Galileo's Dream (63 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
For Piccolomini this brought back memories of his boyhood lessons, and of poor Cosimo, long since dead. “And how then did you deal with it, maestro?”
Galileo insisted on demonstrating the truth of his old finding with a model before proceeding any further. He made use of the glass urinal in his room for the model's bottom mold, and the cathedral artisans made a wooden inner mold to fit it, filling the wood with shot to make it heavy. Then it was placed in the urinal such that, as Piccolomini said, “you couldn't fit a piaster between them.” After that Galileo had a flask of quicksilver brought in, and he poured it into the gap between the glass and wood; and though the weight of the quicksilver was less than a twentieth that of the shot-filled wooden form, the form
rose up a finger or two higher than it had been. Almost all the quicksilver pooled at the bottom of the urinal.
“Even Mercury's silver urine gives wings to things,” Galileo joked, head cocked to the side.
Piccolomini laughed obligingly. “A very clear demonstration,” he said happily. “But then, this being the case, strange though it seems, what should we do about casting our bell?”
Galileo shoved down on the wooden mold with his hand. “The inner mold, heavy or not, has to be fixed in place like the outer one. To prevent it rising, you will need to bolt it to a pavement below. Use the heaviest beams and bolts, and all should be well.”
So they did as he had recommended, and the bell was cast successfully. Regarding the bright new thing when it emerged from its massive mold, for a moment Galileo appeared content.
But that night he howled more painfully than ever.
Cartophilus got up and found him collapsed over a railing, in the stairwell of the bell tower overlooking the piazza where the famous horse race was soon to be run. He was barking into the dark space of the stairwell, then groaning in a kind of harmony as the echoes bounced up and down it. He had been weeping so hard he could barely see; the light of the ancient servant's candle lantern seemed to hurt his eyes.
“You must not have had your glass of milk before bed,” Cartophilus said, sitting down heavily beside him. “I told you never to neglect that.”
“Shut up,” Galileo moaned piteously. “Talking of milk when they've thrown me in hell.”
“It could be worse,” Cartophilus pointed out.
Silence.
Then Galileo growled. It was his wounded bear growl, and the old servant, surprised to hear it, could not help but smile. Once in the Bel-losguardo years the two of them had witnessed a bearbaiting in Florence, and late in the fight the baiters had poked the bloodied bear in the back, to get it to come out of its corner and fight the dogs, and it had briefly glanced up over its shoulder at its tormentors and growledâa low sound, bitter and resigned, that stood the hair upright on the necks of everyone who heard it. On the way home Galileo
had imitated the sound over and over. “That's me,” he told Cartophilus when he got it to his satisfaction. “That's my growl. Because they've got me cornered, and they'll make me fight.”
Now, these many years later, the same sound vibrated out of his hulk and filled the stairwell. “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ⦔ By his glance at Cartophilus, the old servant knew Galileo was reminding him of that moment in Florence, his recognition of the ursine fate awaiting him.
“Yes yes,” Cartophilus murmured, as he tugged the old man back toward his room. “But it could be worse, that's all I'm saying. You need to remember that. You need to pick yourself up somehow and carry on.”
Galileo clutched him by the arm. “Send me back,” he demanded hoarsely. “One more time. Send me to Hera.”
“All right,” Cartophilus said after a pause. “If you want. Let's go.” And later that night the old man fell into one of his syncopes.
The more the Soul strives after the intelligible, the more it forgets ⦠In this sense, therefore, we may say that the good soul is forgetful.
âP
LOTINUS
,
The Enneads
H
ERA APPROACHED HIM
wearing white. They were back at her Ionian temple, high above the sulphurous landscape of her volcano moon. Galileo's heart leaped to see her. He extended his arms, but she stopped short of them, looking down at him with her amused expression. His heart knocked inside him like a child trying to escape.
“So,” she said, “you escaped your fiery alternative.”
“I did,” he said. “That time, anyway.” A flash of anger shocked him: “I never deserved it!”
“No.”
“And youâyou're still here!”
“I'm still here. Of course.”
“But what about that Galileo who burned? You sent me back to the fire, and it had already happened to me, even though when you sent me back I was younger than that.”
She shook her head. “You still don't understand. All the potentialities are entangled. They are all vibrating in and out of each other, all the time. In the
e
time they resonate. We saw that for a time, when we were in Jupiter. I did anyway.”
“I did too.”
“So there you have it.”
Galileo threw up his hands. “So what did Ganymede think he was doing, then? Why did he want me to burn?”
She led him to a bench and they sat on it side by side, overlooking the slaggy downslope of the yellow mountain. She took his hand. “Ganymede has an idea about time that he insists on even now. Whether he comes from our future or not is unclear. I took your suggestion and had a look at him with the mnemonic, and I think it may be true. I don't recognize much that I saw from his childhood. The Ganymede period, however, was clear. It was as I suspected. He made an incursion into the Ganymedean ocean with a small group of supporters, and there he learned of the Jovian mind and the minds beyond. How he learned so much more than the Europans I don't know, and maybe that's another confirmation that he came back to us from a future time. But at that point he began making analepses using one of the entanglers, focusing on the beginning of science. He sees that start and the encounter with the alien consciousness as parts of a single whole, a situation that he has been trying for centuries to alter in both our times. These he believes are crux points in the organismâsensitivities where small changes can have big effects. I think his working theory is that the more scientific culture becomes, the better chance it will have to survive first contact with an alien consciousness. Anyway, what is certain is that he has made more analepses than anyone else. His brain is simply stuffed with these events, which are often traumas to him. He must think they help. He must think that since each one collapses the wave function of potentialities, it changes the sum over histories and therefore the main flow of events. So he made scores of bilocationsâhundreds of them. It's like he's kicking the bank of the stream over and over again, trying to carve a new channel.”
“And has he succeeded?” Galileo asked. “Andâare the years that follow really worse if I am spared? Have billions really died because of it?”
“Not necessarily.” She took his hand in hers. “There are more than two alternatives here, as everywhere. Every analepsis creates a new one, so there is a sense in which we can't be sure what Ganymede has done, because we can't see it. There are times where you are martyred. But we know there is also a stream of potentialities in which you succeeded
in convincing the pope to your point of view, and the Church then took science under its wing and blessed it, even made it a tool of the Church.”
“There is such a time?” Galileo asked, amazed.
“Yes.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I didn't want you to know. I thought if you knew, you would try for that outcome no matter what.”
“Well of course! I did anyway!”
“I know. But I didn't want you to have any extra encouragement. Because that's the potentiality cluster with the worst outcomes of all.”
“No!”
“Yes. When you succeed in a reconciliation, and religion dominates science in its earliest phase, you get the deepest and most violent low points in the subsequent histories. This is what Ganymede saw, and this is what he has insisted ever since. When you are burned and become a martyr to science, science more quickly dominates religion, and the subsequent low point is much reduced. It's bad, but not as bad.”
Galileo thought it over, confused by this newly proliferating vision of the past. “And so,” he said, “what happened after this time, then? This one I am in now?”
“This time is an alternative, as they all are in their time. But this is what you and I, and everyone else in our strand, managed together. An analeptic introjection that made a big change.”
“And is it better?”
She looked him in the eye, smiled very slightly. “I think so.”
Again Galileo considered it. “What happens to the me who burned, then? What happens to that Galileo now?”
She said slowly, explaining again, “All the potentialities exist. When an analepsis creates a new temporal isotopy, it coexists with the others, all of them entangled. All together they make up the manifold, which shifts under the impact of the new potential, and changes, but continues too. Whether we can oxbow a channel and cause it to disappear entirely is an open question. Conceivable in theory, something people claim to have seen, but in practice hard to do. As you might know better than I, I suppose, because of your sessions with Aurora.”
Galileo shook his head doubtfully. “So there is still a world in which Galileo is burned as a heretic?”
“Yes.”
“But no!” Galileo said, rising from the bench to his feet. “I refuse to accept that. I am the sum of all possible Galileos, and all I ever did was say what I saw. None of us should burn for that!”
She regarded him. “It has already happened. What would you do?”
He considered, then said, “Your teletrasporta: I must beg you the use of it. The other box must be there in Rome on that day, I know that already.”
She stood herself and looked down on him, her gaze serious. “You could die there. Both of you.”
“I don't care,” he said. “All of us are one. I can feel it, they're in my mind. In my mind I'm burning at the stake. You have the means for a return. So I have to do this.”
Smoke had filled his lungs and was choking him by the time the fire reached his feet. Pain stuffed his consciousness, blasted it until there was nothing but it, and he almost swooned. If he could hold his breath he would faint, but he couldn't. His feet were catching fire.
Then through the smoke he saw the mass of distended faces break apart at the impact of a man on horseback riding through, his charge smashing people aside so that their roar panicked to a scream. The ring of Dominicans guarding the pyre bunched to repel this helmeted invader, but they all knew what happened when a horse struck men on foot, and before it reached them they broke and ran. The horse reared and twisted before the fire, disappeared behind Galileo. There was a slashing at the chains holding him that made their iron instantly hotter; then he was grabbed around the waist by the horseman, yanked up onto the bucking horse and thrown before the saddle. His ankles were apparently still chained to the stake, so that his feet twisted almost out of their sockets. But then they came free, and he bounced like a long sack on the horse's flexing shoulders. Everything around him jumbled into a slurry of curses and screams, of a horse's twisting flank and a sword flashing in smoke. His rescuer roared louder than all of them together as he mastered the horse and charged away. He caught a glimpse of a bearded lower face under the helmet, square mouth red
with fury. As he lost consciousness he thought,
at least I died dreaming that I saved myself
.
And came to in Count da Trento's cellar in Costozza, moaning. He hurt all over. His companions were still on the stone floor.
“Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please, please! Wake up!”
“Quaâ? Quaâ?”
His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over the flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else's groans, muffled as if through a wall. He wanted to speak but couldn't. The groans were his.
Hera's voice, then, in his ear, as he looked down the blasted mountainside of Io, clutching her arm, laid out on the bench.
“You died on the floor of the cellar, that first time, along with your two companions. Now we'll take the dead body from there and put it back on the stake, to fill your absence in the fiery alternative. Here in Costozza, the rescued one will survive his trauma, and live on. But understand: there will always be this little whirlpool in you, between the worlds.”
“So I live it all again?”
“Yes.”
Galileo groaned. “Do I have to know it?” he asked. “Can you let me forget?”
“Yes, of course. But it will be in you anyway. The potentiality is always there. And sometimes therefore you will remember it, despite the amnestics. Because memory is deep, and always entangled, and while you live, it lives.”
“That's fine, as long as I don't remember it.”
“Yes. But even when you don't, you do. It lies below your feelings.”
“And the others? The other Galileos, in the other potentialities?”
“Please understand. They are always there. There are so many.”
“Will they end? Will it ever end?”
“End? Do things end?”
Galileo groaned again. “So,” he said, “even if I saved myself an infinite
number of times, there would still be an infinite number of me that I hadn't saved. I will live through them again and again. Make the same discoveries and the same mistakes. Suffer the same deaths.”
“Yes. And sometimes you'll know that. Sometimes you'll feel it. This is your paradox of the infinities within infinities, which you will have discovered by feeling it in yourself. You live in Galileo's paradox. You'll hold your wife and mother apart as they try to kill each other, and it will strike you as horrible, then ridiculous, then beautiful. Something to love. This is the gift of the paradox, the gift of memory's spiral return.”
“Always in me. Even if I forget.”
“Yes.”
“Then let me forget. Give me the amnestic.”
“Is that what you want? It will mean losing your conscious memory of a lot of this that you have seen out here.” Gesturing at Io's slaggy grandeur, and at Jupiter's enormity. And at herself.
“But not really,” Galileo said, “as you have just told me. It will still be in me. So, yes. I have to. I can't stand to know about the others. I would have to keep going back and trying to change things, like Ganymede. I can't face that. But I can't face the bad alternatives eitherâall the deaths, all the burning. It isn't right. Soâso I need to forget, to go on.”
“As you wish.”
She gave him a pill. He swallowed it. She had slipped another one in the mouth of the Galileo there on the floor of the poisonous cellar, he was sure; a Galileo who would therefore live through all that followed that moment again, in ignorance, just as he had already; or at least until the stranger arrived. When it would all begin again.
“So I didn't really do anything by rescuing him,” he said. “I didn't change anything.”
“We made this eddy in time,” she said gently, and touched him.