Galileo's Dream (43 page)

And yet still her letters came, each one exhibiting intense care to make it shapely on the page, utilizing her characteristic clear hand with its big loops, and the flowing proud signature at the bottom.

But so often filled with trouble. One morning Galileo watched himself opening her latest letter, full of a sudden dread, and started to read, then shouted with alarm. “Oh
no!
No! Jesus Christ! Pierrrrrrr-a! Fill a basket, and find Cartophilus and tell him to get Cremonini ready. Their mother abbess has gone mad.”

This worthy was no longer Vinta's sister but another woman—small, dark, and intense. “She's slashed herself thirteen times with a kitchen knife,” Galileo told La Piera as he pulled on his boots, finishing Maria Celeste's letter as he did so. “These people are not competent to live!” he exclaimed bitterly. “They need an income, some property, a trust—
anything
!”

La Piera hustled off with a shrug; convents were like that, the shrug said. But she was angry too. “I'll come along,” she said as she reappeared.

On the way over the hills to San Matteo, it was easy to feel that all this had happened before, because it had. His feet had made the very track through the grass that they now followed. It all just kept happening. Sky as gray as rain.

Over at San Matteo, they found things even worse than Maria Celeste had reported, which was not unusual, but this time far beyond anything previous. Not just the mother abbess but also Arcangela had lost her mind, and on the very same night. Arcangela had apparently heard the abbess screaming in her suicidal hysteria, and in response
had begun banging her head against the wall of her room. She had done that until she fell insensible. Now she was conscious, but refusing to speak even to her own sister, who was clinging to Galileo's arm now, red-eyed with fear and grief, frustration, and sleeplessness. All around her was nothing but weeping and lamentation, as all the sisters demanded her attention at once.

Seeing it, Galileo lost his temper and said to them loudly, “It's like a henhouse with a fox inside it, except there's no fox, so you should all shut up! What kind of Christians are you anyway?”

This last sentiment started Maria Celeste crying too, and Galileo enfolded her in his arms. They looked like a bear holding a scarecrow pulled from its pole. She wept on his broad chest, into his beard. “What happened?” he asked again helplessly. “Why?”

She composed herself, and led him back to the dispensary as she told him the story. The mother abbess had been more and more anxious, upset about problems that she would not confess to anyone. At the same time, Suor Arcangela had stopped speaking entirely. The latter had happened before, of course, and although it was a cause for concern, there was nothing they could do about it, as they knew from long experience. “So we were limping along the best we could, when last night the full moon brought on a lunacy in the mother abbess. She was heard crying out, and when we went to her chambers to see what was wrong, we found her slashing her arms with one of the kitchen knives, and moaning. In the uproar we didn't hear Arcangela yelling in her room,”—a private room that Galileo had paid for, to keep her out of the dormitory at night, where she had trouble sleeping, and disrupted the others as well. “When we finally heard Arcangela, I was the first one there, and I found her—pounding her forehead, hard, against the wall! The bricks had cut her and she was bleeding. It was a cut on the forehead, you know how those bleed. Her face was covered with it. And she still wouldn't speak. It took four of us to get her to stop beating her brains out, and now she is restrained on her bed. She's just begun to talk again. But all she does is beg to be let free.”

“You poor girl.” Galileo followed the shivering Maria Celeste to his younger daughter's room.

Arcangela saw him in the doorway and turned her battered head away. She was tied to the mattress with innumerable strips of cloth.

Then: “Please,” she begged the wall. “Let me go.”

“But how can we,” Galileo asked her, “when you harm yourself like this? What would you have us do?”

She would not answer him.

After sunset, in the last hour of light, they headed back to Bellos-guardo. It was clear to all of them that no matter Maria Celeste's courage and ability, they had left behind a convent in desperate disarray. On the trail over the hills, Galileo was full of heavy sighs. That night he sat at the table before his roast capon and bottle of wine, and barely ate. La Piera moved around slowly, cleaning up with as little noise as possible.

“Fetch Cartophilus to me,” Galileo said at last.

A few minutes later the old man stood before him in the lantern light. Clearly he had been asleep.

“What can I do, maestro?”

“You know what you can do,” Galileo replied, with a look as black as any of Arcangela's. The family resemblance in that moment was startling.

Cartophilus knew when Galileo could not be denied. He ducked his head and nodded as he left the room.

That night when Galileo was out on the back terrace, looking stubbornly through his telescope at his little Jovian clock in the sky, Cartophilus emerged from the workshop, carrying the pewter box that held the teletrasporta under one arm.

“You'll send me to Hera?” Galileo said.

Cartophilus nodded. “I'm pretty sure she still has the other end of it.”

When Cartophilus had prepared the box, Galileo stood next to it. He looked up at Jupiter, so bright up there near the zenith. Suddenly it bloomed.

Fear of the Other

B
LACK SPACE,
the dense spangle of stars. The great bulk of Jupiter, almost entirely sunlit, surreally present to the eye, crawling phyllotaxically with its hundreds of colors and thousands of convolutions—

He was sitting in his chair in Hera's little space boat, which was again rendered invisible—a kind of Plato's cave through which the
cosmos poured in. Below and behind them, the virulent ball that was Io jumped out of the starry blackness.

“You're back,” she noted. Her teletrasporta lay on the floor beside his chair. “Good.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Europa, of course.” She looked at him. “We're still trying to keep Ganymede and his people away.”

“You got off the melting land, I see.”

“Yes, I was picked up by my people pretty soon after you left. Good that you did leave, though. It was touch and go.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I don't know, a few hours maybe.”

Galileo blew out through his lips. “Pah.”

“What?”

“For me that was a few years ago.”

She laughed. “Proof again that time is not a steady progression, that it fluctuates and eddies, and we are in different channels. I hope you have been well?”

“Not at all!”

“How so?”

“I was sick. And I remembered what was happening here, and also what will happen to me there. It was all in me at once. Not only what you showed me, the fire I mean, but also, I have to confess—I used Aurora's tutorial to take a look at my life, the last time I was with her. To see the science. I didn't know it would be so—comprehensive. It wasn't just someone's account. I was
there
. Only it was all at once.”

“Ah.”

“I didn't think it would matter, but when I went back home, I seemed to be dislocated somehow. Not in the moment, but a bit behind it, or before. I knew what was going to happen. It was bad. Unsustainable. Can you—can you help me with that, lady?”

“Maybe.”

He shuddered, remembering, then brightened. “On the other hand, there's a new pope, a man who has been like a patron to me. I think I can get him to lift the ban on discussing Copernicus. I think it's even possible to persuade him to approve the Copernican view, to make it the Church's understanding, so that the Church itself will support it. And then I'll be safe.”

She stared at him, shaking her head. “You still don't get it.”

“Things at home aren't so good,” Galileo went on, ignoring her. “But maybe His Holiness can help there too.”

She sighed. “What do you mean?”

“Well—my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I'm hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it's bad for my daughters.”

“You are the one who put them in their situation, right?”

“Yes yes.” Then, trying to distract her: “What will you do when we get to Europa?”

She saw through him. “Distract me or not, you are still stuck in a situation you don't understand.”

There was nothing he could say to that. “I don't see that I'm much different than you,” he parried lamely.

She brushed that aside. “It has always been the same pope in charge when you are condemned to be burnt at the stake.”

This startled Galileo. “Of course,” he temporized. “But, if I could convince him to support the Copernican view, then surely …”

She only stared at him.

“I think it can work,” Galileo ventured. Then: “You said you would help.”

She only shook her head.

They seemed to float without moving. The great banded giant stood off to one side, impossible to believe. The whorls and eddies within each tawny band moved, slightly but visibly, and the imbricating borders where band met band moved even faster, their viscous colors crawling over each other like snakes. Hera's transparent bubble of a craft only just shifted over this massive spectacle, such that its terminator, that smooth border of sunlight and shadow, rolled westward at a speed they barely could see. With close attention, one could spot the progressive illumination of new embroideries in the bands.

But all these stately contradances were as motions in some syrupy dream, and Galileo could see that Hera was impatient for action. She tapped at her console in her usual way, had several fraught conversations with absent colleagues he could not hear; then she fell silent, brooding over problems Galileo was not privy to.

“How long till we get there?” he asked.

“Hours. Europa is on the other side of Jupiter right now, unfortunately.”

“I see.”

Time passed; seconds, minutes: it became tangible, like something you could hold in your hands, or weigh on a scale. Protraction.

Finally she sighed. “Put the mnemonic back on. We might as well keep working. I can perhaps also block some of your memories from the life lesson you so rashly entered. So there are things you need to forget, and things you need to remember. Because you are still misunderstanding your situation at home.”

Galileo regarded her memory celatone uneasily. Mostly he feared what another immersion would reveal to him, but there was an awful fascination in it too. That the mind held within it such vivid scraps of the past—there was a majesty to that, full of pain and remorse—and a desire, despite all, for all the lost time somehow to come back. I want my life back! I want life back. And then also, to lay down so many memories so fully in the mind, and yet be unable ever to call them back—what were they, to be so oddly made? What could God have been thinking?

“Where will you send me?” he asked apprehensively. “What knowledge will you flay me with this time?”

“I don't know. There's so much to choose from, maybe we'll just go spelunking. Your brain is full of trauma nodes.” She scanned her console screen, now apparently displaying maps of his brain, there visible to his sidelong glance in virulent pulsing rainbows. “Maybe we should continue with your relations with the women in your life.”

“No!”

“But yes. You don't want to be one of those supposed scientific geniuses who is also in domestic life a jerk and a fool. There are enough of those already, or more than enough. It would be a shame if the first scientist were to be also the first of that crowd of assholes.”

This was interesting news, but also offensive. “I did my duty,” Galileo objected. “I took care of my family, I supported my sisters and my brother and their families, and my mother and my children, all the servants, all the artisans, all the students and hangers-on—the whole damned menagerie! I worked like a donkey! I wasted my life paying for my wastrel family.”