Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  —J. C. SMITH, Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy

  BLACK SPACE, the dense spangle of stars. The great bulk of Jupiter, almost entirely sunlit, surreally present to the eye, crawling phyllotaxically with its hundreds of colors and thousands of convolutions—

  He was sitting in his chair in Hera’s little space boat, which was again rendered invisible—a kind of Plato’s cave through which the cosmos poured in. Below and behind them, the virulent ball that was Io jumped out of the starry blackness.

  “You’re back,” she noted. Her teletrasporta lay on the floor beside his chair. “Good.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To Europa, of course.” She looked at him. “We’re still trying to keep Ganymede and his people away.”

  “You got off the melting land, I see.”

  “Yes, I was picked up by my people pretty soon after you left. Good that you did leave, though. It was touch and go.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know, a few hours maybe.”

  Galileo blew out through his lips. “Pah.”

  “What?”

  “For me that was a few years ago.”

  She laughed. “Proof again that time is not a steady progression, that it fluctuates and eddies, and we are in different channels. I hope you have been well?”

  “Not at all!”

  “How so?”

  “I was sick. And I remembered what was happening here, and also what will happen to me there. It was all in me at once. Not only what you showed me, the fire I mean, but also, I have to confess—I used Aurora’s tutorial to take a look at my life, the last time I was with her. To see the science. I didn’t know it would be so—comprehensive. It wasn’t just someone’s account. I was there. Only it was all at once.”

  “Ah.”

  “I didn’t think it would matter, but when I went back home, I seemed to be dislocated somehow. Not in the moment, but a bit behind it, or before. I knew what was going to happen. It was bad. Unsustainable. Can you—can you help me with that, lady?”

  “Maybe.”

  He shuddered, remembering, then brightened. “On the other hand, there’s a new pope, a man who has been like a patron to me. I think I can get him to lift the ban on discussing Copernicus. I think it’s even possible to persuade him to approve the Copernican view, to make it the Church’s understanding, so that the Church itself will support it. And then I’ll be safe.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head. “You still don’t get it.”

  “Things at home aren’t so good,” Galileo went on, ignoring her. “But maybe His Holiness can help there too.”

  She sighed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well—my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I’m hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it’s bad for my daughters.”

  “You are the one who put them in their situation, right?”

  “Yes yes.” Then, trying to distract her: “What will you do when we get to Europa?”

  She saw through him. “Distract me or not, you are still stuck in a situation you don’t understand.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. “I don’t see that I’m much different than you,” he parried lamely.

  She brushed that aside. “It has always been the same pope in charge when you are condemned to be burnt at the stake.”

  This startled Galileo. “Of course,” he temporized. “But, if I could convince him to support the Copernican view, then surely …”

  She only stared at him.

  “I think it can work,” Galileo ventured. Then: “You said you would help.”

  She only shook her head.

  They seemed to float without moving. The great banded giant stood off to one side, impossible to believe. The whorls and eddies within each tawny band moved, slightly but visibly, and the imbricating borders where band met band moved even faster, their viscous colors crawling over each other like snakes. Hera’s transparent bubble of a craft only just shifted over this massive spectacle, such that its terminator, that smooth border of sunlight and shadow, rolled westward at a speed they barely could see. With close attention, one could spot the progressive illumination of new embroideries in the bands.

  But all these stately contradances were as motions in some syrupy dream, and Galileo could see that Hera was impatient for action. She tapped at her console in her usual way, had several fraught conversations with absent colleagues he could not hear; then she fell silent, brooding over problems Galileo was not privy to.

  “How long till we get there?” he asked.

  “Hours. Europa is on the other side of Jupiter right now, unfortunately.”

  “I see.”

  Time passed; seconds, minutes: it became tangible, like something you could hold in your hands, or weigh on a scale. Protraction.

  Finally she sighed. “Put the mnemonic back on. We might as well keep working. I can perhaps also block some of your memories from the life lesson you so rashly entered. So there are things you need to forget, and things you need to remember. Because you are still misunderstanding your situation at home.”

  Galileo regarded her memory celatone uneasily. Mostly he feared what another immersion would reveal to him, but there was an awful fascination in it too. That the mind held within it such vivid scraps of the past—there was a majesty to that, full of pain and remorse—and a desire, despite all, for all the lost time somehow to come back. I want my life back! I want life back. And then also, to lay down so many memories so fully in the mind, and yet be unable ever to call them back—what were they, to be so oddly made? What could God have been thinking?

  “Where will you send me?” he asked apprehensively. “What knowledge will you flay me with this time?”

  “I don’t know. There’s so much to choose from, maybe we’ll just go spelunking. Your brain is full of trauma nodes.” She scanned her console screen, now apparently displaying maps of his brain, there visible to his sidelong glance in virulent pulsing rainbows. “Maybe we should continue with your relations with the women in your life.”

  “No!”

  “But yes. You don’t want to be one of those supposed scientific geniuses who is also in domestic life a jerk and a fool. There are enough of those already, or more than enough. It would be a shame if the first scientist were to be also the first of that crowd of assholes.”

  This was interesting news, but also offensive. “I did my duty,” Galileo objected. “I took care of my family, I supported my sisters and my brother and their families, and my mother and my children, all the servants, all the artisans, all the students and hangers-on—the whole damned menagerie! I worked like a donkey! I wasted my life paying for my wastrel family.”

  “Please. Self-pity is simply the reverse side of bravado, and just as unconvincing. That’s something you never seemed to learn. You lived a life of privilege that you took for granted. You started with a little bit of privilege and leveraged it upward, that’s all.”

  “I worked like a donkey!”

  “Not really. There were people who worked like donkeys—literally, in that they were porters and carried burdens for their living—but you weren’t one of them. Let’s see what your own mind tells you about that.”

  Roughly she put the helmet on his head, and he did not really resist her. Where in his lost life would he return to?

  With an odd look, perhaps of pity, almost of affection, a kind of indulgent amorevolezza that was very affecting to see in someone so amore-vole, so lovely, she reached out to touch him on the side of the head.

  It was midsummer, very hot and humid, and the Count da Trento had invited Galileo’s colleague Bedini to his villa in Costozza, in the hills above Vincenza. Galileo, recently arrived in Padua with the entirety of his worldly possessions in a single trunk, had been introduced to everyone by Pinelli, over wine in Pinelli’s library of eighty thousand volumes. Bedini
and Pintard were two of these new friends, and now, courtesy of Bedini’s noble friend, they were off to the hills together.

  At the Villa Costozza, they joined their convivial host and did just what they would have done at home—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, while the count opened bigger and bigger bottles of wine, until they were hoisting fiascos and balthazars and small casks, and had eaten most of three geese, along with condiments, fruits, cheeses, and a great number of pies. And all on a day so hot that even here in the hills they were sweating greasily.

  Finally the count was overcome, and staggered off to vomit like a Roman. The young professors groaned at the prospect, feeling stronger than that. It seemed if they jumped in one of the villa’s fountains or pools, they could immerse themselves to cool their stomachs and slow their bile. When he returned, the Count shook his head groggily as they proposed this. “I have something even better,” he said, and led them to a back room on the ground floor, where the villa had been dug into the hillside. In this room, the plaster wall did not meet the marble floor, and out of the black gap between wall and floor flowed a cold humid breeze, making the whole room as cool as an ice pantry. “It’s always like this,” the count mumbled, still gasping a little from his vomiting. “There’s a little spring somewhere down there. Please, be my guest. On days like this I simply lie on the floor. See, here are some pillows. I would join you, but I fear I must retire again,” and he stumbled off.

  Laughing at him, the three drunk young men pulled off their clothes, groaning and joking and elbowing each other, and arranged the pillows as bedding and fell on them with happy moans and snorts. And there in the cool relief, after sliding right onto the marble and oohing and aahing like pigs in mud, all three of them fell asleep.

  Galileo was hauled out of an ugly red dream by the count and his servants. “Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please! Wake up!”

  “Qua—? Qua—?”

  His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else’s groans. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t. The groans were his. Looking up as if from the bottom of a well, he felt a nausea so deep that it seemed if he vomited he would throw up his bones. Someone nearby was groaning in a truly heartrending way. Ah—he himself again. It was frigidly cold….

  When he came to again, the anxious count and his retainers surrounded him as if looking down into his grave. “Signor, it’s good to have you back,” the count said solemnly. “Something made you three very sick. I have no idea what it could have been. The air out of the hill is usually very fresh, and all the food and wine was checked, and seemed fine to the servants. I don’t know what could have happened. I’m so sorry!”

  “Bedini?” Galileo said. “Pintard?”

  “Bedini has died. I’m so sorry to tell you. It’s really a mystery. Pintard is in a state like yours. He has roused a couple of times, but is now fallen into a catalepsy again. We are keeping him warm and dripping some spirits into his mouth, as we did with you.”

  Galileo could only gag. He too could have died. Death, the fundamental nausea. He felt the horror of it, then the terror.

  Hera’s big white face. She stared into his eyes. “You could have died right there.”

  “I almost did. I was never right again.”

  “Yes. Almost died of an excess of privilege.”

  “Of poisoned air!”

  “The poisoned air of a rich man’s villa. You ate yourself sick, you drank yourself into a stupor. And it wasn’t the first time, or even the hundredth. While your women drudged and starved, had the babies and raised the children and did all the real work, the work that’s work. Your own partner, the one you had children with, she didn’t even know how to read, isn’t that what you said? Didn’t know how to add or subtract? What kind of a life is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You did know.”

  She reached out. Touched him on the forehead.

  When Marina told him she was pregnant he first only stared at her, looking like one of the boxed fish in the market. Part of him was pleased; he was thirty-six years old, and had been with 248 women, if his count was right, and none had ever reported to him that he had gotten her pregnant. Of course they had their ways, and some of the regulars made you hood the rooster, but still he had had reason to wonder if he were sterile. It could make sense that he was like a mule, in that his father had mated with some kind of gorgon. Not that the lack of children bothered him, given the women and children already underfoot everywhere in his household, screeching for his attention. But it was nice to know one was normal, like any other healthy animal or plant. In his garden everything flourished, and so he should too in his way.

  But it was a bit of an embarrassment as well. Here he was angling to become the tutor of the little Medici, one of his best chances of improving his patronage and getting back to Florence, and yet nothing had proceeded there yet, and it was not going to be any kind of help if people said Oh Galilei, he got his Venice girl pregnant, a fishmarket puttella, a Carnivale puttana who can’t even read. Her fine qualities would only make them nod their heads knowingly and conclude Galileo had lost his head—that his cock led his fate, that he was not really a courtier, that he was a bit of a drunken obnoxious fool. And of course his enemies said that every time his name came up. It was not that hard of a case to make.

  All this passed through his mind in less than a second. He sat her down on the edge of the Grand Canal, on the steps of the Riva de’ Sette Martiri, and said, “I’ll care for the child, and for you too, of course. La Collina will be made the godmother, and Mazzoleni the godfather, and I’ll set you all up in a house near mine in Padua. You’ll move there.”

  “Ah yeah.”

  Her mouth had turned down into a bitter cast that he had never seen before. It had a swoop like a gull’s wing. He was leaving her, so she was leaving him—this was what her look said.

  She sat there holding her belly. She was (he suddenly saw) starting to show. A bit pale and sweaty, perhaps with morning sickness. She nodded, looking down at the trash floating on the canal, thinking her own thoughts. She gave him another sidelong look, sharp as glass under a fingernail.

  Then she looked away, roused herself. She was realistic, a smart girl. She knew how things went. That he was going to support her and the child was perhaps even as much as she had been hoping for. Although one always hopes for more than one hopes for, as he well knew. And they had been in love. So he felt a little flash of vertigo as he watched her slip away. Things would never be the same, he could see that already. But there was no other choice for him. He had to get patronage, he had to work. So this was the way it had to be. He would have to cheer her up.

  But that look. In his voluminous Catalogue of Bad Looks, this one was perhaps the worst. A whole life ended there.

  “It all could have been different,” Hera said. Black space, her white face, bilious Jupiter crawling above them. The stars.

  “I know,” Galileo said, subdued. Marina was dead now, a ghost from his past, and yet there she had sat, on the fondamente in his mind, as vivid as Hera herself. The two were not that dissimilar in some ways.

  “You made your children illegitimate. The son without prospects, the girls unable to marry.”

  “I knew I could put the girls in a convent. They’re better off there.”

  She merely looked at him.

  “All right, then,” Galileo said, “send me back earlier than that! You want me to change the, the fire—let me change this too!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Because you need my science! You don’t want me to go back and change my life in a way that will damage my work. You see? I had to do it!”

  “You could have done both.”

  He held his head in his hands, felt the celatone on him like a condemned man’s hood. “So what’s the point? Why
do you torture me like this?”

  “You need to understand.”

  He snorted. “You mean I need to have my nose rubbed in my mistakes. I lived with a prostitute, it wrecked everything. You make me feel like shit! How does that help me?”

  “You need to understand,” she repeated, relentless as Atropos. “Look again. You have to keep looking. This is the essence of Mnemosyne’s physic. In the nothingness which extends behind you, the blackness that you call the past, there are certain luminous points, isolated and discrete. Fragments of your former life that have survived the loss of the rest. Behind you then is not blackness, but a starlit blackness, constellated into a meaning. Without that constellation, there is no chance of a meaningful reality in your present. The living force of those small fires you are discovering make you whatever you are. They constitute a sort of continuous creation of yourself, of the being you are by way of the being you have been. Those crucial moments, unachieved in their time, are entangled with the present always, and when you remember them, they give birth to something that is then achieved, that is your only reality. So look now. Look at your work. First—hmmm—let us look at it in the light of your relations with Marina.”

  She touched his head.

  Belasario Vinta came to him and asked him to do a horoscope for the Grand Duke Ferdinando, who was sick. Galileo was both pleased and nervous. The gratuity would come in handy, and the Medicis were his best chance for patronage. Grand Duchess Christina was already almost in hand, having asked him to teach mathematics to her son Cosimo, Ferdinando’s heir. Galileo was not surprised when Vinta told him she was also the source of this new request. She was frightened.

  Galileo had studied astrology, and it was precisely this that made him uneasy. Vinta stood there regarding him, waiting for his response.

  “Of course,” he said. It wasn’t a request one could refuse, as they both knew. “Tell His Serenity the meraviglioso that I am most deeply honored, obbligatissimo, and that I will attend to the matter directly. And give him my best wishes concerning his health. Has he considered consulting Acquapendente? I have been cured many times by that great doctor.”