night air to express his happiness. Mazzoleni and the rest would have laughed to see it, as they had laughed all the times they had seen it, after one good discovery or another: but none so good as this! He chortled, he shuffled around the terrace in a dance with the spyglass as his partner. He felt an urge to ring the workshop bell; he even began to walk toward the workshop, to wake Mazzoleni and the rest, and share the news with somebody. But he was the bell he wanted to ring, and if he woke the others, Mazzoleni would just nod and grin his gap-toothed grin, and be pleased that the new instrument was working better than the previous one. What went on in the sky did not matter to him.
Galileo stopped in his tracks and returned to the terrace. He recommenced his little contradance around the tripod and work table, singing nonsense words to himself under his breath. An old man dancing at midnight. Tomorrow he would write up his news, and publish it as soon as possible after that, to share it with the world. Everyone would know, everyone would look and see. But only he would be first, first always, first forever. This night was his. Feeling warm in his cloak, he settled on the stool under the tripod to look some more.
Then there came a knock at the garden gate. And he knew who it was.
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.
I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived
The transmogrifications in the stuff of life.
Reveal, now, exactly how they were performed
From the beginning up to this moment.
-OVID, The Metamorphoses
Galileo walked stiffly toward the gate, feeling his heart pound. The knock came again, a steady tap tap tap. He reached the gate and pulled up the crossbar, feeling a sweat of trepidation.
It was indeed the stranger, tall and gaunt in a black cloak. Behind him hunched a short gnarled old man, carrying a leather satchel over one shoulder.
The stranger bowed. ‘You said you would enjoy to look through a spyglass of my own.’
‘Yes, I remember-but that was months ago! Where have you been?’
‘Now I am here.’
‘I’ve seen some amazing things!’ Galileo could not help saying.
‘You still wish to look through what I have?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He let the stranger and his servant in the gate, his unease written all over his face. ‘Come out to the terrace. I was there when you knocked, looking at Jupiter. Jupiter has four stars orbiting it, did you know that?’
‘Four moons. Yes.’
Galileo looked disappointed, also disturbed; how had the stranger been able to see them?
The stranger said, ‘Perhaps you would enjoy to see them through my instrument.’
‘Yes, of course. What is its power of magnification?’
‘It varies.’ He gestured at his servant. ‘Let me show you.’
The man’s ancient servant looked familiar. He wheezed unhappily under his load. On the terrace Galileo reached out to help him lower the satchel, briefly holding him above the elbow and against the back; under his coat the man felt like nothing but skin and bone. He slipped out from under the strap of the long bag carelessly, before Galileo had quite gotten hold of it, and it hit the tiles with a thump.
‘It’s heavy!’ Galileo said.
The two visitors pulled a massive tripod from the satchel, and arranged it next to Galileo’s instrument; then they drew a big spyglass out of the case. Its tube was made of a dull grey metal, like pewter, and they held it by both ends to lift it. It was about twice the length of Galileo’s tube, and three times the diameter, and clicked onto the top of its tripod with a distinct snap.
‘Where did you get that thing?’ Galileo asked.
The stranger shrugged. He glanced at Galileo’s tube, then spun his on its tripod with a light flick of the wrist. It stopped moving when it came to much the same angle as Galileo’s, and with a small smile the stranger gestured at the instrument.
‘Be my guest, please. Have a look.’
‘You don’t want to sight it?’
‘It is aimed at Jupiter. At the moon that you will call Number Two.’
Galileo stared at him, confused and a little afraid. Was the thing supposed to be self-sighting? The man’s claim made no sense.
‘Take a look and see,’ the stranger suggested.
There was no reply to that: it was what he had been saying himself, to Cremonini and everyone. Just look! Galileo moved his stool over to the new device, sat down, leaned forward. He looked into the eyepiece.
The thing’s field of vision was packed with stars, and seemed large, perhaps twenty or thirty times what Galileo saw through his glass. At its centre what he took to be one of the moons of Jupiter gleamed like a round white ball, marked by faint lines. It was bigger than Jupiter itself was in Galileo’s glass. The harder Galileo looked, the more obviously spheroid the white moon became, and its striations more visible. It stood out like a snowball against the stars, which burned in their various intensities against a depth of velvet black.
It appeared that the white ball, clearer than ever to his sight, had faintly darker areas, somewhat like Earth’s moon; but more prominent by far was its broken network of intersecting lines, like the craquelure on an old painting, or the ice on the Venetian lagoon in cold winters after several tides had cracked it. Galileo’s fingers reached for a quill that was not there, wanting to draw what he saw. In some places the lines appeared in parallel clusters, in others they rayed out like fireworks, and these two patterns overlapped and shattered each other repeatedly.
One crackle pattern clarified for him, gleamed in exquisite detail. Focusing on it appeared to increase the enlargement accordingly, until it filled the lens of the eyepiece. A wave of dizziness passed through his whole body; it felt like he was falling up toward the white moon. He lost his balance. He felt himself pitch forward, head first into the device.
Things fall in parabolic arcs: but he wasn’t falling. He flew, up and forward-outward-head tilted back to see where he was going. The plain of shattered white ice bloomed right before his eyes. Or below him-maybe he was falling. His stomach flipflopped as his sense of up and down reversed itself.
He didn’t know where he was.
He gasped for air. He was drifting downward, now; he was upright again; his sense of balance returned just as distinctly as sight returned when you closed and then opened your eyes-something definitive. It was an immense relief, the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.
He stood on ice. The ice was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows; sunset colours, autumn colours. He looked up-
A giant banded orange moon loomed in a black starry sky. It was many times bigger than the moon in Earth’s sky, and its horizontal bands were various pale oranges and yellows, umbers and creams. The borders of the bands curled over and into each other. On the moon’s lower quarter a brick red oval swirl marred the border of a terra cotta band and a cream band. The opaque plain of ice he stood on was picking up these colours. He put his fist up with his thumb stuck out: at home his thumb covered the moon; this one was seven or eight times that wide. Suddenly he understood it was Jupiter itself up there. He was standing on the surface of the moon he had been looking at.
Behind him someone politely cleared his throat. Galileo turned; it was the stranger, standing beside a spyglass like the one he had invited