Authors: Penny Publications
Tags: #Anthologies, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy
"Why?" Galileo growled. "Can't you see that for yourself?"
"If I could, would I be inquiring of you?" Nothing but tranquility and interest was in Gioioso's voice, not that Galileo could hear. The astronomer might have sounded like that himself, when he first turned his spyglass on the Pleiades and saw a host of tiny stars his unaided eye could not discern.
Perhaps I did sound like that
, Galileo thought, bemused.
And Gioioso sat waiting, patient as a pillar saint. Galileo had to look inside himself to find an answer. "
Because
the Church is meddling in affairs that are not its proper concern," he said at last.
"Does the way the Church is acting in this matter remind you of how your father would behave?" Gioioso asked.
"I had not thought of that before, but it does—it does!" Galileo said. "Stubborn, wrongheaded, always trying to have his own way . . ."
"I see," Gioioso said, with an air of now-we're-getting-somewhere. "And your reaction to this unpleasant stimulus is . . . ?"
"How could any man help getting angry?" Galileo asked rhetorically.
"But when you do,
Signor
, do you not also show your own stubbornness? Do you not seek to have your own way in every respect?" Unfailingly courteous, the cardinal said nothing about Galileo's being wrongheaded. He didn't have to. Galileo could—and did—supply that for himself.
He did not believe he was wrongheaded—or wrong. But Gioioso's questions made him examine himself in a way he never had before. "I am a proud man, our Eminence, and I think I have earned my pride," he said. "When I am pushed, what can I do but push back?"
"You might wonder
why
you are being pushed," Cardinal Gioioso said. "You might wonder whether you did not push first, maybe without even noticing, and so unwittingly gave offense. Or you might wonder if, having been pushed in this way when you were young, you now believe yourself pushed even when no one intended to push you, perhaps even when no one pushed you at all?"
"Do you say I imagine that I am being pushed?" Galileo demanded—pushily.
"I said no such thing," Gioioso replied. "You did."
"Yes, I did," Galileo agreed. "I was pushed to Rome. I was pushed to the palace of the Inquisition. I was pushed to these sessions with you. I was pushed onto your
couch
, your Eminence!"
"Say rather,
Signor
, that you pushed yourself here by your deeds and writings," Sigismondo Gioioso said. "For is not the holy Catholic Church the spiritual father of all believers? And do you not push against it because your own father pushed against you in days gone by?"
"He did not want to let me do with my life as I would, as I must." All these years later, the memory still stung. He'd denied that before to Gioioso, but he found that with further reflection he'd changed his mind about it. And he added, "Nor does the Church today."
"Could it not be that you are throwing your views of your father forward onto the Church?" the cardinal said.
"Throwing my views forward?" Galileo frowned. "Please excuse me, your Eminence, but I fail to follow you."
"My Italian must be imperfect. I know what I wish to say, but how to say it . . . ?" Sigismondo Gioioso thought for a moment, then smiled and held up a forefinger, exactly as one of Galileo's countrymen might have done. "I have it! I wanted to suggest that you might be
projecting
your views."
"Ah. Now I understand!
Grazie
." It was Galileo's turn to do some more thinking. As he did it, he eyed Gioioso with respect no less real for being reluctant. "There may indeed be some truth in this, and you are a most astute man"—
a dangerously astute man
, he thought—"for pointing it out."
"This is the purpose of the kind of analysis I have devised: to help a man see that which lies within himself but which he would not find without someone to help show him the way to it," Cardinal Gioioso replied.
"Well, your Eminence, you have considerable skill in this art, as you must know without needing me to tell you." Galileo paused again. Then he raised his forefinger, too, but not in the same way as the churchman had. "When I said there was some truth in your remarks, I meant there was only some. As I've told you again and again, it is not my projection that the Holy Inquisition summoned me—a sick old man—from Florence to Rome, imprisoned me, and is now interrogating me. I am not imagining these things, and they are not happening because I want them to. So do I not possess veritable reasons, altogether apart from anything that may have passed between my father and me, for being unhappy with the way the Church has treated me?"
Gioioso considered. Their conversations seemed filled with hesitations on both sides. "Did you not know, when you published the
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
, that it would lead to this?"
"I knew there would be fireworks," Galileo admitted. He couldn't help smiling; he'd hoped for, craved, fireworks. But he went on, "I didn't think it would come to this. After all, I had the Church's
imprimatur
, allowing the work to be printed, and, by so doing, acknowledging it contained nothing contrary to doctrine or to the Scriptures."
"Yes. You did." Gioioso let the words hang in the air. Galileo wished he hadn't thought of hanging. Better than burning, but still. . . . The cardinal continued, "As I have told
you
, no one would have objected to your quietly using Copernican calculations to reclaim your precious two minutes of rising and setting. Quietly, I say. But when you parade through the center of town with horns and lutes and viols and drums, all played loud as may be, you must expect the magistrates to notice. I have to wonder whether, at some level below that of conscious thought, you did not
want
them to notice."
"How can one want something without being conscious of wanting it?" Galileo said. "If one is not conscious, one is not alive."
"So it might seem at first, but the mind has depth, just as the heavens do," Gioioso answered. "What man does not wish to be loved, to be admired, to be noticed? Most of the time, he is not aware of those desires. He does not go around constantly thinking
I must be loved, I must be admired, I must be noticed!
By no means! But, whether he knows of them or not, these urges push him on regardless. Or do you believe differently? You may, and freely—the Church has not pronounced on these opinions of mine."
"The Church would have done better not to pronounce on matters astronomical. Much better, since those matters have nothing to do with the human spirit, while your interesting ideas do." Galileo didn't want to show how interesting he found Gioioso's notions. Depth in the mind . . . The idea would have been better with some mathematics behind it, but was interesting enough and to spare even without.
Had
he wanted to be noticed so badly that he prodded the Church into noticing him too much? Maybe he had. All the same, though . . . "You cannot make true heavenly phenomena disappear, you know."
"Maybe the phenomena are true. Which hypothesis best explains them . . ." Gioioso's shrug was less expressive than an Italian's would have been, but it got his meaning across. "And when you measure that against the disservice you do the Church and the world by screeching about what you say they mean—"
"Screeching?" That affronted Galileo. "The
Dialogue
only presents the facts and the evidence. It does not even reach any sure conclusion."
"Not at the end, but your belief is plain all through it," Gioioso said.
"Then how did it gain the
imprimatur
, your Eminence?"
"An interesting question. Probably because the churchmen who gave it were . . . naive." Sigismondo Gioioso might have said something else, something stronger, but he refrained. "It has plenty in it to make people no longer credit the holy Catholic Church's teachings."
"For a long time," Galileo said slowly, "all the people who believed in the Ptolemaic world system would laugh at the ones who thought Copernicus was right. Until I started making good spyglasses, there wasn't much to choose from between the two systems. Calculations a little more precise . . . but so what? After that, though . . . People should have seen."
"They should have, but they didn't?" Gioioso suggested, his voice quiet and gentle.
"They didn't." Galileo, by contrast, sounded sad. "I published the
Sidereus Nuncius
, with word of the mountains and valleys of the Moon, with word of all the stars the spyglass showed that the eye could not, and with word of the Medicean stars circling Jupiter as the planets circle—as Copernicus
says
the planets circle—the Sun. And what did I get? I got a miserable little manikin named Martin Horky, who wrote a tract that said I was a crackpot, like the fools who claim they can square the circle or double the cube or make the Philosopher's Stone.
That
is what I got."
"And you wanted to pay this Horky back with the
Dialogue
? Sigismondo Gioioso asked. "You wanted to pay back all the doubters?"
"All the scoffers," Galileo said.
"But do you not see how you wound the Church when you do this?" the cardinal asked. "Do you not see how you make people doubt not only the Ptolemaic world system but all the Church's teachings? Do you not see how destructive that is? And why have you done it? To pay back the scoffers—and, could it not be, to pay back your father with them?"
"To see what lies behind the everyday is not for ordinary souls," Galileo said. "So your worries, your Eminence, seem to me misplaced."
"They are not, and the reason they are not is what you said at first," Gioioso said. "Most souls
cannot
see what lies behind the everyday—not by themselves. That is why the holy Catholic Church does not mind astronomers using the Copernican hypothesis, so long as they are discreet about it. But when you wrote your book,
Signor
. . . and in Italian this time, not even in scholars' Latin! And it is being translated into other vulgar tongues. That part of you below conscious thought, the part that wanted to be noticed, got more than it bargained for this time. Do you see?"
"Well, perhaps I do," Galileo said, and it was much less of a lie than it would have been before he started talking with Cardinal Gioioso. "You have given me a great many fascinating things to think about: no doubt of that. And may I beg your indulgence to give me leave to think about them till tomorrow? As my years grow heavier, I tire ever more easily."
Everyone tired. The Inquisition used that as a weapon. Torture included being deprived of sleep, so a man grew as if drunk and hardly knew what he was saying. It included water in the face till the victim feared drowning. It included all kinds of other ingenious torments that left not a mark on the body, no matter what they did to the spirit.
But Gioioso didn't say a word about any of that. All he said was, "Of course,
Signor
. Please forgive me for overtaxing you in my zeal. Let us resume in the morning." But whether he mentioned them or not, he held those weapons in his arsenal, and both he and Galileo knew it.
"
Buon giorno, Signor
," the cardinal said when Galileo returned to his quarters the next day. "I hope you slept well. Are you refreshed?"
"I
am
refreshed, your Eminence, even if I slept less than I might have," Galileo replied. "I spent considerable time after leaving your honored presence contemplating the many fascinating notions you propounded concerning the mind and its workings."
Gioioso graciously inclined his head. "No man could hope for higher praise. And what conclusions did you reach, if any?" He waved toward the couch. "Why not make yourself comfortable before you tell me?"
"Thank you." Galileo stretched out. "This is an agreeable way to converse, sure enough. . . . Conclusions? No, not really. But sometimes new questions are as interesting, and as important, as answers."
A servant came in with wine and bread and anchovies and olives and other snacks. After the man withdrew, Gioioso remarked, "You are devoted to the new."
"No, your Eminence. Say rather that I am devoted to the true, wherever I find it."
"We mentioned Pontius Pilate earlier in our discussions. Pilate was not altogether a fool when he asked what truth was and then washed his hands," Gioioso replied. "Often, deciding what is true means no more than deciding on the proper point of view, and on how much weight to give this, that, or the other factor, eh?"
"Often, but not always," Galileo said. "Mathematics is true regardless."
"As are the teachings and doctrines of the Church—yes," Gioioso said.
"Of course, your Eminence." Galileo did believe that. He always had. But he would have agreed even if he hadn't. He was in the worst possible position to disagree.
Thoughtfully, but also casually, almost as if the answer didn't matter, the cardinal asked, "Could God make it so the truths of mathematics were different?"
Denying God's omnipotence would be deadly dangerous here, in the most literal sense of the words. But, again, Galileo didn't want to. "I believe He could, your Eminence. To us mere mortals, that different truth would seem as genuine, as perfect, as the actual dispensation does now." He could have said that the Copernican world system would one day replace the Ptolemaic in just that way. He could have, but he didn't. He could tell when not saying something seemed the best idea. Sometimes he could, anyhow. The
Dialogue
. . . No, he hadn't been able to resist the
Dialogue
.
If Sigismondo Gioioso had expected him to risk a heretical statement or an outright blasphemy, the prelate gave no sign. He ate a couple of olives, then said, "Have you given me all your reasons for—hypothetically—preferring the Copernican world system?"