Traitor Angels by Anne Blankman Page B

other forces keep us anchored to the ground.” Viviani stalked to our campsite. “The earth turns toward the east at a high rate of speed.”
    That was impossible! I raced after him.
    “If Earth moves in such a fashion, then wouldn’t falling leaves scatter to the west of trees?” I demanded. “And birds lose their way in midair?”
    Viviani spun around and stared at me. “How do you know to ask such questions? You’re a girl—”
    “Yes, and therefore I ought to be sitting at home, embroidering and pining for a husband,” I retorted. “Tell me how such things are possible!”
    He didn’t take his eyes from my face. “Because the earth imparts motion to all objects. Therefore, we don’t fight the movement but become part of it. Like people walking along the deck of a ship at sea.”
    I thought of the times I had ridden on the small, flat-bottomed boats that traveled up and down the Thames, ferrying passengers who didn’t want to traverse the clogged London streets. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel my body rocking with the motion of the current and hear the water slapping the sides of the boat. Viviani was correct: I had absorbed the boat’s movement, rather than struggling against it.
    Then . . . what he had said was possible. The earth could rotate on its axis. And we could move with it, unaware that at every single instant we were in motion.
    I dropped my head into my hands. If Viviani was right, then the Bible was wrong. And the ground was no longer hard and strong but made of shifting sand.
    “Many are afraid of the laws of nature because they seem to contradict divine scripture,” Viviani said quietly. “My master, like his master before him, thinks the universe is a giant puzzle, laid out by God, and it’s our task to assemble the pieces and make sense of them.”
    “I don’t want to believe that,” I said in a choked voice.
    “No matter what you want to believe, the truth remains the same.” His hand brushed my shoulder—a touch as soft as gossamer. “But my master’s master dared to write what he saw in the stars. He recanted before the Inquisitors during his trial; this kept him alive, but he was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. If I’m ever called upon to defend my beliefs, I hope I can suffer the consequences as unflinchingly as Galileo Galilei did.”
    At the name, my head snapped up.
    “You speak of Galileo,” I breathed.
    “Galileo?” Viviani’s forehead wrinkled. “Maybe that’s how he’s known in your country, but that’s his Christian name, and we refer to him as Signor Galilei.”
    I barely heard him. “My father met him nearly thirty years ago. He visited him secretly when Galileo was under house arrest.”
    In two quick strides, Viviani had closed the distance between us and gripped my hands in his. The telescope was pressed between our palms, the leather rod keeping our fingers from tangling together. “My master became apprenticed to Signor Galileiwhen he was seventeen and lived with him during the last years of his life, from sixteen thirty-nine to forty-two. Could he have met your father?”
    I shook my head. “He visited Galileo in thirty-eight.”
    Viviani released me and paced around the campsite, his boots kicking up eddies of dust from the water-hungry ground. “Nevertheless, something must have happened all those years ago to link the three men together. The secret could be rooted in politics, as you thought. Before he was arrested, Signor Galilei was friends with the pope and dozens of important people. He could have learned something incriminating about the king’s father—something the king is frantic to hide—and told your father about it.”
    I held myself still, trying to quiet my whirling thoughts and arrange them in some semblance of order. Shortly after my father had met Galileo, my country plunged into civil war, and Father revised his Italian third sonnet. In 1649, King Charles the First was executed, his