Then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came through Florence on his way to Bologna. Cardinal Gonzaga also happened to be in the city, and so Cosimo invited both of them to attend a repeat performance of Galileo’s debate on floating bodies, to be held at a court dinner on October 2. Pappazoni again made a reluctant appearance, and after a feast and a concert, and much drinking, Galileo again slaughtered him to the roaring laughter of the audience. Then Cardinal Gonzaga stood and surprised everyone by supporting Pappazoni. But Barberini, smiling appreciatively, perhaps remembering their warm meeting back in the spring in Rome, took Galileo’s side.
It was therefore another triumphant evening for Galileo. As he left the banquet, well after midnight, and long after the sacrifice of Pappazoni, Cardinal Barberini took him by the hand, hugged him, bade him farewell, and promised they would meet again.
The next morning, when Barberini was to leave for Bologna, Galileo did not show up to see him off, having been unexpectedly detained by an illness he had suffered in the night. From the road, Barberini wrote a note to him:
I am very sorry that you were unable to see me before I left the city. It is not that I consider a sign of your friendship as necessary, for it is well known to me, but because you were ill. May God keep you not only because outstanding persons such as yourself deserve a long life of public service, but because of the particular affection that I have and always will have for you. I am happy to be able to say this, and to thank you for the time that you spent with me.
Your affectionate brother,
Your affectionate brother! Talk about friends in high places. To a certain extent, it seemed he had a Roman patron now to add to his Florentine one.
All was triumph. Indeed it would be hard to imagine how things could have gone better in the previous two years for Galileo and his telescope: scientific standing, social standing, patronage in both Florence and Rome—all were at their peak, and Galileo stood slightly stunned on top of what had proved a double anno mirabilis.
Why, then, was he back in Rome less than four years later?
Because there were undercurrents, and counterforces; people out to interfere. Things occurred, even on that very morning that Galileo did not show up to see off Cardinal Barberini. Galileo had been ill, yes, because a syncope had struck him as he got home from the banquet. Cartophilus had hopped down from the trap in front of the rented house in Florence, had stilled the horse, and opened the gate; and there in the little yard stood the stranger, his massive telescope already placed on its thick tripod.
In his crow’s Latin, the stranger said to Galileo, “Are you ready?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Other Galileo
“Yes, I’m ready,” Galileo replied, his blood jolting through him so that his fingers throbbed. He was afraid. But he was curious too. He said to the stranger, “Let’s go up to the altana.”
Cartophilus carried the massive telescope up the outside stairs, bent double under the load. “Local gravity getting to you at last?” the stranger asked acerbically.
“Someone has to carry the load,” Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. “Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, Signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fucking dilettante.”
The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt a jolt of the sensation that this had happened before—what the French would later name déjà vu.
And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.
Jupiter was a big banded ball near the center of the glass, strikingly handsome, colorful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis—and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.
But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.
Who was frowning heavily. “Let me check it.” He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.
“Not good,” Cartophilus said.
“Maybe it’s Hera,” the stranger said darkly.
Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.
They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked at Jupiter again. It was still in the middle of the lens. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. “This is not just a telescopio,” he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels … “It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.”
The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, “The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?”
The stranger reexamined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.
“Ah. Try it again,” the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. “Take another look.”
Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side; III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.
Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. Moon I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black—or so it seemed—because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.
The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity; I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended on it, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones—of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terra-cotta and bloodred, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter—all piled on all, one color pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.
The overlayering of so many colors made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.