No doubt it occurred to him often that if he had just stayed in Florence and continued his work without drawing any attention to it, the storm from the clerics might have blown over. Cesi might have been able to campaign gradually on his behalf in Rome, at the level of the cardinals and the College of Rome. It might have worked. Instead Galileo had, in his usual pigheaded way, decided to reason with the pope—to bombard him so suasively that that ultimate arbiter of the situation would be convinced to support him. He couldn’t imagine things turning out any other way.
Either that, or else, as some of us said when he was asleep, he had seen a danger and run straight at it, attacking it in the hope of killing it when it was young. It was quite possible he had made an accurate estimate of the danger, had calculated the odds and made his best attempt. But failed.
Chapter nine
Aurora
Then it seemed to me, that time is nothing else but protraction; but of what, I know not; and I marvel, if it be not of the mind itself?
On his uneasy journey back to Florence, Galileo wrote letters to all his correspondents, explaining to them why his visit had been such a success, even more so than in 1611. All of them had already heard the story from faster sources, and so did not believe his account, but many wrote back to him reassuringly. A success, no doubt about it.
Every night he complained about the inn food, the flea-bitten beds, the creaky floors, and the endless snoring of the other wayfarers (he himself was a prodigious snorer), so that rather than retire he went out to sleep on the cushioned seat of his litter, or on his telescope stool under a blanket.
One night, at the inn on the road below Montepulciano, he could not sleep at all, and so he sat wrapped in his blanket by his telescope. He crouched to look through it at Jupiter, his own little emblem and clock, and in so many ways the home of his troubles. At this moment it was near the zenith. He marked down the positions of its moons in the chart in his workbook.
After staring at the little orrery of white points for a long time, he got up and went into the stables, where he knew Cartophilus preferred to sleep. He thumped him ungently on the back.
“What?” the ancient one croaked.
“Bring me your master,” Galileo demanded fiercely.
“What, now?”
“Now.”
“Why now?”
Galileo seized the man by his scrawny throat. “I want to talk to him. I have questions for him. Now.”
“Gah,” Cartophilus croaked. Galileo let go of him and he rubbed his neck, frowning resentfully. “Whatever you say, maestro, your wish is my demand, as always, but I cannot produce him immediately.” He reached for a jug of water he kept by his bed at night, took a pull and offered it to Galileo, who waved it off. “I will as soon as I can. It may take a day or two. It would be easiest back in Florence.”
“Quickly,” Galileo ordered. “I’m sick of this. I have some questions.”
The old one gave him a brief glance and looked into his jug. “This trip to Rome was perhaps in reference to him?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Galileo put his big right fist under the man’s nose. “You know more about it than I, I’m sure.”
Cartophilus shook his head unconvincingly.
Galileo humphed. “Of course not. Are you really the Wandering Jew?”
The old one waggled his head equivocally. “The story isn’t really right. Although I do feel cursed. And I’m old. And I have wandered.”
“And are you a Jew?”
“No.”
“Did you mock Christ as he carried the cross to Golgotha?”
“Definitely not. Huh! That’s a story the Gypsies used to tell. A band of them would come into a town, a couple of centuries ago, and explain that they had been made immortal penitents, because they had accidentally insulted Jesus. Practically every town we told the story to opened their gates and treated us like royalty. After that it was a case of transference.”
“So the Wandering Jew came from Jupiter.”
The old man’s eyebrows arced high on his forehead. He took another pull before replying. “You remember something from your last syncope, I take it.”
Galileo growled. “You know better than I.”
“I don’t. But I could see that you wanted to get to Rome to defend yourself.”
“Yes.”
“But it didn’t work as you had hoped.”
“No.”
Cartophilus hesitated for a long time. Just as Galileo thought he had fallen back asleep, he ventured, “Often it seems to me that when one tries to do something based on … knowledge—or even let us say foreknowledge, or a premonition, what the Germans call Schwanung—that whatever you do, it … rebounds. Instead of forestalling it, or fulfilling it, your action has the effect of bringing about exactly the opposite of whatever you might have been trying for. A complementary action, so to speak.”
“You would know better than I, I’m sure.”
“I don’t.”
Galileo lifted his fist again. “Just get your master to me.”
“As soon as I can. In Florence. I promise you.”
Back in Florence, Galileo moved into his newly rented house in Bel-losguardo, the Villa del Segui, a fine establishment overlooking Florence from a hill to the south of the river. He had a real home again, for the first time since Hostel Galilei in Padua. Here he was, back in his gardens, back in La Piera’s care, back in the arms of his girls (or Virginia’s anyway).
He was barely settled in, and had gone out into the garden one night to complete his ablutions, when a movement against the stable wall caused him to flinch.
A black figure emerged from the murk, and he was about to cry out when he saw that it was the stranger. At the sight of that narrow face, the unganymedean face of Ganymede, he experienced a big if vague abreaction; all of the blurred uncertain memories of what had happened to him on the Jovian moons came back to him in force. The memories of his earlier night voyages were like dream memories, with certain moments sticking out more distinctly even than events of the present moment—in particular, in this case, the fire—but the rest fuzzy beyond what was usual for his memory, perhaps because of the dreamy content. They had done things to his mind, he knew that; the woman Hera had helped him to counteract one preparation with another, he recalled. So odd effects were not surprising. In any case, now the earlier voyages had bloomed in him, and all from the sight of the stranger’s hatchet face. Galileo’s heart beat in his chest at the vivid memory of the fire, which had never really left him. “I want to go back,” he demanded. “I have questions to ask.”
“I know,” Ganymede said. “There are questions for you there as well. I have taken steps to secure the device at the other end.”
Galileo snorted. “You hope you have. But I want to see Hera in any case.”
Ganymede frowned. “I don’t think that’s wise.”
“Wisdom has nothing to do with it.”
This time Ganymede merely twisted a knob on a pewter box he was carrying crooked in his elbow, and there they stood, inside one of the green-blue ice caves of Europa.