Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson
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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