Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (59 page)

The cardinal might as well not have heard him. "Two minutes!" Gioioso repeated. "For the sake of two minutes—for the sake of two minutes
at the most
, you said—you and Copernicus propose setting Christendom on its ear?"

"All Copernicus tried to do was find a better way to conceive of the workings of the heavens," Galileo said. "All I tried to do in my
Dialogue
was to give the evidence for and against his views. We never wished to oppose the holy Catholic Church. Rather, the Church has chosen to oppose us."

"When Giordano Bruno chose to cling to Copernicanism despite having every chance to renounce his views, he was burned at the stake," Gioioso said. "Are two minutes—at most two minutes—worth a man's life?"

"I have done my best to make it plain that I do not personally hold to the Copernican world system," Galileo said. "I will make whatever abjurations the Holy Inquisition requires of me. But, even if it is a false hypothesis, Copernicanism is also a useful one."

"Useful in what way?" Gioioso asked.

"In making more exact astronomical calculations," Galileo answered.

"But if, in saving up to two minutes, you cast the Church into disrepute, you throw the whole world into confusion and argument and strife where before everything had seemed certain and clear, if you cast doubt on the Holy Scriptures and on God Himself, is that a useful thing to do?" Seldom had Galileo heard such scorn as that with which Cardinal Gioioso laced the word
useful
.

The astronomer hesitated, however much he didn't care to. Consequences were less easily calculated than planetary motions. At last, he said, "I never intended any such things to happen."

"Eve and Adam also sinned unwittingly," Gioioso pointed out. "Would the world not be a better place had they abstained from doing so?"

"How can I possibly deny that?" Galileo said.

"If you can deny one part of Holy Scripture, why not deny another? Why not deny every line?" Sigismondo Gioioso stood and stretched. His joints creaked—sure enough, he was as old as Galileo. "Perhaps we would do better to continue our conversation tomorrow."

"Perhaps we would," Galileo agreed. Stretching out on the cardinal's couch helped him forget his own painful arthritis. All the same, he'd rarely been so glad to get out of a room as he was to escape that one.

"Good morning,
Signor
. A pleasure to see you," Cardinal Gioioso said when Galileo unwillingly returned the next morning. To Galileo's surprise, the cardinal sounded as if he meant it. They might never have clashed verbal swords the day before.

"Good morning, your Eminence." Galileo kissed Gioioso's ring.

Gioioso waved to a table. "By all means, refresh yourself before we begin. Here are wine and bread and olive oil. I am told the oil is quite good. Myself, I like butter more. But butter is easier to keep fresh in Vienna than it is here."

"No doubt." Galileo ate. He drank. What else could he do? It gave him an excuse to wait before reclining on that comfortable but dangerous couch.

So he stretched things as long as he could, and then a little longer. At last, though, Cardinal Gioioso asked, "Shall we begin?"

"I am your servant," Galileo said once more.

Once more, Gioioso denied it: "By no means, not when I am a servant of the Pope and his Holiness is the servant of the servants of Christ."

He waited for Galileo's response, but Galileo made none. The cardinal could phrase things as prettily as he pleased. All the same, Galileo knew which one of them had ordered the other to be here. He knew which of them asked questions, and which had to answer. And he knew what he thought about that.

Or he thought he knew. He couldn't deny that some of the questions Cardinal Gioioso asked were . . . interesting. As much as Copernicanism did, they made Galileo look at the world from a different perspective.

Something else occurred to the astronomer. When dealing with someone as savvy as Gioioso, it was better to get everything out in the open. "I presume, your Eminence, that the agreement we made yesterday in regard to the Copernican, ah, hypothesis remains in force?" Galileo asked.

"
Assolutamente
," Gioioso affirmed. In his slow, ponderous Italian, the word sounded especially impressive. He went on, "I will give you another written pledge if you so desire, or amend the earlier one to clarify that it extends throughout our, ah, analysis here."

That willingness to agree might mean he was inherently trustworthy. On the other hand, it might not. In Galileo's present situation, he was not inclined to take chances. Producing the pledge Sigismondo Gioioso had written the day before, he said, "If you would be so kind . . ."

The cardinal made the change and initialed it without batting an eye. He handed the paper back to Galileo. It was exactly what he had promised. When Galileo nodded, Gioioso picked up the thread where they had left it the day before: "You maintain that there are many reasons for accepting the Copernican world system in place of the Ptolemaic, not one alone."

"Speaking hypothetically, that is what the evidence suggests—yes, your Eminence," Galileo said.

"Of course we are speaking hypothetically!" Cardinal Gioioso exclaimed. "Were we not, would you have that sheet I just gave back to you?"

"By no means," Galileo admitted, as he had to.

"Well, then," Gioioso said, "perhaps you will be good enough to expound upon another. So it is not only refined calculations of planetary positions, then?"

"By no means!" Galileo said again, this time more enthusiastically. "Another very strong argument in favor of the Copernican system is that, when viewed through a spyglass, Venus appears to show phases like those of the moon. She appears now as a crescent, now as if at first or third quarter, now gibbous, depending on her position relative to Sun and Earth."

"You do not speak of seeing Venus when she is full," Gioioso noted.

"True. I do not, for I have not seen her so," Galileo replied. "Nor has anyone, nor will anyone. By the geometry inherent in the Copernican world system, Venus when she is full lies beyond the Sun: the Earth, the Sun, and Venus then form a straight line. Thus she would be in the sky when the Sun is also, and his much greater light would obscure hers."

"Anyone observing her through a spyglass would see the same thing?" Gioioso asked. "Two people observing through different spyglasses would see the same thing as well?"

"So long as they did so at the same time, yes," Galileo said. The questions were reasonable. More than twenty years earlier, when he'd first started examining the heavens through his spyglasses, many people had wondered whether something inherent in the instrument caused it to yield the results it did. How trustworthy could those results be, if they were invisible to the naked eye?

Cardinal Gioioso hit on that very point: "Without the spyglass, no one will see these things?"

"No, your Eminence," Galileo said. "Otherwise, astronomers would have observed them long ago. I will point out, however, that there are a great many spyglasses in Europe these days, in lands both Catholic and Protestant. A large number of people have observed these phenomena."

"Which would not occur under the Ptolemaic world system?" the cardinal asked.

"Just so. The Ptolemaic system is centered on the Earth, not the Sun. The path Venus necessarily takes in that system forbids these apparitions," Galileo said. "If you give me leave to sketch for you, I can demonstrate why this needs must be so."

"I believe I can visualize the differing paths," Gioioso said. By the way he said it, Galileo saw at once that it was so. No astronomer, Gioioso claimed? Galileo didn't believe that for a moment. The cardinal continued, "These effects you describe are invisible without the spyglass?"

"Not precisely, your Eminence," Galileo said.

"Wait." For the first time, he surprised Sigismondo Gioioso. "A moment ago, you said no one could see them. If someone could, why did nobody notice them before you perfected the instrument?"

That made Galileo smile. He had indeed greatly improved the device. Learning that Dutch spectacle makers had devised spyglasses that would magnify three or four or five times, he'd delved into the theory of optics and improved their results tenfold. He'd had to become a lens-maker himself to bring it off, and he had.

None of which, however, much as it salved Galileo's pride, had much to do with the cardinal's question. "No one could notice it with the eyes in his head," Galileo said. "But, as early as December in the year 1610, my former student, Benedetto Castelli, wrote to me asking if Venus' appearance was as I described to you, and as the Copernican world system predicts. Even if you decline to see the diagrams, I must remind you that, as the Ptolemaic system arranges the heavens, Venus, lying between us and the sun, can be only a crescent if the sun's light illuminates her."

"
Sì
,
sì
," Cardinal Gioioso said impatiently. "So Castelli deduced this more than twenty years ago, and from the Copernican hypothesis alone?"

"He did," Galileo answered, and a new kind of pride filled him. "Any capable geometer could do the same, your Eminence. Most cities will have one such man; many will have several. And books, these days, are printed in editions of hundreds, sometimes even thousands. New discoveries spread more quickly than they did in years gone by."

"The man who first devised the printing press was a German like me," Gioioso said morosely. "He has much to answer for—and I do not mean simply the lying Calvinist and Lutheran pamphlets that come out in editions far larger than the ones you mention."

"I fear the world is as it is, your Eminence, not as we wish it were," Galileo answered. "That is why I said yesterday that the Church should not nail itself to doctrines liable to be proved false."

"Nail itself?" Sigismondo Gioioso's voice held an ominous purr, like that of a cat seeing a mouse's tail sticking out from under a pile of clothes.

Even with the pledge about discussing the Copernican hypothesis in hand, Galileo realized, he could go too far. He'd just gone too far, in fact. "Forgive me," he said quickly. "I should have phrased that better."

"Yes. You should have." But Gioioso seemed inclined to accept the apology. Galileo hoped so, anyhow. The cardinal was devilishly hard to read. He sent Galileo a hooded stare. "You were saying . . . ?"

"Only that the Church might sail a safer course if she did not make pronouncements on how the physical world is framed," Galileo answered.

"The Church has been refining its doctrines since our Lord's time," Cardinal Gioioso said, "and has had the aid of the Holy Spirit in so doing. His Holiness the Pope is the direct successor to St. Peter, the rock on whom Jesus Christ founded the Church. Do you deny this?"

"Not at all, your Eminence. How could I possibly?"
How could I possibly, when you would roast me like a leg of veal if I dared?

"Then how can you deny that its doctrines are correct?" Gioioso demanded.

Sadly, Galileo spread his hands. "It is not I, your Eminence. If the evidence contradicts the doctrine, which is to change?"

Cardinal Gioioso sighed. "The Church never objected when a few astronomers used the Copernican hypothesis to improve their calculations. Who could care about something so small as that? We were always sure a hypothesis was simply a hypothesis. Whether it had anything to do with the real world . . . well, who could say? Come to that, who cared?"

"I understand this. It is also how I was trained. But the spyglass . . . The spyglass changes things," Galileo said. "Now we can test the different world systems against the evidence, and see which is stronger."

"Now you can shout from the housetops: ‘Ptolemy is wrong! Aristotle is wrong! The holy Catholic Church believed them right, so the Church is wrong as well! And behold! The Book of Joshua says that the Sun stood still in the sky. But it is not the Sun that moves! No, it is the Earth! And so Joshua is wrong as well!' And what is left of the holy Catholic Church after that,
Signor
Galilei? What is left of any religion?"

"As a matter of fact, your Eminence, the Copernican world system can explain the events described in Joshua better than the Ptolemaic system can," Galileo said eagerly. "I have written on this very topic, and I would be delighted to expound on it for you. When properly construed, the Copernican hypothesis is altogether compatible with the words of the Holy Scriptures."

But Sigismondo Gioioso disappointed him by holding up a hand. "Spare me," the prelate said. "Seldom do laymen find their way into deep water faster than when they try to tell clerics what the Bible means."

He was not the first churchman to tell Galileo something along those lines. In a way, the astronomer could see the clerics' point. In another way . . . When Galileo looked at things another way, rage ripped through him. "Why should I not interfere in your business, your Eminence?" he ground out. "You enjoy interfering in mine enough, by God!"

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he had them back. Too late, of course. Wishes like that always came too late. He waited apprehensively. Cardinal Gioioso had pledged to let him defend the Copernican world system in a hypothetical way. The cardinal hadn't said a thing about letting him attack the Catholic Church. Maybe, at least, they would strangle him before they burned him, as the Spaniards had done for that savage king in the New World a hundred years before.

But Gioioso merely sat there studying him. Yes, the cardinal was doing just that. Slowly, Galileo realized he himself was as interesting to Gioioso as the Medicean stars going around Jupiter or the convoluted landscape of the Moon was to him. "You are angry," Gioioso said, and nothing more.

"If I have disturbed your Eminence's tranquility, I humbly beg pardon." Galileo would eat crow if he had to. If he had to, he would eat raven.

Cardinal Gioioso waved this apology aside. "Explain to me,
Signor
, if you would be so kind,
why
you are angry."