“Yes.”
“And give me a preparation to make me forget what happened here, you said?”
“Yes.”
“But you can give me something to counteract their preparation?”
Her eyebrows bunched together as she thought it over. She glanced at him sidelong. “Yes,” she said, “I can. For every amnestic there are anamnestics. Although I am not so sure you will like remembering this. I can try to modulate your short-term memory, so that you remember just the outlines of it, and the feeling. But as I don’t know which amnestic they will be using, it will be tricky. I can try to counteract the whole class of drug I think they will use.” She spoke quietly into the back of her hand. “My people will give me what I think you will need. You must expect some confusion to result, whether it works or not.”
“Just so I don’t forget!”
“No. What I give you, you will take now, in advance of their application. Then hold your breath right before they send you back. He shoots a mist into your face at the last moment. If you are successful, the result should be that you remember all this fairly well. The anamnestics are quite effective, you will see. Hopefully not in a way that proves intolerable to you.”
“Good. And—will you bring me back here to you, at some point, if you can? I feel that if I am to succeed in my effort at home, I need to learn more.”
She laughed at that. “This is what you are always saying, yes?”
“So you’ll bring me back?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’ll try?”
“Maybe. Don’t mention that to Ganymede. That should be arrheton—not to be spoken of.”
Then vessels like sealed boat hulls, standing on pillars of fire, descended around them. Hera took him by the arm and led him across the smooth yellow stone parquet of the round temple to where her people were holding the stranger and his small group. Ganymede, still there, glared at them both, his eyes burning with such curiosity that Galileo had to look away for fear his new knowledge would squirt out of him by a glance alone. Meanwhile Hera took his hand and palmed him a small pill. She leaned down to his face: “Swallow it now,” she murmured in his ear, then gave him a kiss on the cheek. He brought his hand up to his face as if to touch hers, and as she withdrew he tossed the pill in his mouth and swallowed it. It had a bitter taste, like unripe limes.
Hera had turned to the Ganymede and his newly arrived supporters, who were looking angry. She gave the pewter box to Ganymede and announced, “Here, you can have him. But let him go back where he belongs.”
“We would have long before, if it weren’t for you,” Ganymede said furiously, and then Galileo was surrounded by the stranger’s associates, and Ganymede was holding the box before him, and he held his breath tightly. But one of them noticed what he was doing and tapped him hard in the solar plexus, waited for him to suck in his breath after the involuntary exhalation, then sprayed the mist in his face.
Chapter eight
Parry Riposte
To hope without hope, which would be wise, is impossible.
No one understood why the maestro was so anxious and melancholy after that night when Cardinal Barberini came through. It was true he had eaten and drunk too much at the banquet, and had then slept badly and eventually fallen into one of his syncopes, and come out of it too ill to attend the farewell breakfast the next morning. But none of that was particularly unusual for him, and the extremely warm letter from the cardinal should have more than reassured him about missing the send-off breakfast. Really, his anno mirabilis had lasted for almost three years now and was still going strong. He should have been happy.
But he wasn’t. His sleep was frequently broken by nightmares, and his days were irritable to him. “Something bad is going to happen,” he kept saying, looking through his telescope at Jupiter like a soothsayer. “Something monstrous wants to be born.”
One night he called Cartophilus to him. Staring at the old man over a cup of warmed milk brought to him to ward off the chill, he said suddenly, “Where is your master?”
“You are my master, maestro.”
“You know who I mean!”
“… He’s not here.”
Galileo contemplated this, frowning. Finally he said, “When I want him again, can you call him here?”
After another pause the old man nodded.
“Be ready,” Galileo warned him.
The ancient one slunk away. He knew why Galileo was afraid, better than Galileo himself. He bowed under the weight of it.
Galileo often wrote to Picchena asking for Cosimo’s permission to go to Rome. By the middle of 1613, the reasons for these requests became more evident. His detractors had grown more vehement in direct proportion to his growing fame. A good deal of this Galileo had brought on himself. A lot of people hated him for what they called his arrogance.
To his household that wasn’t quite right. They spent a fair amount of time discussing him, as one does any great power in one’s life. “He’s very defensive,” La Piera would say. “So defensive that he attacks people in self-defense, and thus he becomes offensive.”
To the other servants it was simpler than that: he was Pulcinella. All over Italy the figure of Pulcinella had begun appearing in the festivals and buffa plays, a loud fool constantly lying, cheating, fornicating and beating on people—in short, the very image of a certain kind of master, which every servant in the land recognized and laughed to see. Once when Galileo was snoring in his chair while wearing a white shirt, someone had put a black cloth over his head and the typical costume was thereby hilariously complete, and they all tiptoed in to look and treasure this knowledge ever after: they worked for the greatest Pulcinella of all.
Now this ham-fisted tendency was catching up to him, and his enemies were becoming remarkably numerous. Colombe for one had never slackened in his assault. Previously this Bible-quoting malevolence could be ignored or used as a foil, as he had had no patrons. But now he was being used by figures much higher than he, who were interested in the success of his tactic of accusing Galileo of contradicting Scripture. Joshua, these figures were now murmuring into higher ears, had ordered the sun to come to a halt, not the Earth. It was as clear as could be. Surely the Church had to respond? They could beat Galileo with this kind of stick forever, because no one outside the Church should have been talking about scriptural interpretation at all.
Galileo ignored that and tried to respond directly to his assailants. He pointed out that God stopping the sun in the sky for Joshua would entail stopping the celestial vault and all the stars as well, as Ptolemy said they were all affixed to each other, whereas if Copernicus were right, then all God would have had to do to fix the sun in the midday sky would be to stop the Earth’s rotation, a much easier task, as could be easily seen. That this was ingeniously argued did not keep it from being also ridiculous—so much so that some people took it to be a mockery of the very idea of biblical explanations of the skies. It was hard to tell; a deadpan sarcasm was one arrow in Galileo’s sling. But either way it would have been wiser not to venture into such territory at all.
Still, he persisted in doing so. He wrote a long “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” explaining to her and to the letter’s wider readership the principles he thought should rule science’s relation to theology. In discussion of physical questions, we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense experiences and necessary demonstration. God is known first through Nature, and then by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.