“The second was a man named Einstein, the first a woman named Bao.”
“A woman?” Galileo said.
Hera shot him a look so full of contempt and pity, disgust and embarrassment that Galileo cringed, unfortunately shifting his balance on the slick floor such that his feet shot out sideways and he crashed down. By chance his bounce off the floor returned him right to his feet, where he could only blush and smooth down his jacket sleeves as if nothing had happened.
“Come with me,” she said to him peremptorily.
He followed her, greatly apprehensive, but aware that if he didn’t cooperate she would drag him away. “What is it?” he complained.
She glared at him. “Leave us,” she ordered her retainers, “and keep anyone else from following.”
She took him by the arm and pulled him with her as one would drag along a reluctant five-year-old. Under her fingers a shock tingled up his arm and all along that side of his body, from his ear to his foot.
Ganymede then emerged from a knot of his retainers on the other side of the terrace, and hurried over to them. Hera cursed under her breath and said to Galileo, “Stay put.”
She went to Ganymede and confronted him, and they argued in undertones that Galileo could not hear. When Hera returned to his side, she wore a look of grim satisfaction. “Come,” she said again, and pulled him across the terrace. “He’s not supposed to be on Europa at all anymore, so he can’t stop us.”
From the railing on this side of the terrace they looked down on a veritable maze of white rooftops cut by canals.
“Do you not remember what I showed you last time you were here?” she demanded of him.
“Yes, I remember!”
“Why did you come here then?”
“I wanted some answers, “Galileo said mulishly. “I told Ganymede to take me to someone who could give me answers, answers that you had not given me.”
She was not moved by this. “You can tell him to give you anything you want, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it. Understand me: he wants you to end in just the way I showed you ending. In the fire.”
“Yes yes, but look. I took the preparation you gave me last time, but they made me breathe the mist you warned me against. I remembered part of what you showed me—certainly the, the essentials. So I went back and did everything I could to make sure that that event could never come to pass. But it didn’t work. In fact it only made things worse! Now I have been forbidden even to mention the Copernican theory. And yet there it rests, at the base of everything else. It’s God’s truth, and a rather elementary truth at that—and we have finally perceived it, yet I can’t say a word about it! If I say anything at all, that could be it. And I have enemies watching my every breath. I might as well cut my tongue out of my head!”
She shook her head. “You can find ways to say what you want to say. Meanwhile, you have to consider what will happen if your understanding is brought up to our time, and then you return to your own time. If you try to counteract that, and take the strong amnestics and forget everything, you will forget the fate you are trying to avoid. You may walk into your fiery alternative unaware. If, on the other hand, you take anamnestics like those I gave you before, and preserve your memory of this visit, you will know too much. Your work will be skewed, and you may change things in ways that would be disastrous to your future, and ours too. You will put yourself on the horns of a dilemma, or in the clutches of a double bind.”
“Can’t you give me a preparation that would keep some memories and suppress others?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“It seemed that it did. In my last few years, I remembered this, but it was only a very partial memory, like a dream. I remembered the fire, and you warning me, but it was all confused.”
“Possibly so, but there is no way of controlling it so finely as to be sure. Memory is very diffuse in the brain, it relies on multiple systems in concert. It’s quite a feat to manipulate it as much as we do. You can’t take the chance of knocking out too much.”
Galileo threw up his hands. “But I want to know things; I’m made to know things! And I don’t see how knowing more can possibly harm me! If you are trying to help, as you say you are, then help! But don’t help me by telling me to stay more ignorant, because I won’t accept that. I’m sick of being told not to know things!”
She heaved a sigh, looking grim. “Prolepses are awkward,” she said. “I wish Ganymede had not done this to you. Now we need to make a plan. In your own time, you should certainly stop talking about the Copernican theory for a while. Bide your time and work on other things. It isn’t as if you understand very much of basic physics, after all, as you now know all too well. You could focus on that. I tell you what—I’ll give you an amnestic that will obscure short-term memory. It will allow you to retain what you remembered before this little tutorial, but make this trip’s contents hard to recall. Hopefully that will serve to keep your part in the flow of events consistent.”
“I want to know,” Galileo said. “I don’t see how it can hurt.”
“You don’t understand—not us, not time, not yourself.”
Now Ganymede and his gang on the other side of the terrace were pushing Hera’s people to the side, approaching Hera and Galileo in a swirl of tussling and curses. Hera put a forefinger under Galileo’s nose.
“I’m the one helping you to avoid your fate,” she reminded him as she took a pewter box from one of her retainers. “So listen to me. You can’t be one thing here and another there. You need to knit your selves together. You either make yourself whole, or else die in the fire.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Celatone
Alas, what evil fate and malefic star has led you into this dangerous and oppressive darkness, cruelly exposed you to many a mortal anguish and destined you to die from the fierce appetite and violent maw of this terrible dragon? Alas, what if I am swallowed whole to rot inside its foul, filthy and fecal entrails, to be afterwards ejected by an unthinkable exit? What a strange and tragic death, what a poor way to end my life! But here I am, feeling the beast at my back. Who has ever seen such an atrocious and monstrous reversal of fortune?
—FRANCESCO COLONNA, The Strife of Love in a Dream
BACK FROM ROME, Galileo spent most of the year 1616 collapsed in his bed, exhausted and sick of the world. All the usual distempers made their appearance: rheumatism, back pains, dyspepsia, fainting spells, syncopes, catarrhs, nightmares, night sweats, hernias, hemorrhoids, bleeding from the skin and the nose. “If it’s not one thing it’s another thing,” La Piera would say.
The cock’s crow started each day, followed by groans almost as loud from the master’s bed. The servants understood these as the histrionics of a humorous man in the clutches of his black melancholy, but poor little Virginia was frightened by them. She spent many a day running back and forth between the kitchen and his bedroom, ostentatiously nursing him.
Of course his moods had always varied. He had looked into this matter of temperament, and come to believe that Galen was better on it than Aristotle—not a surprise. Galen was the first he knew of to describe the humors—one of the few aspects of ancient medical knowledge that would certainly endure, for one saw evidence of them everywhere, all persons stuck under the rule of one humor or other—or occasionally, as with Sarpi, in a balance of them that led to perfect equipoise. For himself, Galileo Galilei, it appeared he was dominated by each of the four at different times: sanguine when his work was going well, choleric when he was attacked or insulted; melancholy often, as when thinking of his debts, or sailing home at sunset, or insomniac in the hours before dawn; and under all the others phlegmatic, somehow, in that his typical response to all his other states was to shrug them off and mulishly get back to work. To work through everything: his incredible tenacity was ultimately phlegmatic, although sanguine as well, and subject to choler. Up and down, side to side, thus he careened through the tumble of days, moving from one humor to the next, full
y inhabiting each in its turn, unable to predict when any of them would strike—even the midnight insomnias, which sometimes instead of black melancholic could be so pure and serene.
Over the years the household had learned to deal with these paradoxical rapid shifts. But this time was the worst ever.
The villa in Bellosguardo was at least a good place to be hypochondri-acal. On its hill, with a good prospect down onto the city, one could sit and rest, and observe the valley of tile rooftops and the great Duomo that appeared to sail east in the midst of a fleet. Villa del Segui, the House of the Pursuit (or the Pursued). He had signed a five-year lease for a hundred scudi a year. La Piera ran the place and disposed of everything to her own satisfaction. She and the whole household enjoyed the not very drafty building and its expansive grounds. It was a good house, and with it their livings were secure.
Giovanfrancesco Sagredo came over from Venice to visit his sick friend in the new home he had not seen yet, and this got Galileo out of bed and out into his new gardens, which were extensive and not too overgrown. Sagredo walked beside him and commiserated with him about Bellarmino’s prohibition, never once saying “I told you so” about his Roman troubles, while also frequently congratulating him on the new house and grounds. Sagredo was a sanguine man, a rare combination of joy and wisdom. How he loved life. In the three years Galileo had taught him in Padua, Galileo had barged into Venice to stay with him at his pink palazzo often, and come to love Francesco’s calm enthusiasm for everything. He ate and drank with a will, swam in the Grand Canal, conducted experiments in magnetism and thermometry tended his menagerie like the abbot of a monastery of beasts; and was always carefree about the task of the moment.
“This is a beautiful place,” he said now. “Look at how you can use the little barn as your workshop, and from there have a view onto the city! What a prospect. You can fly over the people whose lives you will be changing forever by the work in your shop.”
“I don’t know,” Galileo groused, unwilling to be satisfied. Like a lot of melancholics, he could ape a sanguine manner in a sanguine person’s company, but he trusted Francesco enough to reveal his true feelings. “I have this awful feeling of being gagged. I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does.”
Afterward, recalling Galileo’s moaning and groaning, Sagredo wrote to him: Vivere et laeteri; Hoc est enim donum Dei. Live and enjoy; this is a gift from God. Later he wrote again on the same theme: Philosophize comfortably in your bed and leave the stars alone. Let fools be fools, let the ignorant plume themselves on their ignorance. Why should you court martyrdom for the sake of winning them from their folly? It is not given to everyone to be among the elect. I believe the universe was made for my service, not I for the universe. Live as I do and you will be happy.
That was probably true, but Galileo couldn’t do it. He needed to work; without work he tended to go mad. But now the Copernican theory lay at the base of all he was interested in, and he was forbidden to discuss it. And Galileo had been Copernicanism’s chief advocate—in Italy for sure, and really in Europe generally, Kepler being so betan-gled—so without him, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Everyone understood his silence on the matter to be the result of a specific warning to him, no matter what the written testimonial from Bellarmino said. It was not as if he could whip it out every time he met someone and say, I was not really rebuked, see? And of course much of the tale-telling was happening behind his back anyway, as he well knew. Yet he could not reply to them, for there was a crowd of vigilant enemies all ready to leap on anything he might publish or write privately, or even speak aloud. For the spies were everywhere, and the air of Florence was thick with sacerdotal menace.
It was obvious to all that he was on a short leash. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. In the past he had been made happy by opposition, for that meant opponents trampled in debate, gloriously thrashed by his deadly combination of reason and wit. Now that was gone. “I am forbidden to pursue the truth!” he whined pompously to his friends and his household. “Forbidden by vague, confused, and completely unnecessary strictures of a Church in which I am a member in good standing, a true believer. And it isn’t even the Church as represented by the pope that is persecuting me, for he met with me and gave me his blessing, but rather a cabal of envious, lying, secret enemies, who have harmed the Church with their poison even more than they have harmed me! There is no hatred like that of ignorance for knowledge. Because ignorance could know too, if it wanted to, but it’s too damned lazy!” He went on like this, reciting his entire rosary of resentment many times a day, until the household grew heartily sick of it, and of him. And he grew sick of himself. He wanted to work. He wrote to a correspondent: Nature likes to work, generate, produce, and dissolve always and everywhere. These metamorphoses are her highest achievements. Who therefore wants to fix a limit for the human mind? Who wants to assert that everything which is knowable in the world is already known?
Eventually he got bored even with his anger, and turned his attention to other things. He went out into the garden in the mornings—always a sign of returning sanity. He wrote long letters through the afternoons. Only on the clearest nights did he gaze at the stars, as he had so religiously before the trip to Rome, and now when he did it seemed he was in the grip of a compulsion to punish himself, as the sights he saw through the telescope only caused him to moan and curse his fate. It was like pushing at a sore tooth with your tongue.
He would sit on his stool looking through his latest telescope, thinking through the night. Once it occurred to him that as there was no natural longitudinal equivalent of the equator, the Earth’s zero meridian for longitude ought to be designated as running right through the place in the world most aware of the Earth as a planet, meaning his house, or even his telescope, or his mind. “I am the zero meridian of this world,” he muttered irritably. “That’s what makes these bastards so envious.”
By day he tried to focus on other matters. Letters came in from old students, suggesting questions and projects to pursue. As the months passed, he worked with varying low levels of enthusiasm on many things: magnetism; the condensation of water; luminous stones; the proper way to price a horse; the strength of materials, an old interest; and the probabilities involved in the casting of dice, a new interest. In this field the quickness of his intuition was startling, but he only scowled at Cartophilus after a day of working on the matter. “An ugly feeling,” he said darkly, “to already know what you know.” At this Cartophilus skulked away, and Galileo went back to work on probability, then on a new kind of post digger. Anything but astronomy.
Mornings were best. He wandered his new gardens and the newly-planted orchard and vineyard like a retired professor, chatting with Virginia and giving her errands, like planting things or running fruit into the kitchen, or sitting beside him and weeding together. Livia would not come out of the house. Vincenzio too had come to live with them once La Piera had arrived, but he was an unsatisfactory boy, balky and lazy. The children’s mother was now out of their life; she had married a Paduan merchant named Bartoluzzi, to Galileo’s great relief.
But he had new problems to worry about. And he was once again becoming obsessed with money. He was always looking for ways to make more, as the income from Cosimo was a fixed sum of a thousand crowns per year, and once again his finances were skating the edge of debt. He sat at a big table under the arcade of the villa and answered correspondence, often complaining to old friends or students, or his fellow scholars in the Academy of Lynxes.
One afternoon a knock came at the gate, and who was ushered in but Marc’Antonio Mazzoleni.
“Maestro,” Mazzoleni said, his raffish grin a little more gap-toothed, a little more crooked. “I need a job.”
“So do I,” Galileo said. He regarded the old mechanician curiously. “How have you been?”
Mazzoleni shrugged.
When Galileo had first hired him out of the Arsenale, Mazzoleni had been shockingly poor, a single bag containing
his entire household. Galileo had had to buy clothes for his family, who turned up in tatters. What he had been up to since Galileo’s move, Galileo had no idea; he had left Venice and Padua behind and never looked back. He had given up making his compasses, and Mazzoleni had never inquired about keeping that business going. Perhaps the old man had been grinding lenses in the manufacturies. Anyway here he was, looking a little bit desperate.
“All right,” Galileo said. “You’re hired.”
That was a good day. About a week later, Galileo banged open the doors of the little unused barn next to the villa’s stable, and declared it the new workshop. They patched the roof, a big worktable was knocked together, other tables were made from planks and sawhorses, and the boxes filled with his workbooks and papers were brought out from the main house and arrayed on shelves, as before. Soon his sketches and calculations began to litter the table and the floor around it. The days began as of old:
“Mat—zo—len—iiiiiii!”
The maestro was back to work. Everyone in Bellosguardo sighed with relief.
As the pope and his Inquisition had forbidden all discussion of the Copernican theory, naturally Galileo’s first public act once he had gotten on his feet again was to announce to the world a way of using the moons of Jupiter to determine longitude. This stayed within the letter of the prohibition, while defiantly reminding people of his great telescopic discoveries. And it seemed like it could be a device of great practical application to navies and seafarers of all kinds. It also put to use the hundreds of nights he had spent looking at Jupiter and plotting its moons’ orbits. With this dogged effort, extended over years, he had managed to time the orbits so precisely that he could construct tables that predicted their locations for many months into the future. With those tables he had therefore a kind of clock, visible from anywhere on Earth, as long as you had a good enough telescope. As with any clock you could trust to be accurate, you could tell how far away you were in longitude from Rome by the discrepancy between local time and the Roman times listed in the ephemerides he could write for the Jovian moons.
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