Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson
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The Sages of the Order crowded to the front of the line to see for themselves. Every Venetian holding in the eastern Mediterranean was subject to attack by Turks and Levantine pirates: individual ships, fleets, coastal towers, even fortress towns as formidable as Ragusa had suffered surprise assaults. Thus the rulers of Venice, all of them with naval experience of one sort or another, were now nodding to each other meaningfully, and circulating into the crowd surrounding Galileo to shake his hand, slap him on the back, ask for future meetings. Fra Micanzio and General del Monte in particular had worked with him at the Arsenale on various engineering projects, and their congratulations were especially hearty. They had first met him twenty years before, when they had brought him in to consider if there were ways the oars of their galleys could be reconfigured to give them more power, and Galileo had immediately sketched out analyses of the oars’ movement that considered their fulcrum to be not the oarlocks, but the water surface; and this surprising new perspective on the problem had in fact led to improvements in oarlock placement. So they knew what he was capable of; but this time del Monte was shaking his hand endlessly, and Micanzio was grinning, with eyebrows raised as if to say: Finally one of your tricks will really matter!
And at this moment Galileo could afford to laugh with him. Galileo suggested to him that they time the interval between this observation of the fleet through the glass, and the moment when ordinary lookouts saw the ships with their unaided vision. The Doge overheard this and required that it be done.
After that Galileo had only to stand by the device and accept more congratulations, and point the thing to resight it if someone requested it. He drank their praise and he drank wine from a tall gold cup, feeling expansive and generous, the colourful throng around him with its impressive percentage of purple sparking more memories of Carnivale, memories that gave every festive evening in Venice an aura of splendour and sex. Combined with the height of the campanile, and the beauty of the watery city below them, it felt like they stood on Olympus.
On the winding way back down the campanile stairs, Galileo was joined on one dark landing by the stranger, who then clomped down the iron stairs beside him. Galileo’s heart leaped in his chest like an animal trying to escape: the man was dressed in black, and must have lurked in waiting for Galileo, like a thief or an assassin.
‘Congratulations on this success,’ the man said in his hoarse Latin.
‘What brings you here?’ Galileo asked.
‘It seems you listened to what I told you before.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘I was sure you would be interested. You of all people. Now I will return to northern Europe.’ Again: Alta Europa. ‘When I come back to your country, I will bring a spyglass of my own, which I will invite you to look through. Indeed I invite you now.’ Then, when Galileo did not reply (they were nearing the bottom of the stairs and the door to the Piazzetta), he said, ‘I invited you.’
‘It would be my pleasure,’ Galileo said.
The man touched the case Galileo carried from his shoulder. ‘Have you used it to look at the moon?’
‘No-not yet.’
The man shook his head. As his face was a blade, his nose was its sharpened edge, long and curved, tilted off to the right. His big eyes gleamed in the stairwell’s dim light. ‘When you achieve a power of magnification of twenty or thirty times, you will find it really interesting. After that I will visit you again.’
Then they reached the ground floor of the campanile, and walked together out onto the Piazzetta, where they were interrupted by the Doge himself, there waiting to escort Galileo back to the Signoria: ‘Really my dear Signor Galileo, you must do us the honour of returning with us to the Sala del Senato to celebrate the incredible success of your extraordinary demonstration. We have arranged a small meal, some wine-’
‘Of course, Your Beneficent Serenity,’ Galileo said. ‘I am yours to command, as you know.’
In the midst of this exchange the stranger had slipped away and disappeared.
Unsettled, distracted by the memory of the stranger’s narrow face, his black clothing, his odd words, Galileo ate and drank with as much cheer as he could muster. A chance meeting with a colleague of Kepler’s was one thing, a second encounter deliberately made, something else-he wasn’t sure what.
Well, there was nothing to be done now but to eat, to drink more wine, and to enjoy the very genuine and fulsome accolades of Venice’s rulers. Two full hours of the celebration of his accomplishment were marked by the giant clocks on the sala’s walls before the lookouts on the campanile sent word down that they had spotted a fleet approaching San Niccolo. The room erupted in a spontaneous cheer. Galileo turned to the Doge and bowed, then bowed again to all of them: left, right, centre, then again to the Doge. Finally he had invented something that would make money.
Having come to this pass, I appealed out of my innocent soul to the high and omnipotent gods and my own good genius, beseeching them of their eternal goodness to take notice of my wretched state. And behold! I began to descry a faint light.
-FRANCESCO COLONNA, Hypnerotomachia PoliphiliThe Strife of Love in a Dream of Poliphili
The next night, back in Padua, Galileo went out into his garden and aimed his best occhialino at the moon. He left Mazzoleni sleeping by the kitchen fire, woke none of the servants; the house was asleep. This was his hour, as on so many nights when his insomnia took hold of him.
Now his mind was filled with the stranger’s blade of a face, his intense gaze: have you looked at the moon? The moon tonight was near its first quarter, the bright part almost exactly half the whole, the dark part easily visible against the night sky. An obvious sphere. Galileo sat on a low stool, held his breath, brought his right eye to the eyepiece. The little black circle of glass was marked on its left side by a luminous white patch. He focused on it.
At first he saw nothing but a chiaroscuro flecking of greyish black and brilliant white, the tremble of the white seeming to flow over the dark spots. Ah: hills. A landscape. A world seen from above.
A view from world to world.
He loosened the screw on the tripod head and tapped the tube, trying to capture in the glass the tip of the moon’s upper crescent. He tightened the screw, looked again. Brilliant white horn: a dark grey in the curve of the horn, a blackness just slightly washed with white. Again he saw an arc of hills. There, at the border of light and dark, was a flat dark patch, like a lake in shadow. The sunlight was obviously shining horizontally over the landscape, as it would be of course, as he was looking at the area experiencing dawn. He was looking at a sunrise on the moon, twenty-eight times slower than a sunrise on Earth.
There was a little round valley; there another one. Any number of circles and arcs, in fact, as if God had been fooling around up there with a compass. But the strongest impression remained the range of hills, there on the border of black and white.
The moon was a world, the Earth was a world. Well, of course. He had always known this.
As for the assertions the Aristotelians made about the moon, that because it was in the heavens it was therefore a perfect sphere, made of some unearthly crystal that was of unchanging purity-well, its ordinary appearance had always rendered that a very suspicious statement. Now it was clearer than ever that Aristotle had been wrong. This was no great surprise-when indeed had he been right, in the natural sciences? He should have stuck to his strength, which was rhetoric. He had had no mathematics.
Galileo got up and went in to the workshop to get his current folio, and a quill and inkpot. He wondered if he should wake Mazzoleni, then decided against it. There would be other nights. This one was his. He could feel his blood pounding in his head; his neck muscles were sore. It was his night. No one had ever seen these things. Well, perhaps the stranger had.