“Ultimately, we came here by conducting experiments and analyzing their results using mathematics. That is an idea, or a method, if you like, that changed forever the course of human history. And you were the one who had this idea, or invented this method, decisively and publicly, explaining the process so that all could understand it. You are Il Saggiatore, the Experimentalist. The first scientist. And so therefore everywhere, but especially here in the Galilean moons, you are much revered.”
“The Galilean moons?”
“That’s what we call the four big moons of Jupiter.”
“But I named them the Medicean Stars!”
She sighed. “So you did, but as I said to you before, this has always been regarded as a notorious example of science kissing the ass of power. No one but you ever called them that, and since your time very few people have remained interested in the sordid details of your supplications to a potential patron.”
“I see.” He paused. “Well, the Galileans is just as good a name, I suppose.”
“Yes.” She had several different looks of amusement, he was finding.
He considered all that she had said. “Martyr?” he asked, despite himself.
Now her look grew truly serious. She stared into his eyes, and he saw that her pupils were dilated, the oak brown of her irises a vivid ring between glossy blacks and whites. “Yes. I suppose we call these moons the Galileans to memorialize what happened to you. No one has ever forgotten the price you paid for insisting on the reality of this world.”
Galileo, thoroughly spooked, blurted, “What do you mean?”
She said nothing.
Now a kind of dread began to fill his stomach. “Do I want to know?”
“You do not want to know,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking I’m going to tell you anyway.”
She surveyed him in what now struck him as a cold way. “They are giving you amnestics before sending you back into your own time, while underneath that shaping what you learn here, trying to influence your actions at home in a certain direction. But I am thinking that I could give you an anamnestic to counteract their treatment, and teach you some other things, and if you therefore remember what you learn here, it might have a very good effect on your actions. It might change things, in your time and after. That could be dangerous. But then again, there is much since then that needs changing.”
She pointed at the pewter box she had taken from Ganymede, now lying on the polished yellow floor between them.
“What is that?” he quavered, feeling a squirt of fear slide through him.
“That’s what the entangler really looks like. The other entangler, in Italy, is at the event I want to show you.” She took him by the shoulders and moved him next to it, and said coldly, like inflexible Atropos, “I’m going to put you back there.” And she crouched and touched a tab on the side of the box.
The pain was such that he would have screamed immediately, but an iron muzzle clamped an iron gag into his mouth. A spike wrapped in the gag nailed his tongue up into his palate. It was as much as he could do to swallow the blood pouring into his mouth fast enough not to choke on it. His heart was racing, and when he saw and comprehended where he was, it beat even harder. Surely it would burst with the strain.
The hooded brothers of the Company of Saint John the Beheaded, also known as the Company of Mercy and Pity, had just finished strapping the muzzle and gag onto his head. Now they lifted him up onto the back of a cart. They were outside the Castel Sant’Angelo, down on the banks of the Tiber. The horses in harness jerked forward under the lash of the whip, and he tried to hold his head upright to keep it from hitting the sides of the cart. The cartwheels ground over the paving stones at a walking pace. Dominican monks flanked the cart and led the way. These Dogs of God barked at him as they went, hectoring him to recant, to confess his sins, to go to God with a clean conscience. I confess! he wanted to say. I recant, no question about it. The streets were lined on both sides with a ragged crowd, many falling in behind as they passed, joining the procession into the city. In all the shouting there was no chance anyone would hear his moans. It was assumed that he was past speech, he could see that in their eyes, which were feasting on the sight of him and of the cart, and needed no sound other than their own raw roar. He stopped trying to speak. Even to moan was to choke on blood, to drown on it. Perhaps he could choke on purpose at just the right time.
Slowly they crossed the city, from the great prison on the Tiber to the Campo dei Fiori, the Square of Flowers. Low dark clouds scudded overhead on a stiff wind. Priests in black prayed at him and tossed holy water on him, or thrust their crucifixes in his face. He preferred the hooded and impassive Dominicans to these grotesque faces, twisted by hatred. No hatred was like that of the ignorant for the learned—though now he saw that even greater was the hatred of the damned for the martyr. They saw the end they knew would eventually engulf them for their sins. Today they rejoiced that it was happening to someone else, but they knew their time would come and would be eternal, and so their fear and hatred exploded out of them, putting the lie to their pretended joy.
In the Campo dei Fiori, one of the black Dominicans intoned in his ear. The pope had commanded that his punishment be inflicted with as great a clemency as possible, so there was to be no effusion of blood. How this squared with the blood pouring out of his mouth was a question he was never going to get to ask, for the priest was now explaining that this meant he was to be burned at the stake without first being eviscerated.
Many hands lifted him off the cart. The low underside of the clouds was rippled like a windblown field of wheat. He was dragged by the heels over to the pyre, and there stripped naked, the penitent’s white cloth thrown to the ground, although the iron muzzle was left on his head. His arms were pulled around the thick post of the stake and tied tightly at wrist and elbow. Like everyone, he had burned himself once or twice at stove or candle; it was hard to face the idea of his whole body immersed in that pain. Surely it would not last long.
The crowd was roaring. He tried to choke on his blood, tried to hold his breath and faint. Around him the Dogs of God chanted their imprecations. He did not see who lit the stack of kindling under him.
He smelled the smoke first, then felt fire on his toes. His feet tried to slide up the stake of their own accord, but his ankles were chained to a hole in the post. He had not noticed the chains before. In a few seconds the fire shot up and over his legs, became an agonizing burn all over them. His body tried to scream, and he choked on his own blood, began to drown, but did not faint. He smelled the roasting skin and meat of his own legs, a kitchen smell. Then there was nothing but the pain filling his skull and blinding him, red pain like a scream.
He cried out. His mouth was free, his tongue whole. He lay on a smooth stone floor. The pain was now only a ghost of the agony it had been. An afterimage of it seemed to fill everything with a faint red haze.
He was back on the floor of the mountaintop temple, on Jupiter’s moon Io. He lay on the polished rock with his head clutched in his hands, the meaty stench of his burning still in his lungs, on his whole tongue—only not. It was the ghost of the stench only, a memory; it was in his mind only. But surely it was a memory he would never escape, no matter how hard he tried. Every time he ate roast meat—
His palate was whole, and he swallowed nothing but his own snot and saliva, pouring down his throat like blood. He felt sick to his stomach. He had been weeping hard, and his body was covered with a cold sweat. He sat up, held his jaw in his hands. The taste of blood was gone, except in his mind.