Frank mulled over that for a moment. “Can’t we send some astronomy textbooks to Rome, or something? If Galileo can prove it, he gets off, right?”
“Well, again it’s not that simple. You know who Galileo works for?”
“I thought he was just, well, a scientist.”
“He is, but he has to have a patron to keep him in eating money. There aren’t universities with tenure in this day and age, so he gets paid by the Medici family. Now, that means that the Spanish, who as it happens own about half of Italy, are his enemy in order to get at the Medici, who just happen to own one of the bits of Italy that the Spanish want but don’t have. Now, I’m simplifying this a whole lot, but basically the pope has a lot of pressure on him to throw Galileo to the wolves to do the Medicis a bad turn. Even so, in our old timeline, the pope stacked the trial as much as he could, and it was his nephew, Cardinal Barberini—”
“Hold on,” said Frank, shaking his head with confusion. “I thought you said the pope was Cardinal Barberini?”
“He was, before he became pope. Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, he was then. And his brother’s a Cardinal Barberini as well, and both of his nephews are Cardinals Barberini.”
“Doesn’t that get confusing?”
“Very,” said Mazzare, deadpan, and then broke into a chuckle. “We shouldn’t laugh, of course. His Holiness had a terrible crisis of conscience over his nepotism later in life, even though it’s the way things are done nowadays.”
“Right, so one of the Barberini nephews got Galileo a plea bargain?”
“That’s right. He admitted that what he’d done gave the appearance of heresy.”
“So what did they do to him if they didn’t burn him at the stake?”
“Made him promise not to do it again, and sent him home with orders to stay there. He wrote a couple more books after that, and was a lot more careful not to insult anyone.” Mazzare sighed again. “It was still a fairly embarrassing business all round, of course, even if the ban on his book never really got enforced outside Italy and was revoked later anyway. I’d like to think that the fact that they’re waiting a lot longer to put him on trial than they did in the old history means that someone in Rome is thinking a lot harder about all these issues.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do? It doesn’t seem right, him being in jail. Especially because he’s an old man by now. I know that much.”
“I don’t honestly know what we can do, Frank. I’ve got a job to do here in Venice, and I wouldn’t want to go meddling in a situation I don’t fully understand. And no, he’s not in jail just now, if they’re doing it the same way they did in our history. They’ve just banned any more sales of his book and ordered him to stay home pending his trial.”
“He’s not in jail?” Again, things Frank had thought about the Inquisition were turning out not to be true. He’d had a firm image of old Galileo shackled with chains in a dungeon somewhere.
“No. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Inquisition’s a blight on the Church and does a great deal that is, by any standard, wrong, but they’re not complete barbarians. Galileo got very mild, very respectful treatment from them. Apart, that is, from being made to stand trial and having one of his books banned. But he wasn’t ever imprisoned or tortured, and he certainly wasn’t ever treated with any physical harshness.”
“Um.” Frank was wondering how he was going to put this over with the guys. And especially with the Committee. He could just see Antonio Marcoli’s reaction to him passing on apologies for the Inquisition and then asking for a date with his daughter.
On the bright side, on the other hand, if worse came to worst . . .
Springing him from house arrest might not be so bad. It’s gotta beat fighting your way into a dungeon.
Mazzare interrupted the formation of a truly horrible image. Frank Stone, expiring on a pike in the bowels of a castle, his last sight the slime oozing down the damp stone walls . . . a skeleton nearby still sagging from the chains . . .