In fact, so far, so bad. When I made my first analepsis, so long ago that I shudder to think of it, human history was little more than a long descent toward extinction, a matter of evermore devastating wars and genocides, famines and epidemics—growing immiseration for the bulk of humanity and the rest of life on Earth. When I taught young children history, and saw the look on their faces when they understood, I was ashamed.

So I left all that, and went with Ganymede. I joined his attempt to make a retrojection that would shove the nightmare a different way. If people would only understand earlier, we thought, that science is a religion, the most ethical religion, the most devoted and worshipful religion … Clearly I was wrong even to try. It isn’t really possible. The paradoxes and entangled potentialities are the least of the problems. Worse by far is the enormous inertia of human weakness, greed, fear—all the sheer bloody mass of us. It’s been a nightmare. I joined the nightmare, I helped to dream it. We went back and interfered with Archimedes, we taught him things that got him killed; I got him killed. I could have saved him if I’d been fast enough, but I wasn’t. I was too scared. I watched the soldier spear him, paralyzed by fear. So I went back again with Ganymede, thinking I could make up for that—then, when I saw Ganymede doing his best to get Galileo burned at the stake, I started trying to make up for that too, trying to undo it, to stop it. Even though everything that happens happens. All at cross purposes. So many mistakes, so much misery. And yet here I am still. Why do I stay? It’s not as if I’ve helped in any noticeable way. So far it seems I’ve mostly done harm. I stay for the sunlight, I suppose, for the wind and the rain and for Italy. But mostly I stay because I don’t know what else to do.

And in fact I’ve stayed too long. The revolution has overtaken everything; Lavoisier was just guillotined yesterday, and I’m in a cell of the Bastille waiting my turn, which I think comes tomorrow. Sitting on stone in the dark, hearing the voices outside, I recall the poem that Machiavelli wrote after he was released from the prison where they tortured him—the place that taught him the lessons about power he tried so hard to pass on to the rest of us:

What disturbed me most

Was that close to dawn while sleeping

I heard chanting: “per voi s’ora.”

For you we are praying. I hope so. La Piera has the entangler, which would otherwise have been taken from me. Whether she and Buonamici and Sestilia will be able to meet me outside with it and help me out, I can’t be sure. This may be it. I find it hard to believe, which no doubt explains my stoic lack of fear. If it happens, it happens. I’m tired of the tumbrel days. And if this turns out to be the end, in these last hours I’ll be thinking hard. Imagination creates events, and by dawn I intend to have lived ten thousand years. Then my part of the tapestry will loop back in, the threads spreading out through the rest of the pattern.

And I’ll be done with this story, which I tried so hard to stay out of. Some of it I saw, some of it Hera told me, some of it I read in Galileo’s letters to Maria Celeste, some of it I made up—that’s fine, that’s the way it always is—some of it you made up too. Reality is always partly a creation of the observing consciousness. So I’ve said what I like; and I knew him well enough to think I got it mostly right. I know he was like us, always looking out for himself; and unlike us, in that he acted, while we often lack the courage to act. I wrote this for Hera, but no matter what time you are in when you read this, I’m sure that the history you tell yourself is still a tale of mangled potentiality, of unnecessary misery. That’s just the way it is. In all times people are greatly lacking in courage.

But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they keep trying. This too is history. We are all history—we’re the hopes of people in the past, and the past of some future people—known to those people, judged by them, changed by them as they use us. So the story keeps changing, all of it. This too I’ve seen, and so I persist. I hope without hope. At some point the inclined plane can bottom out and the ball begin to rise. That’s what science is trying to do. So far it hasn’t worked, the story has been ugly, stupid, shameful, sure; but that can change. It can always change. Because understand: once I saw Galileo burned at the stake; then I saw him squeak his way clear. You have to imagine how that feels. It makes you have to try.

And so when sometimes you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened—or when you look up in the sky and are surprised by the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance—consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you’re in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

But truly to find a way to adapt physical, metaphysical, and theological senses to words that may have been but a simple fantasy, not to say a chimera of your spokesman, redoubles in me my marvel at minds so acute and speculative.

—GALILEO, LETTER TO LICETI, 1640

Thanks for help with this to:

Charlene Anderson, Terry Bisson, Roland Boer, Linda Burbank, Sam Burbank, Joy Chamberlain, Ron Drummond, Joe Dumit, Karen Fowler, Louis Friedman, Dana Gioia, Jane Johnson, Chris McKay, Colin Milburn, Lisa Nowell, Katharine Park, David Robinson, Don Robinson, Carter Scholz, Ralph Vicinanza, and Joëlle Wintrebert.

A special thanks to Mario Biagioli.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“My book sprang wholly from the application of a special sense, very difficult to describe. It is perhaps like a telescope pointed at time.”

—MARCEL PROUST

THE ITALICIZED PASSAGES in this novel are mostly from Galileo’s writing or that of his contemporaries, with a few visitors from other times. I made some changes in these texts, and many elisions that I did not mark, but I was always relying on the translators who translated the source material from Italian or Latin or French into English. In particular I would like to acknowledge and thank Mary Allan-Olney, Mario Biagioli, Henry Crew and Alfonso de-Salvio, Giorgio de Santillana, Stillman Drake, John Joseph Fahie, Ludovico Geymonat, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Pietro Redondi, James Reston, Jr., Rinaldina Russell, Dava Sobel, and Albert van Helden.

Despite the work of these translators and many more, not all of Galileo’s writing has yet been translated into English. This is a real shame, not only for novelists writing novels about him, but for anyone who doesn’t speak Italian but does speak English, and wants to learn more about the history of science, or one of its greatest characters. His complete works were first edited by Antonio Favaro at the turn of the last century, then recently revised and updated by a communal effort. Surely some English-language history of science program, or Italian department, or university press, could perform the great service of publishing a complete English translation of the Opere. The project could even be done as a wiki, in a communal online effort. I hope it happens. It would be good to read more of Galileo’s words—even after this moment, when with the writing of this sentence, for me he slips back into the pages. Good-bye maestro! Thank you!