Galileo's Dream (7 page)

“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, to 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 gaptoothed 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.

So Galileo stopped in his tracks and returned to the terrace. He recommenced his little contradance around the tripod and worktable, singing nonsense words to himself under his breath. 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. 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.

Entangled

G
ALILEO 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 pavers 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 gray 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 center, 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, 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, gleaming 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, headfirst 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 flopped 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 and the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.

He stood on ice that was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows: sunset colors, autumn colors. 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 colors. 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 lighter 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 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.

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, his heart thumping as it rarely did anymore—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, and 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 colors 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, burned at the stake for saying there were such worlds, 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 farther away than the planets.