Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (58 page)

"Yes—one always hopes," Gioioso said enigmatically.

"What do you mean, your Eminence?"

Instead of answering, the cardinal said, "I notice you have told me next to nothing of your mother."

Galileo scratched his head. "What is there to say? She bore me. She raised me. She loved me. She put up with me—and I have always been a man who is not so easy to put up with." He smiled; a sort of somber pride filled his voice. "I wish it were not so—it will cost me time in Purgatory if it does not send me to a warmer place yet. And you may be sure that I pray for her soul as I pray for my father's. May they both have found places in heaven." He crossed himself.

"Yes. May it be so," Gioioso said—more for politeness' sake, Galileo judged, than from any great sincerity. The prelate stroked his beard. "Now tell me,
Signor
, if you would be so kind . . . did you ever have moments in your childhood when you wished your mother gave you a larger share of her affection?"

"Did I what?" This time, Galileo laughed out loud. "How could I not? I told you, I had two brothers and four sisters. My mother was a busy woman—too busy, sometimes, for me."

"Indeed." Galileo thought his words ordinary and commonplace, but Sigismondo Gioioso seemed to invest them with a special significance. "And your father—did you ever wish he were out of the way so your mother would be able to give you more love, more affection?"

"We banged heads every so often, my father and I," Galileo admitted. "What boy coming to manhood does not bang heads with his father? When you are young, you are sure you already know it all. And when you are a father, you know better, and you are sure your son is a stupid blockhead who will never learn anything. Was it not so with you, your Eminence?"

Cardinal Gioioso's mouth bent—barely—into a thin smile. "Oh, it might have been," he said. "But we were speaking of you. And I was not thinking so much of the time when your beard sprouted. I had in mind your younger days—much younger. Was there not a time when you wished your father would disappear so you could have your mother all to yourself?"

Galileo scratched his cheek as he frowned in thought. "If there ever was, your Eminence, I must confess that I do not recall it."

"Don't worry about that," the cardinal said in reassuring tones. "I have questioned a large number of men about these matters. Very few remember them . . . at first. If you permit it, we shall have more discussions in times to come."

"If
I
permit it?" Galileo raised a grizzled eyebrow. "I am in the hands of the Holy Inquisition. How can I say no?" He knew what happened to people who resisted the Inquisition and its ministrations. He didn't want anything like that happening to him.

But Gioioso answered, "If we are to go forward, I require cooperation that springs from your own free will. Force and coercion have no place here. I meant it when I said no harm would come to you. You may converse with me or not, as you please."

He sounded sincere. Galileo, like any man who'd lived as long as he had, had met plenty of people who seemed sincere and proved to be anything but. Was this cardinal from beyond the Alps another one? Even if he was, the Inquisition couldn't do anything else to Galileo while the prelate talked with him.

The calculation required no more than a heartbeat. "Of course I am at your service, your Eminence," Galileo said.

"Excellent!" Cardinal Gioioso's smile could be surprisingly warm. "We shall continue, then—at your convenience, of course."

"Of course," Galileo said. He understood full well that
at your convenience
, here as so often, meant
at my convenience
. Life might have grown difficult had he not grasped that. Since he did, it wouldn't—not that way, anyhow.

He soon found that the cardinal was an indefatigable questioner. Under such patient, persistent prodding, he dredged up more recollections of his very early life than he'd ever imagined he could. "May I ask you a question for a change, your Eminence?" he said after a while.

"Certainly." Gioioso's manner was placid.

"Why do you want to know so much about the time before I lost my milk teeth?"

"When you look at a building, at how it is made, at how the upper stories rise up, what do you do first?" Gioioso said. "You look at the foundations. From what is below, you can see how what is above has arisen."

"But many different buildings may be raised from the same kind of foundation," Galileo objected.

"True. But when we see a building of such-and-such a type, we may deduce that it should have had this kind of foundation, and could not possibly have been built up from that one," the cardinal said. "Your early dealings with your mother and father helped put you on the course you took to manhood. Had they been different, you would be different today. Or does it seem otherwise to you?"

Galileo wagged a finger at him. "I may have written a dialogue, but you have also read your Plato, your Eminence. And here I think you enjoy playing Socrates yourself."

"If I do, then I suffer from the sin of pride, and I shall have to do penance for it when I make my next confession," Gioioso said. "Any man who dares compare himself to Socrates surely labors under a delusion."

"I think so, too," Galileo said. "Time and again I would notice how much windier than Plato's my characters seemed. But I did not see what else I could do, if I was to put across the ideas I wanted the world to see."

"Since you mention your clever dialogue—and it is very clever indeed,
Signor
, as I have said before—let me ask you something not so firmly rooted in your early years," Sigismondo Gioioso said.

"I am your servant," Galileo said, hope and apprehension warring within him.

"You—you of all people—are no man's servant," Cardinal Gioioso said.

Galileo only shrugged, which was awkward and uncomfortable on the couch. "I am vehemently suspected of heresy," he said. Suspicion of heresy was in itself a crime; vehement suspicion was a higher grade of the same offense. That being so . . . "I am of course a servant of the Holy Inquisition, and of the holy Catholic Church."

"Every man is, or ought to be, a servant of the Church," Gioioso said. "But the Church is not a man, nor is the Inquisition. The Church is a building put together over centuries, and the Inquisition its fire-watch."

"I cannot quarrel with you, your Eminence, nor would I if I could." Galileo was already in plenty of trouble. He didn't need or want more.

"I quite understand," Gioioso said, which meant . . . what, exactly? Before Galileo could decide, the cardinal asked, "How is it that you became such a strong supporter of the Copernican hypothesis?"

That was a question Galileo would rather not have heard. It had a number of possible answers, all of them dangerous. Some, though, were more dangerous than others. Galileo chose the safest one he could, the one he'd used all along to defend himself from the charges against him: "In 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine notified me that the Copernican doctrine was contrary to the Bible and could not be defended or held. I accepted that then, and I accept it still."

"Your dialogue gives me cause to wonder at the truth of that," Gioioso said.

"I am sorry that it should," Galileo said, which was true, even if perhaps not altogether in the sense in which he wanted Gioioso to take it. "Nothing in the holy cardinal's injunction ordered me not to discuss the Copernican doctrine hypothetically, which is all I was doing in the book. And I do not claim it is true. In the end, I declare that it is impossible to know whether the Copernican or the Ptolemaic doctrine is true."

"So you do. Yet you show a greater zeal for the former," Cardinal Gioioso said, as he had when they first met.

"I am sorry for that, too," Galileo exclaimed, and, again, he meant it in more than one way.

The cardinal steepled his fingers again. "May we say that you hold a . . . hypothetical affection for Copernicanism?"

"As much as the Church permits," Galileo said. "Not a feather's weight more."

"All right." He won another of the prelate's small but warm smiles. "Splendid. Very well. Shall we stipulate that for the purposes of discussion?"

"Meaning what, your Eminence?" Galileo asked cautiously. A vulgar phrase occurred to him—he wasn't about to buy a pig in a poke.

Nor did Sigismondo Gioioso seem interested in selling him one. "Meaning that I will take whatever you say in defense of the Copernican heresy to be hypothetical only. I will not claim that you espouse it."

"If you will be gracious enough to put your promise in writing, so that in case of need I may show it to another gentleman from the Holy Inquisition, I am your man," Galileo said. If that didn't show him whether Gioioso was serious, nothing ever would.

The cardinal didn't bat an eye. "Just as you please,
Signor
. Please wait a moment while I get paper and pen." Gioioso was gone no longer than he'd said he would be. "My written Italian, I fear, is not all it might be. Do you mind if the pledge is in Latin?"

"Not at all. Anyone in the civilized world will be able to read it then," Galileo said. After a moment, he politely added, "You speak my language well."

"
Grazie
. I manage, but you give me too much credit." Cardinal Gioioso signed his name with a flourish, then waited for the ink to dry before handing Galileo the paper. "I trust this will prove satisfactory?"

Galileo put on spectacles to read it, as Gioioso had used them to write it. Age had lengthened both men's sight. Grinding good spectacle lenses was a long step toward grinding good spyglass lenses. But that thought slipped from Galileo's mind as he read the churchman's promise. Gioioso might not trust his written Italian, but his Latin was elegant—almost Ciceronian. That surprised Galileo not at all. The astronomer nodded. "Oh, yes. Everything you said it would be. May I keep it?"

"Why else would I have written it? It is your shield—nothing you say here today will be used against you." Cardinal Gioioso leaned forward a little in his chair—he reminded Galileo of a hunting hound taking a scent. The image worried Galileo, but no help for it now. The cardinal said, "Let us begin, then. Why
do
you find yourself so attracted to Copernicanism . . . in a hypothetical way, naturally?"

"Naturally," Galileo agreed, his voice dry. "Because—in a hypothetical way, again—it does a better job of predicting the phenomena we actually observe in the sky than the Ptolemaic hypothesis does."

"I see," Gioioso said. "And why is this so important to you?"

"Because it gives me a better, a deeper, understanding of the way the universe works." Galileo hesitated, then recast that so even a cleric could not fail to grasp it: "Of the way God's creation works."

"Is this not the sin of pride—presuming to understand how God does what he does?" Gioioso asked.

Galileo muttered to himself. He might have known a priest—and a priest who belonged to the Holy Inquisition, at that—would see things so. He tried again: "The more I learn, the better I can praise and glorify Him."

"So you believe that accurate knowledge is required for God to hear and accept one's prayers?" the cardinal said.

There was a snare! Galileo was canny enough to spot it. Was he canny enough to evade it? Picking his words with great care, he replied, "Why would God have arranged things as He did, and why would He have made men as He did, if he did not expect them to try to learn all they could of His creation?"

"Why? I have no idea why," Sigismondo Gioioso said calmly. "Will you tell me you know
why
God chose the Copernican world system—if He did so choose—and not the Ptolemaic? Will you say He could not as easily have chosen the other one?"

That was a trap, too, but a less dangerous one. "God might have done anything He chose to do. Not even a Protestant heretic would claim otherwise," Galileo said. So
there
, he thought. "I do not know why the evidence seems to me to show He chose the Copernican way of shaping the universe. I only know that it seems to show He did."

"Can you give me some examples of how this seems to be so?" Gioioso asked.

"Well, your Eminence, to begin with, the Copernican hypothesis more accurately predicts the positions of the planets against the starry backdrop of the heavens," Galileo said.

"By how much?" the cardinal enquired.

"Oh, by a very large margin!" Galileo said. "Sometimes by as much as half a degree."

"Which is how much in layman's terms?" Gioioso asked, adding, "I have tried to learn what I could of your art, but I am no astronomer."

How much more than he admitted did he really know? A lot, or Galileo missed his guess. He answered with the truth: "Why, the diameter of the Sun, or of the full Moon."

"I see." By the way Cardinal Gioioso nodded, Galileo judged he wasn't hearing this for the first time. He asked, "And how much earlier or later does this make the heavenly bodies rise and set than they would have under the old calculations? Half an hour? An hour? More?"

"No, your Eminence," Galileo said. "It is not such a large error as that, or the Ptolemaic world system would never have become part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church to begin with. As I noted in my own copy of the
Dialogue
, the Church endangers itself when it declares heretical a view that may one day be proved true by logic or by physical means."

"Well, how large an error
are
we speaking of,
Signor
? You have yet to tell me," Gioioso said.

"It is a matter of up to two minutes," Galileo replied, again giving information he was pretty sure the other man already had.

If Sigismondo Gioioso did have it, he concealed that most artfully. "Two minutes?" he exclaimed, making the sign of the cross. "By the blessed Virgin Mother of God, is that all?"

"It may not seem like much, your Eminence, but it is an error easily detected by good instruments and good clocks, both of which grow ever easier to come by these days," Galileo said stubbornly.