Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Here he was, though, like it or not. He'd lodged with Francesco Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador, from the middle of February to the second week of April. That wasn't ... so bad. But then the Inquisition decided he'd cooled his heels long enough. It ordered him to the palace that served as its headquarters and began to question him.

  Even now, things could have been worse. He understood that, and thanked God they weren't. The Inquisition housed him in the quarters usually used by a prosecutor, not in the cells where they kept most prisoners. He could stroll around the courtyard if he liked. When the inquisitors questioned him, they used only words—they didn't put him to the question. All the same, they had the authority to torture him if they chose to, and the threat that they might hung in the air.

  So yes, things could have been worse. But they also could have been better. He could have been free, for instance. This was what he got for trying to understand how the natural world worked?

  Yes. This was what he got.

  * * * *

  Sparrows hopped and fluttered in the courtyard. They hopped up to Galileo instead of fluttering away. People here fed them. They didn't net them and pluck them and bake them in pies. Galileo was fond of songbirds in pies, but he was also fond of the living birds. He ground a chunk of stale bread between his palms and scattered crumbs on the grass.

  Chirping excitedly, the sparrows fell on the feast. More little birds hurried toward Galileo. He smiled thinly. Beggars were all the same, whether they wore feathers or ragged cloaks. If you gave to a few, they expected you to give to everyone.

  He spread his hands, empty now. “Sorry, amici. That was all I had.”

  The birds flew away. But that wasn't because they understood what he said. Another man was approaching, and his red, flapping cardinal's robes had to be what made the birds take flight.

  Nodding to Galileo, the newcomer said, “You are Signor Galilei, is it not so?”

  “Yes, your Eminence.” Galileo bent to kiss the cleric's ring. “Please forgive me, sir, but I fear you have the advantage of me.” Whoever this fellow was, he wasn't one of the ten cardinals who'd been grilling him.

  “No reason for you to know me.” The churchman smiled. He was about Galileo's age. He had a long face and clever, melancholy eyes; he wore a neat white mustache and chin beard. His Italian, while accurate, was slow and gutturally accented. When he went on, he explained that: “My name is Sigismondo Gioioso—I translate the surname into your tongue. His Holiness the Pope summoned me from Vienna to help in the investigation of your case and in determining what should result from it.”

  “He did?” Galileo could have done without the honor, if that was what it was. “You have come a long way, your Eminence. Certainly my insignificant self is not worth such a journey.” Galileo was anything but the most modest of men. But he did not want this scholarly cleric from beyond the Alps focusing attention on him like a convex lens focusing sunlight.

  “Oh, but I believe you are, Signor Galilei,” Cardinal Gioioso said. “Not only for the beliefs you hold, but also for the reasons you have for holding them.”

  “I hold no beliefs contrary to those accepted as true by the holy Catholic Church,” Galileo said quickly. He had to say such things. He might be an old man, but he didn't want to die just yet, or to spend the rest of his days in some bleak and sordid prison cell, locked away not only from life but also from all possibilities of further research. No, he didn't want that one bit!

  Sigismondo Gioioso smiled at him. “I have read the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems with great interest and attentiveness. You are a fine writer, Signor—a fine writer indeed.”

  “You do me too much honor, your Eminence,” Galileo mumbled.

  “Do I? I think not,” Gioioso replied. “And your support for the Copernican hypothesis therein is eloquent, truly eloquent. Salviati has much the better of the argument with Simplicio, who follows the long-accepted Ptolemaic view. Even the name you gave Simplicio suggests that you are unlikely to agree with the ideas he expresses.”

  Not for the first time lately, Galileo wished he'd called Simplicio something—anything—else. “I fear I was trying to be too clever when I wrote,” he said. “Now that I look back on the book, I see I should have done a better job of balancing the arguments on both sides. I took a contrarian view, trying to make the worse case appear the better.”

  “That is what Aristophanes accused Socrates of doing,” Cardinal Gioioso said. “But Socrates did not accuse himself of the same thing.”

  “No doubt you are right,” said Galileo, who cared much less about Aristophanes’ views than about those of Aristotle—which, along with Ptolemy's, had become part of the Church's doctrinal underpinnings. The astronomer hurried on: “I hope you also noted that I clearly stated in the dialogue's conclusion that it was impossible, based on what we currently know, to choose between the two competing world systems.”

  “I most assuredly did note that, yes,” Sigismondo Gioioso said. Galileo winced in spite of himself. He'd never heard such devastating agreement in all his born days. The cardinal from Vienna continued, “An attentive reader might at that point be forgiven for doubting your complete sincerity.”

  “Do you think so, your Eminence?” Galileo exclaimed, as if the idea had never before occurred to him. As if? If only!

  “Well, yes, I am afraid I do, actually,” Gioioso answered. He didn't quite sound like a judge passing sentence—no, not quite. But then, instead of leaping on Galileo like a fierce dog, he shifted his ground: “What truly interests me, though, is how and why you have come to hold your, ah, interesting beliefs.”

  “Please, sir, these are the beliefs set forth in the Dialogue,” Galileo said. “They are not mine. Of necessity, they cannot be mine, for they contradict those held by the Church, of which I am, and am proud to be, a loyal son.”

  “Of course,” Cardinal Gioioso said—another agreement that undermined everything it claimed to agree with. “Would you be willing to talk with me about how you came to espouse these beliefs so strongly, even though you do not hold to them? As I say, that is what truly intrigues me.”

  “Talk with you?” Galileo asked cautiously. Sometimes the word meant what it said, no more and no less. Sometimes it was a euphemism for all the ingenuities the Inquisition could inflict on a man. Galileo didn't think Gioioso meant it that way ... but it wouldn't do to find himself mistaken.

  “Talk. That's all.” By the cardinal's reassuring tone—and by his slightly crooked smile—he knew what Galileo feared. Well, how could he not? These were nervous times for the Catholic Church. Copernicanism wasn't the only threat it faced. Lutheranism and Calvinism also tore at its vitals. Threatened by such a vast radical conspiracy, how could the Church be anything but vigilant in its struggle against misbelievers of all stripes?

  It couldn't—not if you asked any good and pious churchman.

  “Talk?” Galileo asked again.

  “Talk,” Sigismondo Gioioso said firmly. “May God be my witness, Signor—nothing more.” He crossed himself to seal the vow.

  “Well, then, your Eminence, I am at your service.” Galileo would have been at the cardinal's service in any case. But sometimes even the illusion of free will was pleasant.

  * * * *

  Cardinal Gioioso's room was no larger, no finer, than the one the Inquisition had granted to Galileo. The astronomer reminded himself once more how lucky he was to have the quarters he enjoyed, not the dark, dank ones so many prisoners of the Inquisition failed to enjoy. Luck, of course, was relative; he could have been back in Florence, doing what he wanted.

  “So good of you to join me, Signor,” the cardinal said, as if Galileo's arrival were altogether unconstrained. “Will you take some wine with me? And these little cakes are very tasty. They tempt me into the sin of gluttony—indeed they do.”

  “Grazie, your Eminence,” Galileo said. The cakes, rich with almond paste and honey, were as good as Cardinal Gioioso claimed. And the wine was s
weet and strong. Galileo wagged a finger at the prelate. “I think you are trying to make me drunk.”

  “In vino veritas? Is that what you think I am after?” Gioioso asked.

  “Truthfully, sir, I do not know what you are after,” Galileo replied. Not knowing worried him. With the ten cardinals of the Inquisition who had interrogated him before, he knew exactly what they wanted: an abjuration from him. He was willing to give them one. A man had to live. And, abjuration or not, thanks to the printing press too many copies of the Dialogue were out there for the Church to hope to suppress it. His ideas would live, even if his work ended up in the Index of Prohibited Books.

  “It is as I told you before,” Sigismondo Gioioso said. “I wish to discuss with you, not so much your beliefs, but your reasons for holding them.”

  “I am in your hands,” Galileo said. “What you want strikes me as curious, but I find myself in no position to complain.”

  “Which is to say, if the Holy Inquisition had not summoned you to Rome, you would sooner see me damned than give me the time of day,” Gioioso observed. In a different tone of voice, words like those might have meant torture or death or torture and then death. The cardinal from Vienna sounded world-weary and amused, not hot to suppress heresy. He sounded like that, yes. Whether how he sounded had anything to do with how he felt, Galileo did not know him well enough to guess.

  That being so, the astronomer hastened to point out the obvious: “You said this, your Eminence, not I.”

  “As Matthew tells us our Lord responded to Pontius Pilate,” Cardinal Gioioso said.

  “I am not our Lord, sir. Neither are you a Roman governor,” Galileo said earnestly. “And so I entreat you—please do not twist my words or my meaning.”

  “I am not trying to put you in fear, Signor,” Gioioso said. Trying or not, he was doing a good job. Maybe he wouldn't have, had Galileo and he met as man and man. Meeting as man and servant of the Inquisition ... The cardinal, plainly a clever man, must have realized the difficulty. Doing his best to put Galileo at ease, he waved to a couch against the far wall of his room. “As I promised before, no harm will come to you from this. Sit down, please. Make yourself comfortable. Lie down, if you would rather.”

  Galileo did lie down—the couch had no back, and he didn't feel like leaning against the painted plaster of the wall. Cardinal Gioioso dragged a chair over alongside the couch so they could talk conveniently. Then, instead of sitting down, he poured himself another cup of wine. When he raised a questioning eyebrow, Galileo nodded.

  “I thank you,” Galileo said after Gioioso gave him the fresh cup. “How many ordinary men can boast they have had a cardinal pour wine for them with his own hands?”

  “Whatever else you may be, you are not an ordinary man,” Sigismondo Gioioso said.

  Galileo waved that aside. “You know what I mean. How many secular men, I should say, can make that boast?”

  “Not an ordinary man,” Gioioso repeated, as if the astronomer hadn't spoken. “And part of what interests me is how you became so extraordinary. Tell me of your parents. Tell me of the family in which you grew up.” He steepled his fingertips, visibly composing himself to listen and to absorb whatever Galileo said.

  “I am the eldest of seven—I had two brothers and four sisters, though not all, sadly, remain among the living,” Galileo answered. “My father, God rest his soul, was among the best lutanists of his generation. He wrote on both the theory and the practice of music, and also on mathematics.”

  “So you sought to follow in his footsteps? To outdo him if you could?” Gioioso asked.

  “Actually, your Eminence, when I was young I thought of joining the priesthood, but my father had other plans for me. He hoped I would become a doctor. I was something of a musician in those days myself, but my father made it plain to me keeping afloat at that trade was far from easy,” Galileo said.

  “You would have ornamented the field of medicine. And you would assuredly have ornamented our holy Catholic Church,” Cardinal Gioioso said.

  “I also thought of becoming a painter,” Galileo remarked.

  “You were a butterfly,” Gioioso remarked.

  “I was,” Galileo agreed, “until I chanced to light on mathematics myself. I had just begun at the University of Pisa, and after that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. No—I knew what I had to do.”

  “Your father had written on mathematics.”

  “Si.”

  “But he did not want you following in his footsteps?”

  “Not one bit, your Eminence.”

  “Why not? Did you not resent him for trying to keep you away from something you proved to love?”

  “He told me a musician would always have trouble getting enough to eat, but a mathematician was sure to starve. How can you be angry at a man who wants you to have more food on your table than he had on his?”

  “Believe me, Signor, a great many men would find it the easiest thing in the world,” Sigismondo Gioioso said.

  “I hope I am not so dead to honor and respect as to become one of them,” Galileo said.

  “Yes—one always hopes,” Gioioso said enigmatically.

  “What do you mean, your Eminence?”

  Instead of answering, the cardinal said, “I notice you have told me next to nothing of your mother.”

  Galileo scratched his head. “What is there to say? She bore me. She raised me. She loved me. She put up with me—and I have always been a man who is not so easy to put up with.” He smiled; a sort of somber pride filled his voice. “I wish it were not so—it will cost me time in Purgatory if it does not send me to a warmer place yet. And you may be sure that I pray for her soul as I pray for my father's. May they both have found places in heaven.” He crossed himself.

  “Yes. May it be so,” Gioioso said—more for politeness’ sake, Galileo judged, than from any great sincerity. The prelate stroked his beard. “Now tell me, Signor, if you would be so kind ... did you ever have moments in your childhood when you wished your mother gave you a larger share of her affection?”

  “Did I what?” This time, Galileo laughed out loud. “How could I not? I told you, I had two brothers and four sisters. My mother was a busy woman—too busy, sometimes, for me.”

  “Indeed.” Galileo thought his words ordinary and commonplace, but Sigismondo Gioioso seemed to invest them with a special significance. “And your father—did you ever wish he were out of the way so your mother would be able to give you more love, more affection?”

  “We banged heads every so often, my father and I,” Galileo admitted. “What boy coming to manhood does not bang heads with his father? When you are young, you are sure you already know it all. And when you are a father, you know better, and you are sure your son is a stupid blockhead who will never learn anything. Was it not so with you, your Eminence?”

  Cardinal Gioioso's mouth bent—barely—into a thin smile. “Oh, it might have been,” he said. “But we were speaking of you. And I was not thinking so much of the time when your beard sprouted. I had in mind your younger days—much younger. Was there not a time when you wished your father would disappear so you could have your mother all to yourself?”

  Galileo scratched his cheek as he frowned in thought. “If there ever was, your Eminence, I must confess that I do not recall it.”

  “Don't worry about that,” the cardinal said in reassuring tones. “I have questioned a large number of men about these matters. Very few remember them ... at first. If you permit it, we shall have more discussions in times to come.”

  “If I permit it?” Galileo raised a grizzled eyebrow. “I am in the hands of the Holy Inquisition. How can I say no?” He knew what happened to people who resisted the Inquisition and its ministrations. He didn't want anything like that happening to him.

  But Gioioso answered, “If we are to go forward, I require cooperation that springs from your own free will. Force and coercion have no place here. I meant it when I said no harm would come to you. You may c
onverse with me or not, as you please.”

  He sounded sincere. Galileo, like any man who'd lived as long as he had, had met plenty of people who seemed sincere and proved to be anything but. Was this cardinal from beyond the Alps another one? Even if he was, the Inquisition couldn't do anything else to Galileo while the prelate talked with him.

  The calculation required no more than a heartbeat. “Of course I am at your service, your Eminence,” Galileo said.

  “Excellent!” Cardinal Gioioso's smile could be surprisingly warm. “We shall continue, then—at your convenience, of course.”

  “Of course,” Galileo said. He understood full well that at your convenience, here as so often, meant at my convenience. Life might have grown difficult had he not grasped that. Since he did, it wouldn't—not that way, anyhow.

  * * * *

  He soon found that the cardinal was an indefatigable questioner. Under such patient, persistent prodding, he dredged up more recollections of his very early life than he'd ever imagined he could. “May I ask you a question for a change, your Eminence?” he said after a while.

  “Certainly.” Gioioso's manner was placid.

  “Why do you want to know so much about the time before I lost my milk teeth?”

  “When you look at a building, at how it is made, at how the upper stories rise up, what do you do first?” Gioioso said. “You look at the foundations. From what is below, you can see how what is above has arisen.”

  “But many different buildings may be raised from the same kind of foundation,” Galileo objected.

  “True. But when we see a building of such-and-such a type, we may deduce that it should have had this kind of foundation, and could not possibly have been built up from that one,” the cardinal said. “Your early dealings with your mother and father helped put you on the course you took to manhood. Had they been different, you would be different today. Or does it seem otherwise to you?”

  Galileo wagged a finger at him. “I may have written a dialogue, but you have also read your Plato, your Eminence. And here I think you enjoy playing Socrates yourself.”