Claudio Aquaviva, had ordered his people to teach only the Aristotelian philosophy. Then also there was a doctored copy of Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” being passed around Rome that made his positions sound even more radical than they were.

  Worst of all, it was said that Bellarmino had recently ordered an investigation of the Copernican position as put forth by Galileo. This was a secret investigation, but everyone knew about it. A trial had therefore begun—a secret trial that was not actually secret. That was the Inquisition for you; rumors were part of their method, part of their terror. Sometimes they liked to apply pressures that might cause a panicked mistake.

  Galileo fell ill again, very conveniently. He took to his bed for most of the winter, miserable and sleepless. In Rome Cesi made inquiries on his behalf to Bellarmino himself, asking what His Eminence thought Galileo should do. Bellarmino told Cesi that Galileo should stick to mathematics, avoid any assertions about the nature of the world, and avoid in particular any scriptural interpretations.

  “Happy to do so!” Galileo shouted hoarsely from his bed, shaking Cesi’s fisted letter at his servants. “But how? How can I do that, when these ignorant vipers use Scripture to attack me? If I can’t reply in kind then I can’t defend myself!”

  Which was of course the point. They had him. Being thus garotted in a double bind, naturally he choked on it. His stomach too went bad, and he could keep nothing down. He had to remain in his bed. His fear and anger were palpable, a sweaty stink that filled his room. Broken crockery littered the floor, and one had to step carefully to serve him, toe the shards aside and pretend everything was fine, even while dodging things thrown at one. We all knew things were not fine.

  “I have to go to Rome,” he would say, repeating it like a rosary. “I have to go to Rome. I must go.” At night, watching the moons of Jupiter, taking notes as he hummed one of his father’s old tunes, falling asleep on his stool, he would murmur: “Help me, help me, help me. Get me to Rome.”

  Finally Cosimo approved the visit. He wrote to his Roman ambassador to say that Galileo was coming to defend himself against the accusations of his rivals. The ambassador was to provide Galileo with two rooms in the Villa Medici, because he needs peace and quiet on account of his poor health.

  Guicciardini, that same ambassador who had taken over during Galileo’s last stay in Rome, was still unimpressed by the astronomer. He wrote back to Cosimo, I do not know whether he has changed his theories or his disposition, but I know this: certain Dominican friars who play a major role in the Holy Office, and others, are ill disposed toward him. This is no place to come and argue about the Moon and, especially in these times, arrive with new ideas.

  And yet that’s what he did. A ducal litter carried him south to Rome as before, and after the arduous week of the journey he came into the city with Fed
erico Cesi, rolling through the ever-more-crowded outskirts of the great city, to the Pincian Hill in the northeast quarter. The hill rose out of squalid warrens crawling with people, all the poor souls who had migrated to the City of God hoping for succor either mundane or supernatural. Now Galileo made one more.

  THE VILLA MEDICI occupied the very top of the Pincian Hill, which was also known as the Hill of Gardens—and deservedly so, as the few villas on it stuck out like ships on a billowing wave of vineyards. The Medici villa was the vast white hulk at the top, with a tall and nearly blank stucco façade facing the city center. Newer galleries extended away from the main building into the great gardens surrounding it, where one could wander among the hedges and the magnificent collection of antiquities that the family had bought from the Capranicas a generation before.

  The ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, met Galileo on the broad front terrazzo of the villa. He was an elegant man with a finely trimmed black beard, rather cool in his welcome, and so Galileo was likewise. They got through the diplomatic necessities as quickly as possible, after which Guicciardini turned him over to his master of the house, Annibale Primi. Primi proved to be a cheerful man, a tall sanguine figure whose head was set a little before his body. He led Galileo and his contingent to the “two good rooms” Cosimo had ordered him to be provided with. And when Galileo had seen them, and arranged with Cartophilus their disposition, Primi led him through the gardens and up to the high point of the fifty-foot-tall man-made mound.

  “This mound is dirt piled onto the nymphaeum of the ancient Acilian gardens. It’s just the extra height you need to get a view over the other hills, see? People often say it’s the best vista in the city.”

  The other six hills at their various distances blocked a complete bird’s-eye view of Rome, but the prospect still gave them an almost overwhelming sense of the city’s tumbling vastness—a entire province of rooftops, it seemed to Galileo, like a million inclined planes set up for some supremely complicated experiment, with the Tiber a tin gleam here and there in the smoky expanse. All the other big hills were likewise occupied by great villas, and so appeared as mostly green islands sticking up out of tile-clad waves, the vineyards and cypresses on them creating lines horizontal and vertical.

  “This is great,” Galileo said, wandering inside the high point’s circular wall as if on a Venetian altana. “What a city this is. We’ll have to bring up a telescope.”

  “I would like that.” Primi pulled a big bottle of wine from his shoulder bag and held it up for Galileo’s inspection, a grin on his face.

  “Aha,” Galileo said, bowing slightly. “A man after my own heart.”

  “I assumed as much,” Primi said, “given what people say about you. And here we are, after all—on top of the world. You might as well celebrate when you get to a place like this.”

  “So true.”

  The two men sat on the low wall ringing the summit of the mound, and Primi uncorked the fiasco of wine. He poured tin cups full, and they toasted the day and sat and talked while they drank. Primi was the son of an innkeeper and reminded Galileo of his artisans—a quick man who had seen a lot and knew how to do a lot of things. He told Galileo about the greenhouses and the new galleries, and then they sat and looked at the city and drank. There was a noise to the city as well as smoke, a general grumbling hum. Galileo could see across the roofs to the Janiculum, where just four years before he had triumphantly talked to the pope and displayed his telescope to all the Roman nobility. So much had changed. “It’s a hell of a town,” he said, gesturing at it helplessly. He could not keep his fear entirely at bay, but the wine did loosen the strain of it in a comforting way. He breathed in that bracing effect, straightened up. Here he was, after all. At least now he could fight!

  Primi rattled on about the villas on the other hilltops. In the smoky sunset the city turned umber and orange, like a thing of granite under a cloudless sky.

  Primi was a very active master of the house; he even helped them each morning to choose which jackets and doublets and tights would be most appropriate for whatever meetings Galileo had that day. He arranged for the traps and drivers, giving the drivers instructions to take particular ways to their destinations so that Galileo would see things in the city that Primi thought he should see.

  So out he would go, dressed in his finest tights and one of his best jackets. And the nobles and prelates would meet with him, but they were less enthusiastic. Meetings ended in an hour, other engagements were pled. Something was going on, which was of course the rumor of Bellarmino’s interest. That was enough to put a chill on anyone.

  In his bustle and bluster it was not easy to tell if Galileo noticed this, but it seemed certain he must have, and was just trying to pretend all was well. It was either that or else he was even more oblivious than anyone had hitherto suspected. But it seemed more likely that he knew. Every afternoon he would return and drag himself wearily out of the trap and into the villa, having spent the day proclaiming the same thing to everyone: “I am a devout Catholic. My work is to reconcile Copernicanism and the Holy Church. It is an attempt to help the Church, which otherwise will soon find itself contravening obvious facts of God’s world, quite visible to all. That can’t be good for Her! We have to help Her in this hour of need.”

  And everyone would have listened to him thinking, Bellarmino. Don’t be where Bellarmino is looking had been a saying in the city for over twenty years. And so when he got back to the villa, and the ambassador would be nowhere to be seen, Annibale Primi’s appearance in the big garden doorway, with a lumpy shoulder bag under his arm and a big grin on his face, would cause Galileo to bow gratefully, and after changing his clothes he would walk up the spiral gravel path to the top of the garden mound, and often stay out there until the stars were twinkling overhead, eating and drinking, and, after calling for his telescope, viewing the city and the stars. On many mornings after these dissolute nights he could barely move, and yet he had new appointments to keep that day. Sometimes we had to dress him like a scarecrow or a tailor’s dummy.

  Then off he would go again, slapping himself in the face and drinking cinnamon concoctions, making his rounds every day like a tinker or a mendicant, crisscrossing that immense smoky city of the world, meeting anyone who would give him an invitation, or receive one from Cesi. Sometimes he had little successes; a few new potential allies and supporters met with him at Cesi’s palazzo one day, including a newly appointed cardinal, young Antonio Orsini, who was a Galilean and a potentially important ally. But mostly people kept their distance. Don’t be where Bellarmino is looking.

  Thus it was a shock but not really a surprise when one afternoon a papal messenger came to the Villa Medici with an order. Galileo was to meet with Cardinal Bellarmino in the Vatican, on the very next morning.

  That night the mood in the villa was tense and foreboding. Galileo did not go up to the mound with Primi, but stayed in his rooms. Twice in the night he called for Cartophilus to fetch him refreshment: first mulled wine, then warmed milk. It did not appear to Cartophilus that he slept at all that night. And so of course Cartophilus got very little also.

  IN THE MORNING, two of Bellarmino’s inquisitorial officers of arrest showed up at the villa to convey Galileo and Cartophilus to Bellarmino’s house, on the river side of the Vatican grounds. On the way there Galileo said nothing, though he seemed cheerful enough, face ruddy and eyes bright. Time at last for action, his manner seemed to say. He glanced up frequently at the sky, which was flecked by flat, small gray clouds.

  Once inside Bellarmino’s antechamber, the two arresting officers made their bows to Galileo and left. Only servants then remained, standing against the wall—the cardinal’s and Galileo’s, side by side.

  Then the cardinal himself entered the room. Galileo went to one knee and found he was nevertheless still taller than the cardinal. Roberto Bellarmino was a very short man.

  He was around seventy years old. His neat goatee was white, his hair a salted brown. Dre
ssed in his cardinal’s red, he made a handsome and impressive sight, despite his diminutive size, which made him resemble a clock statue come to life. He greeted Galileo in a quiet, urbane voice. “Rise, great astronomer, and speak with me.”

  By comparison, Galileo with his rough baritone felt large and loud and somehow rustic. “Many thanks, Glorious Lord Eminence. I kiss your sandal.” He huffed as he got awkwardly to his feet, then looked down at the little man, one of the chief intellects of their time. Bellarmino regarded him with a quizzical smile, seemingly friendly. Of course he would be used to looking up at people.

  Then there came a murmured interruption from one of the servants, and another inquisitor from the Holy Office entered the room: “Commissary General of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, Father Michelangelo Segizzi,” announced the servant, with a few members of his staff, all Dominicans, as well as two tall men whom Segizzi did not bother to introduce.

  “We are here to serve as notary to the meeting,” Segizzi declared in a hard voice, meeting Bellarmino’s eye boldly. “Thus there will be an official record for His Holiness to read.”

  The little cardinal’s face reddened a bit. They were in Bellarmino’s own home, and if he had not expected these men to join the meeting, it was an impudent thing.

  But he said nothing to Segizzi, except to invite him and all the rest of them into his study. The group filed through the tall door into the sunny room dominated by Bellarmino’s big desk, located under the north window.

  Bellarmino then ignored Segizzi, and said to Galileo in a calm and kindly voice, “Signor, you must abandon the error of Copernicanism, if, indeed, you hold the opinion. It has been found by the Holy Office to be erroneous.”