Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “If I do, then I suffer from the sin of pride, and I shall have to do penance for it when I make my next confession,” Gioioso said. “Any man who dares compare himself to Socrates surely labors under a delusion.”

  “I think so, too,” Galileo said. “Time and again I would notice how much windier than Plato's my characters seemed. But I did not see what else I could do, if I was to put across the ideas I wanted the world to see.”

  “Since you mention your clever dialogue—and it is very clever indeed, Signor, as I have said before—let me ask you something not so firmly rooted in your early years,” Sigismondo Gioioso said.

  “I am your servant,” Galileo said, hope and apprehension warring within him.

  “You—you of all people—are no man's servant,” Cardinal Gioioso said.

  Galileo only shrugged, which was awkward and uncomfortable on the couch. “I am vehemently suspected of heresy,” he said. Suspicion of heresy was in itself a crime; vehement suspicion was a higher grade of the same offense. That being so... “I am of course a servant of the Holy Inquisition, and of the holy Catholic Church.”

  “Every man is, or ought to be, a servant of the Church,” Gioioso said. “But the Church is not a man, nor is the Inquisition. The Church is a building put together over centuries, and the Inquisition its fire-watch.”

  “I cannot quarrel with you, your Eminence, nor would I if I could.” Galileo was already in plenty of trouble. He didn't need or want more.

  “I quite understand,” Gioioso said, which meant ... what, exactly? Before Galileo could decide, the cardinal asked, “How is it that you became such a strong supporter of the Copernican hypothesis?”

  That was a question Galileo would rather not have heard. It had a number of possible answers, all of them dangerous. Some, though, were more dangerous than others. Galileo chose the safest one he could, the one he'd used all along to defend himself from the charges against him: “In 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine notified me that the Copernican doctrine was contrary to the Bible and could not be defended or held. I accepted that then, and I accept it still.”

  “Your dialogue gives me cause to wonder at the truth of that,” Gioioso said.

  “I am sorry that it should,” Galileo said, which was true, even if perhaps not altogether in the sense in which he wanted Gioioso to take it. “Nothing in the holy cardinal's injunction ordered me not to discuss the Copernican doctrine hypothetically, which is all I was doing in the book. And I do not claim it is true. In the end, I declare that it is impossible to know whether the Copernican or the Ptolemaic doctrine is true.”

  “So you do. Yet you show a greater zeal for the former,” Cardinal Gioioso said, as he had when they first met.

  “I am sorry for that, too,” Galileo exclaimed, and, again, he meant it in more than one way.

  The cardinal steepled his fingers again. “May we say that you hold a ... hypothetical affection for Copernicanism?”

  “As much as the Church permits,” Galileo said. “Not a feather's weight more.”

  “All right.” He won another of the prelate's small but warm smiles. “Splendid. Very well. Shall we stipulate that for the purposes of discussion?”

  “Meaning what, your Eminence?” Galileo asked cautiously. A vulgar phrase occurred to him—he wasn't about to buy a pig in a poke.

  Nor did Sigismondo Gioioso seem interested in selling him one. “Meaning that I will take whatever you say in defense of the Copernican heresy to be hypothetical only. I will not claim that you espouse it.”

  “If you will be gracious enough to put your promise in writing, so that in case of need I may show it to another gentleman from the Holy Inquisition, I am your man,” Galileo said. If that didn't show him whether Gioioso was serious, nothing ever would.

  The cardinal didn't bat an eye. “Just as you please, Signor. Please wait a moment while I get paper and pen.” Gioioso was gone no longer than he'd said he would be. “My written Italian, I fear, is not all it might be. Do you mind if the pledge is in Latin?”

  “Not at all. Anyone in the civilized world will be able to read it then,” Galileo said. After a moment, he politely added, “You speak my language well.”

  “Grazie. I manage, but you give me too much credit.” Cardinal Gioioso signed his name with a flourish, then waited for the ink to dry before handing Galileo the paper. “I trust this will prove satisfactory?”

  Galileo put on spectacles to read it, as Gioioso had used them to write it. Age had lengthened both men's sight. Grinding good spectacle lenses was a long step toward grinding good spyglass lenses. But that thought slipped from Galileo's mind as he read the churchman's promise. Gioioso might not trust his written Italian, but his Latin was elegant—almost Ciceronian. That surprised Galileo not at all. The astronomer nodded. “Oh, yes. Everything you said it would be. May I keep it?”

  “Why else would I have written it? It is your shield—nothing you say here today will be used against you.” Cardinal Gioioso leaned forward a little in his chair—he reminded Galileo of a hunting hound taking a scent. The image worried Galileo, but no help for it now. The cardinal said, “Let us begin, then. Why do you find yourself so attracted to Copernicanism ... in a hypothetical way, naturally?”

  “Naturally,” Galileo agreed, his voice dry. “Because—in a hypothetical way, again—it does a better job of predicting the phenomena we actually observe in the sky than the Ptolemaic hypothesis does.”

  “I see,” Gioioso said. “And why is this so important to you?”

  “Because it gives me a better, a deeper, understanding of the way the universe works.” Galileo hesitated, then recast that so even a cleric could not fail to grasp it: “Of the way God's creation works.”

  “Is this not the sin of pride—presuming to understand how God does what he does?” Gioioso asked.

  Galileo muttered to himself. He might have known a priest—and a priest who belonged to the Holy Inquisition, at that—would see things so. He tried again: “The more I learn, the better I can praise and glorify Him.”

  “So you believe that accurate knowledge is required for God to hear and accept one's prayers?” the cardinal said.

  There was a snare! Galileo was canny enough to spot it. Was he canny enough to evade it? Picking his words with great care, he replied, “Why would God have arranged things as He did, and why would He have made men as He did, if he did not expect them to try to learn all they could of His creation?”

  “Why? I have no idea why,” Sigismondo Gioioso said calmly. “Will you tell me you know why God chose the Copernican world system—if He did so choose—and not the Ptolemaic? Will you say He could not as easily have chosen the other one?”

  That was a trap, too, but a less dangerous one. “God might have done anything He chose to do. Not even a Protestant heretic would claim otherwise,” Galileo said. So there, he thought. “I do not know why the evidence seems to me to show He chose the Copernican way of shaping the universe. I only know that it seems to show He did.”

  “Can you give me some examples of how this seems to be so?” Gioioso asked.

  “Well, your Eminence, to begin with, the Copernican hypothesis more accurately predicts the positions of the planets against the starry backdrop of the heavens,” Galileo said.

  “By how much?” the cardinal enquired.

  “Oh, by a very large margin!” Galileo said. “Sometimes by as much as half a degree.”

  “Which is how much in layman's terms?” Gioioso asked, adding, “I have tried to learn what I could of your art, but I am no astronomer.”

  How much more than he admitted did he really know? A lot, or Galileo missed his guess. He answered with the truth: “Why, the diameter of the Sun, or of the full Moon.”

  “I see.” By the way Cardinal Gioioso nodded, Galileo judged he wasn't hearing this for the first time. He asked, “And how much earlier or later does this make the heavenly bodies rise and set than they would have under the old calculations? Half an hour? An hour?
More?”

  “No, your Eminence,” Galileo said. “It is not such a large error as that, or the Ptolemaic world system would never have become part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church to begin with. As I noted in my own copy of the Dialogue, the Church endangers itself when it declares heretical a view that may one day be proved true by logic or by physical means.”

  “Well, how large an error are we speaking of, Signor? You have yet to tell me,” Gioioso said.

  “It is a matter of up to two minutes,” Galileo replied, again giving information he was pretty sure the other man already had.

  If Sigismondo Gioioso did have it, he concealed that most artfully. “Two minutes?” he exclaimed, making the sign of the cross. “By the blessed Virgin Mother of God, is that all?”

  “It may not seem like much, your Eminence, but it is an error easily detected by good instruments and good clocks, both of which grow ever easier to come by these days,” Galileo said stubbornly.

  The cardinal might as well not have heard him. “Two minutes!” Gioioso repeated. “For the sake of two minutes—for the sake of two minutes at the most, you said—you and Copernicus propose setting Christendom on its ear?”

  “All Copernicus tried to do was find a better way to conceive of the workings of the heavens,” Galileo said. “All I tried to do in my Dialogue was to give the evidence for and against his views. We never wished to oppose the holy Catholic Church. Rather, the Church has chosen to oppose us.”

  “When Giordano Bruno chose to cling to Copernicanism despite having every chance to renounce his views, he was burned at the stake,” Gioioso said. “Are two minutes—at most two minutes—worth a man's life?”

  “I have done my best to make it plain that I do not personally hold to the Copernican world system,” Galileo said. “I will make whatever abjurations the Holy Inquisition requires of me. But, even if it is a false hypothesis, Copernicanism is also a useful one.”

  “Useful in what way?” Gioioso asked.

  “In making more exact astronomical calculations,” Galileo answered.

  “But if, in saving up to two minutes, you cast the Church into disrepute, you throw the whole world into confusion and argument and strife where before everything had seemed certain and clear, if you cast doubt on the Holy Scriptures and on God Himself, is that a useful thing to do?” Seldom had Galileo heard such scorn as that with which Cardinal Gioioso laced the word useful.

  The astronomer hesitated, however much he didn't care to. Consequences were less easily calculated than planetary motions. At last, he said, “I never intended any such things to happen.”

  “Eve and Adam also sinned unwittingly,” Gioioso pointed out. “Would the world not be a better place had they abstained from doing so?”

  “How can I possibly deny that?” Galileo said.

  “If you can deny one part of Holy Scripture, why not deny another? Why not deny every line?” Sigismondo Gioioso stood and stretched. His joints creaked—sure enough, he was as old as Galileo. “Perhaps we would do better to continue our conversation tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps we would,” Galileo agreed. Stretching out on the cardinal's couch helped him forget his own painful arthritis. All the same, he'd rarely been so glad to get out of a room as he was to escape that one.

  * * * *

  “Good morning, Signor. A pleasure to see you,” Cardinal Gioioso said when Galileo unwillingly returned the next morning. To Galileo's surprise, the cardinal sounded as if he meant it. They might never have clashed verbal swords the day before.

  “Good morning, your Eminence.” Galileo kissed Gioioso's ring.

  Gioioso waved to a table. “By all means, refresh yourself before we begin. Here are wine and bread and olive oil. I am told the oil is quite good. Myself, I like butter more. But butter is easier to keep fresh in Vienna than it is here.”

  “No doubt.” Galileo ate. He drank. What else could he do? It gave him an excuse to wait before reclining on that comfortable but dangerous couch.

  So he stretched things as long as he could, and then a little longer. At last, though, Cardinal Gioioso asked, “Shall we begin?”

  “I am your servant,” Galileo said once more.

  Once more, Gioioso denied it: “By no means, not when I am a servant of the Pope and his Holiness is the servant of the servants of Christ.”

  He waited for Galileo's response, but Galileo made none. The cardinal could phrase things as prettily as he pleased. All the same, Galileo knew which one of them had ordered the other to be here. He knew which of them asked questions, and which had to answer. And he knew what he thought about that.

  Or he thought he knew. He couldn't deny that some of the questions Cardinal Gioioso asked were ... interesting. As much as Copernicanism did, they made Galileo look at the world from a different perspective.

  Something else occurred to the astronomer. When dealing with someone as savvy as Gioioso, it was better to get everything out in the open. “I presume, your Eminence, that the agreement we made yesterday in regard to the Copernican, ah, hypothesis remains in force?” Galileo asked.

  “Assolutamente,” Gioioso affirmed. In his slow, ponderous Italian, the word sounded especially impressive. He went on, “I will give you another written pledge if you so desire, or amend the earlier one to clarify that it extends throughout our, ah, analysis here.”

  That willingness to agree might mean he was inherently trustworthy. On the other hand, it might not. In Galileo's present situation, he was not inclined to take chances. Producing the pledge Sigismondo Gioioso had written the day before, he said, “If you would be so kind...”

  The cardinal made the change and initialed it without batting an eye. He handed the paper back to Galileo. It was exactly what he had promised. When Galileo nodded, Gioioso picked up the thread where they had left it the day before: “You maintain that there are many reasons for accepting the Copernican world system in place of the Ptolemaic, not one alone.”

  “Speaking hypothetically, that is what the evidence suggests—yes, your Eminence,” Galileo said.

  “Of course we are speaking hypothetically!” Cardinal Gioioso exclaimed. “Were we not, would you have that sheet I just gave back to you?”

  “By no means,” Galileo admitted, as he had to.

  “Well, then,” Gioioso said, “perhaps you will be good enough to expound upon another. So it is not only refined calculations of planetary positions, then?”

  “By no means!” Galileo said again, this time more enthusiastically. “Another very strong argument in favor of the Copernican system is that, when viewed through a spyglass, Venus appears to show phases like those of the moon. She appears now as a crescent, now as if at first or third quarter, now gibbous, depending on her position relative to Sun and Earth.”

  “You do not speak of seeing Venus when she is full,” Gioioso noted.

  “True. I do not, for I have not seen her so,” Galileo replied. “Nor has anyone, nor will anyone. By the geometry inherent in the Copernican world system, Venus when she is full lies beyond the Sun: the Earth, the Sun, and Venus then form a straight line. Thus she would be in the sky when the Sun is also, and his much greater light would obscure hers.”

  “Anyone observing her through a spyglass would see the same thing?” Gioioso asked. “Two people observing through different spyglasses would see the same thing as well?”

  “So long as they did so at the same time, yes,” Galileo said. The questions were reasonable. More than twenty years earlier, when he'd first started examining the heavens through his spyglasses, many people had wondered whether something inherent in the instrument caused it to yield the results it did. How trustworthy could those results be, if they were invisible to the naked eye?

  Cardinal Gioioso hit on that very point: “Without the spyglass, no one will see these things?”

  “No, your Eminence,” Galileo said. “Otherwise, astronomers would have observed them long ago. I will point out, however, that there are a great
many spyglasses in Europe these days, in lands both Catholic and Protestant. A large number of people have observed these phenomena.”

  “Which would not occur under the Ptolemaic world system?” the cardinal asked.

  “Just so. The Ptolemaic system is centered on the Earth, not the Sun. The path Venus necessarily takes in that system forbids these apparitions,” Galileo said. “If you give me leave to sketch for you, I can demonstrate why this needs must be so.”

  “I believe I can visualize the differing paths,” Gioioso said. By the way he said it, Galileo saw at once that it was so. No astronomer, Gioioso claimed? Galileo didn't believe that for a moment. The cardinal continued, “These effects you describe are invisible without the spyglass?”

  “Not precisely, your Eminence,” Galileo said.

  “Wait.” For the first time, he surprised Sigismondo Gioioso. “A moment ago, you said no one could see them. If someone could, why did nobody notice them before you perfected the instrument?”

  That made Galileo smile. He had indeed greatly improved the device. Learning that Dutch spectacle makers had devised spyglasses that would magnify three or four or five times, he'd delved into the theory of optics and improved their results tenfold. He'd had to become a lens-maker himself to bring it off, and he had.

  None of which, however, much as it salved Galileo's pride, had much to do with the cardinal's question. “No one could notice it with the eyes in his head,” Galileo said. “But, as early as December in the year 1610, my former student, Benedetto Castelli, wrote to me asking if Venus’ appearance was as I described to you, and as the Copernican world system predicts. Even if you decline to see the diagrams, I must remind you that, as the Ptolemaic system arranges the heavens, Venus, lying between us and the sun, can be only a crescent if the sun's light illuminates her.”

  “Si, si,” Cardinal Gioioso said impatiently. “So Castelli deduced this more than twenty years ago, and from the Copernican hypothesis alone?”