Galileo's Dream (38 page)

Always Already

L
AID OUT IN THE GARDEN SHIVERING
, Galileo looked around himself. There he was, looking around himself. It was just before sunrise, at Bellosguardo. In the dawn light, the citrons on their branches glowed like little Ios.

Cartophilus was sitting on the ground beside him, wrapped in a blanket. He had thrown another one over Galileo's supine form. Galileo croaked at him; Cartophilus nodded and gave him a cup of watered-down wine. Galileo sat up and drank it, then gestured for more. Cartophilus refilled the cup from a jug.

Galileo drank some more. He blinked, looking around him, sniffing, then crumbling a clod of dirt in his hand. He regarded the citron bush curiously, leaning toward the big terra-cotta pot containing it.

“How long was I gone?”

“All night.”

“That's all?”

“Did it feel longer?”

“Yes.”

Cartophilus shrugged. “You were gone longer than usual.”

Galileo was staring at him.

Cartophilus sighed. “She didn't give you the amnestic.”

“No. They were too busy fighting. I left Hera on Io, sinking into lava! Do you know her?”

“I know her.”

“Good. I want to go back and help. Can you send me back now?”

“Not now, maestro. You need to eat, and get some rest.”

Galileo considered it. “I suppose I need to give her time to get out of that fix, anyway. If she can. But soon.”

Cartophilus nodded.

Galileo poked him with a finger. “This stranger of yours, the Ganymede—did you know he is a kind of Savonarola? That his cult is reviled by the rest of the Jovians, and that now they are fighting?”

“Yes, I'm aware of that.” Cartophilus gestured at the teletrasporta. “I can see here what happens to you there, if I stay in the complementary field. As for Ganymede, I am not one of his people anymore. I just tend the device. I stay with it. Things around Jupiter are always changing. The people in power aren't the same. Their attitude toward entanglement is not the same.”

“How long have you been keeping this end of the teletrasporta?”

“Too long.”

“How long?” Galileo insisted.

Cartophilus waggled his hand. “Let's not talk about it now, maestro. I've been up all night, I'm tired.”

Galileo yawned hugely. “Me too. I'm thrashed. Help me up. But later we are going to talk.”

“I'm sure.”

That winter Galileo's illnesses struck him worse than ever, and he stayed in bed for months, often writhing and moaning. Sometimes he shouted furiously, others he shuddered epileptically, or spoke in Latin
as if in conversation with someone invisible, sounding engaged and curious, surprised, humble, even supplicatory—all tones his voice never contained when he spoke to the living, when he was always so peremptory and sure.

“He speaks with the angels,” the servant Salvadore ventured. The boy was often too frightened to go into his room. Giuseppe thought it was funny.

“He just doesn't want to work,” La Piera muttered. She would barge in no matter his state, and demand that he eat, that he drink tea, that he lay off the wine. When he was conscious of her presence he would curse her, his voice hoarse and dry. “You sound just like my mother. My mother in the disgusting form of a cook shaped like a cannonball.”

“Now who sounds like your mother? Drink something or die whining.”

“Fuck off. Leave me. Leave the drink and go. I had a real life once! I got to speak with real people! Now here I am, trapped with a bunch of pigs.”

Some days he sat upright in bed and wrote feverishly, page after page. The things he said and wrote got stranger and stranger. In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he changed the subject abruptly and wrote:

Another time he got up from bed, where he had been only semiconscious, and went to his table saying: “Pardon me, I need to get this down,” in a soothing voice none of us had ever heard before, and wrote a new page in a letter to a correspondent named Dini—a page that read like the Kepler he had always laughed at:

After which he had returned to his bed and fallen comatose again. And there it was, in writing, him saying to a stranger that the sun was a living creature, eating and shitting, slinging the planets around itself by its rotation, like bangles extending from a top. Was this heresy, was it insanity? Could he not help himself? He had to know it was dangerous to commit such thoughts to print after Bellarmino's warning, but he seemed helpless to stop himself, under the spell of a compulsion no one could comprehend. He only slept a few hours every night, and babbled in his sleep.

He pulled himself out of bed one morning and went out to collar Cartophilus. Rough hands at the ancient one's neck: “Get out your teletrasporta, old man. I need to get back up there to Hera. Now.”

Cartophilus had no choice but to obey, but he didn't like it. “This is a bad idea, maestro. You need to have the other end ready to receive you.”

“Do it anyway. Something's wrong. Maybe up there too, but definitely here. Something's wrong in my mind.”

Cartophilus went to the closet where he slept and came back with the small but heavy pewter box that had replaced Ganymede's telescope some years before. He worked at its knobs for a time, muttering unhappily. “Get next to it,” he said.

Galileo sat next to the box, swallowing involuntarily. Where would she be now? What if the teletrasporta was at the bottom of a lake of liquid rock?

Nothing happened. “Come on,” Galileo said.

“I'm trying.” Cartophilus shook his head. “There's no response. It isn't reaching the other resonance box. I wonder if she disabled it.”

“I wonder if it sank into the lava,” Galileo said. “And her too.” He shuddered. “I need to go back! There's something wrong here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I … When I was there last, I got a mathematics tutorial from Aurora, do you know her? No? A wonderful mathematician, and she and
her machines were teaching me. They immerse you in the mathematics itself, it's like flying. You have done it?”

Cartophilus shook his head.

“Well, you should. But I saw they had immersions that teach you about the mathematicians of the past, so that for instance you could go see, or even inhabit, Archimedes, and Euclid, and Archytas, and there was one for me. And so I took it. I took that immersion. I was just curious to see what they would say about me. But it wasn't what I thought. It was more than a biography. You lived it, but all at once too. I saw my life! They had recorded it!”

Cartophilus sighed. “When they first made the entanglers, they did a lot of things, for years and years. Event engineering, mnemostics, all that. It took a while before people turned against them.”

“Well, I can see why they did.” Another shudder. “I saw too much. It wasn't just learning a—a bad fate, off in the distance. It was … everything.”

“Why didn't you stop it?”

“I did! But not before I saw too much. Now I know what will happen. I mean, day by day. I'm sure I know all of it, but I can't quite bring it to mind until it happens. But it bulks there behind every moment, every thought.” His grip on Cartophilus's arm was like an iron clamp. “While I was up there, it didn't seem to matter. Now it does.”

“So do something different,” Cartophilus suggested.

He almost lost his arm for it, Galileo clutched him so. “I've tried,” Galileo moaned, “but it doesn't work. The different thing is what I already did. I follow myself as if from a couple of steps behind. It's horrible.”

“Like a
Rückgriffe?”

“What's that?”

“That's German for something like ‘retroceptions.'”

Galileo shook his head. “It's more like foresight.”

“Syndetos
means bound together, so an asyndeton is when the connections between things go away. The French call
that jamais vu.”

“No. I am all too connected.”

“Déjà vu, then. The French have a whole system. Already seen.”

“Yes. That would be one way to say it. Although it isn't seeing so much as feeling.
Already felt
. Always already. Here—try Hera again. Get me there.”

Cartophilus attended to his device. “There's still no response,” he said after a while. “She may be busy with other matters. Let's try it again later, maestro. You're killing my arm.”

Galileo let him go and slumped down beside him, bereft. “Damn. I hope she's all right.” He heaved a big sigh. “This will kill me faster than anything.”

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Galileo struggled on with his new sickness, his ability that was a disability, alone.

Some of his friends were like La Piera, and wondered if his illnesses were not perhaps a little too convenient. For the fact was, in the first months of 1619 more comets had appeared in the night skies, alarming everyone. For a while no one spoke of anything else, and the unearthly phenomena filled all the horoscopes and the pages of the
Avvisi
. Of course all the astronomers and philosophers had to weigh in with an opinion on these new apparitions, and naturally, as before, everyone waited to hear what the notorious astronomer of the Medicis would say about them.

But the Dominicans were watching, the Jesuits were listening; everything he wrote or said would eventually get reported to the Holy Office of the Index, and to the Holy Congregation. As with the comets that had shown up a few years previously, it was not obvious if or how they might fit into either the Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmologies—but they were undeniably in the sky. How convenient, then (everyone said), that Galileo was so sick he could not even go out on his terrace in the evening and take a look! Galileo, the greatest astronomer in the world! What a chicken!

Silence from Bellosguardo.

Life limped along, day after tumbled day. Galileo had never looked so ill before. “Everything has already happened,” he would complain,
surveying his visitors as if they were all new acquaintances. “Everything is happening for the second time. Or perhaps for the millionth time, or simply infinitely.” Or he would insist, even to strangers: “I am out of phase. I am living in the wrong potential time. She sent me back to the wrong self. It's an interference pattern, the one where the two equal waves cancel each other out! That's what's happening to me! I'm not really here.”

A letter was going to come from Maria Celeste. It came, and as he had always done, he took out the little stiletto he used as a letter opener and watched himself cut the wax of the seal neatly away. He had unfolded it in just the way he unfolded it, and he read what he had read.
Of the candied citron which you ordered, I have only been able to make a small quantity. I feared the citrons were too shriveled for preserving, and so it has proved. I send two baked pears for these days of vigil
. He tasted the fruit he had been going to taste, and it tasted the way it was going to taste when he tasted it. It had an underlying bitterness, as with all his life. But she was also going to have put a rose in the basket, as he saw when he saw them.
But as the greatest treat of all I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season
.

Indeed the time was out of joint, things blooming out of season. Really there was nothing but asynchronous anachronism. Time was a manifold full of exclusions and resurrections, fragments and the spaces between fragments, eclipses and epilepsies, isotopies all superposed on one another and interweaving in an anarchic vibrating tapestry. And since to relive it at one point was not to relive it at another, the whole was unreadable, permanently beyond the mind. The present was a laminate event, and obviously the isotopies could detach from each other, slightly or greatly. He was caught in a mere splinter of the whole, no matter how entangled with the rest of it. Caught in what his poor brilliant daughter called
the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life
, the words of her letter jumping off the page, the phrase something he had always read, like a prayer said every night of his life. Each moment reiterated. The darkness of this short winter of our mortal life.