“Yes.” Her expression was grim.
“Has it been wounded?”
“Yes. As you can hear. Aurora tells me its messages have gone away.”
“Is she here in this quarter of the city? Can you take me to her?”
Hera nodded. “She’ll send an avatar.”
The people standing in the amphitheater looked crushed, heartbroken. Clearly the painful sounds affected everyone. Aurora herself suddenly appeared before them, also stricken, her nose to a screen before her as she tapped at the buttons on her table, muttering to herself, or to the alien beneath them.
“What’s happened?” Galileo exclaimed to her.
“Here—ohhh—”
“What?”
“Can’t you see? Look there!” Tapping at the screen at her hands, without ever moving her face. It looked like she wanted to dive through the screen. She held on to her desk’s edge as if to the railing of a ship. She moaned, oblivious of those around her.
“Its articulation is bad, the signals off sequence,” she whispered. “The equations are wrong. It’s as if it’s been drugged, or …”
“Or injured,” Galileo said. “Damaged.”
“Yes. It must be. The explosion included a big electromagnetic pulse, very powerful, especially in the area just under the blast. What did they do? And why did they do it?”
Galileo turned away. He had met a man once who had been struck on the left side of the head by a falling hoist beam in the Venetian Arsenale. The beam had sheared off; this was one of the incidents that had made him interested in strength of materials. The man had recovered in most senses, and been able to speak, but his speech was slurred, and he stuttered, babbled, forgot himself, repeated himself; and all with a huge grin, rendered horrible by his babble.
Behind them the meeting of Europans was ongoing, and the argument had become ferocious, with several people shouting at once. Gali leo saw again that through the centuries people had never gotten less emotional. Hera was one of the shouters. “I’m going to kill them,” she was insisting furiously. “The first mind we have ever encountered, and they attacked it!”
Chirrups and oscillating moans now came from the globe. The faces of the Europan councilors blanched or reddened, according to their humors. Too many people were shouting at once. In the cacophony nothing could be distinguished.
Then the gallery turned purple. The transparent aquamarine tones, so green in their blue, all shifted through aquamarine to a dusky purple.
Everyone stopped talking and stared around. Hera’s gaze fixed on Galileo: “What’s this?” she said.
A part of him warmed to see that out of all of them she had asked him, but the cold dread in his heart was not touched. “Let’s go outside and see,” he suggested, gesturing at their ceiling, which now pulsed through various shades of grape. He took her by the hand, pulled her toward the broad opening that led up to the surface.
In Europa’s light pull, she was quickly moving faster than he could go. After a moment they ran side by side. Then she took his hand again and pulled him along, and he could do nothing but focus on keeping his feet. She dragged him along as his mother had once dragged him out of church, after he had started to laugh at the sight of a swinging lamp. They burst through the diaphanous air barrier and ran up the broad ramp, out from under its ceiling and into the black night of the world. Overhead hung giant gibbous Jupiter—
But it was not the Jupiter he had grown used to during their flights among the Galileans. The Great Red Spot had been joined by scores more red spots, spinning in every band, from pole to pole. Most of the spots were horizontally linked, like bloodstones in necklaces. It was as if the planet had caught a pox, each of the new spots a livid brick red oval, spinning slowly but distinctly, squiggling like wet paint. Some spots straddled bands, and threw their convoluted boundaries into wild spurts and splashes of ruddy color. The dominant color of the stupendous planet had shifted from yellow to a plague of various reds, ranging from brick to blood. The light in the city below had therefore shifted from greens to purples.
Hera, head canted back, staggered and cried out at the sight. She grasped his shoulder to keep on her feet.
“What is it?” she cried.
“It’s Jupiter,” Galileo said stupidly, but then clarified what he meant. “It’s Jupiter itself, thinking. Like the thing underneath us, you see? The bands and the swirls have always been its thoughts. Now it’s angry. Or grieving.”
“But why?”
“Because!” Galileo glanced at her in surprise; she was staring wildly at him. “Because we killed its daughter,” he suggested.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Two Worlds
The die is cast, and I am writing the book to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.
—JOHANNES KEPLER, Harmonies of the World
HE WOKE SO STIFF HE COULD NOT MOVE, feeling the pressure of full bowel and full bladder, which seemed to be in competition with each other to shove their way out of his second asshole. He was in his bed. Cartophilus was staring him in the face with his peculiar look—either knowing or intensely curious, it was impossible for Galileo to say.
“What?” Galileo croaked.
“You’ve been entangled, maestro.”
“Yes.” He thought about it while he made the effort to roll into a sitting position. “You know what happens to me when I’m gone, isn’t that right, Cartophilus?”
“Yes. I see it here.” He gestured at his device.
“So you saw?”
Cartophilus nodded unhappily. “It keeps getting worse. That must have been quite a noise. All of you were groaning and weeping near the end. It got so bad, I decided to bring you back. I hope I was right.”
“I don’t know.” Galileo tried to hold on to what had happened. Life seen by lightning bolts—”I’ll have to go back, I think.”
Then La Piera swept in with a basket of bread and citrons, followed by Giuseppe and Salvadore, who carried between them a pot of hot mulled wine flavored with grenadine. They in turn were followed by kitchen girls carrying bowls and cups and plates and implements, and flowers in vases. By way of several slow and articulated movements, groaning at each, Galileo stood. He stared at the faces surrounding him as if he had never seen them before. The syncope this time, La Piera told him, had lasted two days. He had to be starving.
“First help me out to the jakes,” he ordered the boys. “I need to make room for food first. God help me not to shit my guts out.”
In the days that followed, he was very subdued. “Things aren’t clear,” he complained to Cartophilus. “I remember it only in bits and pieces. I think Hera must have done something to my mind. I can’t make it hold together.”
But he wrote one last passage to add to Il Saggiatore before sending it off for publication in Rome. The added passage was a curious thing, unlike anything he had written before:
Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man endowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed, and he observed with great admiration the happy method by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird, he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude.
The very next day he happened to pass by a small hut within which he heard similar tones, and in order to see whether this was a flute or a bird he went inside. There he found a boy who was holding a bow in hi
s right hand and sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood such that he drew from this a variety of notes, and most melodious ones too, without any blowing. Now you who participate in this man’s thoughts and share his curiosity may judge of his astonishment. Yet finding himself now to have two unanticipated ways of producing notes and melodies, he began to perceive that still others might exist.
His amazement was increased when upon entering a temple he heard a sound, and upon looking behind the gate discovered that it came from the hinges as he opened it. Another time, led by curiosity, he entered an inn expecting to see someone lightly bowing the strings of a violin, and instead saw a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet and drawing forth a pleasant tone from that. Then he observed that wasps, mosquitoes, and flies do not form single notes by breathing, as did the birds, but produce their steady sounds by swift beating of their wings. And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he understood how sounds were produced.
Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist, when he believed that he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself plunged deeper than ever into ignorance and bafflement. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other part of it. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath. Thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature, he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to complete ignorance, so that when asked how sounds were created, he answered trembling that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.
I could illustrate with many more examples Nature’s bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means we could never think of without our senses and our experiences to teach us—and sometimes even these are insufficient to remedy our lack of understanding. The difficulty of comprehending how the cicada forms its song, even when we have it singing to us right in our hands, ought to be more than enough reason for us to decline to state how comets are formed or anything else.
When Cesi read this addition to the new book he was puzzled, and wrote back to ask what it meant. Was it a way of saying that Coperni-canism might not be the correct explanation for the movement of the planets after all—the cicada’s song representing therefore something like the music of the spheres?
Galileo wrote back tersely. I know certain things which have been observed by no one but myself. From them, within the limits of my human wisdom, the correctness of the Copernican system seems incontrovertible.
Maffeo Barberini becoming pope had been a miracle; him making his nephew Francesco into a cardinal just three days after Francesco had joined the Lincean Academy was another miracle. The year before, Galileo had helped Francesco to get his doctorate from the University of Pisa, for which favor his uncle the new pope had sent Galileo a gracious letter of thanks. Now Francesco was one of Urban’s closest advisors and confidants.
Then another of Galileo’s disciples, and one of his most enthusiastic supporters, a young man named Giovanni Ciampoli, was appointed to the powerful position of papal secretary. This almost defied belief, given Ciampoli’s grandiloquent self-importance relative to his actual accomplishments and station. He was a rooster, in fact, and yet now he was gatekeeper to the pope and in his company every day—advising, conversing, even reading aloud to him as he ate his meals. Ciampoli read Il Saggiatore to him, in fact, and afterward wrote to Galileo and the Lynxes to say that Urban had often laughed out loud as he listened to it.
And not just the pope was reading Il Saggiatore, it seemed, but everyone in Rome—the literati, the virtuosi, the philosophers, the Jesuits, and everyone else with an interest in intellectual matters. It was the book of the hour; it had completely transcended the original question of the comets, or any of the individual scientific controversies Galileo had gotten embroiled in. It was a rock that people were using to shatter the heavy, somnolent, resentful conformity of the Pauline years. Someone had spoken freely at last, and in the vernacular, about all the new things being discovered. High Barberinian culture was born, emerging like an Athena. Galileo was no longer alone, or part of a faction, but the leader of a movement. With Urban VIII on the Throne of Peter, anything was possible.
Again, however, Galileo’s trip to Rome was delayed by illnesses, and not all of them his own. Urban VIII was so exhausted by his intense campaign for the papacy that he retired into the Vatican for over two months. By the time he was well enough to receive supplicants and visitors, and Galileo had recovered from his own ailments enough to travel, it was the spring of 1624.
But finally the time came. On his last day at Bellosguardo, Galileo rode his mule over to San Matteo to say good-bye to Maria Celeste.
She knew perfectly well why he had to go. She felt that this new pontiff was a direct answer to her prayers, an intercession from God in their favor; she was the one who had first called it a “miraculous conjunction,” giving Galileo both the idea and the phrase. In her letters to him, she had revealed her ignorance of courtly protocol by expressing the hope that he would write Urban VIII to congratulate him on his ascension, not understanding that one at Galileo’s level could not address directly someone so much higher, but must express thanks and best wishes through an intermediary, which Galileo had of course done, using for the purpose Cardinal Francesco Barberini, as he had explained to her in his return letter.
Now Maria Celeste clung to him in her usual way, trying not to cry. Just in the way that she held him, he could feel that no one had ever loved him so intensely. And so of course she always hated it when he went away.
“Are you sure I can’t ask His Holiness to give you all some property?” he said, trying to distract her.
But Maria Celeste said, “What we need is better spiritual guidance! These so-called priests they have inflicted on us, well—you know what they have done. It’s really too much. If we could only have a decent priest, a real priest.”
“Yes yes,” Galileo said. “But not perhaps some land that you could rent? Or an annuity?”
Maria Celeste frowned her quick frown. This was not the kind of thing one asked the pope for, her look said. “I’ll ask the abbess,” she temporized.
Back at Bellosguardo, making his final preparations, a letter from her was brought to him by the convent’s servant Geppo. Please ask Urban for a real priest, it reiterated. Someone educated, and at least somewhat pure of spirit.
Galileo cursed as he read this. There on the page lay his daughter’s beautiful Italian script, the big loops inclining in perfect diagonals to the northeast and northwest, if it had been a map; a true work of art, as always, written by candle in the middle of the night, after the day’s chores were finally done and she had some time to herself. In so many of these beautiful letters, she excused herself for falling asleep as she wrote, and it often took several nights for her to compose one. She apologized also for mentioning the most pressing physical need of the moment, for begging a blanket, or his oldest hen to thicken their broth. And yet now she asked him to ask the new pope for a better spiritual advisor.
“I see the way it is,” he said gloomily as he stared through her letter. “In order to be a Poor Clare and yet not go mad, you have to believe it all, utterly and to the depths of your soul. Otherwise despair would drown you.”
As it had Arcangela, and several other of the sisters, including the poor abbess. Maybe you could even say that most of them were sunk into despair, weighed down by hunger and cold and illness, while Maria Celeste buoyed herself with her belief, and held the rest of them up with her o
therworldly goodness. Galileo muttered sulphurously as he considered his two daughters, stuck in the same situation and thereby illustrating a truly Aristotelian either-or in their response to it. Neither was quite sane; but Maria Celeste was beautiful. A saint.
Later, in Rome, when he made the request she had asked for, he also asked for a sinecure for his son Vincenzio, combined with a papal indulgence that would legitimize his birth. This too was granted. The sinecure gave the youth sixty crowns a year, but since it came with the requirement that he perform some religious exercises, he refused to accept it. At this news, Galileo threw up his hands. “I’ve done my duty by these people!” he roared. “They won’t get another scudi from me, not another quattrini. Family, what a fraud! Blood is no thicker than water, as you see when you cut yourself.”
“When it congeals it gets thicker,” Cartophilus pointed out.
“Yes, and when it dries it sticks to you. And so family is the scab on a wound. I’m sick of it. I renounce them all!”
Cartophilus ignored this, knowing it was just talk. And by then there were more pressing problems.
Unfortunately the Grand Duchess Christina was not convinced of the necessity of this trip to Rome, and did not want to pay for it. The new Medici ambassador to Rome, a Francesco Niccolini, cousin to the previous ambassador but one, was informed in a letter from the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II that Galileo was not invited to stay at the embassy or at the Villa Medici. So Galileo had to make arrangements to stay with his ex-student Mario Guiducci, who lived near the church of Santa Maria Maddalena.
This was the first sign that the mirabile congiunture was not quite as miraculous as it had seemed—or that it was already disjuncting, in the way of many a spectacular but brief astrological conjunction.
The second sign of disjunction was far worse. He was still on his way to Rome, resting at Cesi’s villa in Acquasparta, when the news came that Virginio Cesarini, that brilliant and melancholy young cardinal, had died.