With Virginia gone, the place was less lively; with Livia gone, less stormy. Vincenzio remained as uninspiring as ever. Galileo’s spirits began to flag as it became clear to him that the celatone was even more of a failure than the compass had been. As it turned out, no one would ever buy a single one.

He began to fall ill again. Months passed in which he seldom left his bed, seldom even said a word, as if Livia had put a curse on him. Salviati asked Acquapendente to come over from Padua to have a look at him, to attempt a diagnosis, but he had little success.

“Your friend is very full of all the humors,” he told Salviati afterward. “I have bled him a little, but he doesn’t like that, and sanguinity is not the problem anyway. He is melancholy again, and when a choleric shifts into melancholy, it tends to be a black melancholy. Such people often suffer greatly from exaggerated fears, and Galileo it seems to me now is almost in a state of omninoia.”

“It probably doesn’t help that he has a lot of real enemies who are trying to do him harm,” Salviati said.

“True. These only make him more fearful.”

Indeed, published attacks on Galileo were appearing more and more frequently. He could not reply, and everyone knew it. Astronomical attacks from ambitious Jesuits were constant. Rumors that Galileo was making rash private rebuttals were everywhere, and it was quite true that his fellow Linceans wanted him to make such a reply. When Galileo read these well-meaning but ill-advised letters of encouragement, he would howl on his bed. He began to drink more and more wine. When he was drunk enough, he would often fall into a sweaty delirium. “They want to burn me at the stake,” he would assure people with deadly seriousness, eyes locked on theirs. “They literally want me burnt alive, like the heretic Bruno.”

Thus when three comets arrived in the skies at the same time, injecting triple the usual air of doom and controversy they brought into human affairs, Galileo was at first irritated, then, it seemed, terrified. He retreated to his bed again, and refused to answer any letters that brought up the subject, or to receive any callers. When absolutely pressed, he told people that he had been so sick that he had not been able to make any observations of the phenomenon. Luckily the comets soon disappeared from the night skies, and though the controversies continued to swirl, including very often veiled or open attacks against Galileo’s astronomy, and even his knowledge of basic optics, he resolutely refused to respond.

“They’re out to get me,” he moaned to La Piera and the other servants, throwing letters and books across the room. “There’s no other explanation for arguments this stupid! They’re trying to goad me into speaking out by writing this idiotic stuff, but I’m not fooled.” One book, by a Father Grassi, a Jesuit astronomer, caused him particularly sharp distress, as it accused him of incompetence, mendacity, an inability to comprehend the heavens, and a habit of contradicting the ban on Copernicus. It seemed certain that it would call the Dogs of God down onto him again.

One day he snapped. “Get me Cartophilus,” he said to Giuseppe, voice grating. When the ancient servant arrived, Galileo closed the door of his room and took the old man by the arm.

“I need to go back up there,” he said. He had lost a lot of weight; his eyes were bloodshot, his hair greasy and lying in hanks on his head. “I want you to get me to Hera, do you understand?”

“Maestro, you know I can’t be sure now who’s going to be at the other end of the thing,” Cartophilus warned him in a low voice.

“Get me back there anyway,” Galileo ordered, pinching the old one’s upper arm like a crab. “Hera will find me once I’m there. She always does.”

“I’ll try, maestro. It always takes a little while, you know that.”

“Quickly this time. Quickly.”

One night soon thereafter, Cartophilus came to Galileo in his bedroom. “Maestro,” he said in a low voice, “it’s ready for you.”

“What?”

“The entangler. Your teletrasporta.”

“Ah!” Galileo heaved himself to his feet. He looked shabby and thin. Cartophilus encouraged him to dress, to comb his hair. “It’s colder there, remember. You’ll be meeting strangers, no doubt.”

At the edge of the garden he had set a couch with blankets on it. Beside the couch on the ground was a metal box. It looked like pewter.

“What, no stranger? No telescope?”

“No. I’m the one in charge of this device. He was always just your courier, or guide. He came to get you. But now he has gotten himself in trouble on Callisto, as you’ll find out. Apparently I’m sending you to Aurora, who has been given the care of his entangler. She has agreed to see you again.”

“Good.”

“I think Hera will not be pleased.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know.” Cartophilus regarded him. “I think you need to learn what Aurora has to teach. Remember.” And he tapped the side of the pewter box.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Structure of Time

Imagination creates events.

—GIOVANFRANCESCO SAGREDO, LETTER TO GALILEO, 1612

HE STOOD BY THE RECLINING CHAIR he had taken his tutorial in, high in Rhadamanthys Linea, the Venice of Europa. Aurora was indeed there to greet him. “You look unwell,” she said, staring at him curiously.

Galileo said, “I am fine, lady, thank you. Please, may we continue your tutorial where we left off? I need to understand better how things work, in order to alter my life away from a bad result. You said when we parted that I was only at the beginning of your science. That there was some kind of reconciliation that would solve the paradoxes we were mired in. That I am mired in.”

Aurora smiled. She had in her gaze the glow that her name led Galileo to expect, even though she was obviously aged. “There is a reconciliation,” she said. “But it will require you to go much further than we did before. That session took you through four centuries, as I said. To get to the theory of the manifold of manifolds, you must keep going for a thousand more years. And mathematical progress has often accelerated in that time. Indeed there is one century called the Accelerando.”

“I like those in music,” Galileo said, climbing into the tutorial chair. “Was it then followed by a ritard?”

“Yes, it was.” She smiled as the Aurora of myth would have at old Tithonius. “Maybe that’s part of the definition of an accelerando.”

Warmed by her glance, anticipating with pleasure another flight with her into the future of mathematics, Galileo said, surprising them both, “I never knew a woman mathematician.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t. The power structure in your time was not good for women.”

“Power structure?”

“Patriarchy. A dominance system. A structure of feeling. We are cultural creatures, and what we think of as spontaneous and natural emotions are actually shaped in a culture-made system that changes over time, as with arranged marriages to romantic love, or vengeance to justice. There are of course enduring hormonal differences in brains, but they are minor. Any hormonal mix can result in someone good at math. And everyone is a mathematician.”

“Maybe in your world,” Galileo said, remembering some of his more hopeless students with a little snort. “But please, give me the preparation, and let’s be on our way. And I think it might go better for me this time, if you were to help the machine more often than you did before.”