Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Mazzoleni’s gap-toothed grin greeted the first explanation of this. “I think I get it,” he said.

  Galileo slapped him on the side of the head. “Of course you get it—and if you can get it, anyone can!”

  “True. Maybe make a demonstration with little balls, to make it easier to understand.”

  “Bah.” Although that started him thinking about a kind of astrolabe.

  The first potential customer to show interest in such a device was the military attaché of King Philip III of Spain. When he came over from Genoa, in the company of the Tuscan ambassador to Spain, Count Orso d’Elci, Galileo described the possibilities for such a device enthusiastically. Everyone nautical agreed that determining longitude was the most important outstanding problem in seafaring navigation, and if it were solved it would provide a service of inestimable value (although a fee could be named). Come to Genoa, the Spanish officer said in reply, and give my colleagues there a demonstration.

  Galileo prepared for the meeting with his usual thoroughness. It was not unlike his demonstration of the telescope to the Venetian senate. A bit more technical, he admitted to Mazzoleni. His artisan carefully did not point out that his experiences with the military compass had never supported his belief that a computing device could help make people more intelligent than they really were. Something in Mazzoleni’s face must have conveyed the thought to the maestro, however, because he decided that two devices would be needed—one mainly to remind people of how the Jovian system worked, and what the tables were describing. Together they constructed in the new workshop a thing that he called a “jovilabe,” much like an astrolabe, the usefulness of which was long established. The new brass device was set on a handsome solid tripod: it held a ring set flat, marked by degrees around its edge, and connected by an elaborate armature to a smaller disk that moved through the signs of the zodiac and contained tables for each of Jupiter’s moons. It was a beautiful thing, displaying all that he had learned in his observations of the Jovian system.

  “But you still will need to be able to see Jupiter and his wives from a ship at sea,” Mazzoleni said. “Bouncing on the billowing waves, dodging whales and enemy cannonballs and who knows what. Who’s going to have their hands free to do the looking?”

  “Good point.”

  The solution to that problem was so complex that he went over to Pisa to get some technical advice from his old associates in its little Arsenale. But in the end, as so often in the past, most of his real help came from the ingenious Mazzoleni. Together they built Galileo’s most complicated contraption to date, an object he called a “celatone.” Every time Mazzoleni looked at it, he cackled. It was a bronze and copper helmet, with several telescopes attached to it, each of which could be rotated on armatures until it was in front of the eyes of the person wearing the helmet, giving sharp views of sights at various distances. One looked where one wanted by turning one’s head, and one’s hands therefore remained free, to steer a ship or do anything else.

  Galileo showed this beauty off to the court in Florence, and one of his old enemies there, Giovanni de Medici, was so impressed he declared it a more important invention than the telescope itself. It could be of crucial help in battles at sea, he declared.

  With these new devices perfected, Galileo went to Genoa to speak to the Spanish officials. Whether he was aware that Pope Paul at that moment was trying more and more desperately to stay neutral in the growing crisis between Spain and France, no one could tell. Sometimes Galileo ignored things on purpose; other times he was simply oblivious.

  He met with the officials in the great hall of the Genovan palazzo that the Spanish had rented, under north windows that provided excellent light. Galileo unrolled the large sheets of parchment on which he had drawn more of his characteristic diagrams, their elegant circles only slightly marred by malfunctions of his compass-quill, their converging lines drawn straight with the help of a rule or a plumb, the page inscribed everywhere with his neatest script, with all its incomprehensible abbreviations and capital letters. The Spanish officers crowded around the table.

  “The principle is very simple,” Galileo began, always a bad sign. “So far, one of the only reliable ways that people have had to determine longitude is to observe an eclipse of the moon predicted in an almanac. In most ephemerides, the times listed in the tables are Roman times. One can then determine how far east or west of Rome one is, by seeing the difference in time between when the eclipse is predicted for the Roman sky, as opposed to when it is actually seen from one’s ship at sea. The relationship is clear, the method simple—but unfortunately, eclipses of the moon are fairly rare. Nor is it easy to determine the precise minute when an eclipse has begun, or when it has completely ended. So this theoretically good method is rendered impractical.

  “However!” he declared triumphantly, raising a finger. “We have now, with the power of a good telescope, which I can manufacture better than anyone, a newly discovered reality that includes several eclipses every night! These are, of course, the passing of the four moons of Jupiter behind their great planet, or into its shadow. Either the planet itself, or else its shadow behind it, cuts off our sight of the moons as sharply as snuffing a candle. And that moment can be very simply calculated in advance. It’s completely simple if the moon goes behind Jupiter. And if it moves into Jupiter’s shadow, that is almost as easy, as Jupiter’s shadow always extends straight away from the sun in a cylinder behind Jupiter.”

  The Spanish officers were beginning to glance at each other; and then, worse, not to glance at each other. Some perused the diagrams more closely, putting their faces close to the parchment, as if the secrets eluding them were to be spied deeper in the ink.

  “And who would make these observations?” one asked.

  “Any officer free to make them, using—the celatone!” Galileo replied, indicating the elaborated helmet. “Indeed, whoever you have already designated as responsible for navigation could take this on, and they would be thankful for it. They would merely have to consult my jovilabe and ephemerides, to find out when that night’s eclipse of one or more Jovian moons was to take place, and then observe Jupiter at around that time. Mark the very moment you see the predicted eclipse, and then check the ephemerides and see how much difference there is between the predicted time and the time you marked. Enter that figure into a simple equation, for which I could provide complete tables, and one would then know, to within a degree’s precision of longitude, where on the Earth one was!”

  His finger was pointed to the ceiling in his characteristic professorial gesture. But looking around the table he saw that all the Spanish officers were looking at him like haddock in a fish market, eyes round and appalled.

  “What if Jupiter were not in the sky?”

  “Then you couldn’t do it. But Jupiter is visible nine months of every year.”

  “What if it were a cloudy night.”

  “Then you couldn’t do it.”

  They considered the diagrams, the jovilabe, the bizarre telescope-studded celatone.

  “How does it work again?”

  THE SPANIARDS DIDN’T BUY IT. At one point Galileo even offered his own services, at two thousand crowns a year—only twice what the Medicis were paying him—but they didn’t go for that either. Probably this was just as well, as he would not have sustained the travel. And the pope would have been annoyed to have his effort to stay neutral compromised in such a way; he would have had to answer for Galileo’s move to the French.

  Nevertheless Galileo was cast down. He fell ill again. He spent a lot of time in his garden. He shifted his interests elsewhere. He visited Sagredo in Venice, feasted as of old, got drunk as of old; but he was older too, and angrier, and he ate and drank more than he used to, if indeed that was possible.

  Once one of these dyspeptic saturnalia made him violently ill. At first when he returned home, helped there by Sagredo, he seemed totally blocked inside. Then he spent all the next day in the jakes, moaning with what s
ome of the household guessed was food poisoning. Late in the afternoon he began to shriek with pain and fear. Sagredo, who had stuck around to make sure he was all right, ran down to the jakes to check on him, and after a while he sent a messenger for Ac-quapendente. When the physician arrived, Sagredo led him to the jakes, and Galileo groaned up to them, supine on the malodorous floor, both hands at his crotch: “I can’t believe it—it could only happen to me. I got the runs so bad I’ve shitted myself a second asshole.”

  And he wasn’t just repeating the old joke. Right in the peritoneum, about halfway between his anus and his balls, the bottom of his guts actually had burst through all but the outermost layer of skin. Sagredo took a squinting glance and looked away, his mouth pursed tight. “It kind of looks like you have four balls now,” he admitted.

  Acquapendente deftly shoved the guts back into place, through the wall of muscles and back into the abdomen. “You’ll have to stay lying down a day or two, at the least.”

  “A day or two! I’ll never be able to stand again!”

  “Don’t despair. You’ve healed from worse things before.”

  “Have I? Have I ever healed from anything, God damn it?” In the end they got him back to the house on a shutter, and after that he had to be very careful in the jakes, with many a setback to his condition any time he had a more than usually difficult evacuation. After weeks of pain and fear, he devised and manufactured a mechanical restraint to hold his guts up and in—a kind of iron codpiece, or really something more like a woman’s chastity belt, about which naturally everyone in the house joked, saying that he had finally found a method to check his sensual urges. But they spoke only behind his back and when he was well out of earshot, for he had no sense of humor about it at all. He groaned around the villa, limping badly, usually balanced on a staff, and unable to sit; he could only stand or lie down.

  He was in that most irritable state when Archduke Leopold of the Tyrol came by the villa to talk to him. Galileo ordered a feast, and as it was a nice day, hosted the archduke out on the terrazzo next to the house. Galileo stood next to the archduke, leaning with both hands clasped on his staff. Leopold seemed more capable than the Spaniards of comprehending the jovilabe, but his dukedom was entirely landlocked, and there was no need for his military to be able to determine their longitude. The celatone he also found interesting—though really, as he said, for purposes of warfare, an ordinary spyglass would do the trick. Nevertheless he was engaged and engaging, the very model of what a modern prince could be, and Galileo was encouraged by his visit. “God bless Your Magnificence,” he said on the archduke’s departure. “I kiss your clothes with all due reverence, Your Comprehension.” He was encouraged again by a kind note Leopold sent later, thanking him for the meal and inquiring whether he would ever want to travel up the valley past Lake Como to the Tyrol.

  Unfortunately, as Galileo and the rest of Tuscany learned only a month or two later, on the very day Leopold sent this inviting letter, some Protestant officers had thrown two Catholic officials out the window of a high tower in Prague. This defenestration was a sign; the war was intensifying all over the continent, Spain and the Hapsburgs in Germany fighting Catholic France and its Protestant allies to the north. Few knew how bloody it was going to get, but everyone saw immediately it was dangerous for all concerned. Leopold of Tyrolia, stuck in the middle of it, with allies on both sides of the conflict, had no more time for philosophers and their ideas.

  In Bellosguardo, Galileo did not have to work as hard as he had in the city to avoid his unhappy mother. Giulia was living in the city in a little house he rented for her, just around the corner from where they had lived when he was a boy, and she was specifically not invited across the river and up to the new villa and its fine view. When Galileo saw her at all, she treated him the same as she always had, as if no time had passed. It like a nightmare in which her scorn for Vincenzio and her harsh treatment of her children had merely shifted down a generation without her noticing the people had changed, so that she spoke as if Galileo were her husband and his children hers, her every utterance still a hellish mélange of reproach and insult. She had a curious manner of inflicting her excoriations as if making ordinary conversation, as if they were really just neutral remarks. It started the moment he entered her presence:

  “Oh, here you are. I’m surprised to see you in the middle of the day like this, but I suppose you don’t have anything better to do.”

  “No.”

  “But of course you always were a lazy boy, and clearly it’s just stayed that way all your life.”

  “Sorry for being so lackadaisical as to come to visit you, Ma.”

  “No you’re not. Listen, that door at the back is still missing its bottom hinge, I don’t know why you don’t just tell the landlord to fix it, although you’ve always been afraid of people, I don’t know why, really there’s no reason to be a kiss-ass like you’ve always been. Why don’t you just face up to him?”

  Galileo had long since learned to ignore this kind of thing, but a man in front of his servants could only take so much, and sometimes he made ripostes to her attacks with all the pent-up resentment of his half century under her lash, and these led inevitably to fierce arguments, for she never backed down. These fights never gave him the least satisfaction, for though he could outshout her now, he could never come away feeling triumphant or virtuous. When all was said and done, the old gorgon was unbeatable.

  These days her main reproach, or at least her newest one, concerned his treatment of his three children. Though Giulia had disapproved of the liaison with Marina, she had also disapproved of Galileo terminating it. “Now what will you do with those poor bastard girls?” she would demand, lancing him with her medusan eye. “No one will marry them, and you couldn’t afford the dowries even if they would.”

  “So it’s all right then,” Galileo would mutter through his teeth. He had made strenuous efforts to get the girls into a convent, which would solve both their problems and his, and seemed the best solution all around. But entering a convent before the age of sixteen was against canonical law, and only at thirteen could one become even a novitiate. Early entries happened all the time anyway, but of course Galileo’s application for a special dispensation had been denied, no doubt because the clergy of Florence disliked his thrashing of Colombe.

  Eventually, however, the day came when the girls were grown up enough to be entered as novitiates. By then he had found them spots in a Clarite convent where the abbess was the sister of Belisario Vinta. Galileo still had some unfortunate memories when it came to Vinta, but he had been the broker of Galileo’s move into the Tuscan court, and they had ended up on friendly terms. So it was a real advantage to have the man’s sister in charge of his girls, as she proved immediately by dispensing with the feast they were supposed to give and delegating that money instead to buying the habits the girls would need as nuns, thus saving Galileo a considerable sum.

  So at first it looked like a wonderful thing, even if his mother lambasted him for it. “You’ve condemned those poor sweet things to a lifetime of drudgery and starvation,” she declared, curling her upper lip and slapping the air in his direction with the back of her hand. “You heartless pig. You’re just like your father. I don’t know why I should be surprised at that, but I am.”

  Galileo turned his back on her and looked at the bright side. The girls would be respectable nuns and set for life. Their abbess was a friend and ally. It would take him about an hour to walk over the hills to the convent in Arcetri, and the same to ride a mule, as usually his hernia would force him to do; this he could manage at least once a week. It was good. They would be fine.

  It was true that the Order of the Poor Clares was well named. Clare had been a student of Saint Francis of Assisi, and her declared intent had been to imitate Francis and own nothing on Earth. Fine for her, but when you had thirty women gathered in one house supposedly there to do the same thing, it was not practical. Many Clarite convents had been giv
en some land by their nuns’ families, but not San Matteo. Giulia brandished at her son a letter one of the Clares had written to another local girl seeking entry, which somehow had gotten into her gnarled hands. She held it up before her and read loudly, “‘We dress in vile clothing, always go barefoot, get up in the middle of the night, sleep on hard boards, fast continually, and eat crass, poor, and Lenten food, and spend the major part of the day reciting the Divine Office and in long mental prayers. All of our recreation, pleasure, and happiness is to serve, love, and give pleasure to the beloved Lord, attempting to imitate his holy virtues, to mortify and vilify ourselves, to suffer contempt, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and other inconveniences for His love.’ Sounds great, eh? What a life! Why don’t you just kill them and be done with it?”

  “Why don’t you just steal the eyes out of my head?” Galileo replied, leaving her company without a good-bye.

  Virginia understood her father’s motives. She was a good girl. She took as her nun’s name Maria Celeste, to honor her father’s astronomical accomplishments, and she entered the convent without complaint, and only a few hours of tears. Livia, on the other hand, was three years younger, and had always gone her own way; she had inherited Marina’s sharp tongue, and Giulia’s black outlook. When the time came for the move to San Matteo she had to be restrained by the servants, and was finally taken over to the convent in a sealed litter, trussed like a pig. Released into San Matteo, she composed herself into a white-faced ball in the corner of their public room, trembling like a trapped hedgehog. Looking at Galileo’s feet, she announced with dignity, “I will never speak to you again,” and then hid her face on her knees and went silent. To a much greater extent than Galileo would have believed possible, she kept her vow.