Meanwhile Galileo continued to work desultorily, in a daze of regretful expectation. He took on various studies: what could be seen through a microscope; magnetism again; the strength of materials again; even, since he had Mazzoleni there, a return to some of his old work on the inclined planes, trying to recapture that magic. He wrote letters to his ex-students, and looked for new ways to supplement his income. Every week, sometimes more often, he visited his daughters at San Matteo, riding the old mule over the track he had beaten into the hills. They were suffering there; he always came home distressed at their threadbare hunger.

“In this world a vow of poverty is going too far!” he would complain to La Piera. “They would be poor even if they took a vow to prosper! Make up another basket for them and send it with the boys.”

He had changed his gardening practices even more drastically, and the new crops made it more a farm than ever. He grew beans, garbanzos, lentils, and wheat. And in a big oven, built under Mazzoleni’s supervision, they were now baking bread, and cooking big pots of soup and casseroles to strap to the mule and take over to the sisters. Also sacks and bushels of uncooked beans and grain. Still, there was no way he could grow enough to feed all thirty of the sisters of San Matteo. They were the thinnest group of nuns he had ever seen, although all nuns were thin. And Maria Celeste was the thinnest of them all.

He gave no lectures to the Florentine court. He wrote no books. He contrived no tests or demonstrations. He did not even want to go to Venice for Carnivale; he claimed now that he had never liked Carnivale, which was odd, because everyone could remember how much he had enjoyed it in the old days, how much he had loved any party or festival. Some in the house joked that now he understood it marked the beginning of Lent, which he had definitely never liked; others said it was because it reminded him too much of his iron truss. In any case, now he looked confused, even alarmed, whenever Carnivale was mentioned.

One night, unable to sleep, he sat out on the piazza looking through a telescope at Saturn. Jupiter was not in the sky. Saturn seemed to be some kind of triple star, oddly wide and shimmering, not with fulgurous rays but with bulbous articulations that made it look like a head with ears. He had seen that first in 1612, then watched the ears go away over the years, and Saturn become a sphere like Jupiter. Now the ears had reappeared, and he could write to Castelli that he should expect to see them in full in 1626. They were not there yet, but on the way. It was an odd thing.

But the heaviness in Galileo did not allow him to vibrate to this sight in his usual way, much less to ring. It had been many years since he had rung like a bell at the discovery of some new thing. And really, the objects seen through the telescope had been disenchanted for him by all that he had seen in his proleptic visitations to Jupiter. People would inhabit the stars and yet remain as petty and stupid and contentious as ever—all the vices fully active, in fact, still writhing as lustily as ever in their vicious ways. It was horrible.

He would pick up his lute and pluck a tune of his father’s that he called “Desolation.” His father, so quiet and withdrawn. Well, imagine what it must have been like, living with Giulia all those years. No matter how valid the causes, she had not been sane. Later the mnemosynes would help the insane, and peoples’ characters in general would be smoothed by society as if on a lathe, but in his time they were hacked out by chisels and hatchets, and crazy people were really crazy. If you lived with one, you had to withdraw somehow. But no one could truly disappear. Some parts remained in the world. And so this tune, the saddest he had ever heard. His old man, sitting there at the table looking down as the old rolling pin pounded him. Sometimes Vincenzio would try to argue with her, first reasonably, then snapping and shouting like she did, but always at half speed compared to her. His thought was adagio, while her thought and tongue were always presto agitato. Not that he had been unintelligent, rather the reverse; he had been a fine musician and composer, and one of the deepest experts ever in the theory and philosophy of music, having written books on the subject admired all over Italy. And yet in his own household the nightly debates revealed him mostly cruelly to be only the second smartest person in the house—and really, after Galileo reached about the age of five, the third. It must have been disheartening. And so he had died. Without your heart you died. This late tune of his was a kind of last confession, a shriving, a testament. A remaining thought of his, still alive in this world.

In the shadows under the arcade there was a movement. Somebody up and about, skulking.

“Cartophilus!”

“Maestro.”

“Come here.”

The ancient one shuffled out. “What can I get you, maestro?”

“Answers, Cartophilus. Sit down beside me. Why are you up so late?”

“Had to pee. Is that the answer you wanted?”

Galileo’s chuckle was a low “Huh huh huh,” like the huffing of a boar. “No,” he said. “Sit down.” He handed the old man the jug of wine. “Drink.”

Cartophilus had already been drinking, as became clear when he abruptly collapsed on one of Galileo’s big pillows, groaning as he folded into a tailor’s position. He rolled the jug over his bent elbow and took a long pull.

“How old are you, Cartophilus?”

Another groan. “How can I tell, maestro? You know how it is.”

“How many years have you been alive, that’s all.”

“Something like four hundred.”

Galileo whistled low. “That’s old.”

Cartophilus nodded. “Don’t I know it.” He drank again.

“How old do you people live?”

“It isn’t certain, as far as I know. I think the oldest people are about six or seven hundred. But they’re still going.”

“And how long have you been here in Europe, with the tele-trasporta?”

“Since 1409.”

“That long!” Galileo stared at him. “Where was it that you appeared? Did you come with the first arrival of the thing? And how did it get here, when it was not here to bring it?”

The old man put up a hand. “Do you know about the Gypsies?”

“Of course. They are supposed to be wandering Egyptians, as you are supposed to be the Wandering Jew. They come into towns and steal things.”

“Exactly. Except really they came from India, by way of Persia. The Zott, the tsigani, the zegeuner, the Romani, et cetera. Anyway, we pretended to be a tribe of them, in Hungary in 1409. We were the ones who started what the Gypsies call o xonxano baro, the great trick. In those days, there was a different attitude toward penitents. We found we could go from town to town and say that we were nobles of lesser Egypt who had briefly fallen into paganism and then reconverted to Christianity, and as a penance we were to wander homelessly and beg strangers for help. We could even say we had accidentally offended Christ Himself and so were forced to wander forever after, asking for alms, and that worked just as well. We also had a letter of recommendation from Sigismund, King of the Romans, asking people to take us in and treat us kindly. Thus the Romani. And we could tell fortunes with startling accuracy, as you might imagine. So the tricks worked everywhere we went. We could say anything. Sometimes we told them that we had been ordered to wander for seven years, and during those years we were allowed to thieve without being liable to punishment for it. Even that worked. People were credulous.” He laughed a mirthless laugh.

“And you had the teletrasporta with you the whole time?”

“Yes. Ganymede was with it as well, visiting it off and on. He had tried all this before, you see. He made an earlier analeptic introjection, trying to get the ancient Greeks to develop science to the point of igniting a technological revolution very much earlier in the human story.”