All these things happen in the mind. Imagination creates events. What matters is something that happens in the mind.

They sat on the floor of her little spaceship, confused. A conjunction of spirits. It was all meant to be something that equals did together. Remembering this, Galileo found he was weeping again. When he blinked, tears detached from his face and floated down like little moons of Jupiter. Lazily Hera stuck her tongue out and licked one into her mouth. No wonder he had been so lusty in his wasted youth, no wonder he had jumped at Marina. No wonder his mother had been so angry. Everything in his life had been based on a misunderstanding—a base fear, a refusal to see the other, similar in its cowardice and malignity to the absurd misreadings that his enemies had applied to his theories. Men in his time had been furiously afraid of whatever was other; and thought women were other; and thought it adequate justification of their fear to invoke the dead past, the authority of all the stupid popes. As if might made right. But it wasn’t so. He wept with regret for his wasted life and world and time. What a crazy thing to be human.

They sat side by side on the floor, arm touching arm, leg touching leg. She was bigger than he was, even around the torso, though he was a barrel-chested and pot-bellied man. He was completely relaxed. He could feel she was too. They were entangled. This was only a moment, it would pass: a fragment of time to which clung a fragment of space, in which two minds joined and were whole.

We all have our seven secret lives. Transcendence is solitary, daily life is solitary. Consciousness is solitary. And yet sometimes we sit together with a friend, and the secret lives don’t matter, they’re even part of it, and a dual world is created, a shared reality. Then we are entangled and one, transitory but imperishable.

The light in her ship’s cabin grew. They were no longer alone. They became aware of Aurora, of Ganymede locked in his space suit, of the crew of the ship, all scattered on the floor of the cabin like ninepins, stirring now like the dead come to life. Looking out of their transparent cocoon, their little platform in space, Galileo saw that they had emerged from the upper clouds of Jupiter, and were shooting up into space like a hummingbird. They were just over the dome of the Great Red Spot; it spun up under them at great speed as they rose, the beveled ruddy bands tumbling over themselves, brick on orange on umber on tan on sienna on yellow on bronze on copper on white on mud on hazel on gold on cinnabar on cinnamon, on and on and on, round and round and round. A thought, or a dance, or a life.

Hera stood up and walked to her chair, as free in her movements as a dancer. Galileo watched her, transfixed. She was big and muscular, her female curves parabolic volumes in space, an ultimate reality. Everything he had thought he had known was wrong, and as when it happened to him in the workshop, that realization made him happy. The proof of his wrongness stood there before him, tapping at her keyboards—the goddess animal that humans could be. In his time such a person wasn’t even possible. Force constrained by pale freckled skin. Dark auburn hair suffused with black, wild from her head like Medusa’s snakes. All this talk of gods: he saw that it really had been a prolepsis all along, that they had dreamed of human potential and spoken of it as if already achieved in the sky. The gods were future humans imagined, the gods were our children. “Ahh,” he said.

She glanced over her shoulder, smiled a tiny smile. She saw him.

Then she saw Ganymede, and her look turned serious. “We need to talk to Ganymede.”

“Yes.” He considered it, looked at the locked space suit. “I wonder what he saw in there.”

“Me too.” She walked over to Galileo, and he took her in like a drink of cold water, tears starting again in his eyes, obscuring the sight of her, and he blinked and smiled helplessly as the tears spilled down his cheeks into his beard. There was nothing left to hide at this point. He was what he was, and felt content. She extended a hand to help him up. He took it and rose. Possibly the high point of all his lives was now come to an end. Even so, he was content. All things remain.

“I know what his punishment should be,” Galileo said.

She shook her head. “Later,” she said. “That’s our business. You have your own trial to deal with.” And she pushed a tab on the pewter box next to him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Trial

“I want what Fate wants,” said Jove.

—GIORDANO BRUNO, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

THE HOLY OFFICE OF THE INDEX’S BAN on Galileo’s Dialogo, and the papal order commanding him to present himself to the Holy Office in Rome for examination in the month of October 1632, came as great shocks to Galileo. His book had been approved by all the relevant authorities, and its very title announced its impartiality:

DIALOGUE

Of

Galileo Galilei, Lyncean

Outstanding Mathematician

Of the University of Pisa

And Philosopher and Chief Mathematician

Of the Most Serene

GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY

Where, in the course of four days, are discussed

The Two

CHIEF SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD,

PTOLEMAIC AND COPERNICAN

Propounding inconclusively the philosophical and natural reasons

As much for one side as for the other.

Florence: Giovan Battista Landini, MDCXXXII

With the permission of the authorities

He found out by way of a letter from the grand duke’s new secretary Cioli, sent to him at Arcetri by a single courier. You are hereby commanded by the Holy Congregation of the Church to account for your book in person in Rome. The book itself is banned. Just as flat as that. No one wanted to know him now. Despite all the warning signs and struggles and premonitions, he still couldn’t believe it.

If he had known more of what was going on in Rome, however, he would not have been so surprised. The grand duke’s ambassador to the pontiff, still Francesco Niccolini, could have explained a great deal to him, being caught in the thick of it. The situation far transcended Galileo’s philosophical speculations, which no one but Galileo considered of paramount importance. Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king, and previously an ally of Rome’s, was now leading his Protestant army south through Germany, chopping Catholics down. The Spanish were furious, and were of the opinion that Urban was to blame because he had started his papacy overtolerant of Protestants and all kinds of other heterodoxies. Now they wanted to see the harsh suppressions they felt were necessary to keep Catholicism together.