On the Rumor of a Vessel Sent to the Red Wanderer, Carrying Both Message and Inquiry

In my studio this evening, between the dissection of a forearm and the grinding of ultramarine, a most extraordinary rumor has reached me — passed, I am told, through channels I cannot verify, as if whispered by a spirit dwelling in centuries yet unborn. They say that in a distant age, men will send a craft — not upon water, nor through air alone, but across the black and silent void — to that ruddy star we call Marte, the wandering ember that moves through the zodiac with such deliberate slowness. And this craft, they say, is built not principally for inquiry into nature, but for the relay of messages — a kind of postal courier flung between worlds. Yet upon this courier, they reserve a small chamber for instruments of philosophy, for the study of that distant soil and sky. I confess: my heart races. My doubts are enormous, yet my desire to believe is greater still. Consider — I have spent years devising machines for flight, studying the kestrel's wing, the way air curls beneath a bird's feather like water curls around a stone in the Arno. I have written: the bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law. If this be true for a bird above Fiesole, why not for a vessel above the Earth itself? But the void between worlds — what sustains motion where there is no air to push against? Here my philosophy falters. I must think further. What arrests me most is this marriage of purposes — the practical and the speculative riding together, as paint and geometry ride together upon my panels. They do not separate the carrier of messages from the seeker of knowledge. This is wisdom. When I design a canal, do I not also study the motion of water for its own sake? When I open a body to understand the muscles, do I not also learn how to paint the shoulder of a Saint Jerome? Questions for the notebook: — What power propels a craft through emptiness? Not wind. Not oar. Fire perhaps, as a rocket? — What instruments, small enough to fit inside a vessel, could examine soil from such distance? — These miniature satellites they describe — cubesats — are they like my models, small demonstrations preceding the great machine? — Can messages truly traverse such distances without a wire, without a voice? I do not know if this rumor is prophecy or fantasy. But I copy it here, in my reversed hand, so that if truth it be, some future reader may know: Leonardo believed it possible, and trembled with joy at the thought.