Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  —WILLIAM BRONK, The Metaphor of Physical Space

  LAID OUT IN THE GARDEN SHIVERING, Galileo looked around himself. There he was, looking around himself. It was just before sunrise, at Bellosguardo. In the dawn light, the citrons on their branches glowed like little Ios.

  Cartophilus was sitting on the ground beside him, wrapped in a blanket. He had thrown another one over Galileo’s supine form. Galileo croaked at him; Cartophilus nodded and gave him a cup of watered-down wine. Galileo sat up and drank it, then gestured for more. Cartophilus refilled the cup from a jug.

  Galileo drank some more. He blinked, looking around him, sniffing, then crumbling a clod of dirt in his hand. He regarded the citron bush curiously, leaning toward the big terra-cotta pot containing it.

  “How long was I gone?”

  “All night.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Did it feel longer?”

  “Yes.”

  Cartophilus shrugged. “You were gone longer than usual.”

  Galileo was staring at him.

  Cartophilus sighed. “She didn’t give you the amnestic.”

  “No. They were too busy fighting. I left Hera on Io, sinking into lava! Do you know her?”

  “I know her.”

  “Good. I want to go back and help. Can you send me back now?”

  “Not now, maestro. You need to eat, and get some rest.”

  Galileo considered it. “I suppose I need to give her time to get out of that fix, anyway. If she can. But soon.”

  Cartophilus nodded.

  Galileo poked him with a finger. “This stranger of yours, the Ganymede—did you know he is a kind of Savonarola? That his cult is reviled by the rest of the Jovians, and that now they are fighting?”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.” Cartophilus gestured at the teletrasporta. “I can see here what happens to you there, if I stay in the complementary field. As for Ganymede, I am not one of his people anymore. I just tend the device. I stay with it. Things around Jupiter are always changing. The people in power aren’t the same. Their attitude toward entanglement is not the same.”

  “How long have you been keeping this end of the teletrasporta?”

  “Too long.”

  “How long?” Galileo insisted.

  Cartophilus waggled his hand. “Let’s not talk about it now, maestro. I’ve been up all night, I’m tired.”

  Galileo yawned hugely. “Me too. I’m thrashed. Help me up. But later we are going to talk.”

  “I’m sure.”

  That winter Galileo’s illnesses struck him worse than ever, and he stayed in bed for months, often writhing and moaning. Sometimes he shouted furiously, others he shuddered epileptically, or spoke in Latin as if in conversation with someone invisible, sounding engaged and curious, surprised, humble, even supplicatory—all tones his voice never contained when he spoke to the living, when he was always so peremptory and sure.

  “He speaks with the angels,” the servant Salvadore ventured. The boy was often too frightened to go into his room. Giuseppe thought it was funny.

  “He just doesn’t want to work,” La Piera muttered. She would barge in no matter his state, and demand that he eat, that he drink tea, that he lay off the wine. When he was conscious of her presence he would curse her, his voice hoarse and dry. “You sound just like my mother. My mother in the disgusting form of a cook shaped like a cannonball.”

  “Now who sounds like your mother? Drink something or die whining.”

  “Fuck off. Leave me. Leave the drink and go. I had a real life once! I got to speak with real people! Now here I am, trapped with a bunch of pigs.”

  Some days he sat upright in bed and wrote feverishly, page after page. The things he said and wrote got stranger and stranger. In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he changed the subject abruptly and wrote:

  The open book of heaven contains such profound mysteries and such sublime concepts that the labor and studies of hundreds of the sharpest minds, in uninterrupted investigation for thousands of years, have not yet completely fathomed them. This idea haunts me.

  Another time he got up from bed, where he had been only semiconscious, and went to his table saying: “Pardon me, I need to get this down,” in a soothing voice none of us had ever heard before, and wrote a new page in a letter to a correspondent named Dini—a page that read like the Kepler he had always laughed at:

  I have already discovered a constant generation on the solar body of dark substances, which appear to the eye as very black spots which then later are subsumed and dissolved, and I have discussed how they could perhaps be regarded as part of the nourishment (or perhaps its excrements) that some ancient philosophers thought the Sun needed for its sustenance. By constantly observing these dark substances, I have demonstrated how the solar body necessarily turns on itself, and I have also speculated how reasonable it is to believe that the motion of the planets around the Sun depends on such a motion—

  After which he had returned to his bed and fallen comatose again. And there it was, in writing, him saying to a stranger that the sun was a living creature, eating and shitting, slinging the planets around itself by its rotation, like bangles extending from a top. Was this heresy, was it insanity? Could he not help himself? He had to know it was dangerous to commit such thoughts to print after Bellarmino’s warning, but he seemed helpless to stop himself, under the spell of a compulsion no one could comprehend. He only slept a few hours every night, and babbled in his sleep.

  He pulled himself out of bed one morning and went out to collar Cartophilus. Rough hands at the ancient one’s neck: “Get out your teletrasporta, old man. I need to get back up there to Hera. Now.”

  Cartophilus had no choice but to obey, but he didn’t like it. “This is a bad idea, maestro. You need to have the other end ready to receive you.”

  “Do it anyway. Something’s wrong. Maybe up there too, but definitely here. Something’s wrong in my mind.”

  Cartophilus went to the closet where he slept and came back with the small but heavy pewter box that had replaced Ganymede’s telescope some years before. He worked at its knobs for a time, muttering unhappily. “Get next to it,” he said.

  Galileo sat next to the box, swallowing involuntarily. Where would she be now? What if the teletrasporta was at the bottom of a lake of liquid rock?

  Nothing happened. “Come on,” Galileo said.

  “I’m trying.” Cartophilus shook his head. “There’s no response. It isn’t reaching the other resonance box. I wonder if she disabled it.”

  “I wonder if it sank into the lava,” Galileo said. “And her too.” He shuddered. “I need to go back! There’s something wrong here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I … When I was there last, I got a mathematics tutorial from Aurora, do you know her? No? A wonderful mathematician, and she and her machines were teaching me. They immerse you in the mathematics itself, it’s like flying. You have done it?”

  Cartophilus shook his head.

  “Well, you should. But I saw they had immersions that teach you about the mathematicians of the past, so that for instance you could go see, or even inhabit, Archimedes, and Euclid, and Archytas, and there was one for me. And so I took it. I took that immersion. I was just curious to see what they would say about me. But it wasn’t what I thought. It was more than a biography. You lived it, but all at once too. I saw my life! They had recorded it!”

  Cartophilus sighed. “When they first made the entanglers, they did a lot of things, for years and years. Event engineering, mnemostics, all that. It took a while before people turned against them.”

  “Well, I can see why they did.” Another shudder. “I saw too much. It wasn’t just learning a—a bad fate, off in the distance. It was … everything.”

  “Why didn’t you stop it?”

  “I did! But not before I saw too much. Now I know what will happen. I mean, day by day. I’m sure I know all of it, but I can’t quite bring it to mind unti
l it happens. But it bulks there behind every moment, every thought.” His grip on Cartophilus’s arm was like an iron clamp. “While I was up there, it didn’t seem to matter. Now it does.”

  “So do something different,” Cartophilus suggested.

  He almost lost his arm for it, Galileo clutched him so. “I’ve tried,” Galileo moaned, “but it doesn’t work. The different thing is what I already did. I follow myself as if from a couple of steps behind. It’s horrible.”

  “Like a Rückgriffe?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s German for something like ‘retroceptions.’”

  Galileo shook his head. “It’s more like foresight.”

  “Syndetos means bound together, so an asyndeton is when the connections between things go away. The French call that jamais vu.”

  “No. I am all too connected.”

  “Déjà vu, then. The French have a whole system. Already seen.”

  “Yes. That would be one way to say it. Although it isn’t seeing so much as feeling. Already felt. Always already. Here—try Hera again. Get me there.”

  Cartophilus attended to his device. “There’s still no response,” he said after a while. “She may be busy with other matters. Let’s try it again later, maestro. You’re killing my arm.”

  Galileo let him go and slumped down beside him, bereft. “Damn. I hope she’s all right.” He heaved a big sigh. “This will kill me faster than anything.”

  We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

  Galileo struggled on with his new sickness, his ability that was a disability, alone.

  Some of his friends were like La Piera, and wondered if his illnesses were not perhaps a little too convenient. For the fact was, in the first months of 1619 more comets had appeared in the night skies, alarming everyone. For a while no one spoke of anything else, and the unearthly phenomena filled all the horoscopes and the pages of the Avvisi. Of course all the astronomers and philosophers had to weigh in with an opinion on these new apparitions, and naturally, as before, everyone waited to hear what the notorious astronomer of the Medicis would say about them.

  But the Dominicans were watching, the Jesuits were listening; everything he wrote or said would eventually get reported to the Holy Office of the Index, and to the Holy Congregation. As with the comets that had shown up a few years previously, it was not obvious if or how they might fit into either the Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmologies—but they were undeniably in the sky. How convenient, then (everyone said), that Galileo was so sick he could not even go out on his terrace in the evening and take a look! Galileo, the greatest astronomer in the world! What a chicken!

  Silence from Bellosguardo.

  Life limped along, day after tumbled day. Galileo had never looked so ill before. “Everything has already happened,” he would complain, surveying his visitors as if they were all new acquaintances. “Everything is happening for the second time. Or perhaps for the millionth time, or simply infinitely.” Or he would insist, even to strangers: “I am out of phase. I am living in the wrong potential time. She sent me back to the wrong self. It’s an interference pattern, the one where the two equal waves cancel each other out! That’s what’s happening to me! I’m not really here.”

  A letter was going to come from Maria Celeste. It came, and as he had always done, he took out the little stiletto he used as a letter opener and watched himself cut the wax of the seal neatly away. He had unfolded it in just the way he unfolded it, and he read what he had read. Of the candied citron which you ordered, I have only been able to make a small quantity. I feared the citrons were too shriveled for preserving, and so it has proved. I send two baked pears for these days of vigil. He tasted the fruit he had been going to taste, and it tasted the way it was going to taste when he tasted it. It had an underlying bitterness, as with all his life. But she was also going to have put a rose in the basket, as he saw when he saw them. But as the greatest treat of all I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season.

  Indeed the time was out of joint, things blooming out of season. Really there was nothing but asynchronous anachronism. Time was a manifold full of exclusions and resurrections, fragments and the spaces between fragments, eclipses and epilepsies, isotopies all superposed on one another and interweaving in an anarchic vibrating tapestry. And since to relive it at one point was not to relive it at another, the whole was unreadable, permanently beyond the mind. The present was a laminate event, and obviously the isotopies could detach from each other, slightly or greatly. He was caught in a mere splinter of the whole, no matter how entangled with the rest of it. Caught in what his poor brilliant daughter called the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life, the words of her letter jumping off the page, the phrase something he had always read, like a prayer said every night of his life. Each moment reiterated. The darkness of this short winter of our mortal life.

  He followed himself out into the garden. The world became as it was as it was. The day would be what it had always been. Sun struck the back of his neck. The great Saint Augustine had also felt this pseudoiterative feeling, he would notice in his desperate reading. Had the deepest of all the Christian philosophers also had an encounter with the stranger? No one else Galileo knew had ever written about time the way Augustine did:

  Which way soever then this secret fore-perceiving of things to come, be; that only can be seen, which is. But what now is, is not future, but present. When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves, which as yet are not, (that is, which are to be) it is rather their causes perchance or their signs that are seen, which already are. Therefore they are not future but present to those who now see that from which the future, being fore-conceived in the mind, is foretold. Which fore-conceptions again now are; and those who foretell those things, do behold the conceptions present before them.

  That was right there in The Confessions, Book XI. Augustine made no conclusions in the long feverish chapter that held his meditation on time, but only confessed to his own confusion. Of course he was confused, and so was Galileo. These thoughts had always been there, and now he read them just after they generated themselves spontaneously in his head. It gave him a headache to read like that.

  But in the garden he would sit still, and think. It was possible, there, to collapse all the potentialities to a single present. This moment had a long duration. Such a blessing; he could feel it in his body, in the sun and air and earth sustaining him. Blue sky overhead—it was the part of the rainbow that was always visible, stretching all the way across the dome of sky. Sitting there, he knew he would go back inside and eat, and try to write to Castelli. He was going to shit without shitting his guts out his second asshole. It was going to hurt. He would be standing at the edge of his field at sunset, watching the last light burnish the tops of the ripe barley, praying for the consolation of the sky. There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future. He would precede and follow his own footsteps. It would happen later, as he had already seen. It had already happened, as he would see later. Finally, one spring morning just after sunrise, Galileo roared furiously from his bedroom. What inspired his defiance of the pseudoiterative no one knew, and to him it was still just a matter of obeying the compulsion of the now; but after the trembling happy boys had helped him to dress, cringing at his every move, each of which looked like the start of a blow, which they would have welcomed to see even as they dodged, he hobbled out to the narrow terrace that overlooked Florence in the valley below them to the north. Down there the Duomo stood above the sea of tile roofto
ps like something from a different world, bigger and more geometrical. Like a little moon come down to earth, or like the clouds rafting over it.

  Over his shoulder he growled to La Piera, “Bring me breakfast. Then have the boys move my desk out here. No doubt I have letters to catch up on. I’ll just have to follow myself out there and work through it. Hopefully it will feel like being a scribe making copies. Someone else can do the thinking.”

  Everyone in Bellosguardo ignored his grousing, pleased by his actions. The maestro had returned to life—surly life, it was true, ill-tempered, whining life—but better than the miserable limbo of the winter. He would spend much of the next few weeks writing fifteen or twenty letters a day; it always happened that way when he snapped out of his funks. He was sick so often that even his recovery period was a ritual they all knew.

  “Send me Cartophilus,” he said to La Piera, when she brought out food and wine at the end of a long day of scribbling and cursing.

  When he had finished eating, staring at each biscuit and capon leg as if it were entirely new to him, the ancient servant stood before him.

  Galileo surveyed him wearily. “Tell me more about déjà vu.”

  “There isn’t much to say. It’s a French term, obviously. The French language has always been very analytical and precise about mental states, and they will work out these terms. Déjà vu is the feeling something has happened before. Presque vu is the feeling that you almost understand something, usually something important, but you don’t quite.”

  “I feel that all the time.”

  “But mystically, I mean. A really big existential tip of the tongue moment.”

  “Pretty often, even so. I feel like that pretty often.”

  “And then jamais vu is a sudden loss of comprehension of anything, even just the ordinary day.”

  “I’ve felt that too,” Galileo said thoughtfully. “I’ve felt all of those.”