Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson
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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