GALILEO’S
DREAM
Kim Stanley Robinson

The Muses love alternatives.

- VIRGIL, Eclogues, Book III

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter One The Stranger

Chapter Two I Primi Al Mondo

Chapter Three Entangled

Chapter Four The Phases of Venus

Chapter Five The Other

Chapter Six A Statue Would Have Been Erected

Chapter Seven The Other Galileo

Chapter Eight Parry Riposte

Chapter Nine Aurora

Chapter Ten The Celatone

Chapter Eleven The Structure of Time

Chapter Twelve Carnival On Callisto

Chapter Thirteen Always Already

Chapter Fourteen Fear of the Other

Chapter Fifteen The Two Worlds

Chapter Sixteen The Look

Chapter Seventeen The Trial

Chapter Eighteen Vehement Suspicion

Chapter NineteenEppur Si Muove

Chapter Twenty The Dream

Authors Note

Acknowledgments

Other Books By Kim Stanley Robinson

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One The Stranger

All of a sudden Galileo felt that this moment had happened before-that he had been standing in the artisans’ Friday market outside Venice’s Arsenale and felt someone’s gaze on him, and looked up to see a man staring at him, a tall stranger with a beaky narrow face. As before (but what before?) the stranger acknowledged Galileo’s gaze with a lift of the chin, then walked toward him through the market, threading through the crowded blankets and tables and stalls spread all over the Campiello del Malvasia. The sense of repetition was strong enough to make Galileo a little dizzy, although a part of his mind was also detached enough to wonder how it might be that you could sense someone’s gaze resting on you.

The stranger came up to Galileo, stopped and bowed stiffly, held out his right hand. Galileo bowed in return, took the offered hand and squeezed; it was narrow and long, like the man’s face.

In guttural Latin, very strangely accented, the stranger croaked, ‘Are you Domino Signor Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at the University of Padua?’

‘I am. Who are you?’

The man let go of his hand. ‘I am a colleague of Johannes Kepler. He and I recently examined one of your very useful military compasses.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Galileo said, surprised. ‘I have corresponded with Signor Kepler, as he probably told you, but he did not write to me about this. When and where did you meet him?’

‘Last year, in Prague.’

Galileo nodded. Kepler’s places of residence had shifted through the years in ways Galileo had not tried to keep track of. In fact he had not answered Kepler’s last letter, having failed to get through the book that had accompanied it. ‘And where are you from?’

‘Northern Europe.’

Alta Europa. The man’s Latin was really strange, unlike other transalpine versions Galileo had heard. He examined the man more closely, noted his extreme height and thinness, his stoop, his intent close-set eyes. He would have had a heavy beard, but he was very finely shaved. His expensive dark jacket and cloak were so clean they looked new. The hoarse voice, beaky nose, narrow face, and black hair made the man seem like a crow turned into a man. Again Galileo felt the uncanny sensation that this meeting had happened before. A crow talking to a bear-

‘What city, what country?’ Galileo persisted.

‘Echion Linea. Near Morvran.’

‘I don’t know those towns.’

‘I travel extensively.’ The man’s gaze was fixed on Galileo as if on his first meal in a week. ‘Most recently I was in the Netherlands, and there I saw an instrument that made me think of you, because of your compass, which, as I said, Kepler showed me. This Dutch device was a kind of looking glass.’

‘A mirror?’

‘No. A glass to look through. Or rather, a tube you look through, with a glass lens at each end. It makes things look bigger.’

‘Like a jeweller’s lens?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those only work for things that are close.’

‘This one worked for things that were far away.’

‘How could that be?’

The man shrugged.

This was interesting. ‘Perhaps it was because there were two lenses,’ Galileo said. ‘Were they convex or concave?’

The man almost spoke, hesitated, then shrugged again. His stare went almost cross-eyed. His brown eyes were flecked with green and yellow splashes, like Venice’s canals near sunset. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know.’

Galileo found this unimpressive. ‘Do you have one of these tubes with you?’

‘Not with me.’

‘But you have one?’

‘Not of that type. But yes. But not with me.’

‘And so you thought to tell me about it.’

‘Yes. Because of your compass. We saw that among its other applications, you could use it to calculate certain distances.’

‘Of course.’ One of the compass’s main functions was to range cannon shots. Despite which very few artillery services or officers had ever purchased one. Three hundred and seven of them, to be precise, over a period of twelve years.

The stranger said, ‘Such calculations would be easier if you could see things further away.’

‘Many things would be easier.’

‘Yes. And now it can be done.’

‘Interesting,’ Galileo said. ‘What is your name again, signor?’

The man looked away uneasily. ‘I see the artisans are packing to depart. I am keeping you from them, and I must meet a man from Ragusa. We will see each other again.’

With a quick bow he turned and walked along the tall brick side wall of the campiello, hurrying in the direction of the Arsenale, so that Galileo saw him under the emblem of the winged lion of St Mark which stretched in bas relief over the lintel of the great fortress’s entryway. For a second it looked as if one bird-beast were flying over another. Then the man turned the corner and disappeared.

Galileo turned his attention back to the artisans’ market. Some of them were indeed leaving, in the afternoon shadows folding up their blankets and putting their wares into boxes and baskets. During the fifteen or twenty years he had been advising various groups in the Arsenale, he had often dropped by the Friday market to see what might be on display in the way of new tools or devices, machine parts and so on. Now he wandered around through the familiar faces, moving by habit. But he was distracted. It would be a good thing to be able to see distant objects as if they were close by. Several obvious uses sprang to mind immediately. Obvious military advantages, in fact.

He made his way to one of the lensmakers’ tables, humming a little tune of his father’s that came to him whenever he was on the hunt. There would be better lenses in Murano or Florence; here he found nothing but the usual magnifying glasses. He picked up two, held them in the air before his right eye. St Mark’s lion couchant became a flying ivory blur. It was a poorly done bas relief, he saw again with his other eye, very primitive compared to the worn Roman statues under it on either side of the gate.

Galileo put the lenses back on their table and walked down to the Riva San Biagio, where one of the Padua ferries docked. The splendour of the Serenissima gleamed in the last part of the day. On the riva he sat on his usual post, thinking it over. Most of the people there knew to leave him alone when he was in thought; he could get furious if disturbed. People still reminded him of the time he had shoved a bargeman into the canal for interrupting his solitude.

A magnifying glass was convex on both sides. It made things look larger, but only when they were a few fingers from the glass, as Galileo knew very well. His eyes, often painful to him, had in recent years been losing their sharpness for nearby things. He was getting old: a hairy round old man, with failing eyesight. A lens was a help, especially if ground well.

It was easy to imagine a lens grinder in the course of his work holding up two lenses, one in front of the other, to see what would happen. He was surprised he hadn’t done it himself. Although, as he had just discovered, it didn’t do much. He could not immediately say why. But he could investigate the phenomena in his usual manner. At the very least, for a start, he could look through different kinds of lenses in various combinations, and simply see what he saw.

There was no wind today. The ferry’s crew rowed slowly along the Canale della Giudecca and onto the open lagoon, headed for the fondamente at Porta Maghere. The captain’s ritual cursing of the oarsmen cut through the cries of the trailing seagulls, sounding like lines from Ruzante: you girls, you rag dolls, my mother rows better than you do-‘Mine definitely does,’ Galileo pitched in absently, as he always did. The old bitch still had arms like a stevedore. She had been beating the shit out of Marina until he had intervened, that time the two had fought; and Galileo knew full well that Marina was no slouch when it came to landing a punch. Holding them apart, everyone screaming…

From his spot in the ferry’s bow he faced the setting sun. There had been many years when he would have spent the night in town, usually at Sagredo’s pink palazzo, ‘The Ark’, with its menagerie of wild creatures and its riotous parties; but now Sagredo was in Aleppo on a diplomatic assignment, and Paolo Sarpi lived in a stone monk’s cell, despite his exalted office, and all the rest of Galileo’s partners in mischief had moved away or changed their night habits. No, those years were gone. They had been good years, even though he had been broke (as he still was). Work all day in Padua, party all night in Venice. Thus his rides home had usually been on a dawn barge, standing in the bow buzzing with the afterglow of wine and sex, laughter and sleeplessness. On those mornings the sun would pop over the Lido behind them and pour over his shoulders, illuminating the sky and the mirror surface of the lagoon, a space as simple and clear as a good proof: everything washed clean, etched on the eye, glowing with the promise of a day that could bring anything.

Whereas coming home on the day’s last barge, as now, was always a return to the home fire of his life’s endlessly tangled problems. The more the western sky blazed in his face, the more likely his mood was to plummet. His temperament was volatile, shifting rapidly among the humours, and every histrionic sunset threatened to make it crash like a diving pelican into the lagoon.

On this evening, however, the air was clear, and Venus hung high in a lapis lazuli dusk, gleaming like some kind of emblem. And he was still thinking about the stranger and his strange news. Could it be true? If so, why had no one noticed before?

On the long dock up the estuary he debarked, and walked over to the line of carts starting out on their night journeys. He hopped on the back of one of the regulars that went to Padua, greeting the driver and lying on his back to watch the stars bounce overhead. By the time the cart rolled past Via Vignali, near the centre of Padua, it was the fourth hour of the night, and the stars were obscured by cloud.

With a sigh he opened the gate that led into his garden, a large space inside the L the big old house made. Vegetables, vine trellises, fruit trees: he took a deep breath to absorb the smells of the part of the house he liked best, then steeled himself and slipped into the pandemonium that always existed inside. La Piera had not yet entered his life, and no one before her could ever keep order.

‘Maestro!’ one of the littlest artisans shrieked as Galileo entered the big kitchen, ‘Mazzoleni beat me!’

Galileo smacked him on the head as if driving a tomato stake into the ground. ‘You deserved it, I’m sure,’ he said.

‘Not at all, maestro!’ The undeterred boy got back to his feet and launched into his complaint, but did not get far before a gaggle of Galileo’s students had surrounded him, begging help with a problem they were to be tested on next day in the fortifications course at the university. Galileo waded through them to the kitchen. We don’t understand, they wailed contrapuntally, though it appeared to be a simple problem. ‘Unequal weights weigh equally when suspended from unequal distances having inversely the same ratio as the weights,’ he intoned, something he had tried to teach them just the previous week. But before he could sit down and decipher their professor Mazzoni’s odd notation, Virginia threw herself in his arms to recount in officious detail how her younger sister Livia had misbehaved that day. ‘Give me half an hour,’ he told the students, picking up Virginia and carrying her to the long table. ‘I’m starving for supper, and Virginia is starving for me.’

But they were more afraid of Mazzoni than they were of him, and he ended up reviewing the relevant equations for them, and insisting they work out the solution for themselves, while eating the leftovers from their dinner, all the while bouncing Virginia on his knee. She was light as a bird. He had banned Marina from the house five years before, a relief in many ways, but now it was up to him and the servants to raise the girls and find them a way in the world. Inquiries at the nearby convents, asking for prenovitiate admissions, had not been well-received. So there were some years yet to go. Two more mouths, lost among all the rest. Among thirty-two mouths, to be exact. It was like a hostel in Boccacio, three storeys of rooms all over-occupied, and every person there dependent on Galileo and his salary of five hundred and twenty florins a year. Of course the nineteen students boarding in house paid a tuition fee plus room and board, but they were so ravenous he almost always fed them at a loss. Worse, they cost time. He had priced his military compasses at five scudi each, with twenty more charged for a two-month instructional period in house on the Via Vagnali, but considering the time it took from him, it had become clear that he made each sale at a loss. Really the compasses had not turned out as he had hoped.

One of the house boys brought him a small stack of letters a courier had brought, which he read as he ate, and tutored, and played with Virginia. First up was another letter from his sponge of a brother, begging money to help support him and his large family in Munich, where he was trying to make a living as a musician. Their father’s failure in that same endeavour, and the old dragon’s constant excoriation of him for it, had somehow failed to teach his brother Michelangelo the obvious lesson that it couldn’t be done, even if you did have a musical genius, which his brother did not. He dropped the letter on the floor without finishing it.

The next one was worse: from his sister’s unspeakable husband Galetti, demanding again the remainder of her dowry, which in fact was Michelangelo’s share, but Galetti had seen that the only chance for payment was from Galileo, and it was a family obligation. If Galileo did not pay it, Galetti promised to sue Galileo yet again; he hoped Galileo would remember the last time, when Galileo had been forced to stay away from Florence for a year to avoid arrest.

That letter too Galileo dropped on the floor. He focused on a half-eaten chicken, then looked in the pot of soup hanging over the fire, fishing around for the hunk of smoked pork that ballasted it. His poor father had been driven to an early grave by letters just like these, and by his Xantippe ferreting them out and reading them aloud fortissimo. Five children, and nothing left even to his eldest son, except a lute. A very good lute, it was true, one that Galileo treasured and often played, but it was no help when it came to supporting all his younger siblings. And mathematics was like music in this, alas: it would never make enough money. 520 florins a year for teaching the most practical science at the university, while Cremonini was paid a thousand for elaborating Aristotle’s every throat-clearing.

But he could not think of that, or his digestion would be ruined. The students were still badgering him. Hostel Galileo rang with voices, crazy as a convent and running at a loss. If he did not invent something a little more lucrative than the military compass, he would never escape his debts.

This caused him to remember the stranger. He put Virginia down and rose to his feet. The students’ faces turned up to him like baby birds jammed in a nest.

‘Go,’ he said with an imperious wave of the hand. ‘Leave me.’

Sometimes, when he got really angry, not just exploding like gunpowder but shaking like an earthquake, he would roar in such a way that everyone in the house knew to run. At those times he would stride cursing through the emptied rooms, knocking over furniture and calling for people to stay and be beaten as they deserved. All the servants and most of the students knew him well enough to hear the leading edge of that kind of anger, contained in a particular flat disgusted tone, at which point they would slip away before it came on in full. Now they hesitated, hearing not that tone, but rather the sound of the maestro on the hunt. In that mood there would be nothing to fear.

He took a bottle of wine from the table, polished it off, kicked one of the boys in order to tip the balance of their judgement toward flight. ‘Mazzoleni!’ he bellowed. ‘MAT! ZO! LEN! EEEEEEEEEE!’

Well, no earthquake tonight; this was one of the good sounds of the house, like the cock crowing at dawn. The old artisan, asleep on the bench by the oven, pushed his whiskery face off the wood. ‘Maestro?’

Galileo stood over him. ‘We have a new problem.’

‘Ah.’ Mazzoleni shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond, looked around for a wine bottle. ‘We do?’

‘We do. We need lenses. As many as you can find.’

‘Lenses?’

‘Someone told me today that if you look through a tube that holds two of them, you can see things at a distance as if they were nearby.’

‘How would that work?’

‘That’s what we have to find out.’

Mazzoleni nodded. With arthritic care he levered himself off the bench. ‘There’s a box of them in the workshop.’

Galileo stood jiggling the box back and forth, watching the lamps’ light bounce on the shifting glasses. ‘A lens surface is either convex, concave, or flat.’

‘If it isn’t defective.’

‘Yes yes. Two lenses means four surfaces; so there are how many possible combinations?’

‘Sounds like twelve, maestro.’

‘Yes. But some are obviously not going to work.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Flat surfaces on all four sides are not going to work.’

‘Granted.’

‘And convex surfaces on all four sides would be like stacking two magnifying lenses. We already know that doesn’t work.’

Mazzoleni drew himself up: ‘I concede nothing. Everything should be tried in the usual way.’

‘Yes yes.’

This was Mazzoleni’s stock phrase for such situations. Galileo nodded absently, putting the box down on the work-shop’s biggest table. He reached up to dust off the folios lying aslant on the shelf over it; they looked like guards who had died on watch. While Mazzoleni gathered lenses scattered in pigeonholes around the workshop, Galileo lifted down the current working folio, a big volume nearly filled with notes and sketches. He opened it to the first empty pages, ignoring the rest of the volumes above, the hundreds of pages, the twenty years of his life mouldering away, never to be written up and given to the world, the great work as lost as if it were the scribblings of some poor mad alchemist. When he thought of the glorious hours they had spent working with the inclined planes they had built, a pain stuck him like a needle to the heart.

He opened an ink bottle and dipped a quill in it, and began to sketch his thoughts about this device the stranger had described, figuring out as he did how to proceed. This was how he always worked when thinking over problems of motion or balance or the force of percussion; but light was peculiar. He did not sketch any pattern that looked immediately promising. Well, they would simply try every combination, as Mazzoleni had said, and see what they found.

Quickly the ancient artisan knocked together some little wooden frames they could clamp different lenses into. These could then be attached to the ends of a lead tube Mazzoleni found in a box of odds and ends. While he did that Galileo laid out their collection of lenses by type, fingering each, holding up two at a time and peering through them. Some he gave to Mazzoleni to attach to the ends of the tube.

They only had the lamplit workshop to look at, and the area of the garden and arbour illuminated by the house windows; but it was enough to check for possibilities. Galileo looked at the lenses in the box, held them in the air. Inward, outward: the images blurred, went absent, grew diffuse, even made things smaller than what one saw with the eye alone. Although an effect the reverse of what one wanted was always suggestive.

He wrote down their results on the open page of the work book. Two particular convex lenses gave the image upside down. That cried out for a geometrical explanation, and he noted it with a question mark. The inverted image was enlarged, and sharp. He had to admit to himself that he did not understand light, or what it was doing between the lenses in the tube. He had only ventured to give classes on optics twice in seventeen years, and had been unhappy both times.

Then: hold up two lenses, look: and the potted citron at the edge of the garden appeared distinctly larger in the glass closest to his eye. Green leaf lit from the side by lantern light, big and sharp-

‘Hey!’ Galileo said. ‘Try this pair,’ he told Mazzoleni. ‘Concave near the eye, convex at the far end of the tube.’

Mazzoleni slotted the lenses into the frames and gave the tube to Galileo, who took it and pointed it at the first tree branch in the arbour, illuminated by the lit windows of the house. Only a small part of the branch appeared in the tube, but it was definitely enlarged: the leaves big and distinct, the bark minutely corrugated. The image was slightly blurred at the bottom, and he shifted the outside frame to tilt the glass, then rotated it, then moved it further out on the tube. The image became sharper still.

‘By God it works! This is strange!’

He waved at the old man. ‘Go to the house and stand in the doorway, in the lamp light.’ He himself walked through the garden out into the arbour. He trained the tube on Mazzoleni in the doorway. ‘Mother of God.’ There in the middle of the glass swam the old man’s wrinkled face, half-bright and halfshadowed, as close as if Galileo could touch him; and they were fifty feet apart or more. The image burned into Galileo’s mind, the artisan’s familiar gap-toothed grin shimmery and flat, but big and clear-the very emblem of their many happy days in the workshop, trying new things.

‘My God!’ he shouted, deeply surprised. ‘It works!’

Mazzoleni hurried out to give it a try. He rotated the frames, looked through it backwards, tipped the frames, moved them back and forth on the tube. ‘There are blurry patches,’ he noted.

‘We need better lenses.’

‘You could order a batch from Murano.’

‘From Florence. The best optical glass is Florentine. Murano glass is for coloured trinkets.’

‘If you say so. I have friends who would contest that.’

‘Friends from Murano?’

‘Yes.’

Galileo’s real laugh was a low huh huh huh huh huh. ‘We’ll grind our own lenses if we have to. We can buy blanks from Florence. I wonder what would happen if we had a longer tube.’

‘This one is about as long as we’ve got. I guess we could make some longer sheets of lead and roll them up, but we would have to make the moulds.’

‘Any kind of tube will do.’ Here Galileo was as good as Mazzoleni or any artisan-good at seeing what mattered, quick to imagine different ways of getting it. ‘It doesn’t have to be lead. We could try a tube of cloth or leather, reinforced to keep it straight. Glue a long tube of leather to slats. Or just use cardboard.’

Mazzoleni frowned, hefting a lens in his hand. It was about the same size as a Venetian florin, say three fingers wide. ‘Would it stay straight enough?’

‘I think so.’

‘Would the inside surface be smooth?’

‘Does it need to be?’

‘I don’t know, does it?’

They stared at each other. Mazzoleni grinned again, his weathered face an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta, the white burn mark on his left temple raising that eyebrow in an impish expression. Galileo tousled the man’s hair as he would a child’s. This work they did together was unlike any other human bond he knew, unlike that with mistress or child, colleague or student, friend or confessor-unlike anyone-because they made new things together, they learned new things. Now once again they were on the hunt.

Galileo said, ‘It looks like we’ll want to be able to move one lens back and forth.’

‘You could fix one glass to the tube, and set the other one in a slightly smaller tube that fitted inside the main one, so you could move that one back and forth but keep it aligned vertically. You could rotate it too, if you wanted.’

‘That’s good.’ Galileo would have come to some such arrangement eventually, but Mazzoleni was especially quick concerning things he could see and touch. ‘Can you bang something like that together? By tomorrow morning?’

Mazzoleni cackled. By now it was the middle of the night, the town was quiet. ‘Simple stuff, compared to your damned compass.’

‘Watch what you say. That thing has paid your salary for years.’

‘Yours too!’

Galileo swatted at him. The compass had become a pain, there was no denying it. ‘You have the materials you need?’

‘No. I think we’ll need more lead tubes, and thinner staves than what we’ve got around, and longer, if you want leather tubes. More cardboard too. And you’ll want more lenses.’

‘I’ll send an order to Florence. Meanwhile let’s work with what we’ve got.’

In the days that followed, every moment was given over to the new project. Galileo neglected his collegial obligations, made his boarding students teach each other, ate his meals in the workshop while he worked: nothing mattered but the project. At times like these it became obvious that the workshop was the centre of the house. The maestro was about as irritable as always, but with his attention elsewhere it got a bit easier for the servants.

While the various efforts of manufacture and assemblage and testing went on, Galileo also took time to write his Venetian friends and allies to set the stage for a presentation of the device. Here was where his career up until this point finally helped him in something. Known mostly as an eccentric if ingenious professor of mathematics, broke and frustrated at forty-five, he had also spent twenty years working and playing with many of the leading intellectuals of Venice, including, crucially, his great friend and mentor Fra Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi was not currently running Venice for the Doge, as he was still recovering from wounds suffered in an assault two years before, but he continued to advise both the Doge and the Senate, especially on technical and philosophical matters. He could not have been better positioned to help Galileo now.

So Galileo wrote to him about what he was working on. What he read in Sarpi’s reply startled him, even frightened him. Apparently the stranger from the artisans’ market had gone to others as well. And his news of a successful spyglass, Sarpi wrote, was apparently already widespread in northern Europe. Sarpi himself had heard a rumour of such a thing nine months before, but had not considered it significant enough to tell Galileo about it.

Galileo cursed as he read this. ‘Not significant, my God!’ It was hard to believe; it was so lame it suggested that his old friend had been mentally damaged by the knives that had been stuck in his head during the assault.

Nothing to be done about that now. People in northern Europe, especially the Flemish and Dutch, were already producing little spyglasses. This Dutch stranger, Sarpi wrote, had contacted the Venetian Senate, offering to sell them such a glass for a thousand florins. Sarpi had advised the Senate against the purchase, certain that Galileo could do as well or better in manufacturing any such object.

‘I could if you would have mentioned it to me,’ Galileo muttered.

But he hadn’t, and now news of the device was in the air. It was a phenomenon Galileo had noticed before; improvements at the artisanal level passed from workshop to workshop without scholars or princes knowing anything about them, and so it often happened that suddenly workshops everywhere could all make a smaller gear, or a stronger steel. This time it was a little spyglass. The claim going around was that they enlarged things by about three times.

Quickly Galileo wrote back to Sarpi, asking him to convene a meeting with the Doge and his senators in order to examine a new and improved spyglass that Galileo was inventing. He also asked him to ask the Doge to refuse to entertain any other such offers during that time. Sarpi replied the next day with a note saying he had done as asked, and the requested meeting was set for 21st August. It was now 5th August. Two weeks to make a better glass.

The action in the workshop intensified. Galileo told his frantic students they were on their own, even Count Alessandro Montalban, who had recently moved in to the house to study for his doctoral exams, and was not pleased at being neglected. But Galileo had tutored many sons of the nobility by now, and brusquely he told the young man to study with the others, to lead them, that it would be good for him. Galileo then moved out into the workshop, where he examined very closely the devices they had made already, trying to figure out how to better them.

Understanding what was going on with the doubled lenses was no easy thing. For Galileo, everything physical came down to matters of geometry, and clearly this bending of the light was a geometrical action; but he lacked any laws of refraction, and could not discover them merely by substituting lenses one after the next. There were tangible variables involved, however, that they could subject to the workshop techniques they had already honed in previous pursuits.

So the workshop’s artisans met in the hour after sunrise, some of them servants of the house, others local ancients retired from arsenals, or lads from the neighbourhood; still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, squeezing the bellows to get the fires in the furnaces going, picking up the work they had laid down the night before. They followed Galileo’s routines: they measured things twice, wrote everything down. They worked while breaking their fast. Watched the rainstorms out of the open side of the shed, waiting for the light to get better so they could get back to work. The brick furnace was a bulwark just outside the roof, and they could stand near the back of it and stay warm while the rain came down, although as it was summer the afternoon thunderstorms weren’t so cold. The large central area of the shop was earthen-floored and held several long tables, one of them under the back wall devoted to all their tools. In the dim rain-light they could clean or sharpen tools, put things in order, pick away at the goose carcass from the night before. When the sun came out they returned to the work.

They made so many alterations in every new spyglass, Galileo was not quite sure what change was having what effect; but it was too interesting to slow down and isolate the variables to make sure of things, except when pursuing a crucial point. The epistemology of the hunt was to follow one thing after another, without much of an overall plan. They found that tubes made of cardboard, sometimes reinforced by slats or covered with leather, worked perfectly well; the interiors did not have to be perfectly smooth, although one saw a clearer image if they were painted black. Most important were the lenses. The one next to the eye they called the eyepiece, the one at the far end, the objective. Both concave and convex lens surfaces, if properly ground, constituted sections of spheres, bulging either in or out. Spheres of differing radii gave different curvatures. The radius of the complete sphere that was implied by a lens, Galileo called its focal length, following the lensmakers’ usage. Fairly soon their repeated trials with different lenses revealed that larger magnifications resulted from a long focal length for the convex lens at the far end of the tube, combined with a short focal length for the concave lens of the eyepiece. Grinding the convex lenses was easy enough, although it was important to eliminate small irregularities if possible, as these made for blurred patches. Grinding truly smooth curved depressions into the much smaller concave lenses, however, was harder to do. A small ball set in a rotating steel-milling mechanism that they screwed to one of the work tables served as their grinding tool. To see better they wore spectacles made of lenses ground earlier in the effort.

While this was going on Mazzoleni was also making cardboard tubes that would snug into his main tubes of leather and staves, giving them the ability to adjust the distance between the lenses and thus sharpen the image. The eyepieces were smaller, so they put the drawtube at that end, and fitted it with felt shims.

To find out what degrees of magnification they were getting, Galileo affixed a gridwork to a whitewashed part of the garden wall. This enabled him to measure accurately the difference between the enlarged image of the grid and the image he saw through the other eye at the same time.

On the afternoon of the seventeenth of August, Galileo examined their three best performers. All were about the same length, which was just over a braccio, as measured by their in-house yardstick. Studying the notes, Galileo compared all their dimensions, scribbling more notes as he did so.

All at once he laughed out loud. One of his special moments had come again, a flash of sudden insight at the end of a period of investigation, giving him a jolt and a shiver, as if he were a bell and the clapper had just tapped him. He shouted, ‘MAT ZO LEN EEEEEEE!’

The old man appeared, more dishevelled and whiskery than ever, red-eyed with lack of sleep. ‘Look!’ Galileo commanded. ‘You take the focal length of the objective-for this one, a hundred minims-and you divide that by the focal length of the eyepiece-in this case eleven minims-and you get a number which identifies the power of magnification of the device, thus here about nine times! It’s a ratio! It’s a ratio, it’s geometry again-’ He seized the old man by the shoulder: ‘Not only that, but look! Subtract the eyepiece focal length from the objective focal length, and you get the distance apart that the lenses are when the thing is focused properly! In this case, just short of one braccio. It’s a simple piece of subtraction!’

At this realization he grew somewhat glorious, as he often did when he was able to say new things of that sort. He congratulated everyone in the household, called for wine, threw crazia and other small coins at the servants and students who poured out into the courtyard to join the celebration, hugged them one by one while he was giving thanks to God and also indulging his most boastful humour, which was something to witness. He praised his genius for coming through for him again, he danced, he laughed, he grabbed Mazzoleni by the ears and shouted in his face:

‘I’m the smartest man in the world!’

‘Probably so, maestro.’

‘The smartest man in history!’

‘That’s how much trouble we’re in, maestro.’

This kind of poke in these moments of glory would only make him laugh and toss Mazzoleni aside, to be able to continue his jig. ‘Florins and ducats, crowns and scudi, I’ll buy Rachel and I’ll buy Trudi!’

No one in the household understood quite why he believed the glass was going to make him rich. The servant girls thought he meant to use it to watch them doing the laundry down at the river, which he did already from what he thought was a discreet distance.

Eventually everyone went back to work. Mazzoleni was left holding the glass, shaking his head at it. ‘Why should there be such proportions?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ask why.’ Galileo snatched up the glass. ‘Why is what our philosophers ask, and that’s why they’re so full of shit. Because we don’t know why. Only God knows why. If He does.’

‘All right, I know. Just ask what, just ask how. Still. You can’t help but wonder, can you.’ Waving at the new page of Galileo’s folio, filled with diagrams and numbers. ‘It seems so…’

‘So neat? Yes. Quite a coincidence, for sure. Quite the what-have-you. But it’s just more proof of what we already knew. God is a mathematician.’

As a mathematician himself, Galileo found saying this sentence immensely satisfying; often it was enough to bring tears to his eyes. God is a mathematician. He would emphasize the thought by taking a hammer to their anvil. And indeed the thought rang him like a bell. He would bring his hands together as if in prayer, and take a deep breath and expel it tremulously. To read God like a book; to solve him like an equation; it was the best sort of prayer. Ever since that time when he was a boy, he would explain, when he had looked up in church and seen a lamp swinging on its chain, and realized by timing it to his pulse that it took the same time to make its sweep back and forth no matter how far it was swinging, he had felt the direct touch of God in all these things. There was a method to His madness, clearly, and that method was mathematics. This was a comfort when the madness seemed all, as when he was sick, or in pain, or struck down by melancholy; or witnessing the effects of the plague; or contemplating the immense realm of human wickedness. Then his only comfort was the world’s inherent geom-etries.

The day for his Venetian demonstration approached, and their best tube showed things nine times larger than the eye saw it. Galileo wanted better, and thought he knew how to get it, but time had run out. For now, nine times bigger would have to do.

He had Mazzoleni’s crew cover the exterior of the best tube with red leather, embossed with decorative patterns in gold filigree. Mazzoleni also adapted a tripod stand that they sold as an accessory to the military compass, so that they would have something to hold the spyglass steady. A joint on top of the tripod was made of a metal ball held captive in a hemispherical cup, with one screw through the cup to tension the ball, which was screwed on top into a brass sleeve wrapping the spyglass. Using the tripod one did not have to hold the glass steady while looking through it, something no one could do for more than a second or two. It vastly improved the view through the glass.

The resulting arrangement was a handsome thing, standing there gleaming in the sunlight, strange but purposeful, immediately intriguing, pleasing to both eye and mind. A month earlier there had been no such thing in the world.

On 21st August, 1609, he ferried in to Venice on the morning barge, the looking glass and its stand in a long leather case slung from a strap over his shoulder. Its shape was suggestive of a pair of swords, and he saw the glances of people looking at it and thought, Yes, I’m going in to cut the Gordian knot. I’m going in to cut the world in two.

Venice stood on the lagoon, its usual grubby midday self. Magnificence at low tide. Galileo got off the ferry at the molo at San Marco, and was greeted there by Fra Paolo. The great friar looked gaunt in his best robes, his face still a wreck, as it always would be; but his crooked smile remained kindly, his look still penetrating.

Galileo kissed his hand. Sarpi patted the case gently: ‘So this is your new occhialino?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very good. Your audience is assembled in the Anticollegio. It’s everyone who matters, you’ll be happy to know.’

An honour guard assembled in response to Sarpi’s nod, and escorted them into the Signoria, up the Golden Staircase into the Anticollegio, which was the anteroom to the Signoria’s bigger halls. It was a tall chamber, sumptuously decorated overhead in the usual Venetian style, its octagonal ceiling covered with giltframed paintings allegorizing the origin myth of Venice, while the floor underfoot was painted like the pebbled bed of a mountain stream. Galileo had always found it a strange space, in which he had trouble focusing his eyes.

Now it was stuffed with dignitaries. Better yet, as Galileo soon learned, the Doge himself, Leonardo Dona, was waiting in the Sala del Collegio, the larger assembly hall next door that was the most sumptuous room in the Signoria. As he entered the room he saw Dona and the Savi, his six closest advisors, along with the Grand Chancellor and other state officials, all gathered under the long painting of the battle of Lepanto. Sarpi had outdone himself.

Now the great Servite led Galileo to the Doge, and after a cordial greeting Dona led the entire group into the Sala delle Quattro Porte, then to the Sala del Senato, where many more senators stood in their purple around tables loaded with food. Under the intricacy of crowded paintings and gilt trim that covered every wall and ceiling, Galileo pulled the two parts of his device from their case, and screwed the spyglass on top of the tripod. His hands moved without a quiver; twenty years of lecturing to audiences large and small had burned all possibility of stage fright out of him, and it was also true that it was never that difficult to speak to a crowd to which you felt innately superior. So even though all his hundreds of lectures were now only the prelude to this culmination, he was calm and at ease as he described the work done to make the device, indicating its various features as he pointed it at Tintoretto’s ‘Triumph of Venice’ on the ceiling at the far end of the room, fixing the image in the glass so that it revealed the tiny face of an angel enlarged to the point that it stood out even more vividly than Mazzoleni’s had on that first night of work.

With a sweep of his hand he invited the Doge to have a look. The Doge looked; pulled away to gaze at Galileo, his eyebrows shot high onto his forehead; looked again. The two big clocks on the long side wall marked ten minutes’ passage as he bumped the glass from one view to another. Ten more minutes passed as one purple-robed man after another took a look through the glass. Galileo answered every question they had about how it was made, although failing to bring up the ratios he had discovered, which they did not even know to ask about. He volunteered often that the process being now clear to him, future improvements were certain to follow, and also (trying to hide a growing impatience) that it was not the kind of device that could best be demonstrated in a room, even a room as big and magnificent as the Sala del Senato. Finally the Doge himself echoed this point, and Sarpi was quick to suggest that they take the device to the top of the campanile of San Marco to give it a thorough airing. Dona agreed to this, and suddenly the whole assembly was following him out of the building and across the Piazzetta between the Signoria and the campanile, then inside the great bell tower, winding up the tight iron staircases to the open observation floor under the bells. Here Galileo reassembled the device.

The floor of the viewing chamber stood a hundred braccia above the Piazza. It was a place all of them had been up to many times; from here one could overlook the whole of Venice and the lagoon, and spot the passageway through the Lido at San Niccolo, the only navigable channel into the Adriatic. Also visible to the west was a long stretch of the mainland’s marshy shore, and on clear days one could even see the Alps to the north. A better place to display the powers of the new spyglass could not have been found, and to aim it Galileo looked through the device with as much interest as anyone else, or even more; he had not yet had an opportunity like this, and what could be seen through the glass was as new to him as the next man. He told them as much as he worked, and they liked that. They were part of the experiment. He stabilized and sighted the glass very carefully, feeling that a little delay at this moment was not a bad thing, in theatrical terms. As always, the image in the eyepiece shimmered a little, as if it were something conjured in a crystal ball by a magician-not an effect he wanted, but there was nothing he had been able to do about it. Feeling a sharp curiosity, he tried to spot Padua itself; on earlier visits to the campanile he had marked the vague tower of smoke coming from the town, and knew precisely where it lay.

When he got Padua’s tower of San Giustina centred in the glass, as clear as if he were on Padua’s city wall staring at it, he suppressed any shout, any smile, and merely bowed to the Doge and moved aside, so Dona and then the others could have a look. A little touch of the mage’s silent majesty was not inappropriate at this point, he judged.

For the view was in fact astonishing. ‘Ho!’ the Doge exclaimed when he saw San Giustina. ‘Look at that!’ After a minute or two he gave over the glass to his people, and after that the rush was on. Exclamations, cries, incredulous laughter: it sounded like Carnivale. Galileo stood proudly by the tube, readjusting it when it was bumped. After everyone had had a first look, he spotted terra ferma towns even more distant than Padua, which itself was twenty-five miles away: Chioggia to the south, Treviso to the west, even Conegliano, nestled in the foothills more than fifty miles away.

Moving to the northern arches, he trained the glass on various parts of the lagoon. These views made it clear that many of the senators were even more amazed to see people brought close than they had been buildings; perhaps their minds had leaped as quickly as Galileo’s servants to the uses of such an ability. They gazed at worshippers entering the church of San Giacomo in Murano, or getting into gondolas at the mouth of the Rio de’ Verieri, just west of Murano. Once one of them even recognized a woman he knew.

After that round of viewing Galileo lifted the device, helped now by as many hands as could touch the tripod, and the whole assembly shifted together to the easternmost arch on the southern side of the campanile, where the glass could be directed over the Lido and the fuzzy blue Adriatic. For a long time Galileo tapped the tube gently from side to side, searching the horizon. Then happily he spotted the sails of a little fleet of galleys, making their final approach to the Serenissima.

‘Look to sea,’ he instructed them as he straightened and made room for the Doge. He had to restrain himself to remain serious, to hide his euphoria. ‘See how using one’s plain sight, one sees nothing out there. But using the glass…’

‘A fleet!’ the Doge exclaimed. He straightened and looked at the crowd, his face red. ‘A fleet is approaching, well out from San Niccolo.’

The Sages of the Order crowded to the front of the line to see for themselves. Every Venetian holding in the eastern Mediterranean was subject to attack by Turks and Levantine pirates: individual ships, fleets, coastal towers, even fortress towns as formidable as Ragusa had suffered surprise assaults. Thus the rulers of Venice, all of them with naval experience of one sort or another, were now nodding to each other meaningfully, and circulating into the crowd surrounding Galileo to shake his hand, slap him on the back, ask for future meetings. Fra Micanzio and General del Monte in particular had worked with him at the Arsenale on various engineering projects, and their congratulations were especially hearty. They had first met him twenty years before, when they had brought him in to consider if there were ways the oars of their galleys could be reconfigured to give them more power, and Galileo had immediately sketched out analyses of the oars’ movement that considered their fulcrum to be not the oarlocks, but the water surface; and this surprising new perspective on the problem had in fact led to improvements in oarlock placement. So they knew what he was capable of; but this time del Monte was shaking his hand endlessly, and Micanzio was grinning, with eyebrows raised as if to say: Finally one of your tricks will really matter!

And at this moment Galileo could afford to laugh with him. Galileo suggested to him that they time the interval between this observation of the fleet through the glass, and the moment when ordinary lookouts saw the ships with their unaided vision. The Doge overheard this and required that it be done.

After that Galileo had only to stand by the device and accept more congratulations, and point the thing to resight it if someone requested it. He drank their praise and he drank wine from a tall gold cup, feeling expansive and generous, the colourful throng around him with its impressive percentage of purple sparking more memories of Carnivale, memories that gave every festive evening in Venice an aura of splendour and sex. Combined with the height of the campanile, and the beauty of the watery city below them, it felt like they stood on Olympus.

On the winding way back down the campanile stairs, Galileo was joined on one dark landing by the stranger, who then clomped down the iron stairs beside him. Galileo’s heart leaped in his chest like an animal trying to escape: the man was dressed in black, and must have lurked in waiting for Galileo, like a thief or an assassin.

‘Congratulations on this success,’ the man said in his hoarse Latin.

‘What brings you here?’ Galileo asked.

‘It seems you listened to what I told you before.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘I was sure you would be interested. You of all people. Now I will return to northern Europe.’ Again: Alta Europa. ‘When I come back to your country, I will bring a spyglass of my own, which I will invite you to look through. Indeed I invite you now.’ Then, when Galileo did not reply (they were nearing the bottom of the stairs and the door to the Piazzetta), he said, ‘I invited you.’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ Galileo said.

The man touched the case Galileo carried from his shoulder. ‘Have you used it to look at the moon?’

‘No-not yet.’

The man shook his head. As his face was a blade, his nose was its sharpened edge, long and curved, tilted off to the right. His big eyes gleamed in the stairwell’s dim light. ‘When you achieve a power of magnification of twenty or thirty times, you will find it really interesting. After that I will visit you again.’

Then they reached the ground floor of the campanile, and walked together out onto the Piazzetta, where they were interrupted by the Doge himself, there waiting to escort Galileo back to the Signoria: ‘Really my dear Signor Galileo, you must do us the honour of returning with us to the Sala del Senato to celebrate the incredible success of your extraordinary demonstration. We have arranged a small meal, some wine-’

‘Of course, Your Beneficent Serenity,’ Galileo said. ‘I am yours to command, as you know.’

In the midst of this exchange the stranger had slipped away and disappeared.

Unsettled, distracted by the memory of the stranger’s narrow face, his black clothing, his odd words, Galileo ate and drank with as much cheer as he could muster. A chance meeting with a colleague of Kepler’s was one thing, a second encounter deliberately made, something else-he wasn’t sure what.

Well, there was nothing to be done now but to eat, to drink more wine, and to enjoy the very genuine and fulsome accolades of Venice’s rulers. Two full hours of the celebration of his accomplishment were marked by the giant clocks on the sala’s walls before the lookouts on the campanile sent word down that they had spotted a fleet approaching San Niccolo. The room erupted in a spontaneous cheer. Galileo turned to the Doge and bowed, then bowed again to all of them: left, right, centre, then again to the Doge. Finally he had invented something that would make money.

Chapter Two I Primi Al Mondo

Having come to this pass, I appealed out of my innocent soul to the high and omnipotent gods and my own good genius, beseeching them of their eternal goodness to take notice of my wretched state. And behold! I began to descry a faint light.

-FRANCESCO COLONNA, Hypnerotomachia PoliphiliThe Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphili

The next night, back in Padua, Galileo went out into his garden and aimed his best occhialino at the moon. He left Mazzoleni sleeping by the kitchen fire, woke none of the servants; the house was asleep. This was his hour, as on so many nights when his insomnia took hold of him.

Now his mind was filled with the stranger’s blade of a face, his intense gaze: have you looked at the moon? The moon tonight was near its first quarter, the bright part almost exactly half the whole, the dark part easily visible against the night sky. An obvious sphere. Galileo sat on a low stool, held his breath, brought his right eye to the eyepiece. The little black circle of glass was marked on its left side by a luminous white patch. He focused on it.

At first he saw nothing but a chiaroscuro flecking of greyish black and brilliant white, the tremble of the white seeming to flow over the dark spots. Ah: hills. A landscape. A world seen from above.

A view from world to world.

He loosened the screw on the tripod head and tapped the tube, trying to capture in the glass the tip of the moon’s upper crescent. He tightened the screw, looked again. Brilliant white horn: a dark grey in the curve of the horn, a blackness just slightly washed with white. Again he saw an arc of hills. There, at the border of light and dark, was a flat dark patch, like a lake in shadow. The sunlight was obviously shining horizontally over the landscape, as it would be of course, as he was looking at the area experiencing dawn. He was looking at a sunrise on the moon, twenty-eight times slower than a sunrise on Earth.

There was a little round valley; there another one. Any number of circles and arcs, in fact, as if God had been fooling around up there with a compass. But the strongest impression remained the range of hills, there on the border of black and white.

The moon was a world, the Earth was a world. Well, of course. He had always known this.

As for the assertions the Aristotelians made about the moon, that because it was in the heavens it was therefore a perfect sphere, made of some unearthly crystal that was of unchanging purity-well, its ordinary appearance had always rendered that a very suspicious statement. Now it was clearer than ever that Aristotle had been wrong. This was no great surprise-when indeed had he been right, in the natural sciences? He should have stuck to his strength, which was rhetoric. He had had no mathematics.

Galileo got up and went in to the workshop to get his current folio, and a quill and inkpot. He wondered if he should wake Mazzoleni, then decided against it. There would be other nights. This one was his. He could feel his blood pounding in his head; his neck muscles were sore. It was his night. No one had ever seen these things. Well, perhaps the stranger had. But Galileo suppressed that thought in order to glory in his own moment. All the years, all the centuries and their millions come and gone, the stars rotating above them night after night, and only now had someone seen the hills of the moon.

The moon must rotate on its axis at the same speed it circled the Earth, to keep the same side always facing it; this was odd, but no odder than many other phenomena, such as the fact that the moon and the sun were the same size in the sky. These things were either caused, or accidental; it was hard to tell. But it was a rotating sphere, that was clear. And so was the Earth also a rotating sphere? Galileo wondered if Copernicus’s advocacy of this old Pythagorean notion could be right.

He looked through the glass again, relocated the white hills. The dark part west of them was extremely interesting. Land in shadow, obviously. Perhaps there were lakes and seas too, though he could see no sign one way or the other. But it was not as black as a cave or a dark room at night. One could make out dim large features, because the area was very slightly illuminated. That could not be direct sunlight, obviously. But just as the moonlight illuminating his garden at this moment was really sunlight bouncing off the moon to him, he was no doubt also seeing the dark part of the moon illuminated by sunlight that had bounced off the Earth and struck it-and then bounced back yet again, of course, to get to his eyes. From sun to Earth to moon and then back to him-which would explain the successive diminutions in brightness. As sunlight was to moonlight, moonlight was to the dark side of the moon.

The next morning he said to Mazzoleni, ‘I want a stronger magnification, something like twenty or thirty times.’

‘So you say, maestro.’

They manufactured a lot of spyglasses. Making the objective lenses bigger and smoother, while keeping the eyepiece lenses at their original size and grinding them both deeper and smoother, led to very satisfactory jumps in magnifying power. In a matter of weeks they had glasses that showed things twenty-twenty-five- thirty-finally thirty-two times closer than the unaided eye saw them. There they hit their limit; the lenses could not be made bigger or smoother, and the tubes were twice as long as when they had begun. Also, as magnifying power grew, what one actually saw through the glass contracted down to a very small field of view. One could move one’s eye around the eyepiece a bit to broaden the view, but not by very much. Accurate aiming was important, and Galileo got better at this by attaching an empty spotting tube to the side of the strongest glass. They also had to deal with a white glare that invaded the sides of the larger images, where the irregularities in the lenses also tended to cluster, so that the outer circumference of the image was often nearly useless. Here Galileo put to use a solution he had discovered to deal with the rainbow rings that plagued his own vision, especially of things seen at night. This unhappy phenomenon he tended to attribute to the strange incident of his near-death experience in the cellar of the Villa Costozza, which he also believed had caused his rheumatism, bad digestion, headaches, seizures, melancholia, hypochondria, and so on. Vision problems were only one more remnant of that ancient disaster, and he had long since discovered that if he looked at something through his fist, the aurora of coloured light surrounding the thing would be blocked from view. Now he tried the same remedy with the new spyglasses, fashioning with Mazzoleni’s help a cardboard sleeve that could be fitted over the objective. The most effective one left an oval opening over the lens that blocked most of the outer third of its area. Why an oval worked better than a circle he had no idea, but it did; the glare was eliminated, and the image that remained was about as large as before, and very much sharper.

As the spyglasses got stronger, things in the sky were becoming visible that had not been visible before. One night, after a long inspection of the moon, he swung the glass across the sky toward the Pleiades, just risen above the house. He looked into the glass.

‘My God,’ he said, and felt his body ringing. Around the Seven Sisters were scores of stars. The familiar seven stars of the gorgeous little constellation were brighter than the rest, but surrounding them were thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places. The sense of enormous depth in the little black circle was palpable, almost vertiginous; he swayed a little on his stool, mouth hanging open. Even the spectacle of the mountainous moon had not prepared him for such a thing. No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment. It was the oddest feeling in the world. He sketched a quick map of the newly crowded group, making the familiar sisters little sixpointed stars like a child would draw, with the new stars tiny crosses-the drawing done almost unconsciously, a kind of nervous habit, deeply engrained after so many years of exercising it. Until he sketched something down his hand would itch with the urge.

He looked until his eyes hurt, and the points of light swam in the eyepiece like gnats in the sun. He was cold, almost shivering, his bad back like a rusty hinge inside him. He felt that he would sleep the moment he lay down: a luscious feeling for a lifelong insomniac, he bathed in it as he stumbled off to bed.

His empty bed. No Marina. He had kicked her out, and life was ever so much more peaceful. Nevertheless he felt a quick stab of regret as he dived into the deep pool of sleep. It would have been nice to have someone to tell. Well-he would tell the world. The thought almost woke him.

Only six days after his demonstration to the Venetian Senate, his reward came, in the form of a new contract offer. Procurator Antonio Prioli, one of the heads of the university in Padua, came out of the Sala delle Senato to take Galileo by the hand. ‘The Senate, knowing the way you have served Venice for seventeen years, and sensible of your courtesy in offering your occhialino as a present to the Republic, has ordered your election to the Professorship for life, if you are willing, with a salary of a thousand florins a year.’ He raised his other hand: ‘They are aware that there remains a year on your current contract, and yet want the increase in salary to begin this very day.’

‘Please convey to His Serenity and all the pregadi my deepest thanks for this most kind and generous offer, Your Honour,’ Galileo said. ‘I kiss their hands, and accept with the utmost gratitude.’

‘Shit,’ he said the moment he was out of earshot. And back home he started cursing in a way that emptied the rooms well before he stormed through them. ‘Shit shit shit. Those pricks! Those cheap bastards, those soddomitecci!’

He remembered as he always did that Cremonini, an old duffer Galileo had enjoyed sparring with through the years, already made a thousand florins a year from the Venetian Senate. That was the difference between the standing of philosophy and mathematics in this world, an inverse ratio to justice, as so often happened: the worst philosopher had been paid twice the best mathematician.

Then also, a salary fixed in perpetuity meant there would never be another raise, and Galileo already knew to the last quattrini his expenses, which were such that this raise would only just cover them, leaving him still unable to pay off his sister’s dowry and his other outstanding debts.

Also, the salary was a salary, paid for his teaching, as before-meaning there would be no time to write up his experiments, or make new ones. All that work in the notebooks in the workshop would continue to lie there mouldering.

So this was not exactly the most exciting result one could have imagined, given the extraordinary power of his new device, and its strategic importance, obvious to everyone who had witnessed the demonstration. The triumph of that day had had Galileo imagining a lifetime sinecure, all his debts and expenses paid, and afterward free from all work except research and consultation, which he would have applied most faithfully to the good fortune of La Serenissima. They would have benefited greatly; and in any duchy or principality or kingdom this kind of patronage would not have been unusual. But Venice was a republic, and courtly patronage as it was practised in Florence or Rome, or almost anywhere else in Europe, did not exist here. Gentlemen of the Republic worked for the Republic, and were paid accordingly. It was an admirable thing, if you could afford it.

‘Shit,’ he repeated weakly, staring at his workshop table. ‘Those cheap bastards.’ But a part of his mind was already calculating what the thousand florins a year would do to meet expenses and knock off debts.

Then he heard in a letter from Sarpi that some of the Senators had complained to the body at large that the spyglass was a commonplace in Holland and elsewhere in northern Europe, so that it had not really been Galileo’s achievement, and he had presented his device under false pretences.

‘I never said I invented the idea!’ Galileo protested. ‘I only said I made it much better, which I did! Tell those cheap bastards to find a spyglass as good as mine somewhere else if they think they can!’ He ripped off a long letter that he sent to Sarpi to give to the senators:

News arrived at Venice, where I happened to be at the moment, that a Dutchman had a glass looking through which one could see distant things as clearly as if they were near. With this simple fact I returned to Padua, and pondering on the problem, I found the solution on the first night home, and the next day I made an instrument and reported the fact to my friends at Venice. I made a more perfect instrument, with which I returned to Venice, and showed it to the wonder and astonishment of the illustrati of the Republic-a task which caused me no small fatigue.

But perhaps it may be said that no great credit is due for the making of an instrument, when one is told beforehand that the instrument exists. To this I reply, the help which the information gave me consisted of exciting my thoughts in that particular direction, and without that, of course it is possible they may never have gone that way; but that the simple information itself made the act of invention easier to me I deny, and say more-to find the solution to a definite problem requires a greater effort of genius than to resolve one not specified; for in the latter case accident, mere chance, may play the greater part, while in the former all follows from the work of the reasoning and intelligent mind. Thus, we are quite sure that the Dutchman was a simple spectacle-maker, who, handling by chance different forms of glasses, looked also by chance through two of them, and saw and noted the surprising result, and thus found the instrument. Whereas I, at the mere news of the effect obtained, discovered the same instrument, not by chance, but by way of pure reasoning! I was not assisted in any way by the knowledge that the conclusion at which I aimed already existed. Some people may believe that the certainty of the result aimed at affords great help in attaining it: let them read history, and they will find that Archites made a dove that could fly, and that Archimedes made a mirror that burned objects at great distances. Now by reasoning on these things such people will doubtless be able, with very little trouble and with great honour and advantage, to tell us how they were constructed. No? If they do not succeed, they will then be able to testify to their own satisfaction that the ease of fabrication which they had promised themselves from the foreknowledge of the result is very much less than what they had imagined-

‘Idiots that they are!’ Galileo shouted but did not add to the end of the letter, signing it conventionally and sending it off.

Naturally Sarpi did not forward this letter to the Senate, but rather came out to Padua to assuage his angry friend. ‘I know,’ he said apologetically, putting his hand to Galileo’s freckled cheek, now as red as his hair as he recounted the reasons for his fury. ‘It isn’t fair.’

And it was even less fair than Galileo thought; for Sarpi now told him that the Senate had decided that the stipulated raise in Galileo’s salary was not to go into effect immediately after all, but would begin the following January.

At this Galileo blew up again. And after Sarpi left he immediately took action to deal with the insults, working in two directions. In Venice, he returned to the city with a much more powerful spyglass, the best his artisans had made so far, and gave it to the Doge as a present, indicating again how useful it would be to the protection of the Republic, how grateful he was for the new contract, how much the splendiferousness of the Doge illuminated not just the Serenissima but the entire watershed of the Po, et cetera. Dona would take note of this generosity, perhaps, in the face of what could be seen as a very tepid response from his Senate, even a rebuff; and then maybe he would act to revise the raise accordingly. It was not the likeliest response, but it could happen.

Then, on the Florentine front, always a part of his life, even in these last seventeen years in Padua working for Venice, Galileo wrote to young Grand Duke Cosimo’s secretary Belisario Vinta, telling him about the spyglass, offering to give the prince one of them and to instruct him in its use. A few of the closing phrases of this letter began the process of asking for patronage at the Medici court.

There were some difficulties to be negotiated here. Galileo had been tutor to young Cosimo when his father Ferdinando was the Grand Duke, and that was good. But he had also been asked to work up a horoscope for Ferdinando the previous year, and had done so, and found that the stars predicted a long and healthy life for the Grand Duke, in the usual way; but then shortly thereafter Ferdinando had died. That was bad. In the tumult of the funeral and the succession no one had said anything, nor even seemed to remember the horoscope, except for a single penetrating glance from Vinta the next time they met. So perhaps in the end it had not mattered; and Galileo had taught Cosimo his mathematics, and treated him very kindly, of course, so that they had grown fond of one another. Cosimo was a bright young man, and Cosimo’s mother, the Grand Duchess Christina, was a very intelligent woman, and fond of Galileo-indeed, his true first patron at that court. And as Cosimo was so young, and new to his rule, she was a regent-like power. So the possibilities there were very real. And when all was said and done, Galileo was a Florentine, it was his home. His family was still there, which was bad, but unavoidable.

So, still very angry at the Venetians for their ingratitude, he neglected his classes at Padua, wrote great flurries of letters to influential friends, and began to lay plans to move.

Despite the discord and chaos of the tumble of days, he spent every cloudless night out in the garden, looking through the best glass they had on hand. One night he woke Mazzoleni and took him out to look at the moon. The old man peered up through the tube and then pulled his head back, grinning, shaking his head in amazement. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It’s a world, like this one.’

‘Are there people there?’

‘How should I know?’

When the moon was up, and not too full, he looked at it. Long ago he had taken drawing lessons from his Florentine friend Ostilio Ricci, the better to be able to sketch his mechanical ideas. One of the exercises in Ricci’s treatise on perspectival drawing had been to draw spheres studded with geometrical figures, like raised pyramids or cubes, each one of which had to be drawn slightly differently to indicate where they stood on the hidden surface of the sphere underneath them. This was a meticulous and painstaking form of practice, very polito, at which Ricci had conceded Galileo eventually became the superior. Now Galileo found that it had given him the necessary skills, not just to draw the things the glass showed on the moon, but even to see them in the first place.

It was particularly revealing to draw the moon’s terminator, where light and shadow mixed in patterns that changed from night to night. As he wrote in his workbook, With the moon in various aspects to the Sun, some peaks within the dark part of the moon appear drenched in light, although very far from the boundary line of the light and darkness. Comparing their distance from that boundary line to the entire lunar diameter, I found that this interval sometimes exceeds the twentieth part of the diameter. The moon’s diameter had been proposed since antiquity to be about two thousand miles; thus he had enough to complete a simple geometrical calculation of the height of these lunar mountains. He drew the moon as a circle, then on it drew a triangle with one side the radius at the terminator, another a radius running up to the tip of the lit mountain in the dark zone, and the third line following the beam of sunlight from the terminator to the mountain top. The two sides meeting at the terminator would be at right angles, and he had distances for both, based on the assumed diameter, and thus he could use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the length of the hypotenuse. Subtracting the moon’s radius from that hypotenuse, one was left with about four miles of difference-which was the height of the mountain above the surface.

But on Earth, he wrote, no mountains exist that reach even to a perpendicular height of one mile. The mountains on the moon were taller than the Alps!

He spotted a perfectly round shape right in the middle of the terminator, and very near the equator. He drew it a bit bigger than he saw it, to emphasize how prominent it was to the eye, and how clearly it stood out from its surroundings. A good astronomical drawing, he decided, had to evoke the sight that subsequent viewers would look for, rather than represent it to perfect scale, which in the diminution of the drawing simply made it too small. Paying attention was itself a kind of magnification.

Drawing the constellations with their new host of companion stars was a different kind of problem, easier in some ways, as being mostly a schematic, but much harder too, in that there was no chance of representing what the view through the glass actually looked like. He altered sizes far beyond what he saw, to give an impression of the different brightnesses; but using black on white to represent white on black would never be satisfactory. White marks on black, as in an etching, would be better.

He drew till his fingers got too cold. He made fair copies in the mornings, exaggerating to make the impressions bolder than ever. He made ink washes, very delicate; also bold schematics that would serve as guides to an engraver, because already he had plans for a book to accompany the spyglasses, just as an instruction manual had accompanied his military compass. Although here it really came down to seeing for oneself. The Milky Way, for instance; he could see that it was composed of a vast number of stars granulated together, a truly astonishing finding; but there was no way at all to draw that. People would have to see for themselves.

He fell deeply into his new routine. He had always been an insomniac, and now there was a useful way to spend those sleepless hours. He simply did not go to bed, but stayed out on the terrace by the occhialino, looking through it and jotting down notes, comfortable in the solitary silence of the sleeping town. He had not known how much he enjoyed being alone. He wrote up what he had observed at dawn, and then slept through many a bright cool morning, wrapped in a blanket against a sunny wall in the corner, under the gnomon of the house’s big L.

With the shorter days of November came winter, and clouds. On those nights he read, or caught up on his sleep, if he could; but on many a night he woke every hour or two, his brain full of stars, and went out to check the sky. If it had cleared he would stir the coals of the kitchen fire and put a pot of mulled wine on the grate, add a few sticks and go out to set up the glass, feeling that swirl of dust in the blood that he loved so much. He was on the hunt all right! And never had he had such a quarry! Nothing could keep him from looking when the night was clear. If his work in the daytime had to suffer-and it did-so be it. Those bastard pregadi didn’t deserve his work anyway.

He had ordered one of the work tables moved onto the terrace, placed under a table umbrella, next to a couch. He had a lantern that could be shuttered, and workbooks, inkpots, quills; and three spyglasses on tripods, each with different powers and occlusions. Lastly, blankets to throw over his shoulders. Mazzoleni and the cook kept the household running in the mornings while he slept, and stocked the supplies for his nighttime needs; both were the kind of person who falls asleep at sunset, so they didn’t see him at work unless he forced them to. After a while, he never did; he liked being by himself through the frosty nights, looking at first one thing and then another.

On the night of 7th January, 1610, he was out looking at the planets. As he had written in a letter he was composing for young Antonio Medici, The planets are seen very rotund, like little full moons, and of a roundness bounded and without rays. But the fixed stars do not appear so; rather they are seen fulgurous and trembling, much more with the glass than without, and so irradiated that what shape they possess is not revealed.

So the planets, being obvious little disks, were interesting. And Jupiter was now in the west after sunset. It was the biggest of the planets in the glass, no surprise to anyone used to the way it dominated the night sky whenever it was visible.

Galileo got it in the middle of the eyepiece, and then saw that there were three bright stars to left and right of it, aligned with it in the plane of the ecliptic. He marked their positions on a new sheet of his letter to Antonio, and looked at them for a long time. They did not twinkle like the stars, but gleamed steadily. They were almost perfectly in a line with each other. They were almost as bright as Jupiter, or even brighter, although smaller. Jupiter itself was a very distinct disc.

The next night he looked at Jupiter again, and was shocked to find that the three stars were still there, but this time all to the west of the great planet, whereas on the previous night two of them had been to its east. He wondered if the ephemerides was wrong about Jupiter’s current movement.

On 9th January it was cloudy, and nothing could be seen. But the night of the tenth was clear again.

This time only two of the bright stars were there, both to the east of Jupiter. One was slightly less bright than the other, though on the previous nights they had all been the same.

Mystified, intrigued to the point of obsession, Galileo started a new sheet in his workbook, and copied there the diagrams he had already written in at the end of the letter to Antonio. The letter itself he put aside, as being premature.

In his new desire for night, the days themselves passed slowly, and he did the necessary work without paying the slightest attention to it, as if dreaming on his feet. This was a sign, wellrecognized by the household: he was on the hunt. And just as they never woke sleepwalkers for fear of damaging their sanity, they left him alone at these times, and kept the boys quiet and the students at bay, and put food in him almost as if spoon-feeding a baby. Of course it was true he would beat them if they distracted him, but they enjoyed the craft of it too.

On the night of 12th January, Galileo trained the glass on Jupiter in the last moments of twilight. At first he could see again only two of the little bright stars; but an hour later when it was fully dark he checked again, and one more had become visible, very close to Jupiter’s eastern side.

He drew arrows trying to clarify to himself how they were moving, shifting his attention between the view through the glass and his sketches on the page. Suddenly it became clear, there in the reiterated sketches: the four stars were moving around Jupiter, orbiting it in the same way the moon orbited the Earth. He was seeing circular orbits edge-on; they lay nearly in a single plane, which was also very close to the plane of the ecliptic, in which the planets themselves moved.

He felt the ringing in him. He straightened up, blinking away the tears in his eyes that always came from looking too long, and that this time came also from the sudden surge of an emotion he couldn’t give a name to, a kind of joy that was also shot with fear. ‘Ah,’ he said. A touch of the sacred, right on the back of his neck: God had tapped him. He was ringing.

No one had ever seen this before. People had seen the moon, had seen the stars; they had never seen this. I primi al mondo! The first man to see Jupiter’s four moons, which had been circling it since the creation.

Everything he had seen over the last week fell into place. He stood, staggering a little under the impact of the idea, and circled the work table as if imitating a moon. When there had been only two dots, the others could have been behind the big planet-or before it. And he saw also that the orbiting moon now outermost could perhaps have moved so far away from Jupiter as to be outside his eyepiece’s little circle. The shifts in position suggested they were moving fairly quickly. Earth’s moon took only twentyeight and a half days for its orbit. These four seemed faster still, and perhaps could be moving at differing speeds, just as the planets moved at differing speeds in the sky.

If he was right, then he could expect to see several more things. Seeing the orbits side-on, the moons would appear to slow down as they approached their maximum distance from Jupiter, and be fastest when right next to it. They would also disappear when behind it (or before it) in a regular pattern, and always reappear on the other side, never on the same side. Repeated observations should make it possible to sort out which moon was which, and determine which orbited closest to Jupiter and which farthest away. Knowing that would help him to calculate each orbital period, and that would allow him to keep steady track of them, and even predict where they would be, in a Jovian ephemerides of his own devise.

‘My God,’ he said, overwhelmed at these thoughts, suddenly weeping, feeling he should fall to his knees to say a prayer in thanks to God, only his knees were too stiff, he was too cold. Anyway it was looking through the glass that was the prayer. ‘I’m the first in the world!’

Which-when he recovered from the awe of it-really should be something he could turn to advantage. A truly new thing in the world-how could it not be useful? He had to hop about in the frigid night air to express his happiness. Mazzoleni and the rest would have laughed to see it, as they had laughed all the times they had seen it, after one good discovery or another: but none so good as this! He chortled, he shuffled around the terrace in a dance with the spyglass as his partner. He felt an urge to ring the workshop bell; he even began to walk toward the workshop, to wake Mazzoleni and the rest, and share the news with somebody. But he was the bell he wanted to ring, and if he woke the others, Mazzoleni would just nod and grin his gap-toothed grin, and be pleased that the new instrument was working better than the previous one. What went on in the sky did not matter to him.

Galileo stopped in his tracks and returned to the terrace. He recommenced his little contradance around the tripod and work table, singing nonsense words to himself under his breath. An old man dancing at midnight. Tomorrow he would write up his news, and publish it as soon as possible after that, to share it with the world. Everyone would know, everyone would look and see. But only he would be first, first always, first forever. This night was his. Feeling warm in his cloak, he settled on the stool under the tripod to look some more.

Then there came a knock at the garden gate. And he knew who it was.

Chapter Three Entangled

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.

I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived

The transmogrifications in the stuff of life.

Reveal, now, exactly how they were performed

From the beginning up to this moment.

-OVID, The Metamorphoses

Galileo walked stiffly toward the gate, feeling his heart pound. The knock came again, a steady tap tap tap. He reached the gate and pulled up the crossbar, feeling a sweat of trepidation.

It was indeed the stranger, tall and gaunt in a black cloak. Behind him hunched a short gnarled old man, carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder.

The stranger bowed. ‘You said you would enjoy to look through a spyglass of my own.’

‘Yes, I remember-but that was months ago! Where have you been?’

‘Now I am here.’

‘I’ve seen some amazing things!’ Galileo could not help saying.

‘You still wish to look through what I have?’

‘Yes, of course.’

He let the stranger and his servant in the gate, his unease written all over his face. ‘Come out to the terrace. I was there when you knocked, looking at Jupiter. Jupiter has four stars orbiting it, did you know that?’

‘Four moons. Yes.’

Galileo looked disappointed, also disturbed; how had the stranger been able to see them?

The stranger said, ‘Perhaps you would enjoy to see them through my instrument.’

‘Yes, of course. What is its power of magnification?’

‘It varies.’ He gestured at his servant. ‘Let me show you.’

The man’s ancient servant looked familiar. He wheezed unhappily under his load. On the terrace Galileo reached out to help him lower the satchel, briefly holding him above the elbow and against the back; under his coat the man felt like nothing but skin and bone. He slipped out from under the strap of the long bag carelessly, before Galileo had quite gotten hold of it, and it hit the tiles with a thump.

‘It’s heavy!’ Galileo said.

The two visitors pulled a massive tripod from the satchel, and arranged it next to Galileo’s instrument; then they drew a big spyglass out of the case. Its tube was made of a dull grey metal, like pewter, and they held it by both ends to lift it. It was about twice the length of Galileo’s tube, and three times the diameter, and clicked onto the top of its tripod with a distinct snap.

‘Where did you get that thing?’ Galileo asked.

The stranger shrugged. He glanced at Galileo’s tube, then spun his on its tripod with a light flick of the wrist. It stopped moving when it came to much the same angle as Galileo’s, and with a small smile the stranger gestured at the instrument.

‘Be my guest, please. Have a look.’

‘You don’t want to sight it?’

‘It is aimed at Jupiter. At the moon that you will call Number Two.’

Galileo stared at him, confused and a little afraid. Was the thing supposed to be self-sighting? The man’s claim made no sense.

‘Take a look and see,’ the stranger suggested.

There was no reply to that: it was what he had been saying himself, to Cremonini and everyone. Just look! Galileo moved his stool over to the new device, sat down, leaned forward. He looked into the eyepiece.

The thing’s field of vision was packed with stars, and seemed large, perhaps twenty or thirty times what Galileo saw through his glass. At its centre what he took to be one of the moons of Jupiter gleamed like a round white ball, marked by faint lines. It was bigger than Jupiter itself was in Galileo’s glass. The harder Galileo looked, the more obviously spheroid the white moon became, and its striations more visible. It stood out like a snowball against the stars, which burned in their various intensities against a depth of velvet black.

It appeared that the white ball, clearer than ever to his sight, had faintly darker areas, somewhat like Earth’s moon; but more prominent by far was its broken network of intersecting lines, like the craquelure on an old painting, or the ice on the Venetian lagoon in cold winters after several tides had cracked it. Galileo’s fingers reached for a quill that was not there, wanting to draw what he saw. In some places the lines appeared in parallel clusters, in others they rayed out like fireworks, and these two patterns overlapped and shattered each other repeatedly.

One crackle pattern clarified for him, gleamed in exquisite detail. Focusing on it appeared to increase the enlargement accordingly, until it filled the lens of the eyepiece. A wave of dizziness passed through his whole body; it felt like he was falling up toward the white moon. He lost his balance. He felt himself pitch forward, head first into the device.

Things fall in parabolic arcs: but he wasn’t falling. He flew, up and forward-outward-head tilted back to see where he was going. The plain of shattered white ice bloomed right before his eyes. Or below him-maybe he was falling. His stomach flipflopped as his sense of up and down reversed itself.

He didn’t know where he was.

He gasped for air. He was drifting downward, now; he was upright again; his sense of balance returned just as distinctly as sight returned when you closed and then opened your eyes-something definitive. It was an immense relief, the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.

He stood on ice. The ice was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows; sunset colours, autumn colours. He looked up-

A giant banded orange moon loomed in a black starry sky. It was many times bigger than the moon in Earth’s sky, and its horizontal bands were various pale oranges and yellows, umbers and creams. The borders of the bands curled over and into each other. On the moon’s lower quarter a brick red oval swirl marred the border of a terra cotta band and a cream band. The opaque plain of ice he stood on was picking up these colours. He put his fist up with his thumb stuck out: at home his thumb covered the moon; this one was seven or eight times that wide. Suddenly he understood it was Jupiter itself up there. He was standing on the surface of the moon he had been looking at.

Behind him someone politely cleared his throat. Galileo turned; it was the stranger, standing beside a spyglass like the one he had invited Galileo to look through. Perhaps it was the same one. The air was cool and thin-bracing somehow, like a wine or even a brandy. Galileo’s balance was uncertain, and he felt oddly light on his feet.

The stranger was looking curiously at Galileo. Beyond him on the nearby horizon stood a cluster of tall slender white towers, like a collection of campaniles. They looked to be made of the same ice as the moon’s surface.

‘Where are we?’ Galileo demanded.

‘We are on the second moon of Jupiter, which we call Europa.’

‘How came we here?’

‘What I told you was my spyglass is actually a kind of portal system. A transference device.’

Galileo’s thoughts darted about in rushes faster than he could register. Bruno’s idea that all the stars were inhabited-the steel machinery in the Arsenale-

‘Why?’ he said, trying to conceal his fear.

The stranger swallowed; his Adam’s apple, like another great nose he had ingested, bobbed under the shaved skin of his neck. ‘I am acting for a group here that would like you to speak to the council of moons. A group like the Venetian Senate, you might say. Pregadi, you call those senators. Invitees. Here you are a pregadi. My group, which was originally from Ganymede, would like to meet you, and they would like you to speak to the general council of Jovian moons. We feel it is important enough that we were willing to disturb you like this. I offered to be your escort.’

‘My Virgil,’ Galileo said. He could feel his heart pounding in him.

The stranger did not seem to catch the reference. ‘I am sorry to startle you in this manner. I did not feel that I could explain it to you in Italy. I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of snatching you away like this. And the shock of it. You are looking rather amazed.’

Galileo shut his mouth, which had in fact been hanging open. He felt his dry tongue stick to the dry roof of his mouth. His feet and hands were cold. He recalled suddenly that in his dreams his feet were often cold, even to the point that sometimes he stumped about in boots of ice, and woke to find his blankets had ridden up. Now he looked at his feet, shuddering. They were still in their ordinary leather shoes, looking incongruous on the tinted ice of this world. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger, bit the inside of his lip: he certainly seemed awake. And usually the thought that he might be dreaming was enough to wake him, if dreaming he was. But here he stood, in crisp thin air, breathing fast, heart thumping as it rarely did any more-as it used to when he was young, and frightened by something. Now he did not feel the fear, exactly, but only his body’s response to it. His mind perhaps did not quite believe all this, but his body had to. Maybe he had died and this was heaven, or purgatory. Maybe purgatory orbited Jupiter. He recalled his facetious lecture on the geography of Dante, in which he had calculated the size of Hell by the ratio of Lucifer’s arm to the height of Virgil-

‘But this is too strange!’ he said.

‘Yes. I’m sorry for the shock it must have caused you. It was felt that your recent observations through your spyglass would help you to understand and accept this experience. It was felt that you might be the first human capable of understanding the experience.’

‘But I don’t understand it,’ Galileo had to admit, pleased though he was to be considered first at anything.

The stranger regarded him. ‘A lack of understanding must be a feeling you are used to,’ he suggested, ‘given the state of your research into physical forces.’

‘That’s different,’ Galileo said.

But it was a little bit true, when he thought about it: not understanding was a familiar sensation. At home he never had any trouble admitting it, no matter what people said to the contrary. In fact he was the only one bold enough to admit how little he understood! He had insisted on it!

But here there was no need to insist. He was flummoxed. He looked up again at Jupiter, wondered how far away they were from it. There were too many unknowns to be able to figure it out. Its dark part, a thin crescent, was very dark. The gibbous part, well-lit by the distant sun, was strongly marked by its fat horizontal bands. The borders looked like viscous pours of oil paint, curling and overlapping but never quite mixing. It almost seemed he could see the colours move.

In the sky over his right shoulder gleamed what he took to be the sun-a chip of the utmost brilliance, like fifty stars clumped together into a space not much bigger than the other stars. As on Earth, one could not look at it for long. The sight of it so small made it evident that all the stars could be suns, maybe each with its own set of planets, just as the misfortunate Bruno had claimed. World upon world, each with its own people, like the stranger here, a Jovian it seemed. It was an astounding thought. The memory of Bruno, on the other hand, gave everything he saw a faint undercurrent of terror. He did not want to know these things.

‘Is the Earth visible from here?’ he asked, scanning the stars around the sun, looking for something like a blue Venus, or perhaps from out here it would be more like a blue Mercury, small and very near the sun…Many of the stars overhead, however, were tinted red or blue, sometimes yellow, even green; what might have been Mars could have been Arcturus-no, there was Arcturus, beyond the curve of the Big Dipper. The constellations, he noted, were all the same from this vantage, as they would be only if the stars were very much further away than the planets.

The stranger was also scanning the sky; but then he shrugged. ‘Maybe there,’ he said, pointing at a bright white star. ‘I am not sure. The sky here changes fast, as you know.’

‘How long is the day here?’

‘The rotation is eighty-eight hours, the same as its orbital time around Jupiter, which you are on the verge of determining. Like Earth’s moon, it is tidally locked.’

‘Tides?’

‘Gravitational tides. There is a-a tidal force exerted by every mass. A bending of space, rather. It is difficult to explain. It would go better if other things were explained to you first.’

‘No doubt,’ Galileo said shortly. He was struggling to keep his mind empty of fear by focusing on these questions, because underneath his studied (or stunned) calm, there swelled something very like terror. Perhaps it was only the memory of Bruno.

‘You appear to be cold,’ the stranger noted. ‘You are shivering. Perhaps I can lead you to the city?’ Pointing at the white towers.

‘I will be missed at home.’ Perhaps. It sounded feeble.

‘When you return, only a short time will have passed. It will look like what you call a syncope, or a catalepsy. Cartophilus will take care of that end. Don’t worry about that now. Since I have disturbed you by bringing you this far, we might as well accomplish what was intended, and bring you to the council.’

This too would serve as a distraction from his fear, no doubt; and the calm part of him was curious. So Galileo said, ‘Yes, whatever you like.’ It felt like grasping at a branch from out of a whirlpool. ‘Lead on.’

Despite the effort to stay calm, his emotions blew through him like gusts in a storm. Fear, suspense-the terror underneath everything-but also a sharp exhilaration. The first man who could have understood this experience. Which was a voyage among the stars. I primi al mondo.

They approached the white towers, which still appeared to be made of ice. He and the stranger had walked for perhaps an hour, and the bottoms of the towers had appeared to him in half an hour, so Moon II was probably not as big as the Earth, perhaps more the size of the moon. The horizon looked very close by. The ice they crossed had been minutely pitted everywhere, also streaked by lighter or darker rays, and occasionally marked by very low circular hills. It seemed basically white, and only tinted yellow by the light of Jupiter.

To one side of the white towers an arc of pale aquamarine appeared across the whiteness. The stranger led him to this arc, which proved to be a broad rampway cut into the ice, dropping at a very slight angle, down to where it cut under an arch or doorway into a long wide chamber.

They descended; the chamber under the ice roof had broad white doors, like city gates. At the bottom of the ramp they waited before these. Then the gates went transparent, and a group of people dressed in blouses and pantaloons of Jovian hues stood before them, in what seemed a kind of vestibule. The stranger touched Galileo lightly on the back of the arm, led him into this antechamber. They passed under another arch. The group fell in behind them without a word. Their faces appeared old but young. The space of the room made a gentle curve to the left, and beyond that they came to a kind of overlook, with broad steps descending before them. From here they could see an entire cavern city stretching to the near horizon, all of it tinted a greenish blue, under a high ceiling of opaque ice of the same colour. The light was subdued, but more than enough to see by; it was quite a bit brighter than the light of the full moon on Earth. A hum or distant roar filled his ears.

‘Blue light goes furthest,’ Galileo ventured, thinking of the distant Alps on a clear day.

‘No,’ the stranger said. ‘The different colours are waves of different lengths, red longer, blue shorter. The shorter the wavelength, the more light tends to bounce off things, even ice or water, or air.’

‘A pretty colour.’

‘I suppose it is. Some spaces in here are illuminated with artificial light sources, to make things brighter and give them the full spectrum.’ He indicated a building that glowed like a yellow lantern in the distance. ‘But mostly they leave it like this.’

‘It makes you look like angels.’

‘We are only people, as I’m afraid you will soon learn.’

The stranger led him to an amphitheatre, sunk into the surface of the city floor so that it was not visible until they came to the curved rim of the highest seats. Looking down into it, Galileo saw resemblances to Roman theatres he had seen. The bottom dozen rows of seats were occupied, and in front of them other people were standing on a round stage. They all wore loose blouses and pantaloons that were blue, pale yellow, or the Jovian tones of Galileo’s group. At the centre of the stage stood a white glowing sphere on a pedestal. Faint black lines crisscrossing it gave Galileo the impression that it might be a globe representing the moon they stood on.

‘The council?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What would you have me say?’

‘Speak as the first scientist. Tell them not to kill what they study. Nor to kill themselves by studying it.’

The stranger led Galileo down steps into the amphitheatre, now firmly holding him by the upper arm. Galileo felt again the strange lack of his proper weight; he bounced as he would have if standing neck-deep in a lake.

The stranger stopped several steps above the group and made a loud announcement in a language Galileo did not recognize. Only slightly delayed, he also heard the man’s voice say in Latin, ‘I present to you Galileo Galilei, the first scientist.’

Everyone looked up at him. For a moment they were motionless, and many of them looked startled, even disapproving.

‘They look surprised to see us,’ Galileo noted. ‘Perhaps a bit baffled, or abashed.’

The stranger nodded. ‘They want to be sheep, and so should be sheepish. Come on.’

As they descended further, some of the ones dressed in orange and yellow bowed. Galileo bowed in return, as he would have before the Venetian Senate, which this group somewhat resembled, in that they appeared elderly, and somehow used to authority. Many of them were women, however, or Galileo assumed so: they were dressed in the same kind of blouses and pantaloons as the men. If a monastery and convent had merged their populations, and could only express their wealth in the fine cloth of their simple habits, they might look like this.

Despite the scattering of respectful bows, several among the group were now objecting to the stranger’s interruption. One woman, wearing yellow, spoke in the language Galileo didn’t recognize, and again he heard a Latin translation in his ears-Latin in a man’s voice, accented like the stranger’s. It said, ‘This is another illegal incursion. You have no right to interrupt the council’s session, and such a dangerous prolepsis as this will not be allowed to change the debate. In fact it is a criminal action, as you know very well. Call the guards!’

The stranger continued to guide Galileo down the steps and onto the circular stage, until they were among the people standing there. Almost all of them were considerably taller than Galileo, and he looked up at them, amazed at their faces, so thin and pale-beautifully healthy, but manifesting signs of both youth and age in mixtures very strange to his eye.

Galileo’s guide loomed over the protesting woman, and he spoke down to her, but addressed the entire group, in their language, so that again Galileo heard a slightly delayed translation in his ear: ‘Who gets to speak is only contested by cowards. My people come from Ganymede, and we assert the right to speak for it, to help determine what people do in the Jovian system.’

‘You no longer represent Ganymede,’ the woman said.

‘I am the Ganymede, as my people will attest. I will speak. The prohibition against descending into the Europan ocean was made for very important reasons, and the Europans’ current push to rescind that prohibition ignores several different kinds of immense danger. We will not allow it to happen!’

‘Are you and your group part of the Jovian council or not?’ the woman shot back.

‘We are, of course.’

‘But the matter has been discussed and decided, and your position has lost to that of the majority.’

‘No!’ others around them cried.

Many there then spoke up at once, and the debate grew general, and quickly became a shouting match. People jostled around, contracting into knots like rival gangs in a piazza, growing red-faced with expostulation. The Latin in Galileo’s ear broke up into overlapping shouts: ‘Decided already-We asked him to speak!-We will have you removed!-Cowards! Anarchists!-We want the Galileo to speak to this matter!’

Galileo raised his hand like a student in a class. ‘What matter do you discuss?’ he said loudly. ‘Why have you brought me here?’

In the pause that followed, one of the Ganymedeans addressed him. ‘Most illustrious Galileo,’ the Latin in his ear exclaimed, as the man bowed to him respectfully. He continued in his own tongue, which was translated in Galileo’s ear as: ‘-first scientist, father of physics, we here among the moons of Jupiter have encountered a scientific problem so fundamental and important that some of us feel the need of a truly original mind, someone unprejudiced by all that has happened since your time, someone with your supreme intelligence and wisdom, to help us decide how to deal with it.’

‘Ah well,’ Galileo said. ‘There you have it then.’

One woman laughed at this. She was big and statuesque, dressed in yellow. In the midst of all the arguing, she looked partly irritated, partly amused. The others began their raucous debate again, many becoming vehement, and in the din of all the squabbling she circled around to his left side, opposite the stranger. She leaned down toward him (she stood almost a foot taller than he), and spoke rapidly in his ear, in her own language; but what he heard in his ear was Tuscan Italian, somewhat oldfashioned, like that of Machiavelli, or even Dante.

‘You don’t believe any of that shit, do you?’

‘Why should I not?’ Galileo replied sotto voce, in Tuscan.

‘Don’t be so sure your companion has your best interests in mind here, no matter that you are the great martyr to science.’

Galileo, not liking the sound of that, said quickly, ‘What do you think my interests here are?’

‘The same as anywhere,’ she said with a sly smile. ‘Your own advancement, right?’

In the midst of a fierce harangue at his foes, the stranger looked over and noticed the woman and Galileo in conversation. He stopped arguing with the others and wagged a finger at her. ‘Hera,’ he warned her, ‘leave him alone.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You are not the one to be telling people to leave Signor Galileo alone, it seems to me.’ This was still translated to Galileo in Tuscan.

The stranger frowned heavily, shook his head. ‘You have nothing at stake here. Leave us alone.’ He returned to addressing the entire group, which was now quieting to hear what was going on.

‘This is the one who began it all,’ the stranger boomed, while in his other ear Galileo heard the woman’s voice in Tuscan, saying, ‘He means, this is the one I chose to begin it all.’

The stranger continued without further sotto voce commentary from the woman he had called Hera: ‘This is the man who began the investigation of nature by means of experiment and mathematical analysis. From his time to ours, using this method, science has made us what we are. When we have ignored scientific methods and findings, when the archaic structures of fear and control have re-exerted themselves, stark disaster has followed. To abandon science now and risk a hasty destruction of the object of study would be stupid. And the result could be much worse than that-much worse than you imagine!’

‘You have already made this argument, and lost it,’ a redfaced man said firmly. ‘The Europan interior can be investigated using an improved clean protocol, and we will learn what we have wanted to learn for many years. Your view is antiquated, your fears unfounded. What you did on Ganymede has deranged your understanding.’

The stranger shook his head vehemently. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I am only affirming what the scientific committee assigned to the problem has already said. Who’s being unscientific now, them or you?’

A general debate erupted again, and under its noise Galileo said to the tall woman, ‘What is it that my patron and his allies want to forbid?’

She leaned into him to reply, in Italian again: ‘They don’t want anyone to dive into the ocean under the ice here. They fear what might be encountered there, if I understand the Ganymede correctly.’

Then a group of men dressed in the blue shade of clothing came bouncing down the steps on the other side of the amphitheatre. A senator dressed in the same colour gestured at them and cried at the stranger, ‘Your objection has already been overruled! And you are breaking the law with this incursion. It’s time to put a stop to it.’ He shouted up at the newcomers, ‘Eject these people!’

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 amphitheatre, 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, as 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. 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 real it was, how different from a dream, 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 mêlée 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.

Chapter Four The Phases of Venus

In order not to burden too much the transmigrating souls, Fate interposes the drinking from the Lethean river in the midst of the mutations, so that through oblivion they may be protected in their affections and eager to preserve themselves in their new state.

-GIORDANO BRUNO, Lo spaccio della bestia trionfante,The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

He 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’Aquapendente, 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 paralysed.

‘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, hauled himself up. He surveyed the house, the workshop, the garden, all turning blue in the dawn light. It was like something…

‘Marc’antonio, 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.’

Galileo said, ‘In my dream it was important.’

He 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 to sleep. 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. 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 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 nodded, frowned, waved him away. ‘I’ll speak to her.’

And so Cartophilus came into the service of Galileo, intending (as always, and always with the same failure) to efface himself 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 typical intense 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 in the orbits he was now untangling, 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, and only ten of them were capable of seeing the new little planets; they became visible only through occhialini with magnifications of thirty times, 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 skinflint 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 them for delaying their measly raise until the new year. 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. He had spent many recent summers back in his home city, some of them tutoring the young prince Cosimo, so he had laid the groundwork for a return.

Now it was time to build on that foundation. Ignoring the little awkwardness that had developed the year before with Belisario Vinta, he wrote another of his florid notes. It was to accompany the finest spyglass he had: a gift to his most beloved student ever, now the grandissimo Grand Duke Cosimo. The red leather was embossed in gold with typical Florentine and Medici figures; even the transport case was beautiful. In the letter Galileo 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 honouring 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. He had the spirit for it and more. 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 day that he flagged, slept at odd hours, snarled at the household and all that it represented. Scribbled at great speed on his pages.

He wrote in Latin so that the book, titled Sidereus Nuncius, ‘The Starry Messenger’, 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 augmented with fine etchings made from his drawings. Of the stars and the four moons of Jupiter he wrote briefly, only announcing his discoveries, which were startling enough not to need embellishment.

He told the story of his introduction to the idea of the occhialino with some circumspection: About ten months ago a rumour came to our ears that a spyglass had been made by a certain Dutchman by means of which visible objects, although far removed from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen, as though nearby. This caused me to apply myself totally to investigating the principles and figuring out the means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument, and I achieved that result shortly afterward on the basis of the science of refraction.

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

THE STARRY MESSENGER

Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles,

opening these to the consideration of every man,

and especially of philosophers and astronomers;

AS OBSERVED BY GALILEO GALILEI

Gentleman of Florence

Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua,

WITH THE AID OF A PERSPICILLUM

lately invented by him,

In the surface of the moon,

in innumerable Fixed Stars,

in Nebulae, and above all

in FOUR PLANETS

swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods, and

known to no one before the Author recently perceived them and decided

that they should be named

THE MEDICEAN STARS

Venice 1610

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 splendour 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.

The book was published in March of 1610. The first printing sold out within the month. Copies circulated throughout Europe. Indeed its fame was worldwide: within five years word came that it was being discussed at the Chinese court.

Despite this literary and scientific success, the Galilean household was still running at a loss, with the master’s time also massively over-committed. He wrote to his friend Sagredo, I’m always at the service of this or that person. I have to eat up many hours of the day-often the best ones-in the service of others. I need a Prince.

On 7th May of 1610 he wrote again to Vinta. He did not beat around the bush, but made it an explicit letter of application, a real piece of rhetoric. He requested a salary of a thousand florins a year, and sufficient free time to bring to completion certain works he had in progress. Glancing up at the dusty workbooks on the shelf to make sure he forgot nothing, he made a list of what he hoped to publish if he were given the time:

Two books on the system and constitution of the universe, an overarching conception full of philosophy, astronomy, and geometry; three books on local motion, an entirely new science, as no one else ancient or modern has discovered the many amazing properties that I demonstrate to exist in natural and forced motions, which is why I may call this a new science discovered by me from its first principles; three books on mechanics, two pertaining to principles and foundations, one on its problems-and though others have written on this same material, what has been written to date is not one-quarter of what I will write, either in quantity or otherwise. I have also various little works on physical subjects, such as On Sound and Voice, On Vision and Colours, On the Tides, On the Composition of the Continuum, On the Motion of Animals, and still more. I will also write on military science, giving not only a model of what a soldier ought to be, but also mathematical treatises on fortification, the movement of troops, sieges, surveying, estimating distances and artillery power, and a fuller description of my military compass,

-which is in fact my greatest invention, a single device that allows one to make all of the military calculations I have already mentioned plus also the division of lines, the solution of the Rule of Three, the equalization of money, the calculation of interest, proportional reduction of figures and solids, extraction of square and cube roots, identification of the mean proportionals, transformation of parallelepipeds into cubes, determination of proportional weights of metals and other substances, description of polygons and division of circumferences into equal parts, squaring of the circle or any other regular figures, taking the batter of scarps on walls-in short, an omni-calculator, able to make any computation you could want, despite which hardly anyone has noticed its existence, and even fewer bought one, so stupid is the common run of humanity!

-he did not add, and so moved on to his conclusion:

Finally, as to the title and the scope of my duties, I wish in

addition to the name of Mathematician that His Highness adjoin that of Philosopher. Whether I can and should have this title I shall be able to show Their Highnesses whenever it is their pleasure to give me a chance to deal with this in their presence with the most esteemed men of that profession,

-such as they are, being for the most part grossly overpaid Peripatetic idiots!

-he did not add.

Reading over the final flourishes, it seemed to him that the opportunities being offered to any potential patron were too brilliant to decline. What a great application! What prince could say no to such a thing?

And, in fact, on 24th May, 1610, a reply from Vinta came to the house behind the church of Santa Giustina, the house on Via Vignali where they had all lived and worked together for eighteen years. Grand Duke Cosimo, Vinta wrote, accepts your services.

Galileo wrote to accept the acceptance on 28th May. On 5th June Vinta wrote back, confirming that his title would be ‘Chief Mathematician of the University of Pisa and Philosopher to the Grand Duke’.

Galileo wrote back in turn, asking that his title be revised to ‘Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke’.

He also requested that he be absolved of any further obligation to his two brothers-in-law arising from defaults on dowry payments for his sisters. That would allow him to go home without the inconvenience of embarrassing lawsuits from those disgusting chisellers, or the possibility of arrest. He would go up to them in the streets and say to them, ‘I am mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke, go fuck yourselves.’

And all this was agreed to in his formal appointment of 10th July of 1610. The new service to Cosimo was to begin in October. It was understood to be a lifetime appointment.

He had a prince.

With the prospect of Galileo’s move to Florence, what had never been more than controlled chaos at Hostel Galileo now fell apart into utter chaos. Aside from the practical tasks, Galileo had to deal with a lot of hard feelings in Padua and Venice. Many of the Venetian pregadi were outraged to hear he was walking out on his acceptance of their recent offer, calling it gross ingratitude and worse. The procurator Antonio Priuli was particularly bitter: ‘I hope I never lay eyes on that ingrate again in my life!’ he was said to have shouted, and of course this was quickly reported to Galileo. And it wasn’t just Priuli; the anger was widespread. It was obvious Venice would never offer him employment again.

Galileo gritted his teeth and forged on with the chores of the move. This reaction was to be expected, it was just part of the price he had to pay to get patronage. It was a sign that the Venetians had valued him and yet taken advantage of him, and knew it and felt guilty about it, and as people would always rather feel angry than guilty, the transmutation of the one to the other had been easy. It had to be his fault.

He focused on practical matters. Merely boxing up the contents of the big house took weeks, and just at a time when his astronomical work was at a crucial point. Happily that was night work, so that no matter the loud and dusty tumble of days, he could always wake up after an evening meal and a nap, settle down on his stool, and make his observations through the long cool nights. This meant foregoing sleep, but as he had never been much of a sleeper anyway, often existing for months at a time on mere snatches, it did not really matter. And it was all too interesting to stop. ‘What must be done can be done,’ he would say hoarsely to Mazzoleni as he flogged them through the afternoons. ‘We can sleep when we’re dead.’ In the meantime he slept whenever it was cloudy.

The household therefore avoided him in the morning, when he was often abusive, and even at the best of times a bit befuddled and melancholy. He would throw things at anyone foolish enough to bother him in the couple of hours it took to pull himself together, and out of what looked like deep sleep he could kick with vicious accuracy.

Once up, groaning and yawning on his bed, he broke his fast on leftovers, then took a walk in his garden. Pulled a few weeds, plucked a lemon or a cluster of grapes, then went back in to face the day: the move, the correspondence, the students, the accounts, eating as he worked, wolfing down sugared ravioli or pork pies, washing it down with wine and cinnamon. At night everyone else would collapse into bed, while he went out to the terrazzo alone and made his observations, using spyglasses they had constructed back in the spring; there would be no more improvements made in them until he was settled in Florence.

And of course there was Marina to attend to. Ever since she had gotten pregnant, Galileo had provided her with the funds to rent and keep a little house on the Ponte Corvo, around the corner from his place, so that he could sometimes drop off the girls on the way to his lectures at Il Bo. Now Virginia was ten, Livia nine, and Vincenzio four. They had spent their whole lives between the two houses, the girls mostly in Galileo’s big place, being taken care of by the servants. Now decisions had to be made.

Galileo stumped down to the Ponte Corvo unhappily, readying himself for the inevitable tongue-lashing. He was a barrel of a man with a red beard and wild hair, but now he looked small. At moments like these he could not help remembering his poor father. Vincenzio Galilei had been the most hen-pecked pussywhipped pancake of a husband in the history of mankind; he had felt the lash daily, Galileo had seen it with his own eyes. Marina was nothing compared to the old dragon, who was an educated woman and knew just where to stick the knives. Indeed Giulia was even now a more fearful presence to Galileo than Marina, no matter Marina’s black gaze, her cobalt-edged tongue and thick right arm. He had heard so many harangues in his life that they simply bounced off him; he was an expert in them, a connoisseur, and there was no doubt in his mind that the old rolling pin was champion of the world. He recalled his father’s hung head, the tightness at the corners of his mouth-the way he would pick up his lute and hit its strings, playing double time and fortissimo, even though this only served as accompaniment to Giulia’s dread arias, which were louder by far than the lute-these scenes were all too clear in Galileo’s mind, if he did not avoid them.

And yet here he had gone and done the same thing as his dad: coupled with a younger woman; no doubt it led to some fundamental imbalance, or just the natural contempt of youth for age. In any case here was another Galilei about to get thrashed by a strong-armed woman, hesitating to knock at the door. Fearful to knock.

He knocked. She answered with a shout, knowing by the rap who it was.

He entered. She kept the place clean, there was no doubt of that. Perhaps she did it to emphasize the paucity of furniture, or the confusion and squalor of his place. She stood in the kitchen doorway wiping her hands, as beautiful as ever, even though the years had been hard on her. Black hair, black eyes, a face that still caught Galileo’s breath; the body he loved, her hand on her hip, washcloth flung over her shoulder.

‘I heard,’ she told him.

‘I figured you would.’

‘So-what now?’

She watched him, expecting nothing. It wasn’t like the time he had explained what their arrangement would be, sitting on the fondamenta in Venice with her five months pregnant. That had been hard. This was merely awkward and tedious. They hadn’t been in love for many years. She was seeing a man out near the docks on the canal, a butcher he thought it was. He had what he wanted. Still, that look, that time in Venice-it shot through into this time too, it was still there between them. He had a particular sensitivity to looks, no doubt the result of growing up with Medusa for a mother.

‘The girls will come with me,’ he said. ‘Vincenzio is too young, he still needs you.’

‘They all need me.’

‘I’m taking the girls to Florence.’

‘Livia won’t like it. She hates your place. It’s too loud for her, there are too many people.’

Galileo sighed. ‘It will be a bigger place. And I won’t be taking in students any more.’

‘So now you’re a court creature.’

‘I am the prince’s philosopher.’

She laughed. ‘No more compasses.’

‘That’s right.’

They both went silent, thinking perhaps about how his compass had been an ongoing joke between them.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll keep paying for this place. And I’ll need to see Vincenzio. In a few years he’ll need to move to Florence too. Maybe you can move to Florence then too, if you want.’

She stared at him. She could still flay him with a look; but the tightness at the corners of her mouth reminded him of his father, and he felt a stab of remorse, thinking that maybe now he was the Giulia. A horrible thought; but there was nothing for it but to nod and take his leave, the back of his neck crawling under the heat of that fiery gaze.

All during this time he continued to make his nightly observations, and to spread the word concerning the usefulness of his glass. Occhialino, visorio, perspicullum-different people called it different things, and he did too. He sent excellent glasses to the Duke of Bavaria, the Elector of Cologne, and Cardinal del Monte, among other nobles of court and church. He was now in the service of the Medicis, of course, but the Medici would want the capabilities of his glass advertised to as many of the powers in Europe as possible. And it was important to establish the legitimacy of what Galileo had reported in his book by having it confirmed in other places by influential figures. He had heard there were people like Cremonini refusing to look through a glass, and others claiming his new discoveries were merely optical illusions, artifacts of the instrument itself. Indeed he had suffered an unfortunate demonstration in Bologna, when he had tried to show the famous astronomer Giovanni Magini the Medicean stars, and only been able to see one himself; which may have been because three were behind Jupiter, but it was a hard case to make, especially with the odious Bohemian climber Martin Horky there smirking at every word, obviously delighted that things weren’t going as planned. Afterward he heard that Horky had written to Kepler telling him that the visorio was a fraud, useless for astronomy.

Kepler was experienced enough to ignore backstabbing by such a loathsome toad, but his characteristically long and incoherent letter in support of Galileo’s discoveries, published as a book for the world to read under the title Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, was in some ways as bad as the Horky nonsense. Confusions from Kepler were nothing new, although up until this point they had always made Galileo laugh. One time for the entertainment of his artisans he had translated into Tuscan Kepler’s claim that the music of the spheres was a literal sound made by the planets, a six-note chord which moved from major to minor depending on whether Mars was at perihelia or aphelia. This idea made Galileo laugh so hard he could barely read. He wiped tears from his eyes as he went on: ‘The chapter’s title is “Which Planet Sings Soprano, Which Alto, Which Tenor, and Which Bass!” I swear to God! The greatest astronomer of our time! He admits he has no basis for this stuff except his own desire for it, and then concludes that Jupiter and Saturn must sing bass, Mars tenor, Earth and Venus alto, and Mercury soprano.’

‘But of course!’ The workshop gang then sang in their usual four-part harmony one of their rudest love songs, replacing all the usual girls’ names with ‘Venus’.

That was Kepler: a good source for jokes. Now, reading Kepler’s defence of his discoveries, Galileo felt an uneasiness that sharpened the further he read. Lots of people would read this book, but much of Kepler’s praise was so harebrained it cut both ways:

I may perhaps seem rash in accepting your claims so readily with no support from my own experience. But why should I not believe a most learned mathematician, whose very style attests to the soundness of his judgement? He has no intention of practising deception in a bid for vulgar publicity, nor does he pretend to have seen what he has not seen. Because he loves the truth, he does not hesitate to oppose even the most familiar opinions, and to bear the jeers of the crowd with equanimity.

What jeers of the crowd? For one thing there hadn’t been that many, and for another, Galileo did not bear them with equanimity: he wanted to kill every critic he had. He liked fights in the same way bulls are attracted to red-not because it looks like blood, or so they say, but because it has the colour of the pulsing parts of cows in heat. Galileo loved to fight like that. And so far he had never lost one. So equanimity had nothing to do with it.

Then further on in Kepler’s fatuous endorsement he asked what Galileo saw through his perspicillum when he looked at ‘the left corner of the face of the Man in the Moon,’ because it turned out that Kepler had a theory about that region, which he now propounded to the world-that a certain mark there was the work of intelligent beings who lived on the Moon, who must therefore have to endure days the equal of fourteen days on Earth. Kepler wrote,

Therefore they feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they have a soil as sticky as clay. Their usual building plan, accordingly, is as follows. Digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture down below. In this way they may hide in the deep shade behind their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun’s motion, shift about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their farms in their flight from the sun.

Galileo’s jaw dropped as he read this. He was growing to dread the appearance of the word accordingly in Kepler’s work, a tic which always marked precisely the point where sequential logic was being tossed aside.

A few pages later—Galileo groaned aloud—worse yet: Kepler spoke of the difference Galileo had noted through his spyglass between the light of the planets and that of the fixed stars: What other conclusion shall we draw from this difference, Galileo, than that the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, to use Bruno’s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons or earths?

Just the sight of Bruno’s name in the same sentence as his own was enough to churn his stomach.

Then he came to a passage that made him go chill and hot at the same time. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry:

The conclusion is quite clear. Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.

Galileo threw this pretzel craziness to the floor with a curse and stalked out into his garden, wondering why his hilarity had so quickly turned to dread. ‘Kepler is some kind of idiot!’ he shouted at Mazzoleni. ‘His reasoning is completely deranged! Inhabitants of Jupiter? Where the hell did that come from?’

And why was it so disturbing to read it?

The stranger…the man who had told him about the occhialino, that afternoon in Venice…who had appeared after the great demonstration to the Venetian Senate, and suggested he take a look at the moon-had he not said something about coming from Kepler? Quick flashes of something more-a blue like twilight-Had the stranger not come knocking at the gate one night some time ago? Had Cartophilus not joined the household soon after?

Galileo was not used to having a vague memory for anything. Normally he would have said that he remembered basically everything that had ever happened to him, or that he had read or thought; that, in fact, he remembered too much, as quite a bit of what he recalled stuck in his brain like splinters of glass, stealing his sleep. He kept his thoughts busy partly in order not to be stuck by anything too sharp. But in this matter that clarity did not exist. There were blurs, as if he had been sick.

Cartophilus appeared and picked up Kepler’s book from the floor of the arcade, dusted it off, looked at it curiously. He glanced at Galileo, who glared at him as if he could drag the truth from the old man by look alone. A nameless fear pierced Galileo: ‘What does this mean!’ he shouted at the wizened old man, striding toward him as if to beat him. ‘What’s going on?’

Cartophilus shrugged furtively, almost sullenly, and put the book on a side table, closed so that the page Galileo had been reading was lost. Inhabitants of Jupiter! He said, ‘I’m supposed to be packing the pots.’ And he left the arcade and went inside, as if Galileo were not his master and had not just asked a question of him.

Galileo’s return to Florence was now being called a breach of contract by the outspoken Priuli, as well as a personal betrayal: the Doge should ask Galileo for some of his salary to be returned.

With the mood turning so hard against him, it was a great comfort to Galileo to know that Fra Paolo Sarpi was a steadfast friend and supporter, as he had always been. Having Sarpi on his side was important.

The great Servite visited the Via Vignali when he was passing through Padua, to give support to Galileo, and to see how his combustible friend was doing. He brought with him a letter to Galileo from their mutual friend Sagredo, who was returning from Syria and had found out by mail about Galileo’s decision to move to Florence. Sagredo, concerned, had written, Who can invent a visorio which can tell the crazy person from the sane, the good neighbour from the bad?

Sarpi, it quickly became clear, felt much the same. Galileo sat with him on the terrace overlooking the garden, fruit and some jugs of new wine on a table beside them. Relaxing in this little hole in the city under its stucco walls was something they had done many times before, for Sarpi was no ordinary priestly mentor. Like Galileo, he was a philosopher, and in the same years Galileo had worked on mechanics he had made investigations of his own, discovering such things as the little valves inside human veins, and the oscillations of the pupil of the eye, and the polar attraction of magnets. Galileo had helped him with this last, and Sarpi had helped Galileo with his military compass, and even with the laws of motion.

Now the great Fra Paolo drank deeply, put his feet up, and sighed. ‘I’m very sorry to see you go,’ he said. ‘Things won’t be the same around here, and that’s the truth. I’ll hope for the best, but like Francesco, I’m concerned about your long-term welfare. In Venice you would have always been protected from Rome.’

Galileo shrugged. ‘I have to be able to do my work,’ he insisted.

Sarpi’s point made him uneasy, nevertheless. No one had better reason to worry about protection from Rome than Sarpi; the evidence of that was right there in Sarpi’s horribly scarred face, his disfigured smile. ‘You know my joke,’ he reminded Galileo, putting his hand to his wounds. ‘I recognize the curial style’-style meaning also a kind of stiletto.

It was all part of the ongoing war between Venice and the Vatican, which was partly a public war of words, a matter of curses and imprecations so angry that at one point Pope Paul V had excommunicated the entire population of the Serenissima; but at the same time it was a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counsellor. When Sarpi had announced to the world his intention to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, Paul was alarmed as well as angered. The files were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. It would be an exposé, in short. Assassins were authorized by the Pope to go to Venice to murder Sarpi; but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard of the plan in advance, with some of the assassins even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them in prison.

After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.

Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough.

The attack took place on the night of 7th October, 1607. A fire broke out near San Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco; whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi’s fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied only by an elderly servant and a Venetian senator, also elderly. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo’s palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de’ Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk’s cell.

They jumped him on the north side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him and ran-later we counted fifteen wounds, but it took only a couple of seconds and they were off into the night.

Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could only shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. A stiletto had been left in his right temple, apparently bent on his upper jawbone, re-emerging from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.

But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. When others arrived beside us, all we could do was help to lift him up, help to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.

There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. The doctor worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too.

So now Sarpi could sit with Galileo, and warn him, with an ironic smile given an extra twist by his scars: ‘Rome can be dangerous.’

‘Yes yes.’ Galileo nodded unhappily. He had visited Sarpi often as he hovered between life and death, he had even helped Acquapendente to extract the stiletto from his poor face. The pink scars were still livid. That Pope Paul had given the assailants a pension to reward them, even though they had been unsuccessful, both Galileo and Sarpi had found funny. Of course what Sarpi was pointing out now was true: Florence was under the thumb of Rome in a way Venice never had been. If Galileo ever offended the Church, as seemed quite possible, Sarpi reminded him, given his new astronomical discoveries and some priestly objections to them, not to mention Kepler’s ravings-then Florence might not be far enough away from the long reach of the Dogs of God.

‘I know,’ Galileo said. But he was already committed to the move; and Sarpi’s example cut both ways, so to speak: Florence was an ally of Rome’s, Venice a fierce opponent, excommunicated en masse. Moving to Florence might give him some cover.

Sarpi seemed to read these thoughts on his face. ‘A patron is never as secure as a contract with the Senate,’ he said. ‘You know what always happens to a patron’s favoured ones: they fall. Sooner or later it always happens.’

‘Yes yes.’ They had both read their Machiavelli and Castiglione, and the fall of the favourite was a standard trope in poetry and song. It was one of the ways that patrons showed their power, and stirred the pot, and kept those on the rise hopeful.

‘So that’s another way you will not be as safe.’

‘I know. But I have to be able to do my work. I have to be able to make ends meet. Neither has been possible for me in Padua. The Senate could have made it possible, but they didn’t. They paid me poorly, and worked me like a donkey. And they were never going to pay me just to do my own work.’

‘No.’ Sarpi smiled at him affectionately. ‘You need a patron to be able to get money without working for it.’

‘I work hard!’

‘I know you do.’

‘And it will be useful work, to Cosimo and to everyone!’

‘I know it will. I want you to do your work, you know that. May God bless you for it, I’m sure He will. But you will have to take care what you say.’

‘I know.’

Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. People were always giving in to his superior logic and his intense style of disputation. In debate he was boastful and sarcastic, funny and smart-really smart, in that he was not just quick, though he was that, but penetrating. No one liked arguing with Galileo.

But with Sarpi it was not like that. For many years Sarpi had been a kind of patron to him, but also much more: a mentor, a confessor, a fellow scientist, a father figure; and above all, a close friend, even now when Galileo was leaving Sarpi’s beloved Venice. His scarred face, ruined by the Pope’s murderous functionaries, held now an expression of grave concern, and of love and indulgent affection-amorevolezza. He did not agree with Galileo, but he was proud of him. It was the look you wanted your father to have when he looked at you. It could not be gainsaid. Galileo could only bow his head and dash the tears from his eyes. For he had to go.

So, after months of preparations, Galileo moved to Florence, leaving behind not only Marina and little Vincenzio, but also all his private students, and most of the servants and artisans as well, even Mazzoleni and his family. ‘I won’t be needing a workshop anymore,’ Galileo explained brusquely. ‘I’m a philosopher now.’ This sounded so ridiculous that he added, ‘The grand duke’s mechanicians will be available to me if I need anything.’

No more compasses, in other words. No more Padua. He was saying good-bye to all of it, and didn’t want any part coming with him. ‘You can keep making the compasses here,’ he told Mazzoleni, then turned his back and left the workshop. The compasses were what Mazzoleni had been hired to manufacture in the first place. Of course they wouldn’t sell very well without the course Galileo gave in their use, but there were some instruction manuals left, and it was better than nothing. Besides there was artisanal work all over Padua.

The big house on Via Vignoli was emptied, its people dispersed. One day in the fall it was handed back over to the landlord, and that whole little world was gone.

In Florence Galileo had hastily rented a house that was a bit too near the Arno, but it had a little roof terrace for his night viewing, what the Venetians called an altana, and he figured he could find a more suitable establishment later. And a new acquaintance, a beautiful young Florentine nobleman named Filippo Salviati, assured him that during the year of his lease he could spend as much time as he liked at Salviati’s palazzo in town and at his villa, the Villa delle Selve, in the hills west of Florence. Galileo was pleased; he found the river vapours in Florence unpleasant, also the nearby presence of his mother. Since his father’s death he had kept the old washtub in a house in a poor part of the city, but he never visited her, and didn’t want to now. Better to spend his time out at Salviati’s, writing books and discussing philosophical matters with his new friend and his friend’s circle of acquaintances, men of high quality. When Cosimo wanted him, he could ride into the city quickly; and there would be no need to fear running into his mother by accident. Fra Sarpi, who knew of this fear, had suggested that Galileo try to effect a reconciliation with her, but he didn’t know the half of it; indeed, he didn’t know the hundredth part of it. Galileo had recently received a letter from her welcoming him back to ‘his home town’, and asking him to drop by and visit her, who was so lonely for him. Galileo snorted as he read this; along with everything else stuck in his memory, in his pin cushion of a brain, there was something new to add: in their departure from Via Vignali the cook had found a letter left behind by a servant she had fired, one Alessandro Piersanti, who had earlier worked in Florence for the old firedog. Giulia had written to him,

Since your master is so ungrateful to you and to everyone, and as he has so many lenses, you could very easily take three or four and put them at the bottom of a small box, and fill it up with d’A’quapendente’s pills, and then send it to me. Then, she went on, she would sell them and share the proceeds with him.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Galileo had shouted. ‘Thief on the cross!’ He had thrown the letter down in disgust. Then he picked it up and saved it in his files, just in case it might be useful someday. It was dated 9th January of that year-which meant that the very week that Galileo was discovering the Medicean Stars and changing the skies forever, his own mother was conspiring to steal his spyglass lenses out of his house and sell them for her own profit. ‘Jesus son of Mary. Why not just steal the eyes out of my head.’

That was his mother for you. Giulia Galilei, suborner of servants, thief of the heart of his work. He would reside out at Salviati’s villa as much as he could.

Florentine nights were at first smokier than in Padua, but as the fall of his anno mirabilis moved toward winter, they turned cold enough to clarify the air, and keeping track of Jupiter’s four moons became easier. In December one of his former students, Benedetto Castelli, now a priest, wrote to suggest that if the Copernican explanation were indeed correct, then Venus was orbiting the Sun also, in an orbit closer to the Sun than Earth’s, so that one might therefore be able through an occhialino to see it go through phases like the moon’s, as one would be seeing either the side facing the sun or the dark side, or in between.

This thought had already occurred to Galileo, and he was irritated that he had forgotten to write it down in the Sidereus Nuncius. Then he remembered: Venus had been behind the sun the previous winter when he was writing the book, so he had been unable to check to see if the idea was right, and had thought it better to keep the notion to himself.

Now he turned his best occhialino toward Venus as it appeared in the sky after sunset. In the first days of viewing it was low, a small full disc; then as the weeks passed it rose higher and became larger, but was misshapen-possibly gibbous. Finally it was revealed in the glass to have the shape of a little half-moon, and Galileo wrote Castelli to tell him so. Eventually, when it began to sink again toward the horizon at its first twilight appearance, it was clearly horned. Galileo’s latest spyglass had a very fine objective lens that he had ground himself, and in the eyepiece the image of Venus gleamed, distinctly crescent, a miniature of the new moon that had set just an hour before.

Standing up straight, looking at the brilliant white point, feeling the moon just under the horizon and still shedding its light into the night air, suddenly it all fell into place for him. Copernicus was right; the ball of Venus and the ball of the Earth both rolled around the sun; the ball of the moon rolled around the Earth; the balls of Jupiter’s four moons circled the ball of Jupiter, which slowly circled the sun. Saturn was further out and slower, Mercury quickest of all, there inside Venus, where it was difficult to spot. Perhaps a good enough glass would see its horns as well, for certainly it too would go through phases. So close to the sun, when visible at all it would have to be pretty near quarter phase. Farther out from Earth, Mars rolled between Earth and Jupiter, close enough to Earth to explain the strange back-and-forth aspects of its movement, a shift of perspective created by the two orbits.

The whole system was a matter of circles going around other circles. Copernicus had been right. His system had called for Venus to have phases, and there they were; while the Ptolemaic theory, advocated by the Peripatetics, would specifically reject these phases, as Venus was supposed to be going around the Earth, like the sun and everything else in the sky. Venus’s phases were a kind of proof, or at least a very suggestive piece of evidence. Tycho Brahe’s weird and unwieldy formulation, which had the planets circling the sun but the sun circling the Earth, would also save these particular appearances, but it was a ridiculous explanation in all other respects, in particular simple parsimony. No, these phases of Venus were best explained by Copernicus. They were the strongest indication Galileo had seen-not exactly proof, but powerfully suggestive. All those years in Padua he had taught both Aristotle and Copernicus, and even Tycho, thinking that all of them merely saved the appearances without in any sense explaining what was going on. The Copernican explanation required that the Earth be moving, after all, which seemed wrong-an idea only, not a sensible reality. And the foremost advocate of Copernicanism, Kepler, had been so long-winded and incomprehensible that no one could be convinced by him. And yet here it was, the truth of the situation-the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun. Circles in circles.

Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang. He danced. He circled his occhialino like the Earth circling the sun, spinning in a slow four-step as he made his little orbit on the altana, arms swinging, fingers directing the music of the spheres, which despite Kepler’s craziness seemed suddenly plausible; indeed an audible chord was now ringing silently in his ears.

Then came a knock on the door below. He halted his dance with a jerk, looked down the staircase on the outside of the house.

Cartophilus was there inside the gate, holding a shuttered lantern, looking up at him. Galileo rushed down the stairs and raised a fist as if to strike him. ‘What is this?’ he exclaimed in a low furious voice. ‘Is he here again?’

Cartophilus nodded. ‘He’s here.’

Chapter Five The Other

When she saw that it was not that I would not speak, but that, dumbstruck, I could not, she gently laid her hand on my breast and said, ‘It is nothing serious, only a touch of amnesia, the common disease of deluded minds. He has forgotten for a while who he is, but he will soon remember once he has recognized me. To make it easier for him I will wipe a little of the blinding cloud of the world from his eyes.’

-BOETHIUS, The Consolation of Philosophy

Galileo strode to the gate and hauled it open just as another knock pounded it. The tall stranger stood there looking down at him, his massive perspicillum case in a heap at his feet. He looked flushed, and his eyes were like black fire.

Galileo felt his blood pound in his head. ‘Already you have found me.’

‘Yes,’ the man said.

‘Did this servant you foisted on me tell you where I was?’ Galileo demanded, jerking a thumb toward the hangdog Cartophilus.

‘I knew where you were. Are you willing to make another night journey?’

Galileo’s mouth was dry. He struggled to remember more than that flicker of blue. Blue people-‘Yes,’ he said, before knowing he would.

The stranger nodded dourly and glanced over at Cartophilus, who trudged out the gate and hauled the case over the paving stones into the courtyard. Jupiter lay low in the sky above Scorpio, still tangled with the trees.

The man’s heavy perspicillum seemed more than a spyglass. Galileo helped Cartophilus set up the tripod and to lift the fat tube, which looked to be made of something like pewter, but felt heavier than gold. When they had the device set on its stand and pointed toward Jupiter, which aiming it seemed to do on its own, Galileo swallowed hard, feeling again his dry mouth, his nameless apprehension. He sat on his stool, looked into the strangely luminous glass of the eyepiece. He fell up into it.

Around him lofted a transparent glow, like talcum in sunlight. What is it, he tried to say, and must have succeeded; the stranger replied in his crow’s Latin, ‘Around Jupiter hums a magnetic field so strong that people would die of it, if unprotected. It has to be held off by a similar field of our own creation, a counterforce. The glow marks an interference of the two forces.’

‘I see,’ Galileo murmured.

So he stood on the surface of Europa-again. Some memory of his previous visit had come back to him, though vaguely. The stars trembled overhead as if he were still looking at them through his occhialino, the bigger ones fulgurous, shedding flakes and threads of light into the blackness around them.

The surface of Europa, on the other hand, was exceptionally sharp and clear. The flat ice extended to the horizon that circled them so tightly, opaque white tinted the colour of Jupiter, and stained blue or ochre in some areas; sometimes pocked or chewed at the surface, sometimes deeply cracked in radial patterns; elsewhere smooth as glass. Everywhere it was littered with small rocks, and here and there stood a few housesized boulders, pitted with holes and depressions. Most of the rocks were almost as black as the sky, but a few were metallic grey, or red, the same shade as the red spot low on the banded immense surface of Jupiter. That awesome globe loomed directly overhead, huge in the starry night sky even though only half lit. That was the thing that was twenty-five or thirty times bigger which he had been trying to remember. Its dark half was very dark.

Possibly the tight horizon and the thin air gave the landscape its unreal clarity. The thin air was cool, the sun nowhere to be seen. The two men cast sharp shadows on the ice under them. Galileo, constantly troubled at home by fogged or ringed vision, stared around avidly. Here everyone had hawks’ eyes.

‘This is a hot spot, in local terms,’ the stranger said in the breathy silence. To Galileo the ice looked everywhere the same, and cold. Their feet crunched as the stranger led him to one of the biggest boulders.

There proved to be a door in this rock, which was not a rock, but rather some kind of carriage or ship, roughly ovoid in shape, lying on the ice like a great black egg. Its surface was smooth, not rocky or metallic, but more like horn or ebony.

A door in this surface opened by sliding sideways in the wall, revealing a flight of low black steps. The stranger gestured to Galileo, indicating the entry.

‘This is our vessel. We have learned that the Europans are going to stage an illegal incursion into the ocean under this ice. They have ignored our warnings, and the relevant authorities in the Jovian system have declined to interfere, so we are taking it on ourselves to stop them. We think any incursion will be potentially disastrous in ways these people haven’t even considered. We want to intercept them if we can, and keep them from doing harm. And at the very least, see what they do down there. If what happens is as bad as I fear it could be, they will not tell the truth about it. So we must follow them in. With luck we will get down there first, and can stop them when they break through the layer of ice into the water below.’

‘And you want me to go with you?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes.’ Ganymede hesitated, then said, ‘You should know the nature of the threat.’

Then something caught his attention over Galileo’s shoulder, and he looked startled; Galileo turned and saw a silver object on a tripod, like the perspicillum only bigger, coming down on a pillar of white fire, roaring faintly in the thin air.

The tall man put a hand to Galileo’s shoulder. ‘If there is danger, I will transport you back to your own time. The transition may be abrupt.’

A slit in the silver craft opened and a figure in white emerged.

‘Do you know who this is?’ Galileo asked.

‘Yes, I think so. You met her before, when we spoke to the council.’

‘Ah yes. Hera, she said. Jupiter’s wife?’

‘She thinks she’s that big,’ the stranger said sourly; then added under his breath, ‘It’s almost true.’

The woman was indeed large: tall, broad-shouldered, widehipped, thick-armed, deep-chested. She approached and stopped before them, looking down at the stranger with her ironic smile. ‘Ganymede, I know you hate what they plan to do here,’ she said. ‘And yet here you are. What’s going on? Are you planning to hurt them?’

The stranger, who did not look like Galileo’s idea of Ganymede, faced her like an upright axe. ‘You know what they’ll say about this on Callisto if they hear about it. We hold the same view they do. The only difference is that we’re willing to do something about it.’

‘And so you bring this Galileo along with you?’

‘He is the first scientist, he will be our witness to the council, and speak for us later.’

She did not think much of this, Galileo saw. ‘You use him as a human shield, I think. While you have him with you, the Europans won’t attack you.’

‘They won’t in any case.’

She shrugged. ‘I want to be a witness too. I want to see what happens, and I am your appointed mnemosyne, whether you acknowledge that or not. Let me join you, or my people will alert the Europans that you are here.’

Ganymede stepped to the side, gestured at the door of the ovoid vessel. ‘Be my guest. I want everyone to see just how irresponsible their incursion is.’

Inside the vessel a few people huddled over banks of glass instruments and glowing squares of jewel colour. Their faces, lit from below by the glowing desk tops, looked monstrous. The livid glare of Jupiter seemed to leak out of their eyes.

Standing beside Galileo, Hera leaned over to speak in his ear; again her words came to him in a rustic Tuscan Italian, like something from Ruzante. ‘You understand that they’re using you?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Do you know where you are?’

‘This is one of the four moons orbiting Jupiter. I named them myself; they are called the Medicean Stars.’

Her smile was wicked. ‘That name didn’t stick. It’s only remembered now by historians, as a notorious example of science kissing the ass of power.’

Affronted, Galileo said, ‘It was nothing of the sort!’

She laughed at him. ‘Sorry, but from our perspective it’s all too obvious. And always was, I’m sure. You failed to consider that major planetary bodies are not best named for one’s political patrons.’

‘What do you call them, then?’

‘They are named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.’

‘Collectively,’ Ganymede interjected, ‘they are called the Galilean moons.’

‘Well!’ Galileo said, taken aback. For a moment he was at a loss. Then he said, ‘That’s a good name, I must admit.’ After a moment’s confusion he added, ‘Not greatly different than a name like Medici, if I am not mistaken—’ with a bold look at Hera.

She laughed again. ‘The discoverer of something is not the same as the discoverer’s patron. His hoped-for patron, to be precise. Making the name a gross bit of flattery, a kind of bribe.’

‘Well, I couldn’t very well name them for myself,’ Galileo pointed out. ‘So I had to choose something useful, did I not?’

She shook her head, unconvinced. But she had stopped laughing at him.

When he saw a chance, Galileo drifted over to her so they could speak sotto voce again. ‘You all speak as if I am someone from your past,’ he noted. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your time is earlier than ours.’

Galileo struggled to comprehend this; he had been presuming that the stranger’s device had merely been transporting him across space. ‘What time is it here, then? What year?’

‘In your terms it is the year 3020.’

Galileo felt his mouth hanging open as he struggled to grasp this news. Transported not only to Europa, but to a time some fourteen hundred years after his own…Stunned, he said weakly, ‘That explains many things I did not understand.’

Her wicked smile again.

‘Of course it creates new mysteries as well,’ he added.

‘Indeed.’ She was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read. She was not an angel, or an otherworldly creature, but a human like him. A very imposing woman.

There was a ping, a small jolt, and the room tilted to the side. Ganymede pointed to a white globe, lit from within, floating in the corner of the room. ‘A globe of Europa,’ he said to Galileo. He explained that its whites were faintly shaded to indicate the temperature of the surface; most of it was pale blue, crisscrossed by many faint green lines. Galileo crossed the room to look more closely at it, checking automatically for geometrical patterns in the surface craquelure. Triangles, parallelograms, spicules, radiola, pentagons…Where the lines intersected, the greens sometimes turned yellow, and in a few cases the yellow shifted to orange.

‘The tides break the ice,’ Ganymede explained, ‘and convective upwellings fill some of the cracks in the ice, forming vertical zones like artesian wells, that can serve as channels down to the liquid ocean. On Ganymede we called them flues.’

‘Tides?’ Galileo asked. ‘How can there be tides?’

All the Jovians stared at him. Hera shook her head briefly, as if the explanation would be beyond Galileo’s understanding. Irritated, he looked to Ganymede, who shrugged uncomfortably.

‘Gravity, you see…Perhaps we can discuss it another time. Because now we have begun our journey into the interior. We descend by melting the ice as we go, to clear the flue.’

The craft tilted first at one angle then another. A large rectangular patch on the chamber’s wall was filled with glowing primary colours, as if a rainbow had been used for paint. Ganymede informed him that their vessel was represented by the black pendant in the middle of this rectangle, and flowing upward past it were ribbons of rainbow colour, orange strands closest to the black blob, yellow and green twining around them. Off to one side, a larger rectangle was apparently a window, giving them a view of what passed outside; this consisted of nothing but a field of the darkest blue imaginable, a blue so deep and pure that it captured Galileo’s eye, and exhibited small reticulations and lighter gleams, revealing perhaps that it was an icy slush. It gave him much less information than the other rectangle, the brilliant colours indicating temperatures as he was informed they did.

Down, down, down some more. The blue outside the window flowed upward more swiftly, and darkened even more. The temperature ‘picture’ likewise flowed. Otherwise there was only the hum of the vessel’s machines, the brush of its air. Once Galileo had dreamed of falling off a ship and sinking into the Adriatic. Now they were all dreaming together.

Ganymede hated the necessity of this dive, hated the very idea of an intrusion into the ocean under the ice, and it soon became clear that his crew shared his opinion. They eyed their pictures with grim expressions, and said little; Ganymede strode back and forth nervously behind them, consulting with them in turn.

On the rainbow panel a green potato-shaped patch moved upward; it looked like a boulder. Galileo asked about it.

‘A meteorite,’ Ganymede replied. ‘Space is full of rocks. The shooting stars you see in your night sky are rocks, often as small as sand grains, burning very brightly.’

‘Friction with air is enough to ignite rock?’

‘They are moving really very fast. Here on Europa there is no atmosphere, however, so whatever it encounters crashes straight into the ice. It happens a lot, but impact craters in ice quickly deform and flow back toward flatness.’

‘No atmosphere? What about the air we were breathing up there?’

‘We live inside bubbles of air, held in place by forces or materials.’

Their vessel stopped in its descent; it was interesting to Galileo how clearly he could feel the halt, subtle though it was.

Ganymede said, ‘Pauline, is everything going well?’

‘All is well,’ said a woman’s voice, apparently from within the walls of the vessel.

‘How soon will it be before we reach the ocean?’

‘If we maintain this speed it will be thirty minutes.’

‘Is the Ariadne thread unspooling cleanly?’

‘Yes.’

Ganymede said to Galileo, ‘The Ariadne thread is also a heating element, and will keep the central line of our flue liquid, to ease our return.’

They waited, absorbed in their thoughts. The light downward pull of Europa made the crew’s movements around the bridge fluid and slow, like dance in a dream. Galileo found it hard to keep his balance, it was somewhat like floating in a river.

He drifted to Hera’s side and said, ‘All these machines have to work for us to stay alive.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘It seems risky.’

‘It is. But because it is, we engineer for safety. Materials and power available are terrifically advanced compared to your time. And there is a principle called redundancy at the criticalities, do you know this term? Replacement systems are available in case of failures. Bad things still sometimes happen. But there you are. They do anywhere.’

‘But on Earth,’ Galileo objected, ‘on Earth, in the open air, the things you make don’t have to work for you to survive.’

‘Don’t they? Your clothing, your language, your weapons? They all have to work for you to stay alive, right? We are poor forked worms in this world. Only our technologies, and our teamwork, allow us to survive.’

Galileo pursed his lips. There might be some truth to what she said, but still he felt it obscured a real difference. ‘Worm or not,’ he said, and she was a rather magnificently shaped worm, he did not add, ‘you could stay alive on Earth, by breathing, eating, and staying warm. Granted these take effort, but you could make the effort. You have tools to help you, but they don’t have to remain unbroken for you to survive. A single man alone on an island could do it. There are no mechanical contrivances that surround you and protect you, like a fortress, that have to function successfully forever or else you very quickly die.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s like a sea voyage. You could not have your ship sink and survive.’

‘But you people never land. You sail on forever.’

‘Yes, that’s true. But it’s true for everyone, always.’

Galileo recalled standing in his garden at night, in the open air, under the stars. It was an experience this woman had never had. Possibly she could not imagine it. Possibly she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘You don’t know what it is to be free,’ he said, surprised. ‘You don’t know what it is to stand free in the open air.’

She shook her head impatiently. ‘Have it your way.’

‘I will.’

Again her amused glance, as if she were looking down on a child. She said, ‘You were famous for that, as I recall. Until…’

The voice Pauline interrupted to announce they were near the bottom of the ice layer, and were in what she called brash ice. They could hear floating chunks and clinkers striking the hull, a grinding noise full of scrapes and thuds.

Then they were moving freely, in water. Galileo had spent so much time on barges and ferries, and on a few well-remembered trips out into the Adriatic, that he recognized the feel in his feet. Such kinetic sensations were so slight as to disappear when one focused on them, but when focusing attention elsewhere, one became aware of the totality of the effect.

Ganymede said, ‘Pauline, search for the Europans’ flue, also any other vessels, of course. And give us an analysis of the water, please.’

Pauline reported the water was nearly pure, with trace amounts of salts, floating particulates, and dissolved gases. Some of the crew began tapping madly at glyphs on their desktops. Outside the window was omnipresent black. They might as well have been deep in the bowels of the Earth. Only one’s sense of movement suggested they were in a liquid.

Thus it was a great surprise to see a brief flash of cobalt blue in the window, like the random blue spark one sometimes saw crossing the inside of the eyelid.

‘What was that!’ Galileo said.

‘We call that Cherenkov radiation,’ Ganymede said.

‘Somebody’s patron?’ Galileo inquired, glancing at Hera.

‘The discoverer of the phenomenon,’ she said firmly.

Ganymede ignored their fencing. ‘There are tiny particles called neutrinos, which pour through our manifold in great numbers but very seldom interact with anything. Once in a while one hits a proton, which is a small but substantial part of an atom-hits a proton in such a way that the proton releases a muon, which is a very small component of a proton. If that happens in an ocean like this, the muon will fly through the water in such a way as to spark a short trail of light in the blue wavelength. We will see a few per minute.’

Another little flare of blue appeared, again like the flaws that plagued Galileo’s vision. ‘Like shooting stars,’ he noted.

‘Yes. A very subtle fire.’

‘A fire in water.’

‘Well, a light, let us say. Though some fires will burn in water, of course.’

Galileo tried to imagine that. Of course there were different kinds of fire. Blue streaks in blackness…This dream was testing him in all sorts of ways: could he find a way to test it back? Maybe answer the basic question: was this really happening? He looked around to see if there was something small that he could take and conceal in his coat. Stealing ideas from dreams-perhaps it wasn’t so unusual. Perhaps it was a fundamental mode of thought.

The next flick of blue light was followed by a blue ball, which rapidly expanded, then became a kind of diffuse polyhedron, shedding spicules and other radiola of blue light which then curved away from the polyhedron in spirals, some of them tight equable spirals, making cylindrical coils, others equiangular spirals, growing wildly outward in conic shapes. One of these flashed right by the window, and for a second or two their chamber pulsed sapphire.

Some of the crew cried out; then there was silence.

Galileo said, ‘What was that?’

Ganymede appeared astonished; he stood pressed against the window, his blade of a nose touching it.

He straightened up, expression black, ‘It’s here. I knew it. The anomalies made it very clear, I’ve been saying so all along.’ He turned to his crew. ‘We shouldn’t be here! Have the Europans shown up yet?’

‘We haven’t seen them,’ one replied.

‘Find their flue then! Get to it-we have to get to it before they do, to stop them!’

They turned back to their screens and their crowded desktops. After a time one said, ‘We’ve found it. We can hear them within it. They’re descending. We’re closing on it-wait. There they are. Two of them, just leaving their flue.’

Ganymede hissed. ‘Go!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ram them! Get under them and ram them from below! Full speed until you reach them, then get in position to shove them right back up the flue!’ He looked stricken, grim beyond telling. ‘We have to make them leave!’

‘How can you do that?’ Hera asked.

‘We’ll ram them until they turn back.’

‘Are you going to warn them?’

‘I don’t want to break radio silence. Who knows what effect it might have on what’s in here?’

‘What about the sound of collisions? What about the sounds and the exhaust from your engines?’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying to them! None of us should be here!’

Another blue conic spiral flashed by them. Ganymede read the screens and the desks. ‘That could be some kind of signal. Speech, or thought, in some language of light.’

‘Who would it speak to?’

‘The light may be secondary. Who knows who it talks to. I have my suspicions, but…’

‘Try numbers,’ Galileo suggested. ‘Display a triangle, see if it knows the Pythagorean theorem.’

Ganymede shook his head, visibly trying to remain patient. ‘That’s what the Europans will do, I’m afraid. Reckless interventions like that. They have no idea what they may be getting into.’

‘Is it some kind of fish?’

‘Not a fish. But on the floor of the ocean are layers of something. Perhaps a slime that is organized into larger structures.’

‘But how would a slime make light?’

Ganymede clutched his black hair in his hands. ‘Light from slime is bioluminescence,’ he said tightly. ‘Slime from light is photosynthesis. Both are very common. They’re like alchemical interactions.’

‘But alchemy doesn’t really work.’

‘Sometimes it does. Be quiet now. We have to get the Europans out of here.’

On the screen that had held the rainbow images of the flue, there stood now an image all in greys, in which near-white shapes defined an object much like their own vessel, shifting against a rumpled grey field. Ganymede took over at one desk and began to tap gently on the array of tabs and knobs. A solid bump, and then the screen showed nothing but the ghostly image of another ship. ‘Hold on,’ Ganymede ordered grimly, and began tapping harder than ever. ‘Pauline, keep the vectors such that we push it up into its flue.’

Then a loud bang and instant deceleration knocked them all forward and up into the air. When they fell back Galileo found himself in a heap of bodies in the corner, Hera under him. He got up and tried to give her a hand, but staggered back as the vessel tipped again.

The voice named Pauline said, ‘They’re in their flue now, but they can descend out of it again, of course.’

‘Go after the other one anyway. Wait, while we’re in contact with them, speak hull to hull and tell them to get back to the surface. Tell them if they don’t we’ll ram them hard enough to breach both ships. Tell them who we are and tell them I’ll do it.’

Suddenly a storm of blue flashes exploded in the window, and all the screens lit up as if with torn rainbows. The visual chaos was split by black lightning that somehow was just as devastating to the eyes as white lightning. Cries of alarm filled the air. Then the vessel lurched down and began to spin. Everyone had to hold on to something to stay upright; Galileo clutched Hera by the elbow, as high as his shoulder, and she held him up with that same arm, while grasping a chair back with her other hand. One of the crew clutched her desk while pointing at her screen with the other hand. Ganymede moved like an acrobat across the bucking deck, inspecting one screen and then another. The officers shouted at him over a high ringing tone. On the screens Galileo caught sight of a swirl of a steep conic spiral rising from the depths, now revealed to be immense, a matter of many miles. The blue light flashed in their chamber again.

‘It doesn’t want us here,’ Ganymede said. ‘Pauline, open radio contact with those ships. Send this: Get out! Get out! Get out!’

A high moan lofted up Galileo’s spine, leaving his short hairs as erect as a hedgehog’s. The sound resembled wolves howling at the moon. Often Galileo had heard them in the distance, late at night, when all the rest of the world slept. But the sound filling him now was to wolves’ howls as wolves’ howls were to human speech, a sound so uncanny that actual wolves would surely have run away whimpering. Fear turned his bowels watery. He saw all the others in the craft were just as afraid. He clutched Hera’s thick biceps, felt himself moaning involuntarily. It was too loud now for anyone to hear him; the superlupine howls became a keening shriek that seemed everywhere at once, both inside and outside him. The blue flashes were now inside the vessel, even inside his eyes, though they were squeezed shut.

‘Go!’ Hera shouted. Galileo wondered if anyone else could hear her. In any case the vessel was spiralling upward now, so forcefully that Galileo was knocked to his knees. Hera swung him up and around the way he would have swung a child, and plopped him into a chair; she staggered, almost landed on him, sat hard on the floor beside him. Black flashes still shot through them like lightning, through floor to ceiling, as if carrying them along in some stupendous explosion, aquatic but incorporeal, everything spiralling in a dizzying rise. It was like being in the grip of a living Archimedes’ screw. Up and up again, until there was an enormous crash, casting everyone up onto the ceiling, after which they flailed awkwardly down and thumped to the floor. They had struck the shell of ice capping the ocean, Galileo presumed, and it seemed the vessel might have cracked and everyone would soon drown. Then Galileo felt shoved toward the floor, indicating a new acceleration, as when rocked back on a bolting horse. The vessel itself now creaked and squealed, while the eerie shriek was muffled. The chamber was still bathed in flickers of blue fire. Ganymede, propped on both arms before the biggest table of screens and instruments, conferred in sharp tones with crew members holding on beside him. It seemed they were still trying to steer the thing.

Up they tumbled, turning and spinning this way and that, pitching and yawing but always moving up.

Ganymede said loudly, ‘Are the Europans ahead of us?’

‘There’s no sign of them.’ Pauline’s voice was small under the muffled shriek.

The shriek shot up the scale in a rising glissando, until it was no longer audible; but immediately a violent earache and headache assaulted Galileo. He shouted up at Ganymede, ‘Won’t we emerge too quickly, if we don’t slow down?’

Ganymede glanced at him, started tapping again on one of the desks.

Then the black on the screens turned blue, an indigo that lightened abruptly, and they shot up in a violent turquoise acceleration. Galileo’s head banged the floor of the vessel and he thrust an arm under Hera; the back of her head smacked his forearm, and it hurt, but she turned and saw he had saved her a knock.

On one screen splayed the starry black sky, under it the shattered white plain of Europa’s surface.

‘We’re going to fall!’

But they didn’t. The column of water under them had fountained out of its hole and then quickly frozen in place, so that it stood there as ice, supporting their vessel just as certain sandstone columns held up schist boulders in an area of the Alps. Icicles broke and clattered away from the vessel’s sides, shattering on the low frozen waves now surrounding the column. Black sky; white ice, tinted the oranges of Jupiter; their vessel, like a roc’s egg on a plinth.

‘How will we get down?’ Galileo inquired in the sudden silence. His ears buzzed and hurt, and he could see crew members holding their heads.

‘Something will come to us,’ said Ganymede.

Hera laughed just a touch wildly, detached Galileo’s fingers from her arm. ‘The Europans will come for us. The Council will come for us.’

‘I don’t care, if they get the others too.’

‘The others may have died inside.’

‘So be it. We’ll tell the Council what we did, and tell them they should have done it.’ He turned to one of his crew. ‘Prepare the entangler to send Signor Galileo back.’

The crewman, one of the pilots, bustled out of the chamber through a low door. Ganymede turned to speak to another of them.

Hera leaned over and said quickly in Galileo’s ear, ‘They will give you an amnestic, and you won’t remember any of this. Drink salt water the moment you wake. Do your alchemists have magnesium sulphate? Well, shit-you won’t remember this either. Here-’ she reached inside her tunic, pulled out a small tablet, gave it to him. ‘This is better than nothing. Hide it on you, and when you see it again, eat it!’ She glared at him, her nose inches from his, and pinched his arm hard. ‘Eat this! Remember!’

‘I’ll try,’ Galileo promised, slipping the pill in his sleeve and feeling his arm throb.

Ganymede towered over him. ‘Come, signor. There is no time to lose, we will soon be apprehended. The other ships may not have made it, in which case good riddance to them, but we will have a lot of explaining to do. Let me convey you back to your home.’

Galileo stood. As he passed Hera she pinched him again, this time on the butt. Eat the pill, he thought, ignoring her, and walked with Ganymede to the side of his thick perispicillum. Eat the pill.

‘Here,’ Ganymede said, and a mist from his hand hit Galileo’s face.

Chapter Six A Statue Would Have Been Erected

These confused and intermittent mental struggles slip through one’s fingers and escape by their subtleties and slitherings, not hesitating to produce a thousand chimeras and fantastic caprices little understood by themselves and not at all by their listeners. By these fancies the bewildered mind is bandied about from one phantasm to another, just as in a dream one passes from a palace to a ship and then to a grotto or beach, and finally, when one awakes and the dream vanishes (and for the most part all memory of it also), one finds that one has been idly sleeping and has passed the hours without profit of any sort.

-GALILEO, letter to Cosimo, 1611

And indeed he came out of this syncope as one wakes from a dream, agitated, gasping, struggling to remember as it squirted away; you could see it in his face. ‘No,’ he moaned, ‘come back…don’t forget…’

This time it was his newly hired housekeeper who discovered him: La Piera had arrived at last. ‘Maestro!’ she cried, leaning over to peer into his staring eye. ‘Wake up!’

He groaned, looked at her without recognition. She gave him a hand, hauled him to his feet. Though a braccio shorter, she was about as heavy as he was.

‘They told me you suffer from syncopes.’

‘I was dreaming.’

‘You were paralysed. I shouted, I pinched you, nothing. You were gone.’

‘I was gone.’ He shuddered like a horse. ‘I had a dream, or something. A vision. But I can’t remember it!’

‘That’s all right. You’re better off without dreams.’

He regarded her curiously. ‘Why do you say that?’

She shrugged her broad shoulders as she tugged his clothes into position, holding up a little pellet she pulled from his jacket and then pocketing it. ‘My dreams are crazy, that’s all. Burning things in the oven while all the fish on the table come to life and start biting me, or sliding out the door like eels. They’re always the same. Rubbish I say! Life is crazy enough as it is.’

‘Maybe so.’

Then Cartophilus hustled onto the altana and came up short at the sight of them. Galileo shuddered again, pointed a finger at him: ‘You!’ he exclaimed.

‘Me,’ the ancient one admitted cautiously. ‘What is it, maestro? Why are you up?’

‘You know why!’ Galileo roared. Then, piteously: ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not I,’ Cartophilus said, shifty as always. ‘I heard voices and came out to see what was up.’

‘You let someone in. In the gate?’

‘Not I, maestro. Did you fall into one of your syncopes again?’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ La Piera confirmed.

Galileo heaved a huge sigh. Clearly he could remember nothing, or next to nothing. He glanced up; Jupiter was nearly overhead. He was cold, he slapped his arms to warm himself. ‘Were the wolves in the hills howling earlier?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Not that I heard.’

‘I think they were.’ He sat there thinking about it. ‘To bed,’ he muttered, and stood. ‘I can’t do it tonight.’ He glanced up again, hesitated. ‘Ah, damn.’ He plopped down again on his stool. ‘I have to check them, at least. What time is it? Midnight? Bring me some mulled wine. And stay out here with me.’

Salviati was out of town, and Galileo was therefore stuck in his rented house in Florence. He found himself in a strange mood, distracted and pensive. He made it known to Vinta, in the most obsequious and flowery language he could manage, which was saying a lot, that he wanted to go to Rome to promote his new discoveries-or, as he admitted in a meeting with the Grand Duke’s secretary, to defend them. For there were a lot of serious people who simply didn’t have spyglasses good enough to see the moons of Jupiter, and even well-meaning parties like the Jesuits, the best astronomers in Europe aside from Kepler, were having trouble making the observations. And in Tuscany a new thing had happened: a philosopher named Ludovico delle Colombe was circulating a manuscript that not only ridiculed the notion that the Earth might move, but displayed a long list of quotes from the Bible to back his argument that Galileo’s idea was contrary to Scripture. These quotes included ‘You fixed the earth on its foundation’ (Psalm 104:5); ‘God made the orb immobile’ (1 Chronicles 16:30); ‘He suspended the earth above nothingness, that is, above the centre’ (Job 26:7); ‘The heaviness of stone, the weight of sand’ (Proverbs 27:3); ‘Heaven is up, the earth is down’ (Proverbs 30:3); ‘The sun rises, and sets, and returns to its place, from which, reborn, it revolves through the meridian, and is curved toward the North’ (Ecclesiastes 1:5); ‘God made two lights, i. e. , a greater light and a smaller light, and the stars, to shine above the earth’ (Genesis 1:17).

Galileo read a manuscript of this letter, given to him by Salviati to show him what was being circulated, and cursed at every sentence. ‘The heaviness of stone! This is stupid!’

Who wants the human mind put to death? he wrote angrily to Salviati. Who is going to claim that everything in the world which is observable and knowable has already been seen and discovered?

People were afraid of change. They seized on Aristotle because he said that above the sky there was no change; thus, if you died and went there, you would not change either. He wrote to the astronomer Mark Welser, I suspect that our wanting to measure the universe by our own little yardstick makes us fall into strange fantasies, and that our particular hatred of death makes us hate fragility. If that which we call corruption were annihilation, the Peripatetics would have some reason for being such staunch enemies of it. But if it is nothing else than a mutation, it does not merit so much hatred. I don’t think anyone would complain about the corruption of the egg if what results from it is a chick.

Change could be growth, in other words. It was intrinsic to life. And so these religious objections to the changes he saw in the sky were stupid. But they were also dangerous.

So he wrote weekly to Vinta, asking him to ask the bighearted brilliant splendiferous grandissimo Grand Duke to send him to Rome, so he could explain his discoveries. Eventually Galileo convinced Vinta that a visit could do no harm, indeed could add to the lustre of his prince’s reputation. The trip was therefore approved; but then Galileo fell ill again. For two months he suffered such headaches and fevers that there was no question of travel.

He recuperated at Salviati’s villa. ‘I’m embroiled in something strange,’ he confided to his young friend from out of a fever. ‘Lady Fortuna has grabbed me by the arm, she has tossed me over her shoulder. God knows where I’m headed.’

Salviati did not know what to make of this, but he was a good friend to have in a crisis. He held your hand, he looked at you and understood what you said; his liquid eyes and quick smile were the very picture of intelligent goodness. He laughed a lot, and he made Galileo laugh, and there was no one quicker to point out a bird or a cloud, or to propose a conundrum about negative numbers or the like. A sweet soul, and smart. ‘Maybe it’s La Vicuna who has taken you by the hand, the muse of justice.’

‘I wish it, but no,’ Galileo said, looking inward. ‘Lady Fortuna is the one deciding my fate. The capricious one. A big woman.’

‘But you have always been avventurato.’

‘But with luck of all kinds,’ Galileo groused. ‘Good luck and bad.’

‘But the good has been so good, my friend. Think of your gifts, your genius. That too is Fortuna making her dispensations.’

‘Maybe so. May it continue that way, then.’

Finally, impatient at the delay forced on him by his body, he wrote to Vinta asking if a ducal litter could be provided for his travel. By this time it was becoming clear that the Sidereus Nuncius had made Galileo famous all over Europe. In the courts lucky enough to have been sent one of Galileo’s spyglasses, star parties were being held, from Bavaria and Bohemia to France and England. Vinta decided that Galileo’s presence in Rome could only bring honour and prestige to the Medici: the use of the ducal litter was approved.

On 23rd March, 1611, Galileo left with his servants Cartophilus and Giuseppe, and a little group of the Grand Duke’s horsemen. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, written by an old acquaintance of his, Michelangelo Buonarroti, nephew of Florence’s most famous artist, who had died the day before Galileo was born, causing talk (by Galileo’s father anyway) of a transmigration of souls.

The roads between Florence and Rome were as good as any in Italy, but they were still slow, even in the best stretches, which were much abbreviated by winter damage. In a litter the trip took six days. By day Galileo sat on pillows inside the carriage, enduring the jouncing of the iron-rimmed wooden wheels into potholes and over stones, also the steady grind over cobbles or beds of gravel. Sometimes he rode a horse to give his kidneys and back a rest, but this meant a different kind of hammering. He hated to travel. Rome was as far away from Florence as he had ever been, and his only previous trip had occurred twenty-four years earlier, before the terrible incident in the cellar at Costozza had wrecked his health.

The roadside inns they stopped in along the way-at San Casciano, Siena, San Quirico, Acquapendente, Viterbo, and Monterosi-offered beds that were battered and flea-ridden, in rooms crowded with other bodies all snoring and hacking at once. It was better to spend the night outside in his coat, under a cape and a blanket, watching the sky. Jupiter was high, and every night he could log the positions of the four Jovian moons early and late, looking for the moments when a moon slowed and reached the outer point of its orbit, or the moments when it touched the lambent side of Jupiter itself. He was intent on being the first to determine their exact orbital times, which Kepler had written would be hard to do. He felt a strong bond with the moons, as if being their discoverer he somehow possessed them. One night he heard wolves howling and the bond seemed stronger than ever, as if wolves came from Jupiter. The white disc in his glass seemed to quiver with life, and he felt full of a feeling he couldn’t name.

So the damp spring nights would pass, and he would collapse into the litter as the Grand Duke’s men prepared for departure, hoping for sleep through the jouncing day on the road. Many mornings he succeeded in this, and was insensible to some hours of travel. But both his night and day routines were hard on his back, and he arrived in Rome exhausted.

On Holy Tuesday the litter ground its way through the immense shabby outskirts of Rome. The broad road was flanked hard on each side by innumerable shacks made of sticks, as if built by magpies. Once inside the ancient wall, which was easy to miss, Galileo’s party clopped slowly through packed paved streets. Rome was as big as ten Florences, and the tightly packed buildings were often three and even four storeys tall, balconies overhanging the narrow streets. People lived their lives and dried their laundry on the balconies, commenting freely on the passersby below.

The tight streets opened up by the river, where there were flood fields and orchards. Further into the city they came to the Palazzo Firenze, which overlooked a small campo. This was where Galileo was to be hosted by Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome, one Giovanni Niccolini, a lifelong diplomat near the end of a long career in the Medici service. This worthy appeared in the entryway of the palazzo and greeted Galileo rather coolly. Vinta had written Niccolini to say that Galileo would be accompanied by a single servant, and here were two, Cartophilus having insinuated himself at the last minute. Financial arrangements between the Grand Duke and his ambassador were meticulously kept, so perhaps it was not clear to Niccolini that he would be reimbursed for the keep of this extra servant. In any case, he was distinctly reserved as he led Galileo and his little retinue into a big suite of rooms at the back of the ground floor, looking onto the formal garden. This elaborate green space was dotted with ancient Roman statues whose marble faces had melted away. Something about the look of them caught Galileo’s eye and disturbed him.

Once moved in, Galileo launched into a busy schedule of visits to dignitaries strategic to his purpose, one of the most important being the Jesuit Christopher Clavius at the College of Rome.

Clavius greeted him with the same words he had used twentyfour years before, when Galileo had been an unknown young mathematician and Clavius in his prime, known throughout Europe as ‘the Euclid of the sixteenth century’:

‘Welcome to Rome, young signor! All praise to God and Archimedes!’

He was not much changed in appearance, despite all the years: a slight man with a puckered mouth and a kindly eye. He led Galileo into the Jesuit college’s workshop, where together they inspected the spyglasses the monk mechanicals had constructed. The glasses looked like Galileo’s, and were equivalent in power, although more marred by irregularities, as Galileo told the monks freely.

Christopher Grienberger and Odo Maelcote then joined them, and Clavius introduced his younger colleagues as the ones who had made the bulk of the observations; Clavius lamented his aged eyesight. ‘But I have seen your so-called Medicean stars several times,’ he added, ‘and they are obviously orbiting Jupiter, just as you say.’

Galileo bowed deeply. There were people out there claiming the moons were just flaws in Galileo’s glass; he had angrily offered ten thousand crowns to anyone who could make a glass that would show flaws around Jupiter but not around the other planets, and of course there were no takers, but still-not everyone believed. So this mattered. Seeing was believing, and Clavius had seen. As Galileo straightened up he said, ‘God bless you, Father, I was quite sure that you would see them, they are so prominent, and you such an experienced astronomer. And I can tell you that on my journey to Rome I have made good progress in determining the period of orbit of all four of these new moons.’

Grienberger and Maelcote raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances. Clavius only smiled. ‘I think here we are in rare agreement with Johannes Kepler, that establishing their periods of rotation will be very difficult.’

‘But…’ Galileo hesitated, then realized he had made a mistake, and dropped the matter with a wave of the hand. There was no point in making announcements in advance of results; indeed, since he was intent on being the first to make every discovery having to do with the new stars, he should not be inciting competitors to further effort. It was already startling enough to see that they had managed to manufacture spyglasses almost as strong as his own.

So he let the talk turn to the phases of Venus. The Jesuits also had seen these, and while he did not press the point that this was strong evidence in support of the Copernican view, he could see in their faces that the implications were already clear to them. And they did not deny the appearances. They believed in the glass. This was a most excellent sign, and as he considered the happy implications of a public acknowledgment that their observations agreed with his, Galileo recovered from his uneasiness at the power of their devices. These were the Pope’s official astronomers, supporting his findings! So he spent the rest of the afternoon reminiscing with Clavius and laughing at his jokes.

Another important meeting for Galileo, though he did not know it, came on the Saturday before Easter, when he paid his respects to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini. They met in one of the outer offices of St Peter’s, near the Vatican’s river gate. Galileo examined the interior gardens of the place with a close eye; he had never been inside the sacred fortress before, and he was interested to observe the horticulture deployed inside. Purity had been emphasized over liveliness, he was not surprised to note: paths were gravelled, borders were lines of clean cobbles, long narrow lawns were trimmed as if by barbers. Massed roses and camellias were all either white or red. It was a little too much.

Barberini proved to be a man of the world, affable, quick, well-dressed in a cardinal’s everyday finery; lithe and handsome, goateed, smooth-skinned, fulsome. His power made him as graceful as a dancer, as confident in his body as a minx or an otter. Galileo handed him the introductory letters from Michaelangelo’s nephew and from Antonio de Medici, and Barberini put them aside after a glance and took Galileo by the hand and led him out into the courtyard, dispensing with all ceremony. ‘Let’s take our ease and talk.’

Galileo was his usual lively self, a happy Pulcinella with a genius for mathematics. In his interviews with nobles he was quick and funny, always chuckling in his baritone rumble, out to please. The Barberini were a powerful family, and he had heard that Maffeo was a virtuoso, with a great interest in intellectual and artistic matters. He hosted many evenings in which poetry and song and philosophical debates were featured entertainments, and he wrote poetry himself that he was said to be vain about. Galileo seemed to be assuming that this was therefore a prelate in the style of Sarpi, broad-minded and liberal. In any case he was perfectly at ease, and showed Barberini his occhialino inside and out.

‘I wish I had been able to bring enough of them with me to leave one with you as a gift, Your Eminence, but I was only allowed a small trunk for baggage.’

Barberini nodded at this awkwardness. ‘I understand,’ he murmured as he looked through the glass. ‘Seeing through yours is enough, for now, and more than enough. Although I do want one, it is true. It’s simply amazing how much you can see.’ He pulled back to look at Galileo. ‘It’s odd-you wouldn’t think that more could be held there for the eye, in distant things, than we already see.’

‘No, it’s true. We must admit that our senses don’t convey everything to us, not even in the sensible world.’

‘Certainly not.’

They looked through it at the distant hills east of Rome, and the cardinal marveled and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner of any other man.

‘You have given us new worlds,’ he said.

‘The seeing of them, anyway,’ Galileo corrected him, to seem properly humble.

‘And how do the Peripatetics take it? And the Jesuits?’

Galileo tipped his head side to side. ‘They are none too pleased, Your Grace.’

Barberini laughed. He had been trained by the Jesuits, but he did not like them, Galileo saw; and so Galileo continued, ‘There are some of them who refuse to look through the glass at all. One of them recently died, and as I said at the time, since he would not look at the stars through my glass, he could now inspect them from up close, on his way past them to Heaven!’

Barberini laughed uproariously. ‘And Clavius, what does he say?’

‘He admits the moons orbiting Jupiter are really there.’

‘The Medici moons, you have called them?’

‘Yes,’ Galileo admitted, realizing for the first time how this could be another awkwardness. ‘I expect to make many more discoveries in the heavens, and hope to honour those who have helped me accordingly.’

The little smile that twitched over the cardinal’s face was not entirely friendly. ‘And you think these Jovian moons show that the Earth goes around the sun in an analogous manner, as Copernicus claimed?’

‘Well, it shows at least that moons go around planets, as our moon goes around the Earth. Better proof of the Copernican view, Your Grace, is how you can see the phases of Venus through the glass.’ Galileo explained how in the Copernican understanding the phases of Venus had combined with its varying distance from Earth to make it give to the naked eye always the same brightness, which had argued against the idea it had phases, when one had no glass to see them; and how its position, always low in the sky in the mornings and evenings, combined with actual sighting of the phases through the glass confirmed the idea that Venus was orbiting the sun inside the Earth’s own orbiting of it. The ideas were complicated to describe in words, and Galileo felt at ease enough to stand and take three citrons from a bowl, then place them and move them about on the table to illustrate the concepts, to Barberini’s evident delight.

‘And the Jesuits deny this!’ the cardinal repeated when Galileo had completed a very convincing demonstration of the system.

‘Well, no. They agree now that the phenomena at least are real.’

‘But then saying that the explanation is not yet so clear. Yes, that makes sense. That sounds like them. And after all, I suppose God could have arranged it any way He wanted.’

‘Of course, Your Grace.’

‘And what does Bellarmino say?’

‘I don’t know, Your Grace.’

The cardinal’s smile was even a little wicked in its foxiness. ‘Perhaps we will find out.’

Then he spoke of Florence, of his love for the city and its nobility, which Galileo happily echoed. And when Barberini asked the usual question about favourite poets, Galileo declared, ‘Oh, I prefer Ariosto to Tasso, as meat over candied fruit,’ which made the cardinal laugh, as being the reverse of the usual characterization of the two; and thus the interview continued well to its conclusion and Galileo’s obsequious withdrawal. And Cardinal Barberini must have enjoyed it, for that very afternoon he wrote to Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s nephew, and to Antonio de Medici, to say he appreciated their recommendations of Florence’s new court philosopher, and would be delighted to help him in any way he could.

A few days later Galileo was invited to a party organized by Giovanni Battista Deti, nephew of the late Pope Clement III, where he met four more cardinals, and listened to a talk given to the group by Giovanni Battista Strozzi. In the discussion afterward Galileo held his tongue, as he told all his correspondents later, feeling that as a newcomer this was the courteous thing to do. Staying silent was no doubt difficult for him, given his natural tendency towards continuous speech, and also given what could only be called his growing intimacy with the topic of Strozzi’s talk, which was Pride. For the success of all these visits was clearly going to his head. Night after night he was joining evening meals, often at Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s residence on the Quirinal, right next to the Pope’s palace, and after the food and the musical entertainment standing up to become himself the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen of nearby landmarks through his glass. People never ceased to be amazed, and Galileo puffed up accordingly; back at the Palazzo Firenze after these events we could barely get him out of his jacket and boots.

One meeting had lasting consequences. It took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli, the young man who had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, in which matters of mathematics and natural philosophy were regularly discussed. Cesi also used his fortune to gather in his palazzo an ever-growing collection of natural wonders. When Galileo arrived at his palazzo, Cesi took him on a tour of two rooms that were filled to overflowing with lodestones, chunks of coral, fossils, unicorn horns, griffins’ eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, sharks’ teeth, jars containing monstrous births, carbuncles that glowed in the dark, turtle shells, a rhinoceros horn worked in gold, a bowl of lapis lazuli, dried crocodiles, model cannons, a collection of Roman coins, and a box of truly exquisite lapidary specimens.

Galileo inspected each of these objects with genuine curiosity. ‘Marvellous,’ he said as he looked in the hollow end of a unicorn’s horn chased with gold. ‘It must be as big as a horse.’

‘It does seem so, doesn’t it,’ Cesi replied happily. ‘But come look at my herbarium.’

Most of all, it turned out, Cesi was a botanist; he had hundreds of leaves and flowers arranged in big thick books, all dried and displayed with descriptions. He pointed out his favourites enthusiastically. Galileo watched him closely: he was young and handsome, very wealthy, fond of the company of men. And his admiration for Galileo was boundless. ‘You are the one we’ve waited for,’ he said as they closed the plant books. ‘We’ve needed an intellectual leader to blaze the path to the higher levels, and now that you’re here, I’m sure it will happen.’

‘Maybe so,’ Galileo allowed. He liked the idea of the Lincean Academy very much. To get out from under the thumb of the universities and all their Peripatetics, to elevate mathematics and natural philosophy to the highest level of thought and inquiry; it was a great new thing, a way forward. A new kind of institution, and a potential ally too.

Later that day Cesi hosted a dinner to introduce Galileo to the rest of the Lynxes. The party took place on top of the Janiculum, the highest of the Roman hills, in the vineyard of Monsignor Malvasia. The Lincean membership and a dozen other likeminded gentlemen assembled while it was still day, for the views from the Janiculum over the city were unobstructed in all directions. Among the guests were the foreign Linceans Johann Faber and Johann Schreck from Germany, Jan Eck from Holland, and Giovanni Demisiani from Greece.

Galileo trained his glass first on the basilica of St John Lateran, across the Tiber at a distance of about three miles, adjusting it until the chiselled inscription was legible on the loggia over the side entrance. It had been placed there by Sixtus V in the first year of his pontificate:

Sixtus

Pontifex Maximus

anno primo

Everyone was startled, as usual. When they had all looked through the occhialino more than once, and read and re-read the distant inscription, several toasts were proposed and drunk down. The group grew raucous, even a little giddy; Cesi’s musicians, sensing the spirit of the moment, played a fanfare on horns they pulled out from beneath their chairs. Galileo bowed, and while the brassy music played on, turned his glass on the residence of the Duke of Altemps, on a hill in the first rise of the Appenines, far to the east of them. When he had it fixed the Linceans again crowded round, taking turns counting the windows on the façade of the great villa, some fifteen miles away. This made people stark amazed, and the Janiculum rang with cheers.

Later that night, after a great deal of eating and drinking and talk, and a brief look at the moon, which was too full to see through the glass as other than a white blaze, Demisiani the Greek sat down by Galileo and leaned into him.

‘You should name your device with a new Greek word,’ he said, his saturnine face alive with the humour of his suggestion, or the fact that he was the one making it. ‘You should call it a telescope.’

‘Telescopio?’ Galileo repeated.

‘To see at a distance. Tele scopio, distance seeing. It’s better than perspicillum, which means merely a lens after all, or visorio, which is only to say visual or optical. And occhialino is petty somehow, as if you wanted only to spy on someone, it’s too small, too provincial, too Tuscan. The other languages will never use it, and will have to make up words of their own. But telescope all will understand and use together. As always with Greek!’

Galileo nodded. Certainly the best scientific names were always either Latin or Greek. Kepler had been calling it a perspicillum.

‘The root words are very old and basic,’ Demisiani said, ‘and the compounding method as well.’

Galileo surged to his feet and raised his glass, waited for the group to notice and go quiet. ‘Telescopio!’ he bellowed, dragging out the syllables as if calling for Mazzoleni, as if announcing the name of a champion: the group cheered, and Galileo leaned over to give the grinning Greek a hug, filled with sudden glee: of course his invention was such a new thing in the world that it needed a new name! No mere occhialino this!

‘TEL ESCOPIO!’ Who knows how many of the surrounding hills of Rome heard the party shouting out the new word. Galileo alone could have been heard halfway to Salerno.

The very next day, word came: the Pope wanted to see him.

An audience with Pope Paul V. The routine at the Palazzo Firenze took on a slightly frenzied air. Sleep was difficult. Galileo didn’t even try, but watched Jupiter and considered what was to come, and so slept eventually. He woke early, before sunrise, and took a slow dawn walk in the formal garden among the statues. He performed his ablutions, ate a small meal. Perhaps on this day it was even smaller than usual. Then Cartophilus and Giuseppe helped him dress in his best clothes, choosing the darker and more formal of his two dress jackets, which were getting a lot of wear on this visit.

Niccolini came by while he was completing his toilet, to discuss the audience, and to tell him all the latest from the Avvisi, Rome’s broadsheet of rumour and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s activities the previous week and what seemed to be on his mind. Like everyone else, Galileo already knew the Pope’s background: he had been Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a heretofore obscure member of that most powerful and dangerous of families, a canon lawyer whose election as Pope was so unlooked-for that he himself considered it an intercession of the Holy Ghost, and all his subsequent pontifical actions therefore divinely intended. This included the hanging of one Piccinardi, who had been so remiss as to write (though not to have published) an unauthorized biography of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII. That had set a tone that no one forgot.

Niccolini did not remind Galileo of that particular example of Paul’s severity, but made the point in more roundabout ways. The pontiff, he warned, was rigid, headstrong, peremptory; in these difficult years of the Counter-Reformation, he brooked no deviation from the rules and tactics laid out by the Council of Trent half a century before. In short, a pope. ‘He has grown a bit fat with papal power, in the usual way,’ Niccolini concluded.

The audience was held at the Villa Malvasia, where Galileo had been only the night before. This was the Pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul V, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.

The Pope was indeed fat, an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him to use.

‘Rise,’ Paul said gruffly, interrupting him. ‘Speak to us standing.’

This was a great honour. Holding his features steady, Galileo got to his feet with the least clumsiness he could manage, then bowed his head.

‘Walk with us,’ Paul said. ‘We wish to take a turn in the garden.’

Galileo followed the Pope and walked with him, Niccolini and a clutch of papal assistants and servants trailing behind. They wandered through the hilltop’s vineyard, already well known to Galileo, and as he grew used to the big man’s blunt manner, and his slow gait, he grew more comfortable. He seemed to forget the stiletto sticking in and out of Paolo Sarpi’s head, and spoke as if to God Himself. Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

‘Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries,’ Galileo said calmly, ‘but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God’s world and God’s word are necessarily the same, both being God’s. Any apparent discrepancies are only a matter of human misunderstanding.’

‘Of course,’ Paul said shortly. He did not like theology. He waved these problems aside as if they were the bees humming in the vineyard. ‘You have our support in this.’

After that Galileo spoke of other things, billowing on this pronouncement like a sail filled with the wind. He became less serious, more his usual courtier self. Then, after three quarters of an hour of this slow stroll through the vines, Paul glanced back at his secretaries and simply walked away, down to his litter at the front of the villa.

Startled by this abrupt departure, Galileo stood with his mouth hanging open, wondering if he had said something to offend. But Niccolini assured him that this was Paul’s way, that given the frequency of his audiences, the time he saved by dispensing with the always-lengthy farewells added up to an hour or more a day. ‘The amazing thing is that he stayed as long as he did. If he had not been truly interested he would have left much earlier.’ In truth the audience had gone wonderfully well, and Galileo had been shown great favour by being commanded to walk with the Pope. It had been one of the friendliest audiences the ambassador had ever witnessed. A triumph for both Galileo and for Florence. Coming from Niccolini, who was suddenly enthusiastic, Galileo knew it must be so.

After that Galileo lost his head, everyone around him saw it. The endless parade of banquets at which he was the centre of all attention and praise; the rich food; the balthazars and fiascos of wine; the long nights, when despite all the revelry he would stay up afterward to get some more sightings of Jupiter and its moons, so that even in the midst of everything else he was homing in on good orbital times for I, II, III, and IV-and yet he still had to rise early on the mornings after to prepare for yet another feast: all these began to take their toll on him. The idea that he would keep his mouth shut during a banquet discussion, be it on pride or anything else, became laughable. He talked lots: he discoursed, he lectured, he conversed, he boasted. He had always known that he was smarter than other people, but in the years when that had not actually seemed to benefit him, he had not been so impressed by it. Now, as he became ever more full of himself, he began to use his wit like a sword, or to be more accurate, given the rough buffo tenor of his humor, like a club. Buffo became buffare as he swelled up.

Speaking one night of the uneven surface of the moon, for instance, revealed so clearly by his telescope, he reminded everyone that this was a big problem for the poor Peripatetics, as the Aristotelian orthodoxy was that everything in the heavens was perfectly geometrical, and the moon therefore a perfect sphere. Even Father Clavius, he said, had ventured, and in print, that although the visible surface of the moon was uneven, this could be illusory, and all its mountains and plains could be encased in a clear crystal shell that constituted its perfect sphericality. Galileo’s tone of voice expressed his incredulity at this opinion, and as the audience chuckled they also grew more attentive; this was treading a little close to the edge.

Cartophilus had joined some of the other servants in borrowing a pillow and a bottle of wine and lying out in the vineyard, outside the cast of the torchlight bathing the long banqueting table, there to watch and listen. The guests in their bejewelled finery were like a painting come to life and performing for them alone; but Cartophilus sat up and put the bottle down as Galileo began to poke fun at the famous old Jesuit:

‘If everyone is allowed to imagine whatever they please, then of course someone can say that the moon is surrounded by a crystalline substance that is transparent and invisible! Who can deny it? I will grant it without objection, provided that with equal courtesy I be allowed to say that the crystal has on its outer surface a large number of huge mountains, thirty times as high as terrestrial ones, but invisible because they are diaphanous. Thus I can picture to myself another moon ten times as mountainous as I said in the first place!’ The guests at the table laughed. ‘The hypothesis is pretty,’ Galileo went on, goaded by their amusement, ‘but its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable! Who does not see that this is a purely arbitrary fiction? Why, if you counted the Earth’s atmosphere as a similar kind of clear shell, then the Earth too would be perfectly spherical!’

And of course they all laughed. Ha ha! Very funny! And it was. Galileo’s signature mix of wit and sarcasm had been making people laugh for years. But Christopher Clavius had always been friendly to him; and more generally, it was never good to make fun of the Jesuits. Especially publicly, in Rome, and right before the Jesuits were to host a lavish feast at the College of Rome to celebrate your accomplishments. Yet here he was. Cartophilus could only groan and take another swig from his bottle: from the darkness of the vineyard, the sight of Galileo standing in the torchlight over the long table of seated revellers was the very image of Pride before its Fall.

But Galileo did not notice any danger. He ate, he talked, he boasted. He trained his telescope on the sun, using a method suggested by Castelli: the sun’s light was directed through the tube onto a sheet of paper, where one could look at the big lit circle with no danger to the eyes. And immediately it became apparent to any viewer that the lit image of the sun was dotted by small indistinct dark patches. Over the course of days, these dark spots moved across the sun’s face in a manner that suggested to Galileo that the sun too was rotating, at a speed that he calculated made its day about a month long. Rotating at about the same speed as the moon in its course around the Earth, therefore; and they were the same size in the sky. It was odd. He made sketches each day of the sun spots’ patterns, and placed the sketches side by side to show the sequence of movement.

Galileo claimed this discovery of the sun’s rotation for himself, though there were astronomers-Jesuits again-who had been tracking the sun spots for some time. He proclaimed his discovery far and wide, ignoring the fact that it was another inconvenient finding for the Peripatetics, also that it contradicted certain astronomical statements in the Bible. He didn’t care; if he noticed such problems for his opponents, he would only make another sharp heavy joke about them.

For now, none of these indiscretions seemed to be having any bad effect. At the Jesuit banquet in his honour no one spoke of his jape at Clavius’s expense, and Clavius’s colleague, the Dutch astronomer Odo Maelcote, read a learned commentary on Sidereus Nuncius which confirmed every discovery Galileo had reported. It appeared he did not have to care.

Then the newly enthusiastic Niccolini was replaced as Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome by Piero Guicciardini, who, finding Galileo at the height of his magniloquence, did not like him. And back home, Belisario Vinta was replaced as secretary to Cosimo by Curzio Picchena, who shared with Guicciardini a more jaundiced view of Galileo’s loud advocacy of the Copernican position. They saw no reason the Medici should be drawn into such a potentially awkward controversy. But if Galileo noticed these new men and their attitude toward him, again he did not seem to care.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmino, Pope Paul’s closest advisor, also a Jesuit, and the inquisitor who had handled the case of Giordano Bruno, initiated an investigation into Galileo’s theories. This was probably on Paul’s instruction, but the spies within the Vatican who had found out about it could not be sure of that. Bellarmino, they said, had looked through a Jesuit telescope himself; he had asked his Jesuit colleagues for an opinion; he had attended a meeting of the Holy Office of the Congregation, which subsequently began to look into the case. Bellarmino seemed to have been the one to order the investigation.

But no one told Galileo about this troubling development, being not quite sure what it meant. And because of his meeting with the Pope, and everything else that had happened, he was still full of himself, bumptious and grand. The visit to Rome was a triumph in every way, even if Guicciardini was now hinting that it might be best to leave while he was still being lionized. The ambassador stayed just on the right side of politeness about this, but if Galileo had sneaked into his office and looked at the letters on his desk, as proved fairly easy to do, he would have gained a truer sense of the ambassador’s mind:

Galileo has little strength of judgement wherewith to control himself, so that he makes the climate of Rome extremely dangerous to himself, particularly in these times, when we have a Pope who hates geniuses.

Eventually Galileo took the ambassador’s hint, or decided on his own, and announced he was returning to Florence. Cardinal Farnese hosted the farewell banquet in his honour, and accompanied him in his trip north as far as Caprarola, the country villa of the Farnese, where Galileo was invited to rest a night in luxury. Galileo carried with him a written report he had requested and received from Cardinal del Monte, addressed to Cosimo and Picchena. The Cardinal had finished his tribute with the words, Were we still living under the ancient republic of Rome, I am certain that a statue would have been erected in his honour on the Capitol- perhaps next to the statue of Marcus Aurelius-not a bad companion in fame. No wonder Galileo’s head had been turned. The visit to Rome was a complete success, as far as he knew.

Things continued that way after he got back to Florence. He was feted in fine style by Cosimo and his court, and it was clear that Cosimo was extremely pleased with him; his Roman performance had made Cosimo’s patronage look very discriminating indeed.

The Medici youth was no longer so young; he sat at the head of his table like a man used to command, and the boy Galileo remembered so well was no longer evident. He looked quite a bit the same, physically: slight, a bit pale, very like his father in his features, which was to say long-nosed and narrow headed, with a noble forehead. Not a robust youth, but now much more sure of himself, as only made sense: he was a prince. And he like everyone else had read his Machiavelli. He had given hard commands, and the whole duchy had obeyed them.

‘Maestro, you have set the Romans on their heels,’ he said complacently, offering a toast to the room. ‘To my old teacher, the wonder of the age!’

And the Florentines cheered even louder than the Romans had.

Soon after his return, Galileo got involved in a debate concerning hydrostatics: why did ice float? His opponent was his old foe Colombe, the malevolent shit who had tried to hang scriptural objections around his neck and thus cast him into hell. Galileo was anxious to stick the knives in this man while his Roman victories were fresh in everyone’s mind, and went at the contest like a bull seeing red, yes. But then he was frustrated by Cosimo, who ordered him to debate with such insignificant enemies in writing only, speaking over such a gadfly’s head to the world at large. Galileo did that, writing as usual at great length, but then Cosimo ordered him to debate the issue orally with a Bolognan professor named Pappazoni, whom Galileo had just helped to get his teaching position at Il Bo. This was like staking down a lamb to be killed and eaten by a lion, but Galileo and Pappazoni could only play their parts, and Galileo could not help enjoying it, as it was only a verbal killing after all.

Then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came through Florence on his way to Bologna. Cardinal Gonzaga also happened to be in the city, and so Cosimo invited both of them to attend a repeat performance of Galileo’s debate on floating bodies, to be held at a court dinner on 2nd October. Papazzoni again made a reluctant appearance, and after a feast and a concert, and much drinking, Galileo again slaughtered him to the roaring laughter of the audience. Then Cardinal Gonzaga stood and surprised everyone by supporting Papazzoni; but Barberini, smiling appreciatively, perhaps remembering their warm meeting back in the spring in Rome, took Galileo’s side.

It was therefore another triumphant evening for Galileo. As he left the banquet, well after midnight, and long after the sacrifice of Pappazoni, Cardinal Barberini took him by the hand, hugged him, bade him farewell, and promised they would meet again.

The next morning, when Barberini was to leave for Bologna, Galileo did not show up to see him off, having been unexpectedly detained by an illness he had suffered in the night. From the road Barberini wrote a note to him:

I am very sorry that you were unable to see me before I left the city. It is not that I consider a sign of your friendship as necessary, for it is well known to me, but because you were ill. May God keep you not only because outstanding persons such as yourself deserve a long life of public service, but because of the particular affection that I have and always will have for you. I am happy to be able to say this, and to thank you for the time that you spent with me.

Your affectionate brother,

Cardinal Barberini

Your affectionate brother! Talk about friends in high places! To a certain extent it seemed he had a Roman patron now to add to his Florentine one.

All was triumph. Indeed it would be hard to imagine how things could have gone better in the previous two years for Galileo and his telescope: scientific standing, social standing, patronage in both Florence and Rome-all were at their peak, and Galileo stood slightly stunned on top of what had proved a double anno mirabilis.

But there were undercurrents and counterforces at work, even on that very morning when Galileo did not show up to see off Cardinal Barberini. Galileo had been ill, yes: because a syncope had struck him when he got home from the banquet the night before. Cartophilus had hopped down from the trap in front of their house in Florence, had stilled the horse, and opened the gate; and there in the little yard stood the stranger, his massive telescope already placed on its thick tripod.

In his crow’s Latin the stranger said to Galileo, ‘Are you ready?’

Chapter Seven The Other Galileo

You are given a light to know evil from good,And free will, which, if it can endureWithout weakening after its first bout with fixed Heaven,

If it is believed in, will conquer all it meets later.So if the present world strays from its course,The cause is in you; look for it in yourself.

-DANTE, Purgatorio, Canto XVI

‘Yes, I’m ready,’ Galileo replied, his blood jolting through him so that his fingers throbbed. He was afraid!

But he was curious too. He said to the stranger, ‘Let’s go up to the altana.’

Cartophilus carried the massive telescope up the outside stairs, bent double under the load. ‘Local gravity getting to you at last?’ the stranger asked acerbically, in Latin.

‘Someone has to carry the load,’ Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. ‘Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fucking dilettante.’

The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt the sensation that this had happened before.

And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.

Jupiter was a big banded ball near the centre of the glass, strikingly handsome, colourful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis-and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.

But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.

Who was frowning heavily. ‘Let me check it.’ He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.

‘Not good,’ Cartophilus said.

‘Maybe it’s Hera,’ the stranger said darkly.

Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.

They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked through the lens again. Jupiter was still in the middle of it. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. ‘This is not just a telescopio,’ he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels…‘It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.’

The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, ‘The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?’

The stranger re-examined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.

‘Ah. Try it again,’ the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. ‘Take another look.’

Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side. III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.

Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black-or so it seemed-because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.

The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity: I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones, of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terracotta and blood red, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter-all piled on all, one colour pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.

The overlayering of so many colours made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.

He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. On the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.

He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.

On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.

‘What’s this!’ the stranger exclaimed angrily.

‘You know what this is, Ganymede,’ said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, ‘Welcome to Io, you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your travelling companion.’

She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.

‘You stole our entangler,’ Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. ‘What are you trying to do, start a war?’

Hera glared at him. ‘As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, the factions are at each other’s throats.’

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ said Ganymede coldly.

As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the extraordinary idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation sounded suspiciously defensive to Galileo, and was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plough blade. ‘This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!’

‘You’re the one who kidnapped him,’ Hera replied. ‘I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.’

Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort, his face flushed a dark red. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’

‘No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.’

‘No!’

At this the people standing behind Hera moved forward en masse. They wore clothes similar to hers, and were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards in particular, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favour.

Hera nodded at them, and said to Ganymede, ‘Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.’

‘I can’t allow this!’

‘It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.’

‘This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.’

Hera said, ‘We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and we decide what happens here.’ She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.

Hera said to Galileo. ‘Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?’

‘Not quite,’ Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry…

With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, ‘Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.’

She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and held it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her. Galileo was interested to hear what she might say; and he already knew that she was going to get what she wanted no matter what. He had seen wilful women before.

She was at least a hand taller than he, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again; after that he held onto her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy), calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.

‘You are well named,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.’

When they reached the far side of the little temple she paused. He let go of her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on, a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.

Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. ‘This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that rupture crack in the side of the shield, down there steaming.’ She pointed. ‘Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.’

Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. ‘It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.’

‘It is hot. In many places if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside Io, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.’

‘Tides?’ Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. ‘But surely there are no oceans here.’

‘By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.’ She grimaced expressively. ‘We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.’

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