Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson
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been unhappy both times.
Then: hold up two lenses, look: and the potted citron at the edge of the garden appeared distinctly larger in the glass closest to his eye. Green leaf lit from the side by lantern light, big and sharp-
‘Hey!’ Galileo said. ‘Try this pair,’ he told Mazzoleni. ‘Concave near the eye, convex at the far end of the tube.’
Mazzoleni slotted the lenses into the frames and gave the tube to Galileo, who took it and pointed it at the first tree branch in the arbour, illuminated by the lit windows of the house. Only a small part of the branch appeared in the tube, but it was definitely enlarged: the leaves big and distinct, the bark minutely corrugated. The image was slightly blurred at the bottom, and he shifted the outside frame to tilt the glass, then rotated it, then moved it further out on the tube. The image became sharper still.
‘By God it works! This is strange!’
He waved at the old man. ‘Go to the house and stand in the doorway, in the lamp light.’ He himself walked through the garden out into the arbour. He trained the tube on Mazzoleni in the doorway. ‘Mother of God.’ There in the middle of the glass swam the old man’s wrinkled face, half-bright and halfshadowed, as close as if Galileo could touch him; and they were fifty feet apart or more. The image burned into Galileo’s mind, the artisan’s familiar gap-toothed grin shimmery and flat, but big and clear-the very emblem of their many happy days in the workshop, trying new things.
‘My God!’ he shouted, deeply surprised. ‘It works!’
Mazzoleni hurried out to give it a try. He rotated the frames, looked through it backwards, tipped the frames, moved them back and forth on the tube. ‘There are blurry patches,’ he noted.
‘We need better lenses.’
‘You could order a batch from Murano.’
‘From Florence. The best optical glass is Florentine. Murano glass is for coloured trinkets.’
‘If you say so. I have friends who would contest that.’
‘Friends from Murano?’
‘Yes.’
Galileo’s real laugh was a low huh huh huh huh huh. ‘We’ll grind our own lenses if we have to. We can buy blanks from Florence. I wonder what would happen if we had a longer tube.’
‘This one is about as long as we’ve got. I guess we could make some longer sheets of lead and roll them up, but we would have to make the moulds.’
‘Any kind of tube will do.’ Here Galileo was as good as Mazzoleni or any artisan-good at seeing what mattered, quick to imagine different ways of getting it. ‘It doesn’t have to be lead. We could try a tube of cloth or leather, reinforced to keep it straight. Glue a long tube of leather to slats. Or just use cardboard.’
Mazzoleni frowned, hefting a lens in his hand. It was about the same size as a Venetian florin, say three fingers wide. ‘Would it stay straight enough?’
‘I think so.’
‘Would the inside surface be smooth?’
‘Does it need to be?’
‘I don’t know, does it?’
They stared at each other. Mazzoleni grinned again, his weathered face an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta, the white burn mark on his left temple raising that eyebrow in an impish expression. Galileo tousled the man’s hair as he would a child’s. This work they did together was unlike any other human bond he knew, unlike that with mistress or child, colleague or student, friend or confessor-unlike anyone-because they made new things together, they learned new things. Now once again they were on the hunt.
Galileo said, ‘It looks like we’ll want to be able to move one lens back and forth.’
‘You could fix one glass to the tube, and set the other one in a slightly smaller tube that fitted inside the main one, so you could move that one back and forth but keep it aligned vertically. You could rotate it too, if you wanted.’
‘That’s good.’ Galileo would have come to some such arrangement eventually, but Mazzoleni was especially quick concerning things he could see and touch. ‘Can you bang something like that together? By tomorrow morning?’
Mazzoleni cackled. By now it was the middle of the night, the town was quiet. ‘Simple stuff, compared to your damned compass.’
‘Watch what you say. That thing has paid your salary for years.’
‘Yours too!’
Galileo swatted at him. The compass had become a pain, there was no denying it. ‘You have the materials you need?’
‘No. I think we’ll need more lead tubes, and thinner staves than what we’ve got around, and longer, if you want leather tubes. More cardboard too. And you’ll want more lenses.’
‘I’ll send an order to Florence. Meanwhile let’s work with what we’ve got.’
In the days that followed, every moment was given over to the new project. Galileo neglected his collegial obligations, made his boarding students teach each other, ate his meals in the workshop while he worked: nothing mattered but the project. At times like these it became obvious that the workshop was the centre of the house. The maestro was about as irritable as always, but with his attention elsewhere it got a bit easier for the servants.
While the various efforts of manufacture and assemblage and testing went on, Galileo also took time to write his Venetian friends and allies to set the stage for a presentation of the device. Here was where his career up until this point finally helped him in something. Known mostly as an eccentric if ingenious professor of mathematics, broke and frustrated at forty-five, he had also spent twenty years working and playing with many of the leading intellectuals of Venice, including, crucially, his great friend and mentor Fra Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi was not currently running Venice for the Doge, as he was still recovering from wounds suffered in an assault two years before, but he continued to advise both the Doge and the Senate, especially on technical and philosophical matters. He could not have been better positioned to help Galileo now.
So Galileo wrote to him about what he was working on. What he read in Sarpi’s reply startled him, even frightened him. Apparently the stranger from the artisans’ market had gone to others as well. And his news of a successful spyglass, Sarpi wrote, was apparently already widespread in northern Europe. Sarpi himself had heard a rumour of such a thing nine months before, but had not considered it significant enough to tell Galileo about it.
Galileo cursed as he read this. ‘Not significant, my God!’ It was hard to believe; it was so lame it suggested that his old friend had been mentally damaged by the knives that had been stuck in his head during the assault.
Nothing to be done about that now. People in northern Europe, especially the Flemish and Dutch, were already producing little spyglasses. This Dutch stranger, Sarpi wrote, had contacted the Venetian Senate, offering to sell them such a glass for a thousand florins. Sarpi had advised the Senate against the purchase, certain that Galileo could do as well or better in manufacturing any such object.
‘I could if you would have mentioned it to me,’ Galileo muttered.
But he hadn’t, and now news of the device was in the air. It was a phenomenon Galileo had noticed before; improvements at the artisanal level passed from workshop to workshop without scholars or princes knowing anything about them, and so it often happened that suddenly workshops everywhere could all make a smaller gear, or a stronger steel. This time it was a little spyglass. The claim going around was that they enlarged things by about three times.
Quickly Galileo wrote back to Sarpi, asking him to convene a meeting with the Doge and his senators in order to examine a new and improved spyglass that Galileo was inventing. He also asked him to ask the Doge to refuse to entertain any other such offers during that time. Sarpi replied the next day with a note saying he had done as asked, and the requested meeting was set for 21st August. It was now 5th