Galileo's Dream (26 page)

Aurora was looking down at the canal running up to their tower. Galileo, following her gaze, said, “What about the thing that lives in the ocean below you?” he inquired. “Have you tried giving these lessons to it? Have you learned its language, or even hailed it and gotten an answer?”

“We have communicated with it, yes. And the communication has been entirely mathematical, as you have guessed.”

“What other way would there be?”

“Exactly. So, first we tried to find out if the sentience perceives some of the same mathematical operations in its natural phenomena as we do.”

“Yes, of course. And what have you found?”

“It is in agreement with us on the existence and value of pi. That was a first success, established with simple diagrams and a binary number code. Also, it appears to pick out the first twenty or fifty prime numbers, and the usual sequences like the Fibonacci sequence and so on. In short, you may say that when it involves real numbers, or the simplest Euclidean geometry, we appear to be in substantial agreement with it.”

“But?”

“Well …” She hesitated. “When it comes to various higher mathematics, when we have been able to formulate clear questions, the sentience does not seem to recognize what we are saying. Quantum mechanics, for instance, appears not to register.”

Galileo laughed. “So it's like me!”

She regarded him without joining his laughter. He reconsidered.

He said, “Is this why you agreed to teach me? Because you think I am as sequestered as this thing in its ocean, so that you can use me to get ideas to communicate with it better?”

“Well,” the old woman said, “it's true that a different perspective on the problem might bring new insights. You are well remembered here on the Galilean moons, as you might well imagine. I believe Ganymede entangled you into this time for other reasons of his own, but some here think you might bring a certain freshness to our local problem too. Others feel your context is just a handicap, and that you can be of no help. In any case, while it's possible the Europan sentience exists in a mathematical moment roughly corresponding to your own, I think it is more likely that it senses principally in different manifolds than we do. That may form the basis of the problem. Mathematicians with a philosophical bent are having a heated discussion of the ontological and epistemological questions brought up by the situation, as you can imagine.”

“It may think it is dealing with a simpler mentality than it,” Galileo suggested ironically. “Like you think you are doing with me.”

“It is capable of generating very complicated geometrical patterns,”
she said, “conveyed to us by sound arranged in a binary code. But there are gaps that suggest it lives in some of the other manifolds.”

Galileo didn't know what this meant. “The creature must be blind, no? It was really dark in there.”

“It may sense parts of the spectrum not visible to us that would serve as equivalents to our sight. We continue to work out codes of communication in which it sings to us information that we can display as visual patterns for our own comprehension. So in that sense you could say that it sees, I think. Indeed, when we sent to it a schematic of the gravitational patterns created by all the bodies in the Jovian system, it sent us corrections that make us think it knows very subtle aspects of gravitation, aspects like gravitons and gravitinos, which are apparent only when seen in the context of the full manifold of manifolds theory. For us, working with that model is only a recent development. So this is rather thought provoking.”

Then there was an eruption of shouting at the vertical antechamber. It proved to be Hera and a retinue of followers, bulling their way through Ganymede's crowd. Hera was in the lead, angry and unstoppable.

“Oh dear,” Aurora said. “She appears unhappy.”

Galileo snorted. “Is she ever otherwise?”

Aurora laughed. Hera approached and loomed over them, her white arms thick, bare, muscular, and tensed, as if she were only just restraining herself from thrashing them both, and Aurora's assistants as well.

“I hope you have not been disturbed by this wandering ghost?” she inquired of Aurora.

“Not at all,” Aurora replied, looking amused. “It was our pleasure to converse with such a famous person.”

“Do you know that such conversations can be dangerous? That you may alter the manifold analeptically enough to change us all, perhaps right out of existence?”

“I don't think anything that happens to Galileo here could have that kind of impact,” Aurora said.

“You have no way of judging.”

“Measured inertias of temporal isotopies give me a grasp of the
chances involved,” Aurora said, in a tone that suggested Hera could form no such grasp.

“Ganymede is trying to use Galileo to change things,” Hera replied. “So he must think it works.”

“Perhaps so. But I don't think what happens to Galileo here is properly located to make any such change. Besides, Galileo has always had a remarkably strong sense of proleptic intuition. Indeed, when judged by that rubric, of anticipating future developments, I've read commentaries that rate him as the third smartest physicist of all time.”

“Third,” Galileo scoffed. “Who are these supposed other two?”

“The second was a man named Einstein, the first a woman named Bao.”

“A woman?” Galileo said.

Hera shot him a look so full of contempt and pity, disgust and embarrassment that Galileo cringed, unfortunately shifting his balance on the slick floor such that his feet shot out sideways and he crashed down. By chance his bounce off the floor returned him right to his feet, where he could only blush and smooth down his jacket sleeves as if nothing had happened.

“Come with me,” she said to him peremptorily.

He followed her, greatly apprehensive, but aware that if he didn't cooperate she would drag him away. “What is it?” he complained.

She glared at him. “Leave us,” she ordered her retainers, “and keep anyone else from following.”

She took him by the arm and pulled him with her as one would drag along a reluctant five-year-old. Under her fingers a shock tingled up his arm and all along that side of his body, from his ear to his foot.

Ganymede then emerged from a knot of his retainers on the other side of the terrace, and hurried over to them. Hera cursed under her breath and said to Galileo, “Stay put.”

She went to Ganymede and confronted him, and they argued in undertones that Galileo could not hear. When Hera returned to his side, she wore a look of grim satisfaction. “Come,” she said again, and pulled him across the terrace. “He's not supposed to be on Europa at all anymore, so he can't stop us.”

From the railing on this side of the terrace they looked down on a veritable maze of white rooftops cut by canals.

“Do you not remember what I showed you last time you were here?” she demanded of him.

“Yes, I remember!”

“Why did you come here then?”

“I wanted some answers, “Galileo said mulishly. “I told Ganymede to take me to someone who could give me answers, answers that
you
had not given me.”

She was not moved by this. “You can tell him to give you anything you want, but that doesn't mean you'll get it. Understand me: he wants you to end in just the way I showed you ending. In the fire.”

“Yes yes, but look. I took the preparation you gave me last time, but they made me breathe the mist you warned me against. I remembered part of what you showed me—certainly the, the essentials. So I went back and did everything I could to make sure that that event could never come to pass. But it didn't work. In fact it only made things worse! Now I have been forbidden even to mention the Copernican theory. And yet there it rests, at the base of everything else. It's God's truth, and a rather elementary truth at that—and we have finally perceived it, yet I can't say a word about it! If I say anything at all, that could be it. And I have enemies watching my every breath. I might as well cut my tongue out of my head!”

She shook her head. “You can find ways to say what you want to say. Meanwhile, you have to consider what will happen if your understanding is brought up to our time, and then you return to your own time. If you try to counteract that, and take the strong amnestics and forget everything, you will forget the fate you are trying to avoid. You may walk into your fiery alternative unaware. If, on the other hand, you take anamnestics like those I gave you before, and preserve your memory of this visit,
you will know too much
. Your work will be skewed, and you may change things in ways that would be disastrous to your future, and ours too. You will put yourself on the horns of a dilemma, or in the clutches of a double bind.”

“Can't you give me a preparation that would keep some memories and suppress others?”

“It doesn't work that way.”

“It seemed that it did. In my last few years, I remembered this, but it was only a very partial memory, like a dream. I remembered the fire, and you warning me, but it was all confused.”

“Possibly so, but there is no way of controlling it so finely as to be sure. Memory is very diffuse in the brain, it relies on multiple systems in concert. It's quite a feat to manipulate it as much as we do. You can't take the chance of knocking out too much.”

Galileo threw up his hands. “But I
want
to know things; I'm made to know things! And I don't see how knowing more can possibly harm me! If you are trying to help, as you say you are, then help! But don't help me by telling me to stay more ignorant, because I won't accept that. I'm sick of being told not to know things!”

She heaved a sigh, looking grim. “Prolepses are awkward,” she said. “I wish Ganymede had not done this to you. Now we need to make a plan. In your own time, you should certainly stop talking about the Copernican theory for a while. Bide your time and work on other things. It isn't as if you understand very much of basic physics, after all, as you now know all too well. You could focus on that. I tell you what—I'll give you an amnestic that will obscure short-term memory. It will allow you to retain what you remembered before this little tutorial, but make this trip's contents hard to recall. Hopefully that will serve to keep your part in the flow of events consistent.”

“I want to know,” Galileo said. “I don't see how it can hurt.”

“You don't understand—not us, not time, not yourself.”

Now Ganymede and his gang on the other side of the terrace were pushing Hera's people to the side, approaching Hera and Galileo in a swirl of tussling and curses. Hera put a forefinger under Galileo's nose.

“I'm
the one helping you to avoid your fate,” she reminded him as she took a pewter box from one of her retainers. “So listen to me. You can't be one thing here and another there. You need to knit your selves together. You either make yourself whole, or else die in the fire.”

The Celatone

B
ACK FROM
R
OME,
Galileo spent most of the year 1616 collapsed in his bed, exhausted and sick of the world. All the usual distempers made their appearance: rheumatism, back pains, dyspepsia, fainting spells, syncopes, catarrhs, nightmares, night sweats, hernias, hemorrhoids, bleeding from the skin and the nose. “If it's not one thing it's another thing,” La Piera would say.

The cock's crow started each day, followed by groans almost as loud from the master's bed. The servants understood these as the histrionics of a humorous man in the clutches of his black melancholy,
but poor little Virginia was frightened by them. She spent many a day running back and forth between the kitchen and his bedroom, ostentatiously nursing him.

Of course his moods had always varied. He had looked into this matter of temperament, and come to believe that Galen was better on it than Aristotle—not a surprise. Galen was the first he knew of to describe the humors—one of the few aspects of ancient medical knowledge that would certainly endure, for one saw evidence of them everywhere, all persons stuck under the rule of one humor or other—or occasionally, as with Sarpi, in a balance of them that led to perfect equipoise. For himself, Galileo Galilei, it appeared he was dominated by each of the four at different times: sanguine when his work was going well, choleric when he was attacked or insulted; melancholy often, as when thinking of his debts, or sailing home at sunset, or insomniac in the hours before dawn; and under all the others phlegmatic, somehow, in that his typical response to all his other states was to shrug them off and mulishly get back to work. To work through everything: his incredible tenacity was ultimately phlegmatic, although sanguine as well, and subject to choler. Up and down, side to side, thus he careened through the tumble of days, moving from one humor to the next, fully inhabiting each in its turn, unable to predict when any of them would strike—even the midnight insomnias, which sometimes instead of black melancholic could be so pure and serene.