Hera, head canted back, staggered and cried out at the sight. She grasped his shoulder to keep on her feet.

“What is it?” she cried.

“It’s Jupiter,” Galileo said stupidly, but then clarified what he meant. “It’s Jupiter itself, thinking. Like the thing underneath us, you see? The bands and the swirls have always been its thoughts. Now it’s angry. Or grieving.”

“But why?”

“Because!” Galileo glanced at her in surprise; she was staring wildly at him. “Because we killed its daughter,” he suggested.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Two Worlds

The die is cast, and I am writing the book to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.

—JOHANNES KEPLER, Harmonies of the World

HE WOKE SO STIFF HE COULD NOT MOVE, feeling the pressure of full bowel and full bladder, which seemed to be in competition with each other to shove their way out of his second asshole. He was in his bed. Cartophilus was staring him in the face with his peculiar look—either knowing or intensely curious, it was impossible for Galileo to say.

“What?” Galileo croaked.

“You’ve been entangled, maestro.”

“Yes.” He thought about it while he made the effort to roll into a sitting position. “You know what happens to me when I’m gone, isn’t that right, Cartophilus?”

“Yes. I see it here.” He gestured at his device.

“So you saw?”

Cartophilus nodded unhappily. “It keeps getting worse. That must have been quite a noise. All of you were groaning and weeping near the end. It got so bad, I decided to bring you back. I hope I was right.”

“I don’t know.” Galileo tried to hold on to what had happened. Life seen by lightning bolts—”I’ll have to go back, I think.”

Then La Piera swept in with a basket of bread and citrons, followed by Giuseppe and Salvadore, who carried between them a pot of hot mulled wine flavored with grenadine. They in turn were followed by kitchen girls carrying bowls and cups and plates and implements, and flowers in vases. By way of several slow and articulated movements, groaning at each, Galileo stood. He stared at the faces surrounding him as if he had never seen them before. The syncope this time, La Piera told him, had lasted two days. He had to be starving.

“First help me out to the jakes,” he ordered the boys. “I need to make room for food first. God help me not to shit my guts out.”

In the days that followed, he was very subdued. “Things aren’t clear,” he complained to Cartophilus. “I remember it only in bits and pieces. I think Hera must have done something to my mind. I can’t make it hold together.”

But he wrote one last passage to add to Il Saggiatore before sending it off for publication in Rome. The added passage was a curious thing, unlike anything he had written before:

Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man endowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed, and he observed with great admiration the happy method by which they could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of sweet songs.

One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird, he set out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by quite a different method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude.

The very next day he happened to pass by a small hut within which he heard similar tones, and in order to see whether this was a flute or a bird he went inside. There he found a boy who was holding a bow in his right hand and sawing upon some fibers stretched over a hollowed piece of wood such that he drew from this a variety of notes, and most melodious ones too, without any blowing. Now you who participate in this man’s thoughts and share his curiosity may judge of his astonishment. Yet finding himself now to have two unanticipated ways of producing notes and melodies, he began to perceive that still others might exist.

His amazement was increased when upon entering a temple he heard a sound, and upon looking behind the gate discovered that it came from the hinges as he opened it. Another time, led by curiosity, he entered an inn expecting to see someone lightly bowing the strings of a violin, and instead saw a man rubbing his fingertip around the rim of a goblet and drawing forth a pleasant tone from that. Then he observed that wasps, mosquitoes, and flies do not form single notes by breathing, as did the birds, but produce their steady sounds by swift beating of their wings. And as his wonder grew, his conviction proportionately diminished that he understood how sounds were produced.

Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist, when he believed that he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself plunged deeper than ever into ignorance and bafflement. For having captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other part of it. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath. Thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature, he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to complete ignorance, so that when asked how sounds were created, he answered trembling that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.

I could illustrate with many more examples Nature’s bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means we could never think of without our senses and our experiences to teach us—and sometimes even these are insufficient to remedy our lack of understanding. The difficulty of comprehending how the cicada forms its song, even when we have it singing to us right in our hands, ought to be more than enough reason for us to decline to state how comets are formed or anything else.

When Cesi read this addition to the new book he was puzzled, and wrote back to ask what it meant. Was it a way of saying that Coperni-canism might not be the correct explanation for the movement of the planets after all—the cicada’s song representing therefore something like the music of the spheres?

Galileo wrote back tersely. I know certain things which have been observed by no one but myself. From them, within the limits of my human wisdom, the correctness of the Copernican system seems incontrovertible.

Maffeo Barberini becoming pope had been a miracle; him making his nephew Francesco into a cardinal just three days after Francesco had joined the Lincean Academy was another miracle. The year before, Galileo had helped Francesco to get his doctorate from the University of Pisa, for which favor his uncle the new pope had sent Galileo a gracious letter of thanks. Now Francesco was one of Urban’s closest advisors and confidants.