WHEN THE MORNING STARS SANG TOGETHER
by Isaac Szpindel
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you understand! Who decided its measurements, if you know? . . . Where are its bases fastened? Or who laid its corner-stone; when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
—Job 38:4-7
THEY’RE coming for you now. You knew they would.
You knew better. There are no secrets in the Brotherhood and your theory is dangerous, not only to you, but to the world. It threatens 300 years of Holy Science, 300 years of history and stability. But you had to satisfy your curiosity and some misconception of justice and truth.
You knew better. You are a scientist, a Jesuit like all scientists, but your faith couldn’t protect you. It won’t protect you from them now that they come as they should.
Your heart pounds through your chest and your head. So hard to think. Destroy the evidence. Destroy it, before they use it to destroy you. Destroy it before it gets out and poisons minds.
They’ll be here soon with their computers and their technologies. Saint Galileo had no Inquisition like this, those three centuries ago. But this is 1946, Saint Galileo’s 1946, and the Church’s. And now you threaten their world from your little apartment in a converted motel room in the shadow of the Holy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
You should have kept your ideas to yourself, you should have stayed in Rome. But you live here, too, you trained here, and from here you were called to the Vatican to be curator of the Holy Galileo Letters. How fitting that you and those very Holy Letters be the Inquisition’s next victim. You can still recall the way the coarse textures of their aged pages felt through your gloved hands. You can smell their intoxicating musk even though you were allowed the experience only once, to scan them for the archives and for analysis. They were so fragile, so delicate, like the people and the ideas preserved, trapped forever, within their folds.
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.
Inquisition sirens wail diatonically in the distance. You gather the hard copies of your offending work together: all your calculations, your speculations laid out logically, perhaps irrefutably. The world isn’t ready for such dangerous thoughts, you know, and you shouldn’t have boasted of them. Your consumption of wine at Brother Al-Fahudi’s birthday celebration, surely the sin that begat the greater sin of pride.
You search now for a suitable spot in which to make a sin offering of your hard copies. Your one-room bachelor apartment, once a single-efficiency hotel room, offers few altars save a bathtub and a small oven.
You settle on the white enameled oven, built, you believe, to contain fire, to contain the sacrifice that is to become of your work and your ideas. Your hands tremble, as you straighten the papers for no reason. They will burn as easily, perhaps better, if left in disarray.
Outside, the sirens become louder and their pitch drops from the Galileo Effect, warning you of the Inquisition, their vehicles closing in and slowing.
Your offering lies heavily in your hands as it does on your mind. It overwhelms you for a moment, and you hesitate. Stand and fight, hoping for later enlightenment and greater glory in the service of the Church, like Saint Galileo, or recant now?
But you are not Saint Galileo, even though in some small way, you wish you could be like him.
The sirens stop.
They’re here.
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.
Car doors slam, hard soles bite into gravel. They’re here.
You throw your notes into the oven, then you strike a match and set the papers ablaze before closing the oven door. You flick the overhead switch for the exhaust fan, to help draw away the smoke. The alarm in the room has never worked; you worry more about your eyes.
Flames dance across your work. They curl the edges of your work and blister the surfaces brown. Even with the fan, the odor is overpowering and sinister, like a forest fire through dead wood. But this is no natural blaze—it’s an inferno, a live sacrifice, a holy offering to atone for your sins. Let someone less pious pose the question that brought you here, let them propose the theory, if it be worthy. Let it be an amateur outside the Jesuit order, a layperson who has not dedicated his life to the holy union of Church and Science. Let it be someone who may more easily beg absolution.
The flames rise and upon them your words and your work, an apology to the heavens for the century of peace your ideas threaten, for the controversy they might have created, for the doubts they would create. If not for the scientific proofs of the Church’s holy doctrines, the Schism could not, would not, have been healed. With doubt replacing science as an ally, a weakened Church could not have gathered the world into its holy fold, and could not have ultimately convinced the Hebrews and the Mohammedans to join in the scientifically-proved spiritual truths.
You know now that with this act you ask for forgiveness for a theory that threatens to forever separate science from Church, that might make enemies of old allies. You confess your idea which threatens the Church’s most basic and Holy precept of universal centrality, the very one that returned the sainted Galileo and his Holy Sciences to the Church. Sciences you now know were likely misconceived, products of a Galilean fallibility as monumental as your discovery of them. And instead of illuminating and protecting Holy Galileo’s memory and his Letters, you stand now as their accuser.
You know the Inquisition exists to protect and to preserve. If they do not find your work, if they find only you, they might accept this penitent offering you have made of your scientific hubris. They will see that you have chosen faith over science, and then, perhaps, you will be spared.
Darling Daughter Most Beloved Maria Celeste,
I am heartened that the Lord spares your life, even in cruel sleep. Yet, it grieves me greatly that your mind prefers that company of the heavens above, to that of the earth below. This poor sinner prays for you daily, though I fear that I am becoming weak.
My bones are made cold and wretched by the passing winter and by the chilled drafts allowed against me by hands less skilled than yours in the mending of my vestments. More than my garments, I fear that without the wisdom of your words, I am truly imprisoned, my confinement unbearable. I have sought leave, and await permission, to travel to your convent in San Matteo if only to be by your side, to hold your delicate fingers within mine, and to beseech you in my own voice to return to me.
Until then, I offer word of all that remains me, that of my experiments.
My friends in the East have been most kind in delivering to me a wondrous and elaborate clockwork upon which to mount my mirror telescope. This gargantuan clockwork, once trained on Polaris, causes the telescope to then follow the celestial body it is fixed upon across the duration of the night sky without need for further adjustment.
Moreover, in the Easterners’ luminous kindness—and I believe that in His infinite wisdom, God gifts even the heathens thus—they have provided me also with a recipe for an amazing gelatin bath exquisitely more sensitive than the eye to color. These baths may be laid out in dishes, where the light emanating from my telescopic eyepieces may fall upon their surfaces. And while the gelatins are poor representatives of contour, they react precisely according to color.
Moreover, inspired by the nature of the affliction of my eyes, I have devised a method to reproduce the rainbows I had observed around the moon and to project a representation of color, rather than shape or form, from the telescope’s eyepiece. This I have achieved through the simple artifice of the placement of a metal disk possessed of a fine central slit over the eyepiece, the slit approximating the narrowed gaze of my failing vision. Light emanating from the eyepiece is thus translated from shape or form into a most divine assembly of color. And thus, when the telescope is trained to follow a celestial body across the night, the object’s rainbow autograph is recorded.
Most promising, is that in this apparatus that I have dubbed a Telecolorimeter, I believe I have found the means to my salvation. You will forgive me if I explain in simple terms, as I grow weary and no doubt your condition will not suffer the details. My reasoning and methods are thus: I first intend to train the device on our sun, to capture its characteristic color autograph which will serve as my universal model for all such stars. I will then train the device on a duller distant sun such as Aldebaran. (An homage to the Mohammedans for their excellent studies of the heavens and for their superb work regarding the nature of light. A crystal wedge sent to me by one of their natural philosophers was my first attempt at devising a colorimeter.) With the ability to follow a distant sun through the night, and by affixing a gelatin plate to rotate along with the clockwork mount, I hope to capture the star’s color imprint. This color signature should be identical to our sun’s, since they are stars just the same, but for the color perturbations according to my earlier theory likening sound to light. Owing to Aldebaran’s motion, I will expect to see a change in its colors as I would expect a change in pitch with approaching or receding sound.
I suspect also that what appears to me to be distant suns may, in fact, be assemblages of stars, not unlike that which encompasses our own planet, and I will require an even larger telescope in order to better appreciate their colors. To this end I have commissioned the manufacture, and will soon take delivery, of a mirror telescope of such generous measure that it is limited in size only by the clockwork’s ability to carry its weight.
If I am mistaken and the Church is correct and we find ourselves at rest at the center of a fixed celestial sphere, no color perturbations should exist, since these objects maintain a fixed distance from us. If I find this, I will humbly publish my discoveries and recant fully to the public. Should I find, however, a tapestry of varied color perturbations, it will prove that our world is engaged in an intricate dance of advancing and withdrawing celestial motions. I expect my vindication will come with shifts toward the color red on the one hand and blue on the other, these being the colors of the rainbow’s edge.
I fear my reasoning may require further reflection and I pray that you recover to aid me in the refinement of this theory, so that you might also bask in the glory and holy illumination that it will provide. With much shame, I admit likewise, that I am possessed of a more selfish desire to see you recover to mend this old man’s longing heart along with his increasingly threadbare garments. I beseech you, darling Daughter, to quit your Father on high and to return to me, your humble and earthly father below. As the Phoenix of myth is reborn from ashes and flame, I beg you, Daughter, to return to me that we might both truly live.
Your most beloved and affectionate father,
G.G.
The fire within the oven consumes your ideas and transforms them to flame, ashes, and dust.
Footfalls fill the stairwells and echo through the hallways toward your room. The sounds of doors opening and closing, and of your Brethren emerging from their apartments, complete the cacophony that announces the Inquisition’s arrival.
The sounds grow louder and stop at your door.
Then you remember your computer, an early-forties’ point-and-click model squatting on the metal writing desk in the corner of your apartment not occupied by kitchen, lavatory, or bed. The computer, cradled between two bookshelves overstuffed with volumes of science and divinics, blinks innocently at you, not realizing that it holds within it the evidence and power to condemn you and change the world. The computer itself, a convenience of the scientific theocracy it threatens to tear asunder.
In a moment you are at the computer, manipulating its mouse, dragging files to the wipe window. Backup files, memos, animations, calculations, anything that might incriminate you. The wipe program will read every bit of information, will then overwrite each with a zero and once again with a one. The evidence will be irrecoverable.
You continue to the sickening rhythm of an Inquisition ram slamming into your door. The computer screen mocks you with its Church-logo wallpaper: two reflecting telescopes arranged into the shape of a cross, a Barberini bumblebee perched proudly atop its apex.
A voice booms through the door, “Stand aside, Brother, we intend no harm.” You recognize the voice, Father Julius Rosenberg, the Grand Inquisitor himself, and a fellow Jesuit. Has he come to Tucson specially for you, or was he here, like you, for his allotment at the observatory and seminary?
Maybe you believe Rosenberg, maybe you’re still looking for a way out. Maybe you just need a little more time to gather and wipe the necessary files. You can’t let them distract you from the computer and the files. “Go ahead, break the door down, I’m safe and I’m not—”
The door splinters through your apartment before you can finish the sentence. Rosenberg fills the doorway, tall and gaunt and moving mechanically like an animated corpse. The others remain out of sight, likely standing at the ready. Julius steps across the threshold, the fluorescent lights of your apartment scattering through the dark tangled edges of his wild hair like a halo.
You stand, your hand hovering at the ready over the mouse button, one click away from activating the wipe, a warning and a threat. One press, no evidence, no doubt, no threat. But you know it’s also the evidence Rosenberg wants most. It’s your only bargaining chip.
“Brother,” says Rosenberg, in a low growl. “You are making a terrible mistake.” He stares at your hand, and you wonder what he’d do if faced with the same horrible secret, the same horrible decision you have before you. Then you notice that his eyes are twitching, or maybe it’s just another trick of the light.
Most Venerable and Beloved Daughter Suor Maria Celeste
I have received word that you have begun to stir and that my letters have caused on at least one occasion a most gentle fluttering of your eyelids. Though I feel the Lord has forsaken me in many endeavors, I thank Him for such small gifts.
Vincenzo, your brother, happened upon me yesterday morn as I examined the color autographs from the distant suns that I had been following. Since my last letter, I have trained my clockwork mirror telescope on many stars, whether bright or faded, whether seemingly orange, or seemingly blue. The many gelatinous plates, upon which star autographs have been preserved with a fixative, now extend through my poor garden like rays from my old stone sundial like the pagan goddess Shiva’s many arms. They obliterate what little grass remains not overgrown with weed. Fortunately, the hedgerow hides this from my already angered neighbors who have taken to complaining of the clockwork’s unsightly appearance. It appears that I had indeed offended them with my experiment of the trumpets, as Salvatore so rightly feared.
“Father, you are distressed,” Vincenzo remarked in concern from his perch on the dial. “Not our Sister-Sister?” He has named you thus out of love and a poor sense of pun.
“I am distressed always over your sister,” I replied, “but currently I am consumed by my inexplicable failure in this experiment.”
Vincenzo approached the plate closest to him and examined it. “An excellent rainbow,” he declared, “albeit, overly crimson. Beautiful, nonetheless.”
“They are all tainted crimson,” I confessed. “My other Vincenzo has checked and rechecked the baths, and our apparatus, and after several correspondences with the East he swears no error or failure in apparatus or in method exists.”
“Would that I could assist you.”
“No. I am lost without your sister’s ear and her counsel. Only two explanations remain in this matter. For if one is correct, then my very sciences have failed me; and if the other, I have failed my God.”
Vincenzo then raised himself from the dial. “Father, I have thought much lately of your former pupil, Delmedigo the Spaniard. He is an excellent physician who is said to heal within the graces of God even though he be a Hebrew. Perhaps he might be of assistance?”
An excellent suggestion, I thought, even for your brother. And so, with the disposal of my humble invitation, my onetime student, José Solomon Delmedigo, has now graced your side. I understand that, with great skill and attention, he has been hastening your healing some time now. I have received word, that with his good work nearly completed, he promises to visit with me on his return to Spain.
I continue to pray for you. Your progress has renewed in my purpose, even though my results fail me. My heart leaps to share more with you, my daughter, but the hour is late and my bones have become as fragile and as quarrelsome as my spirit.
Your most affectionate and beloved father,
G.G.
“Don’t fail us now, Brother.” The words escape like steam from Rosenberg’s mouth. He doesn’t call you by name, won’t meet your eyes.
“The contents of this computer are too dangerous, Julius. Not just to me.”
Rosenberg takes a step forward and you stop him with your thumb against the mouse’s button. “This is a test, Brother,” he says.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Indeed,” Rosenberg half whispers, meeting your eyes for the first time, not looking away, not blinking.
“The Church, our world, is predicated on Saint Galileo’s science, and my theory could prove him wrong,” I tell him what he must already dread. “Were there others who stumbled across this same discovery in the past? Were they silenced, or have we all simply been led away from this discovery through the scientific control of the Church?” My voice rises. “Is what might have been discovered years ago without the Church, only being discovered by me for the first time now?”
“Had others made the same discovery, Brother, the world would already be a different place. It may yet be, thanks to theories such as yours,” Rosenberg answers without emotion.
“What kind of place would it be,” you ask, “without Church and science uniting us under one theology? War and dissent would replace progress. How backward would the world be, how backward would we become?”
“The world would be different, that is all. Whether better or worse, depends only on us. We move backward, we become backward, when we hide the truth.”
“And if that truth reveals a mistake made by an old man overjoyed by the recovery of his daughter and of his faith, a misstep so powerful that it has affected the course of history for hundreds of years?”
Dearest Darling Holy Daughter Suor Marie Celeste,
Joy is the kingdom of the Lord and all his wonders, greatest of which is the news of your convalescence. I have news that your eyes have opened, and I expect you have made an even greater recovery in the time it has taken these words to travel to you. Your recuperation has renewed my faith in the Lord and in His Church, and with my work I will honor all.
Your physician, Delmedigo, as I spoke of last, has visited with me and remains the strange and marvelous fellow I once knew as my pupil. It seems that since he has left my tutelage, he has become recognized as a great biblical scholar, mathematician, encyclopedist, and scientist (I borrow the term from your brother, as I have taken a liking to it). Moreover, I have discovered Delmedigo to be a fellow Copernican. After some pleasantries, both usual and unusual, and while surrounded by the gelatinous oddity of my garden, I put forth the problem of my failed colorimeter experiments to him.
“Most troubling,” he pondered, while standing over the sundial as your brother had not long before. “The baths in each plate favor the red, whether on hot days or on cold, on clear nights or cloudy, under moonlight or in darkness. Yet your reasoning that color and light are like sound, ripples in a pond, rings true.”
“Indeed,” I responded, marveling at Delmedigo’s play on words, and wondering if it was play also with me. Still, I know Delmedigo well, and he is not one for idle games.
“It occurs to me,” Delmedigo continued, “that dragging a stick toward oneself in a pond, pushes the closest ripples together, and rarifies those that trail. To sound, this becomes the changes in pitch you have described. To light, as you have surmised, it is color. In a rainbow, the color blue is closest to earth, red the farthest away and possibly most rarified. If your methods and apparatus are true and there is no error, then all these bodies you observe, they move away from this earth? If I am mistaken, then they must all move toward us, no? In any event we can conclude that they move with respect to us in altogether the same way.”
“But the Copernican view describes celestial movements that should display themselves as color shifts in many directions.”
“Then perhaps our interpretation, or our understanding, of Copernican theory is flawed, rather than your apparatus.”
“But this is vexing. My observation of the tides proves that we ourselves must also be in motion.”
Delmedigo pondered a moment. “Yes, but not to our own senses. Perhaps to understand this problem, another perspective must be adopted?” Delmedigo offered this suggestion, as if it were nothing more than a daily tea, then took his leave of me as humbly and as respectfully as he had arrived.
I have much to think on, Sister-Daughter: your recovery, and the awful truth only now becoming apparent to me borne on the wings of Delmedigo’s words. You have taken a long journey in your illness, as have I in my experiments and in my faith. Now we must both return. And it strikes me odd that we have been aided, both of us, by pagans, Mohammedans, and a Hebrew. It seems almost silly, not unlike one of your brother’s humorous tales.
Mend well, my most beloved intricate and perfect creation. In illness and in health, it seems you provide me more with solution than with problem.
Your most humbled and affectionate lord father,
G.G.
“Truth can be a problem, indeed,” says Rosenberg, staring you down. “A test of faith, in the least.”
“Not if you prevent my poisonous ideas from spreading,” you say. “Not if my theory disappears along with me. It’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it?”
“There will be others with similar ideas—you’ve said so yourself. Perhaps there have been others already, but their fear of the Church or the scientific limits of the time prevented them from coming as far as you have.”
“Or maybe their faith was stronger, their hubris weaker?”
“Word has spread about you, wild stories that your theory involves parlor tricks, balloons even, according to some.”
Rosenberg’s words terrify you because they are true. If your Brethren know about this, then others might easily discover what you have. They will. So why does Rosenberg toy now with you?
“No tricks,” you’re almost lying, “it’s all about mistakes. Saint Galileo was wrong about the tides, and he was wrong about this, too. Had he come to the proper conclusion about universal centrality, it would have divided the Church and set both it and science back hundreds of years.”
Rosenberg rubs his eyes unsteadily. “Saint Galileo’s mistake, Brother, may well have been something else entirely, as may yours.”
Most Blessed and Beloved Sister-Daughter,
To have your few words reach my failing eyes, even in your unsteady hand has, if I am not mistaken, been my greatest pleasure in this miserable life. Autumn is upon the land once again, stealing from nature its color and from me what remains of my disposition. Within the grace of your words, however, there is summer and sunshine, so my mind does not protest even as my bones do. In exchange for this, your gift, I return to you another, in your service, in that of the Lord, and in that of our beloved Church.
I have deciphered Delmedigo’s cryptic observations and I realize now that I did not fail. Vincenzo, my student, and I have captured the colors of countless more heavenly suns since my last letter. They, too, are red and our methods remain sound, but the merciful Lord in his kindness has allowed me to only now see the meaning in all this. Please forgive me, once again as I summarize and simplify.
The redness of the night’s stars can mean only that they move altogether away from us (or failing that, toward us, altogether, nonetheless). If our world inhabits a universe of constant motion, then this can only be true if one condition is met: that our world finds its place at the very center of that celestial movement. The Church has been correct all this time, but in a way heretofore unimaginable. Our earth constantly rotates and revolves around the sun, I still believe that, but by adopting a different observation point as Delmedigo suggested, from outside that of our planetary sphere, one may find a position, perhaps one that rotates, from where one is able to appreciate this most intricate dance that places our earth at rest at its center.
I have reviewed my conclusions with the Pope and he has accepted both them and my humble self back to the fold. I have been bestowed with the title of Astronomer Holy of the Vatican, and with a position at the right hand of the Pope, a man who once again calls me friend. In this honor, a pamphlet describing my conclusions will be published in unheard of numbers by the Church itself. And furthermore, it has been agreed that my methodologies and my sciences, as we are now calling them, are to be administered through the Jesuit order and the holy offices of the Church.
I can only give thanks to the Lord for returning you to me, and by making of me a more perfect instrument by which to illuminate his heavens. With the proofs of science at our disposal, the Pope and I are confident we can heal the schism that has developed lately within the Church. We believe also that we have finally found a common language, or even a proving grounds, with which to win over the Hebrews, the Mohammedans, and scores of nonbelievers.
Glory to God and all his creations, foremost amongst them my most gifted daughter, Marie Celeste. Peace and understanding to us all. Amen.
Your most illustrious lord father,
G.G.
“Understanding may well reside within those computer files you threaten now, Brother. They may be of help to us, rather than harm,” says Rosenberg in cool, measured tones.
You don’t know if you can believe Rosenberg, if you should trust him, or his Inquisition. They’ve been a benign arm of the Church for centuries, but their history is that of ruthlessness beforehand. It doesn’t matter now, though. You’ve made up your mind with Saint Galileo as your example. You have purified yourself with fire, and with the click of a mouse you will repent. You choose the Church as Saint Galileo did, that is the test, and you will wait for divine inspiration to show you the correct way, as it did Saint Galileo, even if it be flawed.
Your thumb depresses the mouse button.
Click.
Rosenberg watches the computer screen flicker to life, watches the progress bar which indicates the data being wiped forever from the magnetic surface of its hard drive. You have made your choice, passed your test. Why then does Rosenberg seem so sad? Didn’t you choose correctly?
“It’s better, safer, this way,” you say.
“We should not have entrusted you with the Holy Galileo letters,” he answers. “As their curator, you have fallen victim to Saint Galileo’s same mistake.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve forsaken my pride in favor of the Church. I have no intention of pursuing my theories or proving them, not as Saint Galileo attempted.”
“And that is your mistake. The Inquisition is as its name states, an office of inquiry. Scientific or spiritual, they are the same. The Inquisition’s objective is to enlighten, to discover and disseminate the truth. By abandoning your hypothesis, one possible truth, you do a disservice to us all. Saint Galileo’s error was in his inability to accept possibilities, in his insistence that his was the one and only truth. The Church fell victim to this same error, in its own way, until its truth finally agreed with Galileo’s at the time of his ultimate discovery. The same truth you feel you now threaten. But the Church has since learned from this episode, as it appears you have not.”
“I don’t understand,” you say honestly.
“God is infallible, but man’s interpretation of God is not. Only once this is accepted can the scientific search for understanding share a common goal with religion.”
“But you know the Scripture. Doesn’t the Book of Job warn us specifically against just this kind of arrogant attempt at understanding God’s creation?”
“That is one interpretation. The one the Church prefers, the one that has united the world, is that Job invites us to attempt to understand that which we may never fully grasp. Job invites us to learn, to fail, and to succeed. Your theories may well do so in someone else’s hands, if not your own.”
Rosenberg motions at the doorway. An acolyte in tech robes, a battery pack belt attached to the parabolic antenna in his hand, slides into view. You realize they have it all now. Your computer’s magnetic hard drive reads and writes information using Modified Frequency Modulation techniques just like any FM broadcast and, given the proper equipment, is detectable just like any other radio signal. They have your work, every bit of your data; they read it on the first pass of the wipe. Rosenberg knew he’d get it one way or another, even without you. It was a test of your faith all along, a test of your faith in the Church and its offices.
“I failed,” you say, embarrassed and ashamed.
“Your faith is weak,” says Rosenberg in a formal tone, about to give sentence. “Do you accept the penance I now charge you with through the office of this Holy Inquisition?”
“I do.”
“You are to continue to illuminate this, your hypothesis, without fail. And as you progress, you are to report regularly to this Holy Office. This, in addition to the penances demanded of you by our Holy Father at your next audience.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Brother,” Rosenberg’s tone and posture soften. “Many of us seek divine enlightenment our entire lives, with little success. I myself have never been so blessed. Please share with me one thing now. What was your inspiration? What are these stories of balloons?”
You consider explaining, but instead you reach into your pocket, the better to show him. Rosenberg watches you remove the deflated balloon, the one you had decorated with polka-dots for Brother Al-Fahudi’s party. He watches you put the balloon to your mouth, and he watches you inflate it slowly. Through the distorted membrane of the balloon’s yellow skin you see Rosenberg’s expression turn from puzzlement to wide-eyed realization. The balloon expands, the dots on its surface move apart, all moving away from each other, all at once across its expanding surface, with none at its center.
Rosenberg takes it in for what seems an eternity, nods to you in acknowledgment, then departs without a word. The sounds of footfalls follow him.
You are alone again, the door to your apartment shattered, your notes burned, your computer’s memory, like you, empty. All that remains now is your regret and your overwhelming fear of the task before you. What of the consequences of your sciences? What world will they invent? What world will they destroy?
And you hang your head in your hands and you weep.
Revision Point
Galileo Galilei is famous for many scientific innovations, including the astronomical application of the telescope and his experiments with gravity. He is perhaps most famous, however, for his feud with the Catholic Church over the heliocentric theory of the universe. This conflict ultimately led to Galileo’s appearance before the Holy Inquisition, and his sentencing to house arrest for the crime of heresy, under which he served the remaining years of his life. Galileo, nevertheless, remained a devout follower of the Church.
Much of what we know of Galileo, the man, comes from the correspondences of his daughter, Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun. Of Galileo’s three children, she appears to have been the most scientifically gifted and is suggested by some historians to have been his sometime intellectual collaborator. Galileo’s letters to his daughter, on the other hand, remain lost; only his professional publications have survived. They reveal a brilliant, albeit flawed, scientific and artistic mind capable of great feats of reason that often led to correct conclusions through erroneous means. For instance, Galileo argued that the ocean tides were a result, and proof, of the Earth’s rotation, rather than properly attributing them to the moon’s gravitational pull. And although his conclusion that the Earth did indeed rotate was correct, the means by which that conclusion was reached remained cogently and elaborately spurious. Even in his support of the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe, Galileo maintained that planetary orbits were perfectly circular, rather than accepting Kepler’s elliptical theory.
A common misconception is that Galileo invented the telescope. Rather, he innovated its use for military and astronomical applications. Given enough time and proper inspiration, and had he not been deprived of the collaboration of his daughter by her untimely death, he might well have gone on to further discovery, invention, innovation, and conclusion. These would likely have remained elaborately conceived and crafted, brilliantly insightful, and, at times, fraught with error.
I.S.