Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ the entire population of the Serenissima; but at the same time it was a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counsellor. When Sarpi had announced to the world his intention to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, Paul was alarmed as well as angered. The files were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. It would be an exposé, in short. Assassins were authorized by the Pope to go to Venice to murder Sarpi; but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard of the plan in advance, with some of the assassins even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them in prison.

      After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.

      Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough.

      The attack took place on the night of 7th October, 1607. A fire broke out near San Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco; whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi’s fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied only by an elderly servant and a Venetian senator, also elderly. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo’s palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de’ Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk’s cell.

      They jumped him on the north side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him and ran-later we counted fifteen wounds, but it took only a couple of seconds and they were off into the night.

      Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could only shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. A stiletto had been left in his right temple, apparently bent on his upper jawbone, re-emerging from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.

      But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. When others arrived beside us, all we could do was help to lift him up, help to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.

      There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. The doctor worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too.

      So now Sarpi could sit with Galileo, and warn him, with an ironic smile given an extra twist by his scars: ‘Rome can be dangerous.’

      ‘Yes yes.’ Galileo nodded unhappily. He had visited Sarpi often as he hovered between life and death, he had even helped Acquapendente to extract the stiletto from his poor face. The pink scars were still livid. That Pope Paul had given the assailants a pension to reward them, even though they had been unsuccessful, both Galileo and Sarpi had found funny. Of course what Sarpi was pointing out now was true: Florence was under the thumb of Rome in a way Venice never had been. If Galileo ever offended the Church, as seemed quite possible, Sarpi reminded him, given his new astronomical discoveries and some priestly objections to them, not to mention Kepler’s ravings-then Florence might not be far enough away from the long reach of the Dogs of God.

      ‘I know,’ Galileo said. But he was already committed to the move; and Sarpi’s example cut both ways, so to speak: Florence was an ally of Rome’s, Venice a fierce opponent, excommunicated en masse. Moving to Florence might give him some cover.

      Sarpi seemed to read these thoughts on his face. ‘A patron is never as secure as a contract with the Senate,’ he said. ‘You know what always happens to a patron’s favoured ones: they fall. Sooner or later it always happens.’

      ‘Yes yes.’ They had both read their Machiavelli and Castiglione, and the fall of the favourite was a standard trope in poetry and song. It was one of the ways that patrons showed their power, and stirred the pot, and kept those on the rise hopeful.

      ‘So that’s another way you will not be as safe.’

      ‘I know. But I have to be able to do my work. I have to be able to make ends meet. Neither has been possible for me in Padua. The Senate could have made it possible, but they didn’t. They paid me poorly, and worked me like a donkey. And they were never going to pay me just to do my own work.’

      ‘No.’ Sarpi smiled at him affectionately. ‘You need a patron to be able to get money without working for it.’

      ‘I work hard!’

      ‘I know you do.’

      ‘And it will be useful work, to Cosimo and to everyone!’

      ‘I know it will. I want you to do your work, you know that. May God bless you for it, I’m sure He will. But you will have to take care what you say.’

      ‘I know.’

      Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. People were always giving in to his superior logic and his intense style of disputation. In debate he was boastful and sarcastic, funny and smart-really smart, in that he was not just quick, though he was that, but penetrating. No one liked arguing with Galileo.

      But with Sarpi it was not like that. For many years Sarpi had been a kind of patron to him, but also much more: a mentor, a confessor, a fellow scientist, a father figure; and above all, a close friend, even now when Galileo was leaving Sarpi’s beloved Venice. His scarred face, ruined by the Pope’s murderous functionaries, held now an expression of grave concern, and of love and indulgent affection-amorevolezza. He did not agree with Galileo, but he was proud of him. It was the look you wanted your father to have when he looked at you. It could not be gainsaid. Galileo could only bow his head and dash the tears from his eyes. For he had to go.

      So, after months of preparations, Galileo moved to Florence, leaving behind not only Marina and little Vincenzio, but also all his private students, and most of the servants and artisans as well, even Mazzoleni and his family. ‘I won’t be needing a workshop anymore,’ Galileo explained brusquely. ‘I’m a philosopher now.’ This sounded so ridiculous that he added, ‘The grand duke’s mechanicians will be available to me if I need anything.’

      No more compasses, in other words. No more Padua. He was saying good-bye to all of it, and didn’t want any part coming with him. ‘You can keep making the compasses here,’ he told Mazzoleni, then turned his back and left the workshop. The compasses were what Mazzoleni had been hired to manufacture in the first place. Of course they wouldn’t sell very well without the course Galileo gave in their use, but there were some instruction manuals left, and it was better than nothing. Besides there was artisanal work all over СКАЧАТЬ