ReVISIONS

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Most Affectionate Daughter Suor Maria Celeste,

  I am warmed by your words as I am by the shirts you have so delicately and expertly mended for me. They keep the cold from this old man’s bitter breast, even within this house that has become his prison.

  The unexpected magnitude and progress of your illness is most unwelcome news, as it deprives me both of the works of your hand and of those of your mind. And I must confess, that without them both, I am at a loss. Vincenzo, my pupil not your brother, has arranged for one of the Sisters, a Suor Maria Joseph, to read to you my words at your bedside that they might hasten your recovery and return you, merciful God willing, from his heavenly world to ours here on earth.

  By your leave, then, you will forgive and indulge me in continuing to speak to you of my work, as I have become accustomed. I have made significant improvement to my invention of the mirror telescope by suspending a secondary flattened collecting mirror at a centrally direct and perpendicular distance from the main curved reflector. This secondary mirror’s diminutive size, and the four slender metal threads that suspend it above the first, block only a small fraction of the incident light from the main mirror. A trifling obstruction when compared to the large primary collecting mirror areas now possible. And so very little of the image is lost or distorted. The other Vincenzo, my pupil, has kindly supervised its construction at a local silversmith’s.

  It seems also that I have made the gravest error in sharing this news with Vincenzo, your brother, ever the practitioner of a failing wit. He reacted thus to a demonstration of the new device only this past evening. “I fear, Father,” said he, “that your confinement, has dimmed your mind perhaps more than your ailing vision. Do you propose to gaze upon the heavens with this eyesore, or do you intend to merely collect within? It resembles more a hideously large bucket than it does a spyglass.”

  “My dear Vincenzo,” I responded. “My vision has not entirely taken leave of me, as perhaps your wit has of you, and I daresay that with the aid of this hideous bucket, as you call it, I will be illuminating the very light of God’s own truth.”

  As I told Vincenzo thus, I inserted the final component—a diminutive telescope no longer than my own hand—upon a focusing track in line with the secondary mirror’s reflection. This miniature eyepiece telescope, as I call it, collects the reflected light into a final, albeit inverted, image. Considering that we are gazing upon the heavens, however, I scarcely feel the orientation to be of issue. Moreover, by doing so I have added to the distance the light must travel before producing an image at the eyepiece telescope which allows me to achieve celestial magnifications of a hundredfold. And due to the much larger apertures possible with mirrors rather than lenses, I have realized a sixteenfold improvement in light-gathering capacity over even the most sizable spyglass.

  While these abilities are impressive, I must admit that at high magnifications I find myself making constant minute adjustments to the telescope’s position to match pace with a viewed object’s celestial motion. At my age, and in my condition, I find this quite maddening. I have written to my colleagues in the East, the Orient to be precise, of this problem and they have graciously offered to devise a solution.

  Nevertheless, my mirror telescope remains impressively functional to the extent your brother was stricken mercifully speechless at the sight of a highly magnified Jupiter and its moons. I must also say that we were then both stricken by a marvelous view of Saturn. Saturn, dear daughter, has not eaten its children, as I had previously speculated, it simply gathers them about itself, enclosed in the thinnest of ribbons.

  Yet, even in this moment of discovery my thoughts are for you. I pray that the Lord judge you mercifully to return you to health, to return my child to me, as He has returned those of Saturn to my sight. And added to my sight, I long to once again hear the sound of your words upon your voice

  Your beloved lord father,

  G.G.

  Inquisition sirens wail diatonically in the distance. You gather the hard copies of your offending work together: all your calculations, your speculations laid out logically, perhaps irrefutably. The world isn’t ready for such dangerous thoughts, you know, and you shouldn’t have boasted of them. Your consumption of wine at Brother Al-Fahudi’s birthday celebration, surely the sin that begat the greater sin of pride.

  You search now for a suitable spot in which to make a sin offering of your hard copies. Your one-room bachelor apartment, once a single-efficiency hotel room, offers few altars save a bathtub and a small oven.

  You settle on the white enameled oven, built, you believe, to contain fire, to contain the sacrifice that is to become of your work and your ideas. Your hands tremble, as you straighten the papers for no reason. They will burn as easily, perhaps better, if left in disarray.

  Outside, the sirens become louder and their pitch drops from the Galileo Effect, warning you of the Inquisition, their vehicles closing in and slowing.

  Your offering lies heavily in your hands as it does on your mind. It overwhelms you for a moment, and you hesitate. Stand and fight, hoping for later enlightenment and greater glory in the service of the Church, like Saint Galileo, or recant now?

  But you are not Saint Galileo, even though in some small way, you wish you could be like him.

  The sirens stop.

  They’re here.

  Most Affectionate Suor Maria Celeste,

  May the words of this letter reach you through the kind lips of Suor Maria Joseph to guide you home to this earth. May they also warm your cloistered bones in this cold winter season that I now suffer more without your works of kindness. And by this I mean not only the designs of your hand, but those of your wit and your counsel. A most wondrous and illuminating event has occurred, Daughter, sprung from your own advices. You have often chastised me for my complaints and encouraged me to find blessings in my ailments within the graces of the Good Lord, and so I have of late discovered in the affliction of my eyes, which I had called a curse, to be one such blessing.

  One evening upon the darkness, and while observing the full moon from my courtyard in the company of my servant, Salvatore, I remarked, “Is it not odd, Salvatore, to observe a rainbow around the moon on such a dry winter’s eve?”

  Salvatore regarded me with alarm. “Sire, you jest with your poor servant, I see no such rainbow. . . . Are you well?”

  “Salvatore,” I replied, newly humbled by insight. “In your honesty, I have found inspiration.” And immediately, I set the perplexed Salvatore upon a most unusual task that found us waiting at our loggia the very next morning.

  As the pale light of daybreak devoured the morning stars, a horse-drawn carriage in my employ, carrying trumpeters at the horn, announced the dawn at full gallop past our position.

  “Are you most certain you are well, Lord?” Salvatore begged once again as the cacophonous procession passed, “You have surely woken, and greatly angered, all our good neighbors.”

  “Fear not, Salvatore,” I replied. “I have simply called them to enlightenment.” I did not explain to poor Salvatore, who doubtless considers me truly mad now, that my experiment, as I call it, confirmed an observation made during a childhood experience involving a similar procession during a celebration. As the trumpets approached, their tones increased in pitch, as they drew away, their pitch similarly fell. Our experiment has just now confirmed this property of sound which I expect to employ in the service of light.

  I have often ridiculed Lucretius’ preposterous and antiquated theories that sight is produced by ethereal skins that are shed by objects to fly through the air and dance upon our eyes. My telescopes have been the victim of many a public slander from cretinous Lucretians who condemn their lenses for distorting delicate reality by interfering with these skins.

  As ridiculous as this idea might be, what if simple misguided Lucretius had hit on something, nonetheless? What if light were to the eye what sound were to the ear? What if both travel as ripples, like those on a pond? And if this
be the case, then could not the rainbow-like halos I had remarked upon around the moon hint that color is to light what pitch is to sound? If not for the infirmity of my eyes, I might have missed it, but perhaps with a modification to the larger, sharper eye of my new mirrored telescope I might demonstrate the implications of this discovery for all to see. Aided by the solution I await from the East—a wondrous clockwork, I am told—we might gaze long enough upon a single heavenly body to appreciate not only its shape, but the subtle rainbow of its procession as well. And, perhaps, such observations could be of further use to me, in ways I have not yet conceived.

  As always, dear Daughter, I long for your insights into these matters. Vincenzo, my student, is possessed of a keen mind for ideas already fully formulated. He has not been blessed, as you have, with the gift for lucid speculation. More so, I long for the sound of your voice, the rise and fall of your notes, even once removed through another’s lips. Your illness has shut upon me a lid of scholarly silence where the counsel of others grates below my wits like gravel under a worn sole.

  Your beloved and beseeching lord father,

  G.G.

  Car doors slam, hard soles bite into gravel. They’re here.

  You throw your notes into the oven, then you strike a match and set the papers ablaze before closing the oven door. You flick the overhead switch for the exhaust fan, to help draw away the smoke. The alarm in the room has never worked; you worry more about your eyes.

  Flames dance across your work. They curl the edges of your work and blister the surfaces brown. Even with the fan, the odor is overpowering and sinister, like a forest fire through dead wood. But this is no natural blaze—it’s an inferno, a live sacrifice, a holy offering to atone for your sins. Let someone less pious pose the question that brought you here, let them propose the theory, if it be worthy. Let it be an amateur outside the Jesuit order, a layperson who has not dedicated his life to the holy union of Church and Science. Let it be someone who may more easily beg absolution.

  The flames rise and upon them your words and your work, an apology to the heavens for the century of peace your ideas threaten, for the controversy they might have created, for the doubts they would create. If not for the scientific proofs of the Church’s holy doctrines, the Schism could not, would not, have been healed. With doubt replacing science as an ally, a weakened Church could not have gathered the world into its holy fold, and could not have ultimately convinced the Hebrews and the Mohammedans to join in the scientifically-proved spiritual truths.

  You know now that with this act you ask for forgiveness for a theory that threatens to forever separate science from Church, that might make enemies of old allies. You confess your idea which threatens the Church’s most basic and Holy precept of universal centrality, the very one that returned the sainted Galileo and his Holy Sciences to the Church. Sciences you now know were likely misconceived, products of a Galilean fallibility as monumental as your discovery of them. And instead of illuminating and protecting Holy Galileo’s memory and his Letters, you stand now as their accuser.

  You know the Inquisition exists to protect and to preserve. If they do not find your work, if they find only you, they might accept this penitent offering you have made of your scientific hubris. They will see that you have chosen faith over science, and then, perhaps, you will be spared.

  Darling Daughter Most Beloved Maria Celeste,

  I am heartened that the Lord spares your life, even in cruel sleep. Yet, it grieves me greatly that your mind prefers that company of the heavens above, to that of the earth below. This poor sinner prays for you daily, though I fear that I am becoming weak.

  My bones are made cold and wretched by the passing winter and by the chilled drafts allowed against me by hands less skilled than yours in the mending of my vestments. More than my garments, I fear that without the wisdom of your words, I am truly imprisoned, my confinement unbearable. I have sought leave, and await permission, to travel to your convent in San Matteo if only to be by your side, to hold your delicate fingers within mine, and to beseech you in my own voice to return to me.

  Until then, I offer word of all that remains me, that of my experiments.

  My friends in the East have been most kind in delivering to me a wondrous and elaborate clockwork upon which to mount my mirror telescope. This gargantuan clockwork, once trained on Polaris, causes the telescope to then follow the celestial body it is fixed upon across the duration of the night sky without need for further adjustment.

  Moreover, in the Easterners’ luminous kindness—and I believe that in His infinite wisdom, God gifts even the heathens thus—they have provided me also with a recipe for an amazing gelatin bath exquisitely more sensitive than the eye to color. These baths may be laid out in dishes, where the light emanating from my telescopic eyepieces may fall upon their surfaces. And while the gelatins are poor representatives of contour, they react precisely according to color.

  Moreover, inspired by the nature of the affliction of my eyes, I have devised a method to reproduce the rainbows I had observed around the moon and to project a representation of color, rather than shape or form, from the telescope’s eyepiece. This I have achieved through the simple artifice of the placement of a metal disk possessed of a fine central slit over the eyepiece, the slit approximating the narrowed gaze of my failing vision. Light emanating from the eyepiece is thus translated from shape or form into a most divine assembly of color. And thus, when the telescope is trained to follow a celestial body across the night, the object’s rainbow autograph is recorded.

  Most promising, is that in this apparatus that I have dubbed a Telecolorimeter, I believe I have found the means to my salvation. You will forgive me if I explain in simple terms, as I grow weary and no doubt your condition will not suffer the details. My reasoning and methods are thus: I first intend to train the device on our sun, to capture its characteristic color autograph which will serve as my universal model for all such stars. I will then train the device on a duller distant sun such as Aldebaran. (An homage to the Mohammedans for their excellent studies of the heavens and for their superb work regarding the nature of light. A crystal wedge sent to me by one of their natural philosophers was my first attempt at devising a colorimeter.) With the ability to follow a distant sun through the night, and by affixing a gelatin plate to rotate along with the clockwork mount, I hope to capture the star’s color imprint. This color signature should be identical to our sun’s, since they are stars just the same, but for the color perturbations according to my earlier theory likening sound to light. Owing to Aldebaran’s motion, I will expect to see a change in its colors as I would expect a change in pitch with approaching or receding sound.

  I suspect also that what appears to me to be distant suns may, in fact, be assemblages of stars, not unlike that which encompasses our own planet, and I will require an even larger telescope in order to better appreciate their colors. To this end I have commissioned the manufacture, and will soon take delivery, of a mirror telescope of such generous measure that it is limited in size only by the clockwork’s ability to carry its weight.

  If I am mistaken and the Church is correct and we find ourselves at rest at the center of a fixed celestial sphere, no color perturbations should exist, since these objects maintain a fixed distance from us. If I find this, I will humbly publish my discoveries and recant fully to the public. Should I find, however, a tapestry of varied color perturbations, it will prove that our world is engaged in an intricate dance of advancing and withdrawing celestial motions. I expect my vindication will come with shifts toward the color red on the one hand and blue on the other, these being the colors of the rainbow’s edge.

  I fear my reasoning may require further reflection and I pray that you recover to aid me in the refinement of this theory, so that you might also bask in the glory and holy illumination that it will provide. With much shame, I admit likewise, that I am possessed of a more selfish desire to see you recover to mend this old man’s longing heart
along with his increasingly threadbare garments. I beseech you, darling Daughter, to quit your Father on high and to return to me, your humble and earthly father below. As the Phoenix of myth is reborn from ashes and flame, I beg you, Daughter, to return to me that we might both truly live.

  Your most beloved and affectionate father,

  G.G.

  The fire within the oven consumes your ideas and transforms them to flame, ashes, and dust.

  Footfalls fill the stairwells and echo through the hallways toward your room. The sounds of doors opening and closing, and of your Brethren emerging from their apartments, complete the cacophony that announces the Inquisition’s arrival.

  The sounds grow louder and stop at your door.

  Then you remember your computer, an early-forties’ point-and-click model squatting on the metal writing desk in the corner of your apartment not occupied by kitchen, lavatory, or bed. The computer, cradled between two bookshelves overstuffed with volumes of science and divinics, blinks innocently at you, not realizing that it holds within it the evidence and power to condemn you and change the world. The computer itself, a convenience of the scientific theocracy it threatens to tear asunder.

  In a moment you are at the computer, manipulating its mouse, dragging files to the wipe window. Backup files, memos, animations, calculations, anything that might incriminate you. The wipe program will read every bit of information, will then overwrite each with a zero and once again with a one. The evidence will be irrecoverable.

  You continue to the sickening rhythm of an Inquisition ram slamming into your door. The computer screen mocks you with its Church-logo wallpaper: two reflecting telescopes arranged into the shape of a cross, a Barberini bumblebee perched proudly atop its apex.

  A voice booms through the door, “Stand aside, Brother, we intend no harm.” You recognize the voice, Father Julius Rosenberg, the Grand Inquisitor himself, and a fellow Jesuit. Has he come to Tucson specially for you, or was he here, like you, for his allotment at the observatory and seminary?