Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  But then the nights would come, and sleep would not. Wine did nothing to put him out, nor warm milk neither. Half-crazed he would prowl and howl down the cold moonlit galleries, staring out windows, seemingly confused by the striped duomo of Siena’s cathedral, looming over all the tilted planes of tile. By morning time he would be collapsed somewhere, staring red-eyed at nothing, his voice and mind shattered. It seemed incredible that he could face the day to follow in anything like a coherent form, the night having exhausted rather than refreshed him. And indeed by day there were dark hollows in his face, and his politeness to guests was a brittle thing. One afternoon a Father Pelagi joined the group to give a presentation on whether whirlpools created vortices of attraction or repulsion, and Galileo sat by the window with his arms crossed over his barrel chest, glowering as he listened to this priest’s unexpected mishmash of Aristotle and Scripture. At the assertion that a floating body would sink if the material’s buoyancy was not enough to keep it on the surface, he snorted and said, “I see your whirlpool has pulled in even your argument, it runs in such circles!”

  “What do you mean?” Pelagi snapped.

  “I mean,” Galileo said, “you make a circular argument. You are saying things float because they want to float. These are not whirlpools, but tautologies.”

  “How dare you,” the priest retorted. “You who have been reproved by the Holy Office!”

  “So?” Galileo said. “The Earth still moves, and you’re still a fool!” And he leaped to his feet and jumped on the man and started beating him. The others had to haul him off and then get between them. After some shouting and scuffling Pelagi was ejected—indeed, nearly defenestrated. Piccolomini announced that he was banished from the palazzo for the rest of Galileo’s stay. On the other hand it had been good to see the old warrior so feisty again, and everyone hoped it might refresh and reinvigorate him.

  But that night the howls from Galileo’s room were more anguished than ever. The moon happened to be full, giving his performance the true lunatic brio. For those who had to endure it, it was like when a baby is crying; an hour seems a year, a night all eternity.

  Then the next day some real problems also arrived to disturb him, in news conveyed by one of Maria Celeste’s letters. Galileo’s friends Gino Boccherini and Niccolo Aggiunti had come to San Matteo to ask her for the keys to his house and desk, so that they could enter and remove certain papers. It was during the time we suspected you to be in the greatest danger; they went to your house and did what had to be done, seeming to me at the time well conceived and essential, to avoid some worse disaster that might yet befall you, wherefore I knew not how to refuse them the keys and the freedom to do what they intended, seeing their tremendous zeal in serving your interests.

  This action had come on Galileo’s instruction, as he informed Maria Celeste later; he had sent a letter to his friends (ex-students again) requesting their help. So he must have been afraid that the case against him was not yet over. And he was probably right to think that some of the things he had written down through the years might prove dangerous. Copernicanism, atomism, the sun a live creature, something like a god—he had written a lot of things that could worry him now.

  Even with those papers in the house spirited away, there were still reasons to fear. It was becoming obvious to us that Urban was still very angry at Galileo. It was possible Urban felt now that Galileo had been let off too lightly—that in order to show resistance to the Borgia, he had not inflicted as much pain on Galileo as he really wanted to. Luxurious house arrest in an admiring archbishop’s palazzo was not much of a punishment for vehement suspicion of heresy. For now, Urban was taking out his anger elsewhere; the news coming to Siena made it clear that all those who had helped Galileo were being punished for it. Riccardi’s prevaricating did not save him; he was dismissed as Master of the Sacred Palace. The inquisitor in Florence who had approved the publication was reprimanded. Castelli had fled from Rome to avoid notice. Ciampoli was ordered to leave Rome, and for life, Urban told everyone. He was going to be a parish priest in one of the miserable villages of Umbria for the rest of his days.

  And these were by no means the strictest punishments Urban was ordering, for he was in a truly foul mood. A bishop and two priests accused of conducting black masses to call down his death were tied together to the stake and burned in the Campo di Fiore. People said these unknown miscreants had served Urban as replacements for Galileo, who had somehow slipped away—at least so far. The story was not necessarily over. For the pope was clearly no longer quite sane. So there were real reasons for fear; and sometimes fear took Galileo over. By day he smoldered, he fulminated, he moaned, he roared and shrieked. He stumbled to his bed and failed to sleep. And then at night the fears took over, each one a blacker dark night of the soul.

  In this sad disarray the days stumbled along. Piccolomini, at a loss, consulted Cartophilus again. After that he went out to the cathedral’s workshop and asked the artisans what they were working on. From them he learned of a problem they were having in the city foundry, where they were trying to cast a replacement for the cathedral’s largest bell. The casting mold for the new bell was made of two immense blocks of clay, with the outer mold turned upside down and held in position by a framework of heavy beams, and the inner mold, a massive solid plug with its outside carved to the shape of the inside of the bell, suspended from a lattice of cross beams in a position very close to the curved clay of the outer shell. The empty space between the two molds was the shape of the bell. This was the usual method, and all seemed well with it, but when they poured in the molten metal, it ran to the bottom of the open space and pooled there, shoving up the inner mold even though the massive block of clay weighed much more than the poured metal did. No one could understand it.

  Piccolomini, walking around the great wooden armature holding the cast, smiled. “This is good,” he said. “This is just what we need.”

  He went to Galileo and described what had happened, and Galileo sat and thought about it for a while. For a time it looked as though he had forgotten the matter and slipped into sleep, which even by itself would have been a benefit. Then he stirred. He took up a big sheet of paper and his quill and inkpot, and drew a side elevation of the problem to illustrate his points to the archbishop. “I discovered this when I was working on the floating bodies problem. What I found was that a very small weight of liquid can lift a much greater solid weight, if the liquid is trapped in a curve below the weight, as here.”

  “But why?”

  “Let’s not ask why,” Galileo requested.

  For Piccolomini this brought back memories of his boyhood lessons, and of poor Cosimo, long since dead. “And how then did you deal with it, maestro?”

  Galileo insisted on demonstrating the truth of his old finding with a model before proceeding any further. He made use of the glass urinal in his room for the model’s bottom mold, and the cathedral artisans made a wooden inner mold to fit it, filling the wood with shot to make it heavy. Then it was placed in the urinal such that, as Piccolomini said, “you couldn’t fit a piaster between them.” After that Galileo had a flask of quicksilver brought in, and he poured it into the gap between the glass and wood; and though the weight of the quicksilver was less than a twentieth that of the shot-filled wooden form, the form rose up a finger or two higher than it had been. Almost all the quicksilver pooled at the bottom of the urinal.

  “Even Mercury’s silver urine gives wings to things,” Galileo joked, head cocked to the side.

  Piccolomini laughed obligingly. “A very clear demonstration,” he said happily. “But then, this being the case, strange though it seems, what should we do about casting our bell?”

  Galileo shoved down on the wooden mold with his hand. “The inner mold, heavy or not, has to be fixed in place like the outer one. To prevent it rising, you will need to bolt it to a pavement below. Use the heaviest beams and bolts, and all should be well.”

  So they did as he had recommended
, and the bell was cast successfully. Regarding the bright new thing when it emerged from its massive mold, for a moment Galileo appeared content.

  But that night he howled more painfully than ever.

  Cartophilus got up and found him collapsed over a railing, in the stairwell of the bell tower overlooking the piazza where the famous horse race was soon to be run. He was barking into the dark space of the stairwell, then groaning in a kind of harmony as the echoes bounced up and down it. He had been weeping so hard he could barely see; the light of the ancient servant’s candle lantern seemed to hurt his eyes.

  “You must not have had your glass of milk before bed,” Cartophilus said, sitting down heavily beside him. “I told you never to neglect that.”

  “Shut up,” Galileo moaned piteously. “Talking of milk when they’ve thrown me in hell.”

  “It could be worse,” Cartophilus pointed out.

  Silence.

  Then Galileo growled. It was his wounded bear growl, and the old servant, surprised to hear it, could not help but smile. Once in the Bel-losguardo years the two of them had witnessed a bearbaiting in Florence, and late in the fight the baiters had poked the bloodied bear in the back, to get it to come out of its corner and fight the dogs, and it had briefly glanced up over its shoulder at its tormentors and growled—a low sound, bitter and resigned, that stood the hair upright on the necks of everyone who heard it. On the way home Galileo had imitated the sound over and over. “That’s me,” he told Cartophilus when he got it to his satisfaction. “That’s my growl. Because they’ve got me cornered, and they’ll make me fight.”

  Now, these many years later, the same sound vibrated out of his hulk and filled the stairwell. “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …” By his glance at Cartophilus, the old servant knew Galileo was reminding him of that moment in Florence, his recognition of the ursine fate awaiting him.

  “Yes yes,” Cartophilus murmured, as he tugged the old man back toward his room. “But it could be worse, that’s all I’m saying. You need to remember that. You need to pick yourself up somehow and carry on.”

  Galileo clutched him by the arm. “Send me back,” he demanded hoarsely. “One more time. Send me to Hera.”

  “All right,” Cartophilus said after a pause. “If you want. Let’s go.” And later that night the old man fell into one of his syncopes.

  The more the Soul strives after the intelligible, the more it forgets … In this sense, therefore, we may say that the good soul is forgetful.

  —PLOTINUS, The Enneads

  HERA APPROACHED HIM wearing white. They were back at her Ionian temple, high above the sulphurous landscape of her volcano moon. Galileo’s heart leaped to see her. He extended his arms, but she stopped short of them, looking down at him with her amused expression. His heart knocked inside him like a child trying to escape.

  “So,” she said, “you escaped your fiery alternative.”

  “I did,” he said. “That time, anyway.” A flash of anger shocked him: “I never deserved it!”

  “No.”

  “And you—you’re still here!”

  “I’m still here. Of course.”

  “But what about that Galileo who burned? You sent me back to the fire, and it had already happened to me, even though when you sent me back I was younger than that.”

  She shook her head. “You still don’t understand. All the potentialities are entangled. They are all vibrating in and out of each other, all the time. In the e time they resonate. We saw that for a time, when we were in Jupiter. I did anyway.”

  “I did too.”

  “So there you have it.”

  Galileo threw up his hands. “So what did Ganymede think he was doing, then? Why did he want me to burn?”

  She led him to a bench and they sat on it side by side, overlooking the slaggy downslope of the yellow mountain. She took his hand. “Ganymede has an idea about time that he insists on even now. Whether he comes from our future or not is unclear. I took your suggestion and had a look at him with the mnemonic, and I think it may be true. I don’t recognize much that I saw from his childhood. The Ganymede period, however, was clear. It was as I suspected. He made an incursion into the Ganymedean ocean with a small group of supporters, and there he learned of the Jovian mind and the minds beyond. How he learned so much more than the Europans I don’t know, and maybe that’s another confirmation that he came back to us from a future time. But at that point he began making analepses using one of the entanglers, focusing on the beginning of science. He sees that start and the encounter with the alien consciousness as parts of a single whole, a situation that he has been trying for centuries to alter in both our times. These he believes are crux points in the organism—sensitivities where small changes can have big effects. I think his working theory is that the more scientific culture becomes, the better chance it will have to survive first contact with an alien consciousness. Anyway, what is certain is that he has made more analepses than anyone else. His brain is simply stuffed with these events, which are often traumas to him. He must think they help. He must think that since each one collapses the wave function of potentialities, it changes the sum over histories and therefore the main flow of events. So he made scores of bilocations—hundreds of them. It’s like he’s kicking the bank of the stream over and over again, trying to carve a new channel.”

  “And has he succeeded?” Galileo asked. “And—are the years that follow really worse if I am spared? Have billions really died because of it?”

  “Not necessarily.” She took his hand in hers. “There are more than two alternatives here, as everywhere. Every analepsis creates a new one, so there is a sense in which we can’t be sure what Ganymede has done, because we can’t see it. There are times where you are martyred. But we know there is also a stream of potentialities in which you succeeded in convincing the pope to your point of view, and the Church then took science under its wing and blessed it, even made it a tool of the Church.”

  “There is such a time?” Galileo asked, amazed.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to know. I thought if you knew, you would try for that outcome no matter what.”

  “Well of course! I did anyway!”

  “I know. But I didn’t want you to have any extra encouragement. Because that’s the potentiality cluster with the worst outcomes of all.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. When you succeed in a reconciliation, and religion dominates science in its earliest phase, you get the deepest and most violent low points in the subsequent histories. This is what Ganymede saw, and this is what he has insisted ever since. When you are burned and become a martyr to science, science more quickly dominates religion, and the subsequent low point is much reduced. It’s bad, but not as bad.”

  Galileo thought it over, confused by this newly proliferating vision of the past. “And so,” he said, “what happened after this time, then? This one I am in now?”

  “This time is an alternative, as they all are in their time. But this is what you and I, and everyone else in our strand, managed together. An analeptic introjection that made a big change.”

  “And is it better?”

  She looked him in the eye, smiled very slightly. “I think so.”

  Again Galileo considered it. “What happens to the me who burned, then? What happens to that Galileo now?”

  She said slowly, explaining again, “All the potentialities exist. When an analepsis creates a new temporal isotopy, it coexists with the others, all of them entangled. All together they make up the manifold, which shifts under the impact of the new potential, and changes, but continues too. Whether we can oxbow a channel and cause it to disappear entirely is an open question. Conceivable in theory, something people claim to have seen, but in practice hard to do. As you might know better than I, I suppose, because of your sessions with Aurora.”

  Galileo shook his head doubtfully. “So there is still a world in which Galileo is
burned as a heretic?”

  “Yes.”

  “But no!” Galileo said, rising from the bench to his feet. “I refuse to accept that. I am the sum of all possible Galileos, and all I ever did was say what I saw. None of us should burn for that!”

  She regarded him. “It has already happened. What would you do?”

  He considered, then said, “Your teletrasporta: I must beg you the use of it. The other box must be there in Rome on that day, I know that already.”

  She stood herself and looked down on him, her gaze serious. “You could die there. Both of you.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “All of us are one. I can feel it, they’re in my mind. In my mind I’m burning at the stake. You have the means for a return. So I have to do this.”

  Smoke had filled his lungs and was choking him by the time the fire reached his feet. Pain stuffed his consciousness, blasted it until there was nothing but it, and he almost swooned. If he could hold his breath he would faint, but he couldn’t. His feet were catching fire.

  Then through the smoke he saw the mass of distended faces break apart at the impact of a man on horseback riding through, his charge smashing people aside so that their roar panicked to a scream. The ring of Dominicans guarding the pyre bunched to repel this helmeted invader, but they all knew what happened when a horse struck men on foot, and before it reached them they broke and ran. The horse reared and twisted before the fire, disappeared behind Galileo. There was a slashing at the chains holding him that made their iron instantly hotter; then he was grabbed around the waist by the horseman, yanked up onto the bucking horse and thrown before the saddle. His ankles were apparently still chained to the stake, so that his feet twisted almost out of their sockets. But then they came free, and he bounced like a long sack on the horse’s flexing shoulders. Everything around him jumbled into a slurry of curses and screams, of a horse’s twisting flank and a sword flashing in smoke. His rescuer roared louder than all of them together as he mastered the horse and charged away. He caught a glimpse of a bearded lower face under the helmet, square mouth red with fury. As he lost consciousness he thought, at least I died dreaming that I saved myself.