ReVISIONS (32 page)

In 1995, Congress held a series of hearings on the “National Information Infrastructure.” At that time, lobbyists for the entertainment industry petitioned the government to redesign the Internet so that copyright infringement could be detected and stopped.

This bid was wisely ignored by the Congress—after all, these were the same companies that sued to get rid of the piano roll, the radio, and the VCR! In “Unwirer,” Congress had adopted regulations that defund any research into the decentralized Internet, and has created a series of criminal offenses for the use of the Internet in the commission of a crime. Consequently, America's technology boom never arrives, while abroad, Jean Louis Gassee's Be, Inc., turns France into a technology juggernaut.

C.D. and C.S.

—Job 38:4-7

Most Affectionate Daughter Suor Maria Celeste,

I am warmed by your words as I am by the shirts you have so delicately and expertly mended for me. They keep the cold from this old man's bitter breast, even within this house that has become his prison.

The unexpected magnitude and progress of your illness is most unwelcome news, as it deprives me both of the works of your hand and of those of your mind. And I must confess, that without them both, I am at a loss. Vincenzo, my pupil not your brother, has arranged for one of the Sisters, a Suor Maria Joseph, to read to you my words at your bedside that they might hasten your recovery and return you, merciful God willing, from his heavenly world to ours here on earth.

By your leave, then, you will forgive and indulge me in continuing to speak to you of my work, as I have become accustomed. I have made significant improvement to my invention of the mirror telescope by suspending a secondary flattened collecting mirror at a centrally direct and perpendicular distance from the main curved reflector. This secondary mirror's diminutive size, and the four slender metal threads that suspend it above the first, block only a small fraction of the incident light from the main mirror. A trifling obstruction when compared to the large primary collecting mirror areas now possible. And so very little of the image is lost or distorted. The other Vincenzo, my pupil, has kindly supervised its construction at a local silversmith's.

It seems also that I have made the gravest error in sharing this news with Vincenzo, your brother, ever the practitioner of a failing wit. He reacted thus to a demonstration of the new device only this past evening. “I fear, Father,” said he, “that your confinement, has dimmed your mind perhaps more than your ailing vision. Do you propose to gaze upon the heavens with this eyesore, or do you intend to merely collect within? It resembles more a hideously large bucket than it does a spyglass.”

“My dear Vincenzo,” I responded. “My vision has not entirely taken leave of me, as perhaps your wit has of you, and I daresay that with the aid of this hideous bucket, as you call it, I will be illuminating the very light of God's own truth.”

As I told Vincenzo thus, I inserted the final component—a diminutive telescope no longer than my own hand—upon a focusing track in line with the secondary mirror's reflection. This miniature eyepiece telescope, as I call it, collects the reflected light into a final, albeit inverted, image. Considering that we are gazing upon the heavens, however, I scarcely feel the orientation to be of issue. Moreover, by doing so I have added to the distance the light must travel before producing an image at the eyepiece telescope which allows me to achieve celestial magnifications of a hundredfold. And due to the much larger apertures possible with mirrors rather than lenses, I have realized a sixteenfold improvement in light-gathering capacity over even the most sizable spyglass.

While these abilities are impressive, I must admit that at high magnifications I find myself making constant minute adjustments to the telescope's position to match pace with a viewed object's celestial motion. At my age, and in my condition, I find this quite maddening. I have written to my colleagues in the East, the Orient to be precise, of this problem and they have graciously offered to devise a solution.

Nevertheless, my mirror telescope remains impressively functional to the extent your brother was stricken mercifully speechless at the sight of a highly magnified Jupiter and its moons. I must also say that we were then both stricken by a marvelous view of Saturn. Saturn, dear daughter, has not eaten its children, as I had previously speculated, it simply gathers them about itself, enclosed in the thinnest of ribbons.

Yet, even in this moment of discovery my thoughts are for you. I pray that the Lord judge you mercifully to return you to health, to return my child to me, as He has returned those of Saturn to my sight. And added to my sight, I long to once again hear the sound of your words upon your voice

Your beloved lord father,
G.G.

Most Affectionate Suor Maria Celeste,

May the words of this letter reach you through the kind lips of Suor Maria Joseph to guide you home to this earth. May they also warm your cloistered bones in this cold winter season that I now suffer more without your works of kindness. And by this I mean not only the designs of your hand, but those of your wit and your counsel. A most wondrous and illuminating event has occurred, Daughter, sprung from your own advices. You have often chastised me for my complaints and encouraged me to find blessings in my ailments within the graces of the Good Lord, and so I have of late discovered in the affliction of my eyes, which I had called a curse, to be one such blessing.

One evening upon the darkness, and while observing the full moon from my courtyard in the company of my servant, Salvatore, I remarked, “Is it not odd, Salvatore, to observe a rainbow around the moon on such a dry winter's eve?”

Salvatore regarded me with alarm. “Sire, you jest with your poor servant, I see no such rainbow. . . . Are you well?”

“Salvatore,” I replied, newly humbled by insight. “In your honesty, I have found inspiration.” And immediately, I set the perplexed Salvatore upon a most unusual task that found us waiting at our loggia the very next morning.

As the pale light of daybreak devoured the morning stars, a horse-drawn carriage in my employ, carrying trumpeters at the horn, announced the dawn at full gallop past our position.

“Are you most certain you are well, Lord?” Salvatore begged once again as the cacophonous procession passed, “You have surely woken, and greatly angered, all our good neighbors.”

“Fear not, Salvatore,” I replied. “I have simply called them to enlightenment.” I did not explain to poor Salvatore, who doubtless considers me truly mad now, that my experiment, as I call it, confirmed an observation made during a childhood experience involving a similar procession during a celebration. As the trumpets approached, their tones increased in pitch, as they drew away, their pitch similarly fell. Our experiment has just now confirmed this property of sound which I expect to employ in the service of light.

I have often ridiculed Lucretius' preposterous and antiquated theories that sight is produced by ethereal skins that are shed by objects to fly through the air and dance upon our eyes. My telescopes have been the victim of many a public slander from cretinous Lucretians who condemn their lenses for distorting delicate reality by interfering with these skins.

As ridiculous as this idea might be, what if simple misguided Lucretius had hit on something, nonetheless? What if light were to the eye what sound were to the ear? What if both travel as ripples, like those on a pond? And if this be the case, then could not the rainbow-like halos I had remarked upon around the moon hint that color is to light what pitch is to sound? If not for the infirmity of my eyes, I might have missed it, but perhaps with a modification to the larger, sharper eye of my new mirrored telescope I might demonstrate the implications of this discovery for all to see. Aided by the solution I await from the East—a wondrous clockwork, I am told—we might gaze long enough upon a single heavenly body to appreciate not only its shape, but the subtle rainbow of its procession as well. And, perhaps, such observations could be of further use to me, in ways I have not yet conceived.

As always, dear Daughter, I long for your insights into these matters. Vincenzo, my student, is possessed of a keen mind for ideas already fully formulated. He has not been blessed, as you have, with the gift for lucid speculation. More so, I long for the sound of your voice, the rise and fall of your notes, even once removed through another's lips. Your illness has shut upon me a lid of scholarly silence where the counsel of others grates below my wits like gravel under a worn sole.

Your beloved and beseeching lord father,
G.G.