Viviani, on the other hand, was aging fast. It’s hard to watch such mayfly lives. The end of the seventeenth century was near.

“Come help me,” he said now, face racked with urgency, but also with that high mystic serenity that people sometimes fall into when they begin a pilgrimage to a place where they believe everything can change.

I could have begged off then, but I didn’t. He might have tried to haul me along with him bodily. Anyway it was a look that couldn’t be denied, even after all these years. I followed him down to the back of San Matteo where their own little mausoleum was dug into the earth, crowded with dark holes to each side, like a giant honeycomb. It was dusk of the first night of carnival, and everyone in the village had gone down to Florence to see the parades and the fireworks. Everyone except for Geppo and Salvadore, it turned out, and also the short round crone who now swept the floors at San Croce: La Piera. Viviani had stayed in touch with her, as had I.

And he knew just which hole Maria Celeste’s coffin was in. We heaved up on the end of it and tugged it back a little, by the light of a single candle lantern. The coffin weighed just the same as it would have if it were empty, but in that narrow passage we had a bad angle on it.

“Signor Viviani,” I said, “this isn’t a good idea.”

“Pull!”

So I kept pulling with them, until we had it out and turned so we could carry it out of the mausoleum. I held the bottom of it, Viviani led the way, Salvadore and Geppo took the sides. La Piera carried the lantern. We walked across the convent yard to a small donkey cart outside the gate, which had in it already some mason’s tools and some dry mortar sand and a few buckets. We lifted up the coffin and placed it beside the sand, then covered it with a tarp.

Viviani took the donkey’s rope and led us down the lane of Arcetri to the big road from the western hills, where we joined all the late traffic into the city. We looked like four poor servants, following our master and his donkey. Carnival revelers hooted and shouted as they rushed past us.

Down into Florence and its noise we trudged, across to San Croce, then down the stairs into the novice’s chapel. Inside the small room under the campanile, the brick tomb stood dark and dusty. Viviani took a sledge from Geppo and smashed it down on the top of the tomb.

“This is a terrible idea,” I said, looking down the stone passageway to the open door to the street. “Someone will see us.”

“No one cares,” he said bitterly. “No one will notice.”

“No one at all,” I said. “Not even Galileo! He is dead, Signor.”

“He will see it from heaven.”

“In heaven they don’t think about us. They’re done with us, and happy to be so.”

He shrugged. “You can’t be sure.”

We pulled Galileo’s heavy coffin out of its opened tomb, a much tougher job than moving his daughter. Following Viviani’s directions, we then placed down in the tomb Maria Celeste’s coffin, so pitifully light. It was like burying a cat. Salvadore and Geppo wedged a few crossbeams into the bricks over her coffin for support. Then we replaced Galileo’s coffin, right there on top of hers, as if to shield her from the sky.

The old boys brought a bucket of plaster down from their cart, and replaced the bricks at the top of the tomb one by one, plastering them into place over another set of bracing crossbeams.

There were noises in the street outside, and for a while we all froze in fear.

“This is so pointless,” I complained. “The maestro is dead and gone. We could get in such trouble, and he’ll never even know about it.”

“He would like it if he knew,” Viviani said.

You, Occasion, walk ahead, precede my footsteps, open thousands and thousands of different paths to me. Go irresolutely, unrecognized and hidden, because I do not want my coming to be too easily foreseen. Slap the faces of all seers, prophets, diviners, fortune-tellers, and prognosticators. In one moment and simultaneously, we go and come, rise and sit, stay and move. Let us then flow from all, through all, in all, to all, here with gods, there with heroes, here with people, there with beasts.

—GIORDANO BRUNO, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

HE WOULD LIKE IT IF HE KNEW.

Maybe this is as a good a way to put it as any. Just do what the maestro would like. Viviani, who believed that the soul of the dying Michelangelo had flown into baby Galileo at the moment of his birth, the two having happened at nearly the same hour, followed that principle all his life. He died a few years after our carnival night, and he was buried next to Galileo, as he had requested, without anyone noticing that the scientist’s tomb had been rebricked. By the time his nephew’s heirs finally succeeded in getting the approval of a pope—Clement XII, a Florentine—for the construction of the elaborate tomb that Viviani had advocated, it was 1737. When that tomb’s construction was finished, they moved the coffins, and were surprised to find three together in Galileo’s little tomb. It was pretty obvious then what had happened, and all three of the coffins were placed in the new monument, right across the nave from Michelangelo’s. Art and Science, buried side by side! With a student and a poor Clare included, wisping through the world unnoticed. From Galileo’s body they took a vertebra, a tooth, and three detached fingers, for use as relics. The remainer of the three bodies are still there: Galileo, Maria Celeste, and Vincenzio Viviani.

The rest of us moved on: forward, backward, sideways. I went to Holland, then England, then France, where I have been most of the time since. I’ve tended the entangler, and kept in touch with La Piera and Buonamici and Sestilia. The wars have been almost continuous. Huy-gens was a good man, Leibniz too. All in all we helped several people. All over Europe, Galileo’s ideas were taken up by the philosophers, and his methods by the scientists. Nevertheless very little scientific progress has been made, or progress of any kind, to be frank. And yet I notice no one is coming back in the entangler anymore. Sometimes Hera checks in, but she doesn’t tell me much, and it’s painful to report to her what I’ve seen. The suffering is if anything getting worse, as populations rebound from the Black Death but epidemics remain virulent and unchecked. And people keep killing each other.

Somehow in all this protraction of years, watching all the lives rush by, Galileo keeps coming back to me. If La Piera was right, and we are alive when people are thinking about us, then Galileo is definitely still alive, coming back in us as I suppose he keeps coming back to that poisoned cellar floor: unkillable, boastful, sarcastic, self-regarding—all the obvious flaws, sure.

The good that he fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.

But listen to me, because I saw it myself: science began as a Poor Clare. Science was broke and so it got bought. Science was scared and so did what it was told. It designed the gun and gave the gun to power, and power then held the gun to science’s head and told it to make some more. How smart was that? Now science is in the position of having to invent a secret disabler of guns, and then start the whole process over. It’s not clear it can work. Because all scientists are Galileos, poor, scared, gun to our head. Power lies elsewhere. If we can shift that power … that’s the if. If we can shift history into a new channel, and avoid the nightmare centuries. If we can keep the promise of science, a promise hard to keep.