Why was he what he was, and not better? Was there still time? He had come to nothing. Why? Why had he not done what he should or could?

There wasn't an answer, only that hand slipping away again. A right hand, which had taken Pierce's left. A hot thread ran from there to where his heart had been. And Pierce thought: I can't fill myself with only myself.

The dull echo of shod feet on stone and far voices returned, and Pierce seemed to shrink, or expand, or both at once: to become small in a great world or huge enough to contain a small one. Only a moment had passed, it seemed. His group had gone on, and Pierce followed after. The guide pointed out a grille set into the floor, a dark deep hole below, and the crowd looked down in as they passed and made small sounds of awe and horror. Prigione di San Marocco. An oubliette, the only one Pierce had ever seen or would ever see, only excepting the ones within himself. And down there Casanova or Cagliostro or Benvenuto Cellini was briefly thrown, if he understood the guide.

Upward farther. They seemed to be climbing up around the funerary mound or mountain from within. Small doors led off the path to rooms named for various popes who hid there, or rested there; one a bathroom, with marble bath, painted grotesques. And then they came out onto the tower's top, where once the symbolic earth of the original Roman tomb had been laid, deep enough to grow trees; now all stone and a Renaissance fountain. Pleasant for the popes to wander in, refresh themselves. But around the courtyard, just below ground level, cells for celebrity prisoners: the guide showed them the stone air shafts rising here. For the Pope walking in the garden here to contemplate? Historic. Prigione storiche, the crowd whispered. Beatrice Cenci, who killed her father. Cardinal Carafa, strangled in his cell. Giordano Bruno. That one.

There was a way to go down into it.

Small. The thick door open, eternally now. In a sort of alcove was a stone shelf where his mat would have been laid. He must have had a table at least, and a stool. A bucket. A crucifix. It was said he was allowed no books except those that related directly to his defense, but that could have been thousands, a library. Not as large as the fluid living library in his head or heart. Hungry, though, maybe: the feeding of a prisoner was the responsibility of his family, and Bruno had none.

Pierce sat down on the stone bed. He touched the rough-smooth walls. He lifted his eyes to the square of sun at the top of the air shaft. Had Bruno suffered from heat in summer, cold in winter? Had they allowed him candles on long winter nights?

He wondered if it was really possible to be certain that this cell had been the one Bruno had been kept in. Had the knowledge somehow actually come down through the years, passed on from keeper to keeper, then archivist to archivist, guide to guide? And was it unchanged since then? It seemed that it could not have altered much: its stone walls, warm Roman stone, almost appealing, feet thick no doubt. He looked for incised initials, like Byron's at Chillon, but there were none, none now. No other mark either of the thousand he might have made.

The record of Bruno's trial before the Inquisition is lost: Pierce knew that. All that exists is a sommario of the proceedings prepared by the famed Jesuit cardinal and doctor of the church, Roberto Bellarmino, sainted in 1936, a big figure therefore in Pierce's childhood. Bellarmine apparently talked long with Bruno over the last year of his imprisonment. Winning heretics back to the church was a passion with the gentle ugly cardinal; he engaged in a long theologico-ecclesiastical dispute with King James I of England, father of Elizabeth, the Winter Queen. Getting Bruno to see his errors would have been a coup. With his powers Bruno could have become one of their stars, like Gaspar Schopp, the young Protestant scholar and thinker who turned Catholic, and who was there in the Campo dei Fiori at the end to watch Bruno burn.

Would His Eminence have come here to question Bruno, or would Bruno have been taken to him? His horn-rimmed spectacles, red silks sweeping this floor; a little stool for him set by a servant. Wearied maybe. Bruno never grew tired of talking.

Shall we go on, Fra’ Giordano, from where we broke off: of things, and what causes them to come to be?

Your Eminence, by speaking of things we cause them to come to be: or to be tempted to come to be, or recognize in themselves the power to come to be. Why shouldn't it be so? We see ourselves in the mirror of the world, placed before us by the infinite creativity of divine intelligence; and that universe is as alive as we are ourselves; so it may see itself in the mirror of our intelligence, and think to refashion itself.

But it hasn't. It never has done that, refashioned as you say.

No?

No. It was fashioned by God in the beginning, and has remained as it was built. The foundations of the earth.

Oh? For how long then was the world flat, like a plate or a cowpat, and the sun went down at its western edge, and traveled through the Austral waters to rise again at its eastern?

It never was so. It was only our lack of understanding that described it in this way. It was always as it is now, a globe. In the center of the universe, around which the stars and planets go.

No edge? No Austral waters?

No. Of course not.

Ah. Well then. Maybe when we have described the earth long enough as traveling with the other planets around the sun, in an infinite universe of suns, then that too will always have been so.

But you couldn't know, really. Galileo hadn't yet been condemned, then; Bellarmino was himself a proponent of the New Learning. It was easy to imagine him trying hard to win Bruno over, probe for the places where his old faith might hook him again; explaining just what Bruno had to assent to, what minimum, in exchange for safety. All over Europe there were people doing it, in the lands of one confession or another. He, Pierce, had done it most of his life. He had thought, in the winter of this very year, in the middle of some very bad nights, that he might do it again: thought he might return, under threat of deracination and dissolution or out of a desperate hope of peace, to the safety of Mother Church. If only Mother Church had stayed put to return to.

But not Bruno.

How can I be as brave as you were? Pierce asked. If I can't go back and can't go forward, what can I do here?

It had begun to grow dim in the chamber. Pierce could no longer hear small sounds, feet striking stone, the grinding of a hinge. It might be that the hours of daylight when the prisons and the tomb itself could be visited were over, and he should have continued with his group of Belgians or whoever they had been; the doors he had passed through to reach this chamber might even now be shutting, one by one, all down or up the way that led to here, and he not be able to come out again till dawn.

10

Why is there anything and not rather nothing? Tell me. Why does a universe come to be?

—It comes to be because it can. No other reason.

And why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

—It is the way it is because it chooses to be. It is always choosing, and thus changes how it is, within the limits of its nature.

But why should the things that are have these limits that they have, and not different ones?

—Because this is the age we inhabit, and not a different one.

And you—do you choose to be here, or are you constrained to be here?

—Who are you that you should ask me this?

A countryman of yours.

—Allow me to doubt that.