Galileo's Dream (9 page)

The stranger grabbed Galileo by the arm and hustled him in the other direction. His allies closed behind them, and they raced up the steps two at a time. Galileo almost tripped, then felt himself being lifted by the people on each side of him. They held him under the elbows and carried him.

At the top of the steps, out of the hole of the amphitheater, they could suddenly see across the expanse of the blue city again, looking cold under its green-blue ceiling, the people on its broad strada so distant they were the size of mice. “To the ships,” the stranger declared, and took Galileo by the arm. As he hustled Galileo away, he said to him, “It's time to return you to your home, before they do something we will all regret. I'm sorry they would not listen to you. I think if you had been able to judge the situation, you would have sided with us and made our point clear. I'll call on you again when I am more sure you will be listened to. You are not done here!”

They came to the broad ramp rising out of the city, through its gates and onto the yellowy surface. People dressed in blue stood in their way, and with a roar the stranger and his group rushed at them. A brisk fight ensued, and Galileo, staggering in the absence of his proper weight, dodged around little knots of brawlers. If he had been dreaming, he would have happily started throwing punches himself, for in his dreams he was much more audacious and violent than in life. So it was a measure of how different this was from a dream, how real it was, that he held back. He wasn't even sure which side he should have been supporting. So he skidded through the fray as if on the frozen Arno, waving his arms as needed to restore his balance. Suddenly in his gyrations, the stranger and another man snatched him up by the arms and hustled him away.

Some distance from the melee, the stranger's companions had set up the big spyglass, and were making final adjustments to it. It was either the same one that had stood on Galileo's terrace, or one just like it.

“Stand next to it, please,” the stranger said. “Look into the eyepiece, please. Quickly. But before that—breathe this first—”

And he held a small censer up and sprayed a cold mist into Galileo's face.

The Phases of Venus

G
ALILEO WOKE LYING ON THE GROUND NEXT
to his spyglass, the stool tipped over beside him. The night sky was lightening in
the
east, and Mazzoleni was tugging at his shoulder.

“Maestro, you should go to bed.”

“What?”

“You were in some kind of a trance. I came out before, but I couldn't wake you.”

“I—I had a dream, I think.”

“It seemed more like a trance. One of your syncopes.”

“Maybe so.”

On the long list of Galileo's mysterious maladies, one of the most mysterious was a tendency to fall insensible for intervals that ranged
from minutes to three or four hours, his muscles rigid the entire time. His physician friend, the famous Fabrizio d'Acquapendente, had been unable to treat these syncopes, which in most people were accompanied by fits or racking seizures. Only a few sufferers like Galileo became simply paralyzed.

“I feel strange,” Galileo said now.

“You're probably sore.”

“I had a dream, I think. I can't quite remember. It was blue. I was talking with blue people. It was important somehow.”

“Maybe you spotted angels through your glass.”

“Maybe so.”

Galileo accepted the artisan's hand, and hauled himself up. He surveyed the house, the workshop, the garden, all turning blue in the dawn light. It was like something. “Marc'Antonio,” he said, “do you think it's possible that we could be doing something important?”

Mazzoleni looked doubtful. “Nobody else does what you do,” he admitted. “But of course it may just be that you're crazy.”

“In my dream it was important.” Galileo stumped over to the couch under the portico and threw himself down on it, pulled a blanket over him. “I have to sleep.”

“Sure, maestro. Those syncopes must be real tiring.”

“Leave me instantly.”

“Sure.”

Mazzoleni left and he drifted off. When he woke again it was the cool of early morning, sunlight hitting the top of the garden wall. The morning glory was a well-named flower. The blue of the sky had pale sheets of red and white pulsing inside it.

The stranger's old servant stood there before him, holding out a cup of coffee.

Galileo jerked back. On his face one could see the fear. “What are you doing here?” He began to remember the stranger's appearance the night before, but little beyond that. There had been a big heavy spyglass that he had sat on his stool to look through…. “I thought you were part of the dream!”

“I brought you some coffee,” the ancient one said, looking down and to the side, as if to efface himself. “I heard you had a long night.”

“But who are you?”

The old man shoved the cup even closer to Galileo's face. “I serve people.”

“You serve that man from Kepler! You came to me last night!”

The old one glanced up at him, lifted the cup again.

Galileo took it, slurped down hot coffee. “What happened?”

“I can't say. You were struck by a syncope for an hour or two in the night.”

“But only after I looked through your master's spyglass?”

“I can't say.”

Galileo regarded him. “And your master, where is he?”

“I don't know. He's gone.”

“Will he return?”

“I can't say. I think he will.”

“And you? Why are you here?”

“I can serve you. Your housekeeper will hire me, if you tell her to.”

Galileo observed him closely, thinking it over. Something strange had happened the night before, he knew that for sure. Possibly this old geezer could help him remember—or help him in whatever might come of it. Already it began to seem as if the ancient one had always been there.

“All right. I'll tell her. What's your name?”

“Cartophilus.”

“Lover of maps?”

“Yes.”

“And do you love maps?”

“No. Nor was I ever a shoemaker.”

Galileo frowned, then waved him away. “I'll speak to her.”

And so I came into the service of Galileo, intending (as always, and always with the same failure) to efface myself as much as possible.

In the days that followed, Galileo slept in short snatches at dawn and after dinner, and every night stayed up to look through his spyglass at Jupiter and the little stars circling it, his curiosity now tweaked by an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. He marked the four moons' positions
each night using the notation I, II, III, and
IV
, with I being the closest to Jupiter in the orbits he was now untangling, and IV the farthest away. Tracking and timing their movements gave him an increasingly confident sense of how long each took to circle Jupiter. All the expected signs of circular motion seen edge-on had manifested themselves. It was getting clearer what was going on up there.

Obviously he needed to publish these discoveries, to establish his precedence as discoverer. By now Mazzoleni and the artisans had made about a hundred spyglasses, but only ten of them were capable of seeing the new little planets; they became visible only through occhialini with magnifications of thirty times, and sometimes twenty-five when the grinding was lucky. (What else had been twenty-five or thirty times larger?) The difficulties in making a device this powerful reassured him; it was unlikely someone else would see the Jovian stars and publish the news before him. Still, it was best not to be slow about it. There was no time to lose.

“I'm going to make those bastard Venetians really regret their offer!” he declared happily. He was still furious at the senators for questioning his honesty in representing the spyglass as his invention. He took pride in his honesty, a virtue he wielded so vigorously as to make it a fault. He also hated their measly raise, which was not even to start until the new year, and now was looking more and more inadequate. And really, through all the years in Padua—eighteen now—he had kept in the back of his mind the possibility of a return to Florence.

Ignoring the little awkwardness that had developed the year before with Belisario Vinta, he wrote another florid note accompanying the finest spyglass he had, explaining that he was giving it to his most beloved student ever, now the grandissimo Grand Duke Cosimo. He described his new Jovian discoveries, and asked if it would be permissible to name his newly discovered little Jovian stars after Cosimo. And if so, if the grand duke would prefer him to name them the Cosmian Stars, which would merge Cosimo and Cosmic; or perhaps to apply to the four stars the names of Cosimo and his three brothers; or if they should together be named the Medicean Stars.

Vinta wrote back thanking him for the spyglass and informing him that the grand duke preferred the name Medicean Stars, as best honoring the family and the city it ruled.

“He accepted the dedication!” Galileo shouted to the household. This was a stupendous coup. Galileo hooted triumphantly as he charged around, rousing everyone and ordering that a fiasco of wine be opened to celebrate. He tossed a ceramic platter high in the air and enjoyed its shattering on the terrace, and the way it made the boys jump.

The best way to announce this dedication to the world was to insert it into the book he was finishing about all the discoveries he had made. He pressed hard to finish; the combination of work by both day and night left him irritable, but it had to be done. At night, working by himself, he felt enormously enlarged by all that lay ahead. Sometimes he had to take a break and walk around in the garden to deal with the thoughts crowding his head, the various great futures looming ahead of him like visions. It was only during the days when he flagged, slept at odd hours, snarled at the household and all that it represented. Scribbled at great speed on his pages.

He wrote the book in Latin so that it would be immediately comprehensible across all the courts and universities of Europe. In it, he described his astronomical findings in more or less chronological order, making it into a narrative of his discoveries. The longest and best passages were on the moon, which he also augmented with good etchings made from his drawings. The sections on the stars and the four moons of Jupiter were shorter, and mostly just announced his discoveries, which were startling enough not to need embellishment.

He told the story of his introduction to the idea of the occhialino or perspicillum with some circumspection:

A few strategic opacities there, but that was all right. He arranged with a Venetian printer, Tomaso Baglioni, for an edition of 550 copies. The first page, an illustrated frontispiece, said in Latin:

The first four pages following this great proem of a title page were filled by a dedication to Cosimo Medici that was exceptionally florid even for Galileo. Jupiter had been in the ascendant at Cosimo's birth, it pointed out;
pouring out with all his splendor and grandeur into the most pure air, so that with its first breath Your tender little body and Your soul, already decorated by God with noble ornaments, could drink in this universal power…. Your incredible clemency and kindness … Most Serene Cosimo, Great Hero … when you have surpassed Your peers You will still contend with Yourself, which self and greatness You are daily surpassing, Most Merciful Prince … from Your Highness's most loyal servant, Galileo Galilei
.