Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Galileo had been expecting something less drastic. He said nothing; he grew as pale as Bellarmino was flushed. It was as if they had traded complexions. Twice he started to speak, hesitated, stopped. Ordinarily his only response to opposition was to whip it into submission by way of relentless argument. He had no other response in him.

  In the charged silence, Commissioner Segizzi lowered his head like a bull and began to read loudly from a written proclamation he held out before him: “You, Galileo Galilei, are commanded and enjoined, in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the said opinion that the sun is the center of the world and at rest, and that the Earth moves. Nor are you ever henceforth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way, verbally or in writing. Otherwise proceedings will be taken against you by the Holy Office.”

  Again Galileo had nothing to say. Cardinal Bellarmino, looking startled, even angry, glared at Segizzi as sharply as any ordinary man.

  “You must acquiesce to this order,” Segizzi told Galileo. “Otherwise there will be another meeting, and not here.”

  There was a long silence. Finally: “I acquiesce,” Galileo said tightly. “I promise to obey the order.”

  Bellarmino, distracted, still red-faced, waved a hand and brought the meeting to an end without adding anything more. He looked at his desk, frowning slightly, glancing once at Segizzi, then at his desk again.

  Thus concluded the first trial of Galileo.

  “What was that all about?” Galileo said as they walked behind the Medici carriage sent to carry them back up to the villa. He had been too agitated to sit inside the thing.

  It was a rhetorical question, as he was busy examining his memory to secure his sense of what had been said, but Cartophilus offered up tentatively, “Cardinal Bellarmino did not seem to expect those Dominicans to join the meeting.”

  “Really?” Galileo frowned.

  “Really.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, maestro.” The ancient one shook his head, confused.

  Late that night Cartophilus slipped out into the garden of the villa and went to the servant’s gate at the bottom of the orchard. There he met a friend of his named Giovanfrancesco Buonamici. He told him what had happened that day at the Vatican.

  Buonamici sucked on his teeth. He was tall and, under a voluminous dark cape, as lithe as a weasel. He chewed a fingernail thoughtfully for a while. “That could be bad,” he said. “They could produce a witness now who would claim that he tried to talk about Copernicus after this warning, maybe use what he’s been saying all this last month against him by postdating it, or something like that. It could happen fast. I’ll get word of this to the father, and see what he thinks we ought to do.”

  “Yes, good. Because that was something strange today, I don’t know what.”

  “If anyone knows, he will.”

  “I hope so.”

  Galileo was very lucky, given the power of his enemies, and the situation facing him, and his own fecklessness, that he had allies and supporters working for him too, and not only in public, as with Cesi’s Lynxes, but behind the scenes—and not just us, but the Venetians. Venice had the biggest spy network in Europe, with a particularly comprehensive contingent in Rome—most of it in the Vatican, of course, but penetrating also into the Roman courts, the courier services, the academies, the hostels, and the brothels. Not even the Vatican itself had as complete an understanding of Rome’s tangled mazes of rumor and machination as the Venetian spy service did.

  So the following week, when Cartophilus next heard Buonamici’s looping whistle, he took the slops down to the villa’s compost heap and went on to the orchard gate to meet him. Buonamici led him down the hill into the dense tenements east of it, then into the yard of a small church—one of the many moldering away in the city serving a local neighborhood in complete anonymity. There, Buonamici knocked at a battered side door, while Cartophilus looked around at the old hens pecking listlessly in the garden bed of the resident priest. The door opened, and after a word from Buonamici a man emerged, entirely covered by a monk’s habit and hood. He turned to Cartophilus, who was shocked to see it was the general of the Venetian spy service himself: Father Paolo Sarpi.

  Sarpi had been the secret general of Venice’s spy service for many years, since before the beginning of the current war of words and knives between Venice and Rome. He was the perfect man for the job—comprehensive in his knowledge of Europe, and imbued with great analytical powers and a keen vigilance when it came to Rome. The fact that Pope Paul had once tried to kill him was of course a factor in this vigilance, but not the main factor. Rome was always a big problem for Venice, and mostly Paul’s assault had only caused the venerable Servite to take Rome seriously as a danger. The vengeance most people would have sought, Sarpi transformed into a plan for a larger victory; not just Paul’s downfall, but the permanent hamstringing of Rome’s imperial efforts.

  Now Sarpi stood there with them, right there in a city where he could have been taken up and tossed into Castel Sant’Angelo, after which disappearing forever was the good option.

  “Should you be here, Fra Paolo?” Cartophilus could not help asking.

  “Bless you, I am well hidden here. An old monk is invisible in this city, as everywhere. I actually once spent months tucked away in this very church, when my presence in Rome was useful. Now I felt the situation is such that I am needed again.”

  “It’s that bad?” Cartophilus asked, wondering how much he knew.

  “Word has come that there is a faction here that would like our astronomer to be silenced for good. That’s a real danger. So first I need to know all that you saw in the meeting with Bellarmino.”

  He listened closely as Cartophilus recited what he recalled of the meeting. “What about the men with Segizzi?” he asked. “Tell me everything you remember of them.”

  Cartophilus told him everything he could, humming unhappily as he tried to recall the scene to mind. As Sarpi listened he frowned, causing his scarred face to bunch on the left side. When Cartophilus finished, he stood there silently for a while.

  “I think that was Badino Nores with Segizzi,” he said at last, “and Agostino Mongardo, from Montepulciano. They are Borgia men, and so is Segizzi. So I very much doubt they were supposed to be at that meeting, which means Segizzi intruded on a private conference in Bel-larmino’s own house. That is something Bellarmino would not have tolerated if he didn’t have to.”

  “But he’s the Lord Cardinal.”

  “Yes, in theory he fears no one. But in fact, he can’t afford to cross the Borgias. I’ve been hearing from people in the other parts of this puzzle, and it’s all beginning to fit together. I think Segizzi’s appearance was a surprise attack. Possibly the warning Segizzi made to Galileo was stronger than what either Bellarmino or Paul had intended. And of course it matters what documents have now been placed in Galileo’s Vatican file to memorialize the meeting. They might declare that Galileo was warned even more explicitly than what really happened, for instance. Our Galileo would be thus doubly deceived, so to speak, as to what exactly the pope has allowed or forbidden him to say.”

  “Dangerous,” Buonamici said laconically.

  “Indeed. Very dangerous, because even when he is fully on guard, our impetuous one is not so good at holding his tongue.”

  The two men nodded wordlessly; it was an understatement to say the least.

  “So.” Sarpi shook his head. “Let us set about finding out more about what is happening, and then untying this knot around Galileo’s neck if we can.” He smiled at the prospect, which rendered his face even more terrifying than his frown. “No matter what we find, Cartophilus, I think it would help if you were to convey to Galileo that he should ask Bellarmino for a signed declaration, one which memorializes explicitly what Galileo is commanded to do and not to do. I think Bellarmino will accommodate him, because he is likely to see this as a way to pay
the Borgia back for invading his home. Then, if our philosopher is hauled in before the Inquisition proper, we may be able to turn the tables on this little plot.”

  Cartophilus nodded gloomily. “I’ll do it. I hope it will be enough.”

  “It will be just one move in a chess game, of course. But we can only do what we can do, at this point and always.” And with his hideous smile, the scientist priest slipped back into the ramshackle little church, into one corner of the immense complexity that was Rome.

  Late that same night, the ancient one carried Galileo’s warmed milk to his room, and when Galileo brought up the subject of Bellarmino and Segizzi’s ominous and contradictory warnings, as he did every night, obsessively, Cartophilus took the opportunity to say, hesitantly, “Maestro, I’ve heard that what people are saying now is that you were forced to make a secret abjuration or something like that.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” Galileo growled. “People have been writing to ask me about it, even from Florence.”

  Cartophilus nodded as he stared at the floor. “Maybe you might want to get whatever warning it really is from Bellarmino himself, in writing and signed by him, so that you have it specifically spelled out and in a document you can show people later. In case there is ever a question about it.”

  “Yes.” Galileo glared at him; he did not like the old one interfering like this, in ways that made him think about what Cartophilus represented. “Good idea,” he said heavily.

  “It’s nothing, maestro.”

  Galileo began the process of securing another audience with Bellarmino. This had to be done through Guicciardini, so it took per sistence and a bit of begging. While Galileo went through that distasteful process, he spent every evening out at banquets, but now he no longer made virtuoso recitals in defense of the Copernican view, being merely convivial instead. Naturally people noticed this change, and rumors about how severely he had been warned off by the Lord Cardinal proliferated.

  Galileo ignored all that and soldiered on. He discovered that Rome had many more than seven hills. It became more and more difficult to clean his jacket without revealing how old and shabby it was. Every night he ate too much and drank too much wine. Even on the rare night that he stayed home at the Villa Medici, he could not calm himself without copious amounts of wine, and he almost always partied late with Annibale Primi on the hilltop, drinking to distract himself in the very face of the huge city and the power it wielded over everyone. On more than one such hopeless night we had to load him into a wheelbarrow and trundle him down the hill to his bed, dumping him onto it like a load of bricks, him all the while snarling and snoring and muttering about bad things sure to happen.

  We went to work with Sarpi’s Roman network, wandering the back alleys in the low foul warrens near the Tiber, knocking on doors or meeting people in taverns and the backs of little churches. Rome had been drawing strange people to it for centuries, and their offspring were even stranger and more hand-to-mouth than they had been when they came. We talked to gatekeepers, servants, foreign diplomats’ aides, secretaries, lawyers, cooks, clerks. Some had secrets to sell, or knew of others who did. We paid certain publicans, go-betweens, a poor noble, a defrocked priest, several madams and prostitutes; we hired a few observant old street dwellers to keep an ear to certain doorways, and even employed a roof-crawling professional eavesdropper, a man smaller even than Bellarmino, who was willing to try to make his way to within hearing distance of certain rooms in the Vatican. One contact led to another in this vast net of humanity on the sly, servants and beggars leading us deeper and deeper into the parisitical tangle of the clerical bureaucracy. Rome was an infinite maze at this level, a warren of alleys and dirt-floored piazzas where one passed arcade after arcade with their shops open to the world, where the smells filling the air changed abruptly from baking bread to tanning leather to rotten meat to the stink of the urinals. It was hard to sort out the true from the false, or the useful from the harmful; this was where a big network like the Venetians’ could validate findings, and hope to confirm or invalidate them. Almost certainly they had a better sense of the whole situation than any other group in Rome, even the factions inside the Vatican; but it nevertheless remained a stubbornly murky thing. Forces were swirling.

  Buonamici appeared at the gate one day, and when Cartophilus got free they went down to the little church where Sarpi was hiding, and sat in the cool of the shade among the chickens. Some of the street tykes were having a water fight, squirting it at each other through reeds they had found.

  The spymaster flicked seed shells at the skinny birds as he told the men part of what he had learned. “A few weeks ago young Cardinal Orsini made an appeal on Galileo’s behalf directly to Pope Paul. He explained Galileo’s view of things, and declared there was no contradiction between that view and Scripture, but the pope told him Galileo should give up his views. When Orsini tried to continue, Paul cut him off by saying the matter was being looked into.”

  “That was Bellarmino,” Buonamici said.

  “Yes. Paul called him in and instructed him to convoke a special congregation of the Holy Office, who were to be explicitly tasked to identify Galileo’s opinion as erroneous and heretical. This congregation gathered just a few days later—six Dominicans, a Jesuit, and an Irish priest. They reported to the pope that the idea that the sun was the center of the universe was ‘foolish and absurd.’ Stultam et absurdam. Also formally heretical. The idea that the Earth moved was ‘erroneous in faith’ and ‘contradicted the sense of Holy Scripture.’”

  Cartophilus put his head between his knees, feeling sick to his stomach. Even Buonamici, the coolest of men, was looking a bit pale. “Formally heretical. That’s new, yes?” he said.

  “Yes,” Sarpi said dryly. “And so it was that Galileo was called into Bellarmino, so that the lord cardinal could order him to abandon the Copernican view. If he refused to do it, he was to be sent to Segizzi, who would order him formally to abjure his positions. If he refused that order, he was to be incarcerated until he agreed to obey it.”

  “So Segizzi jumped the sequence.”

  “Yes.”

  “All of this,” Cartophilus pointed out gloomily, “was caused by Galileo coming to Rome to argue his case. If he had not come, all this would not have happened.”

  Sarpi shrugged, staring at Cartophilus curiously. “But that isn’t what happened. So we have to deal with this, now.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “It’s also apparently the case that Segizzi has put a document in Galileo’s file that states his warning was comprehensive. Now it’s in the hands of the clerks, and back in the boxes and shelves of the innermost offices. Out of reach of anyone who might want to change it.”

  There was silence for a while, and the low cackle and hum of the city wafted into the church and over them. The tykes were shrieking.

  “We still have some angles of attack available,” Sarpi reassured them. “Galileo needs to talk to Bellarmino again, because Bellarmino is angry, and that could be a big help. And I’m going to see if I can get our man an audience with Paul again. Of course I will have to use an intermediary; I can’t ask him directly!” His laughing face was both ugly and beautiful.

  At first after the interview with Bellarmino, Galileo had told everyone about it, getting angrier every time. His friends in the city came by and tried to calm him down, but he became even more enraged when they did, and shouted so loudly that anyone on the Pincian Hill could hear him. Cesi came by, then Antonio Orsini, then Castelli, but he only got angrier.

  Guicciardini dictated letters home to Picchena and Cosimo that could be heard during their composition, or read by anyone who cared to slip into his offices at night and dig into the courier’s bags. One at this time said,

  Galileo has relied more on his own counsel than on that of his friends. Cardinal del Monte and myself, and also several Cardinals from the Holy Office, tried to persuade him to be quiet and not to go on irritating the issue. If he wanted to ho
ld this Copernican opinion, he was told, let him hold it quietly and not spend so much effort in trying to make others share it. Everyone feared that his coming here might be prejudicial and dangerous and that, instead of justifying himself and triumphing over his enemies, he could end up with an affront. Now this has happened, but he only gets more hotly excited about these views of his, and he has an extremely passionate temper, with little patience and prudence to keep it in control. It is this irritability that makes the skies of Rome very dangerous for him. He is passionately involved in this quarrel, as if it were his own business, and he does not see what it could lead to, so that he will get himself into danger, together with anyone who seconds him. For he is vehement and is all fixed and impassioned, so that it is impossible, if you have him around, to escape from his hand. And this is a business which is not a joke but may become of great consequence.

  That same day, March 6, Galileo was writing his own report to Picchena, which was something he did on a weekly basis. He apologized for having missed writing the previous week’s letter, explaining that it was because nothing had happened.

  A week later news came that the Congregation of the Index had ordered Copernicus’s books taken out of circulation, until corrections were added to them that made it clear his hypothesis was a mathematical convenience only, and not a statement of physical fact. The Copernican books of Diego de Zuñiga and Foscarini were prohibited outright.

  Galileo, however, was not mentioned in this decree, nor was the word heresy used. Nor had he been ordered to appear before the public tribunal of the Inquisition. So his warning from Bellarmino and Segizzi remained a private matter. Bellarmino and Segizzi had told no one about it, and Galileo belatedly began to keep the details of that meeting to himself.

  Nevertheless, all Rome was buzzing with the news. The outline of the story was all too clear. Galileo had come to Rome to campaign for the Copernican view, and in spite of this—indeed, because of this—his view had been declared formally false and contrary to Scripture. Many were pleased at this, and rumors that he had been admonished even more severely in private were widespread.