Another time he got up from bed, where he had been only semiconscious, and went to his table saying: “Pardon me, I need to get this down,” in a soothing voice none of us had ever heard before, and wrote a new page in a letter to a correspondent named Dini—a page that read like the Kepler he had always laughed at:
I have already discovered a constant generation on the solar body of dark substances, which appear to the eye as very black spots which then later are subsumed and dissolved, and I have discussed how they could perhaps be regarded as part of the nourishment (or perhaps its excrements) that some ancient philosophers thought the Sun needed for its sustenance. By constantly observing these dark substances, I have demonstrated how the solar body necessarily turns on itself, and I have also speculated how reasonable it is to believe that the motion of the planets around the Sun depends on such a motion—
After which he had returned to his bed and fallen comatose again. And there it was, in writing, him saying to a stranger that the sun was a living creature, eating and shitting, slinging the planets around itself by its rotation, like bangles extending from a top. Was this heresy, was it insanity? Could he not help himself? He had to know it was dangerous to commit such thoughts to print after Bellarmino’s warning, but he seemed helpless to stop himself, under the spell of a compulsion no one could comprehend. He only slept a few hours every night, and babbled in his sleep.
He pulled himself out of bed one morning and went out to collar Cartophilus. Rough hands at the ancient one’s neck: “Get out your teletrasporta, old man. I need to get back up there to Hera. Now.”
Cartophilus had no choice but to obey, but he didn’t like it. “This is a bad idea, maestro. You need to have the other end ready to receive you.”
“Do it anyway. Something’s wrong. Maybe up there too, but definitely here. Something’s wrong in my mind.”
Cartophilus went to the closet where he slept and came back with the small but heavy pewter box that had replaced Ganymede’s telescope some years before. He worked at its knobs for a time, muttering unhappily. “Get next to it,” he said.
Galileo sat next to the box, swallowing involuntarily. Where would she be now? What if the teletrasporta was at the bottom of a lake of liquid rock?
Nothing happened. “Come on,” Galileo said.
“I’m trying.” Cartophilus shook his head. “There’s no response. It isn’t reaching the other resonance box. I wonder if she disabled it.”
“I wonder if it sank into the lava,” Galileo said. “And her too.” He shuddered. “I need to go back! There’s something wrong here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I … When I was there last, I got a mathematics tutorial from Aurora, do you know her? No? A wonderful mathematician, and she and her machines were teaching me. They immerse you in the mathematics itself, it’s like flying. You have done it?”
Cartophilus shook his head.
“Well, you should. But I saw they had immersions that teach you about the mathematicians of the past, so that for instance you could go see, or even inhabit, Archimedes, and Euclid, and Archytas, and there was one for me. And so I took it. I took that immersion. I was just curious to see what they would say about me. But it wasn’t what I thought. It was more than a biography. You lived it, but all at once too. I saw my life! They had recorded it!”
Cartophilus sighed. “When they first made the entanglers, they did a lot of things, for years and years. Event engineering, mnemostics, all that. It took a while before people turned against them.”
“Well, I can see why they did.” Another shudder. “I saw too much. It wasn’t just learning a—a bad fate, off in the distance. It was … everything.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
“I did! But not before I saw too much. Now I know what will happen. I mean, day by day. I’m sure I know all of it, but I can’t quite bring it to mind until it happens. But it bulks there behind every moment, every thought.” His grip on Cartophilus’s arm was like an iron clamp. “While I was up there, it didn’t seem to matter. Now it does.”
“So do something different,” Cartophilus suggested.
He almost lost his arm for it, Galileo clutched him so. “I’ve tried,” Galileo moaned, “but it doesn’t work. The different thing is what I already did. I follow myself as if from a couple of steps behind. It’s horrible.”
“Like a Rückgriffe?”
“What’s that?”
“That’s German for something like ‘retroceptions.’”
Galileo shook his head. “It’s more like foresight.”
“Syndetos means bound together, so an asyndeton is when the connections between things go away. The French call that jamais vu.”
“No. I am all too connected.”
“Déjà vu, then. The French have a whole system. Already seen.”
“Yes. That would be one way to say it. Although it isn’t seeing so much as feeling. Already felt. Always already. Here—try Hera again. Get me there.”
Cartophilus attended to his device. “There’s still no response,” he said after a while. “She may be busy with other matters. Let’s try it again later, maestro. You’re killing my arm.”
Galileo let him go and slumped down beside him, bereft. “Damn. I hope she’s all right.” He heaved a big sigh. “This will kill me faster than anything.”
We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.
Galileo struggled on with his new sickness, his ability that was a disability, alone.
Some of his friends were like La Piera, and wondered if his illnesses were not perhaps a little too convenient. For the fact was, in the first months of 1619 more comets had appeared in the night skies, alarming everyone. For a while no one spoke of anything else, and the unearthly phenomena filled all the horoscopes and the pages of the Avvisi. Of course all the astronomers and philosophers had to weigh in with an opinion on these new apparitions, and naturally, as before, everyone waited to hear what the notorious astronomer of the Medicis would say about them.
But the Dominicans were watching, the Jesuits were listening; everything he wrote or said would eventually get reported to the Holy Office of the Index, and to the Holy Congregation. As with the comets that had shown up a few years previously, it was not obvious if or how they might fit into either the Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmologies—but they were undeniably in the sky. How convenient, then (everyone said), that Galileo was so sick he could not even go out on his terrace in the evening and take a look! Galileo, the greatest astronomer in the world! What a chicken!
Silence from Bellosguardo.
Life limped along, day after tumbled day. Galileo had never looked so ill before. “Everything has already happened,” he would complain, surveying his visitors as if they were all new acquaintances. “Everything is happening for the second time. Or perhaps for the millionth time, or simply infinitely.” Or he would insist, even to strangers: “I am out of phase. I am living in the wrong potential time. She sent me back to the wrong self. It’s an interference pattern, the one where the two equal waves cancel each other out! That’s what’s happening to me! I’m not really here.”
A letter was going to come from Maria Celeste. It came, and as he had always done, he took out the little stiletto he used as a letter opener and watched himself cut the wax of the seal neatly away. He had unfolded it in just the way he unfolded it, and he read what he had read. Of the candied citron which you ordered, I have only been able to make a small quantity. I feared the citrons were too shriveled for preserving, and so it has proved. I send two baked pears for these days of vigil. He tasted the fruit he had been going to taste, and it tasted the way it was going to taste when he tasted it. It had an underlying bitterness, as with all his life. But she was also going to have put a rose in the basket, as he saw when he saw them. But as the greatest treat of all I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season.