“The vision it just gave us indicated they are not. There are three giants left outside Saturn, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. Uranus, Neptune, and Hades.”

“Any one of which would provide enough potential energy to power a short analepsis into Ganymede’s past,” Galileo said.

“Possibly.”

Galileo turned to Hera. He pointed at Ganymede. “Send him back,” he said. “Send him back, and make him change what he did before.”

“It might kill him.”

“Even so.”

“It might change things such that all this voyage goes away,” she said, looking at Aurora. “All that we have done since his attack could be lost.”

“It’s lost anyway,” Galileo pointed out. “Everything is always changing.”

She shook her head. “In the e time—”

“But even there. Alas.”

They shared a gaze.

“Remember for me,” Galileo said.

“And you for me,” she replied. She gave him the smallest of smiles, looking him in the eye. Galileo saw it and said to himself: remember.

He glanced at Ganymede, but Ganymede was staring up at the ceiling of the ship’s cabin, or through it to infinity. Whether he was looking for atonement or just another chance to do the job, Galileo couldn’t tell. Real hopes are one of the seven secret lives.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Vehement Suspicion

You see then how treacherous time subdues us, how we are all subject to mutation. And that which most afflicts us among so many things is that we have neither certainty nor any hope at all of reassuming that same being in which we once found ourselves. We depart, and do not return the same; and since we have no recollection of what we were before we were in this being, so we cannot have an indication of that which we shall be afterward.

—GIORDANO BRUNO, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

GALILEO WOKE WITH A START, and Cartophilus put a hand to his arm. “You’re in the Vatican. Remember?”

“I remember,” Galileo croaked, looking around.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Galileo stared at him. “I want justice.”

Cartophilus frowned. “Everyone does, maestro. But there may be more important things to want right now. Like your life.”

Galileo growled at him.

Cartophilus shrugged. “Just the way it is, maestro. Here. Drink this wine.”

Eighteen days after his first deposition, and two days after his private conversation with Maculano, Galileo asked to speak to the commissary general again. He was brought before his examiners, there in the same room where the first deposition had taken place.

When they were all in their assigned places, Maculano said in his sonorous Latin, “Please state whatever you wish to say.”

Galileo read aloud from a page of writing he held in his hand, enunciating clearly his Tuscan Italian. “For several days I have been thinking continuously and intensively about the interrogation I underwent on the sixteenth of this month, and in particular about the question of whether sixteen years ago I had been prohibited, by order of the Holy Office, from holding, defending, and teaching in any way whatever the opinion, then condemned, of the earth’s motion and sun’s stability. It dawned on me to reread my printed Dialogo, which over the last three years I had not even looked at.”

This was impossible to believe, given the job it had been to print it; but onward—

“I wanted to check very carefully whether, against my best intentions, through an oversight, I might have written not only something enabling readers or superiors to infer a defect of disobedience on my part, but also other details through which one might think of me as a transgressor of the order of the Holy Church. Being at liberty, through the generous approval of superiors, to send one of my servants for errands, I managed to get a copy of my book, and I started to read it with the greatest concentration and to examine it in the most detailed manner. Not having seen it for so long, I found it almost a new book by another author. Now, I freely confess that it appeared to me in several places to be written in such a way that a reader not aware of my intention might have had reason to form the opinion that the arguments for the false side, which I intended to confute, were so stated as to be capable of convincing because of their strength, rather than being easy to answer. In particular, two arguments, one based on sunspots and the other on the tides, are presented favorably to the reader as being strong and powerful, more than would seem proper for someone who deemed them to be inconclusive and wanted to confute them, as indeed I inwardly and truly did, and do, hold them to be inconclusive and refutable. As an excuse for myself, for having fallen into an error so foreign to my intention, I did it because I was not completely satisfied with saying that when one presents arguments for the opposite side with the intention of confuting them, they must be explained in the fairest way and not be made out of straw to the disadvantage of the opponent. Being dissatisfied with this excuse, as I said, I resorted to that of the natural gratification everyone feels for his own subtleties and for showing himself to be cleverer than the average man, by finding ingenious and apparently correct considerations of probability even in favor of false propositions. Nevertheless—even though, to use Cicero’s words, ‘I am more desirous of glory than is suitable’—if I had to write out the same arguments now, there is no doubt I would weaken them in such a way that they could not appear to exhibit a force which they really and essentially lack. My error then was, and I confess it, one of vain ambition, pure ignorance, and inadvertence.

“This is as much as I need to say on this occasion, and it occurred to me as I reread my book.”

He looked up at Maculano and nodded, and Maculano again gestured to the nun. In a moment the transcript was ready for his signature, boldly and clearly executed:

I, Galileo Galilei, have testified as above.

When he was done with that, after swearing him again to secrecy, Maculano concluded the hearing.

Galileo was free to leave the chamber, and did. But all of a sudden he rushed back in, looking stricken. Everyone there was startled to see him reappear. Pop-eyed, his voice far humbler than it had been at any time so far, he asked Maculano if he could add something to his deposition.

Maculano, taken aback, could only agree. Galileo then spoke extempore, almost faster than the scribe could write.

“And for greater confirmation that I neither did hold nor do hold as true the condemned opinion of the earth’s motion and sun’s stability, if, as I desire, I am granted the possibility and the time to prove it more clearly, I am ready to do so. The occasion for it is readily available since in the book already published the speakers agree that after a certain time they should meet again to discuss various physical problems other than the subject already dealt with. Hence, with this pretext to add one or two other Days, I promise to reconsider the arguments already presented in favor of the said false and condemned opinion and to confute them in the most effective way that the blessed God will enable me. So I beg this Holy Tribunal to cooperate with me in this good resolution, by granting me the permission to put it into practice.”

If granted, this would of course imply that the Dialogo was to be taken off the prohibited list. It looked like he had come back in on an impulse, to beg for the book’s life, even though the changes he proposed would make it into one gigantic mass of incoherent contradiction.