Galileo’s Dream

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Galileo has little strength of judgement wherewith to control himself, so that he makes the climate of Rome extremely dangerous to himself, particularly in these times, when we have a Pope who hates geniuses.

Eventually Galileo took the ambassador’s hint, or decided on his own, and announced he was returning to Florence. Cardinal Farnese hosted the farewell banquet in his honour, and accompanied him in his trip north as far as Caprarola, the country villa of the Farnese, where Galileo was invited to rest a night in luxury. Galileo carried with him a written report he had requested and received from Cardinal del Monte, addressed to Cosimo and Picchena. The Cardinal had finished his tribute with the words, Were we still living under the ancient republic of Rome, I am certain that a statue would have been erected in his honour on the Capitol- perhaps next to the statue of Marcus Aurelius-not a bad companion in fame. No wonder Galileo’s head had been turned. The visit to Rome was a complete success, as far as he knew.

Things continued that way after he got back to Florence. He was feted in fine style by Cosimo and his court, and it was clear that Cosimo was extremely pleased with him; his Roman performance had made Cosimo’s patronage look very discriminating indeed.

The Medici youth was no longer so young; he sat at the head of his table like a man used to command, and the boy Galileo remembered so well was no longer evident. He looked quite a bit the same, physically: slight, a bit pale, very like his father in his features, which was to say long-nosed and narrow headed, with a noble forehead. Not a robust youth, but now much more sure of himself, as only made sense: he was a prince. And he like everyone else had read his Machiavelli. He had given hard commands, and the whole duchy had obeyed them.

‘Maestro, you have set the Romans on their heels,’ he said complacently, offering a toast to the room. ‘To my old teacher, the wonder of the age!’

And the Florentines cheered even louder than the Romans had.

Soon after his return, Galileo got involved in a debate concerning hydrostatics: why did ice float? His opponent was his old foe Colombe, the malevolent shit who had tried to hang scriptural objections around his neck and thus cast him into hell. Galileo was anxious to stick the knives in this man while his Roman victories were fresh in everyone’s mind, and went at the contest like a bull seeing red, yes. But then he was frustrated by Cosimo, who ordered him to debate with such insignificant enemies in writing only, speaking over such a gadfly’s head to the world at large. Galileo did that, writing as usual at great length, but then Cosimo ordered him to debate the issue orally with a Bolognan professor named Pappazoni, whom Galileo had just helped to get his teaching position at Il Bo. This was like staking down a lamb to be killed and eaten by a lion, but Galileo and Pappazoni could only play their parts, and Galileo could not help enjoying it, as it was only a verbal killing after all.

Then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came through Florence on his way to Bologna. Cardinal Gonzaga also happened to be in the city, and so Cosimo invited both of them to attend a repeat performance of Galileo’s debate on floating bodies, to be held at a court dinner on 2nd October. Papazzoni again made a reluctant appearance, and after a feast and a concert, and much drinking, Galileo again slaughtered him to the roaring laughter of the audience. Then Cardinal Gonzaga stood and surprised everyone by supporting Papazzoni; but Barberini, smiling appreciatively, perhaps remembering their warm meeting back in the spring in Rome, took Galileo’s side.

It was therefore another triumphant evening for Galileo. As he left the banquet, well after midnight, and long after the sacrifice of Pappazoni, Cardinal Barberini took him by the hand, hugged him, bade him farewell, and promised they would meet again.

The next morning, when Barberini was to leave for Bologna, Galileo did not show up to see him off, having been unexpectedly detained by an illness he had suffered in the night. From the road Barberini wrote a note to him:

I am very sorry that you were unable to see me before I left the city. It is not that I consider a sign of your friendship as necessary, for it is well known to me, but because you were ill. May God keep you not only because outstanding persons such as yourself deserve a long life of public service, but because of the particular affection that I have and always will have for you. I am happy to be able to say this, and to thank you for the time that you spent with me.

Your affectionate brother,

Cardinal Barberini

Your affectionate brother! Talk about friends in high places! To a certain extent it seemed he had a Roman patron now to add to his Florentine one.

All was triumph. Indeed it would be hard to imagine how things could have gone better in the previous two years for Galileo and his telescope: scientific standing, social standing, patronage in both Florence and Rome-all were at their peak, and Galileo stood slightly stunned on top of what had proved a double anno mirabilis.

But there were undercurrents and counterforces at work, even on that very morning when Galileo did not show up to see off Cardinal Barberini. Galileo had been ill, yes: because a syncope had struck him when he got home from the banquet the night before. Cartophilus had hopped down from the trap in front of their house in Florence, had stilled the horse, and opened the gate; and there in the little yard stood the stranger, his massive telescope already placed on its thick tripod.

In his crow’s Latin the stranger said to Galileo, ‘Are you ready?’

Chapter Seven The Other Galileo (#ulink_229c3337-1877-5b57-bc59-5a42030664ab)

You are given a light to know evil from good,And free will, which, if it can endureWithout weakening after its first bout with fixed Heaven,

If it is believed in, will conquer all it meets later.So if the present world strays from its course,The cause is in you; look for it in yourself.

-DANTE, Purgatorio, Canto XVI

‘Yes, I’m ready,’ Galileo replied, his blood jolting through him so that his fingers throbbed. He was afraid!

But he was curious too. He said to the stranger, ‘Let’s go up to the altana.’

Cartophilus carried the massive telescope up the outside stairs, bent double under the load. ‘Local gravity getting to you at last?’ the stranger asked acerbically, in Latin.

‘Someone has to carry the load,’ Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. ‘Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fucking dilettante.’

The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt the sensation that this had happened before.

And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.

Jupiter was a big banded ball near the centre of the glass, strikingly handsome, colourful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis-and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.

But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.

Who was frowning heavily. ‘Let me check it.’ He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.

‘Not good,’ Cartophilus said.

‘Maybe it’s Hera,’ the stranger said darkly.

Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.

They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked through the lens again. Jupiter was still in the middle of it. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. ‘This is not just a telescopio,’ he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels…‘It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.’

The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, ‘The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?’

The stranger re-examined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.

‘Ah. Try it again,’ the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. ‘Take another look.’

Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side. III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.

Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black-or so it seemed-because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.

The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity: I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones, of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terracotta and blood red, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter-all piled on all, one colour pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.

The overlayering of so many colours made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.

He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. On the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.

He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.

On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.

‘What’s this!’ the stranger exclaimed angrily.

‘You know what this is, Ganymede,’ said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, ‘Welcome to Io, you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your travelling companion.’

She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.

‘You stole our entangler,’ Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. ‘What are you trying to do, start a war?’

Hera glared at him. ‘As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, the factions are at each other’s throats.’

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ said Ganymede coldly.

As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the extraordinary idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation sounded suspiciously defensive to Galileo, and was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plough blade. ‘This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!’

‘You’re the one who kidnapped him,’ Hera replied. ‘I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.’

Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort, his face flushed a dark red. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’

‘No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.’

‘No!’

At this the people standing behind Hera moved forward en masse. They wore clothes similar to hers, and were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards in particular, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favour.

Hera nodded at them, and said to Ganymede, ‘Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.’

‘I can’t allow this!’

‘It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.’

‘This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.’

Hera said, ‘We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and we decide what happens here.’ She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.

Hera said to Galileo. ‘Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?’

‘Not quite,’ Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry…

With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, ‘Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.’

She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and held it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her. Galileo was interested to hear what she might say; and he already knew that she was going to get what she wanted no matter what. He had seen wilful women before.

She was at least a hand taller than he, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again; after that he held onto her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy), calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.

‘You are well named,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.’

When they reached the far side of the little temple she paused. He let go of her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on, a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.

Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. ‘This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that rupture crack in the side of the shield, down there steaming.’ She pointed. ‘Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.’

Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. ‘It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.’

‘It is hot. In many places if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside Io, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.’

‘Tides?’ Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. ‘But surely there are no oceans here.’

‘By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.’ She grimaced expressively. ‘We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.’