Galileo's Dream (54 page)

G
ALILEO FOUND HIMSELF
sitting on the floor. Hera was still standing, although she was holding on to her chair like a sailor holding a plank after the ship has gone down. The terror in her eyes was new to Galileo; he was shocked to see it. He felt that he could not speak, that a spike had stabbed up through his tongue—or worse, speared down through his skull and pricked just that part of the mind that initiated speech. There was a roaring in his ears. He looked at her console screen, trying to think, trying to remember. What had happened? He held on to her thick leg like a child clutching its mother.

Spun gold went white. Shapes coalesced in the unspeakable glare: eyes, tumbling bodies, whole worlds or something more. Spinning whorls of stars, fireworks in his head, pain in every nerve at once—or had it been joy?
Ex stasis
. Rushing up, out, in. Into a center that was a pinprick of the most fulgurous black, piercing his eye, mind, and soul, sucking him into it. Then a syncope; all was still, cold, dead. Was that how it had ended? What came before was a blur, a dizzy feeling. There had been an awesome roar of the sublime; within it, the tiny ringing of a bell. He had been the bell. Then something had pricked, like a pin
through a castle wall, and no more Galileo. A syncope came like sleep, like blessed sleep.

Then Galileo was gone again, but a consciousness remained, cosmic and manifold. The sun was a star, the stars all suns. Each held a mind that was as vast and bright as the sun in the noonday sky. You could not look at it, but saw only its light on paper. A kind of angel—or the being, ever so much greater than an angel, that the idea of an angel had been invented to suggest. The sky was filled with trillions of such minds, and clusters of them swirled in whirlpools of their own weight, were drawn down into themselves continuously. At their centers they compressed to nothing, and their substance was sucked away, into other universes in other dimensions. They were all entangled throughout the manifolds. Present, past, future, eternity, all became one and then transmuted elsewhen. Which meant …

A wolf's mournful howl, a whale's eerie glissando. Time splintered and Galileo was back again in the midst of it. An eddy in time; Jupiter reiterating a point, in a loop of grief, an ecstasy, another entangled moment. Which meant …

He stopped trying to understand. This took an immense effort, it was utterly contrary to him, the hardest thing he had ever done. The work of Oelilag: give up trying. Folding inside out. Just exist, he commanded himself, just see. But it was too big to see, too bright, it blinded him to try. A whirlpool of infinite minds, an infinity of whirlpools. One could not compare infinities, he felt that clearly. There were an infinite number of starry whirlpools, and in each an infinite number of minds. Kepler had suggested this was the case, and Bruno had claimed it outright. Bruno had died for saying it. Galileo did not want to die. The world was too astonishing to die for saying something, no matter what it was.

Although it was also true that there was a sort of universal syncope, in which death did not obtain. It was not heaven, but ecstasy,
ex stasis
, out of one's tiny individual body into the universal body, the manifold of manifolds. All the possibilities came true. All things remained in God—he sang this phrase, held to it in his mind. It became all he had to hold on to, his floating plank in the tossing sea of stars. All things remain in God.

And yet decisions are made, the wave functions collapse. Consciousness and the manifold are entangled. There was a voice, like a pin through a castle wall. Release me, oh Jove.

Then another return to the consciousness of being Galileo. He struggled in his head, completely exhausted, thinking, Hello! I'm here! Let me go! Where are you? Who are you?

It was his faithful dog, nuzzling his face.

No, it was Hera. She held his face in her big hands.

“What happened?” Galileo croaked. Something filled him—an ocean of clouds inside his chest, stuffing him with a feeling he did not recognize. A feeling that made him want to weep, for what he did not know, and yet he was too confused even for tears. But it had to do with her presence. If he had gone through this without her, if she hadn't been there at his side, it would have been insupportable. It was too much to bear alone.

“I don't know,” she said, looking him in the eye. There was a tenderness in her look, an
amorevolezza
, as Maria Celeste was always putting it, that he had not known existed in her. Perhaps she had been going through something similar in the period of
ex stasis
. No doubt she had. We all go through the same things! Her face was streaked with tears. She leaned in toward him until their faces were aligned nose to nose. The tips of their noses touched as if kissing, their eyes were as mirrors to the complementary other, her irises a deep living field of flecks and streaks, like rounds of polished jasper or the insides of two flowers, the black holes of her pupils lightly pulsing in and out, reminding him of something just seen in his recent shattering. Her eyes floated in toward his until they were as big as the surface of Jupiter, filled with warmth, their affection coursing into him.

Then her eyes simply moved into his eyes. They merged as if touching in a mirror, two as one. Jove will be jealous, Galileo tried to say, but her eyes stopped him, and he yielded to her, falling up as in the nights of his youth, into the wild girls of Venice. Her fractured stone irises bloomed like emblems of his feelings. This was the entangled cosmos they always inhabited, but now felt.
Amorevolezza, eros, agape
—one made love the way one pronounced a word, the way one made a sentence. He had never made love with someone he knew to be his equal, someone as strong and as full and as smart as he, and that thought pierced him, swept him away on such a wave of grief and love
that he might have felt fear, if it were not for her eyes, telling him all was perfectly well. Their eyes merged entirely and he saw what she saw, and felt their
ex tasis
as a tall thick chord, a harmonic. The mother goddess inside him.

All these things happen in the mind. Imagination creates events. What matters is something that happens in the mind.

They sat on the floor of her little spaceship, confused. A conjunction of spirits. It was all meant to be something that equals did together. Remembering this, Galileo found he was weeping again. When he blinked, tears detached from his face and floated down like little moons of Jupiter. Lazily Hera stuck her tongue out and licked one into her mouth. No wonder he had been so lusty in his wasted youth, no wonder he had jumped at Marina. No wonder his mother had been so angry. Everything in his life had been based on a misunderstanding—a base fear, a refusal to see the other, similar in its cowardice and malignity to the absurd misreadings that his enemies had applied to his theories. Men in his time had been furiously afraid of whatever was other; and thought women were other; and thought it adequate justification of their fear to invoke the dead past, the authority of all the stupid popes. As if might made right. But it wasn't so. He wept with regret for his wasted life and world and time. What a crazy thing to be human.

They sat side by side on the floor, arm touching arm, leg touching leg. She was bigger than he was, even around the torso, though he was a barrel-chested and pot-bellied man. He was completely relaxed. He could feel she was too. They were entangled. This was only a moment, it would pass: a fragment of time to which clung a fragment of space, in which two minds joined and were whole.

We all have our seven secret lives. Transcendence is solitary, daily life is solitary. Consciousness is solitary. And yet sometimes we sit together with a friend, and the secret lives don't matter, they're even part of it, and a dual world is created, a shared reality. Then we are entangled and one, transitory but imperishable.

The light in her ship's cabin grew. They were no longer alone. They became aware of Aurora, of Ganymede locked in his space suit, of the crew of the ship, all scattered on the floor of the cabin like ninepins, stirring now like the dead come to life. Looking out of their transparent cocoon, their little platform in space, Galileo saw that they had emerged from the upper clouds of Jupiter, and were shooting up into space like a hummingbird. They were just over the dome of the Great Red Spot; it spun up under them at great speed as they rose, the beveled ruddy bands tumbling over themselves, brick on orange on umber on tan on sienna on yellow on bronze on copper on white on mud on hazel on gold on cinnabar on cinnamon, on and on and on, round and round and round. A thought, or a dance, or a life.

Hera stood up and walked to her chair, as free in her movements as a dancer. Galileo watched her, transfixed. She was big and muscular, her female curves parabolic volumes in space, an ultimate reality. Everything he had thought he had known was wrong, and as when it happened to him in the workshop, that realization made him happy. The proof of his wrongness stood there before him, tapping at her keyboards—the goddess animal that humans could be. In his time such a person wasn't even possible. Force constrained by pale freckled skin. Dark auburn hair suffused with black, wild from her head like Medusa's snakes. All this talk of gods: he saw that it really had been a prolepsis all along, that they had dreamed of human potential and spoken of it as if already achieved in the sky. The gods were future humans imagined, the gods were our children. “Ahh,” he said.

She glanced over her shoulder, smiled a tiny smile. She saw him.

Then she saw Ganymede, and her look turned serious. “We need to talk to Ganymede.”

“Yes.” He considered it, looked at the locked space suit. “I wonder what he saw in there.”

“Me too.” She walked over to Galileo, and he took her in like a drink of cold water, tears starting again in his eyes, obscuring the sight of her, and he blinked and smiled helplessly as the tears spilled down his cheeks into his beard. There was nothing left to hide at this point. He was what he was, and felt content. She extended a hand to
help him up. He took it and rose. Possibly the high point of all his lives was now come to an end. Even so, he was content. All things remain.

“I know what his punishment should be,” Galileo said.

She shook her head. “Later,” she said. “That's our business. You have your own trial to deal with.” And she pushed a tab on the pewter box next to him.

“I want what Fate wants,” said Jove.

—G
IORDANO
B
RUNO
,
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast