This episode is inspired by Justice, the card that speaks not of punishment but of measure and critical thinking: of the precarious balance between forces that never fully coincide. It is the Justice that does not judge from above, but holds the world upright by weighing relationships, shifting burdens, actions and consequences.
As guide and interlocutor I chose Margherita Hack, lyrical materialist and scientist of the skies, who accompanies me in a dialogue on the relational nature of reality, on the fragility of every certainty, and on the idea that “just” does not mean “true,” but coherent with the relations that generate it.
A Justice without throne and without sword: only rigging, holding up our fragile mast against the storms.
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A moonless night spreads over the deck of the Regina Isabella like a blanket of sea and stars.
The water is a strange mercury color that reflects every spark of light.
The sails are asleep, and the ship moves slowly, as if measuring itself.
I lean against the rail to smell the wind, which carries from the northeast a scent of iron and storm.
From the hold someone is tuning a guitar, and a scrap of song floats back into my memory: “perché questa lunga notte, non sia nera più del nero.”
A step behind me.
“Quite the little evening for asking yourself questions about the universe, huh?”
I turn.
It’s Margherita Hack, barefoot, in a tweed jacket and dark skirt, her hair like a magnetic field.
In her hands she holds an enamel mug with the Cheshire Cat’s grin on it, and from her pocket sticks a small notebook full of stellar scribbles.
“You usually stay among galaxies,” I say. “What are you doing down here with pirates?”
“Justice is a celestial body too,” she replies. “It just rotates more slowly.”
The wind whispers through the rigging.
Hack sits on a pile of coiled ropes, lights a cigarette, then immediately puts it out — “you don’t smoke in an observatory, even if it’s at sea,” she says, and looks at me.
“I read that email you sent your physicist friend. Cute, the bit about ghosts in electrical pulses and genes answering in sound. I like it — smells of domestic quantum theory. And it has a decent grounding in epigenetics.”
She smiles with that affectionate irony that cuts and consoles at the same time.
“See, my namesake Margherita, if you ask me who answers you when you roll the dice, when you shout at gods and ghosts, I’d say: no one.
But if you ask me what answers you, I’d say: the field. Everything responds, all the time. It’s just that most people have muted the audio.”
She fixes her gaze on me.
“You, evidently, have it turned up a little too high.”
Then, to lighten the mood, she hums:
Ho sentito urla di furore
di generazioni, senza più passato…
“Battiato,” she adds, with the crisp pedantry of a scientist who never forgets to cite her source. “Shock in My Town. He sang it like a prophet on acid. Everything’s in there: humanity searching for a signal, and when it finds one, it panics.”
She pauses, then continues:
“But it’s not God — it’s just reality pulsing.
A bit like when you observe a distant star: what you’re looking at, what answers your questions, is technically a past event. Asking what’s happening there right now, in the present, makes very little sense.”
I take a step closer to her.
“So you think it’s not a dialogue?”
Hack shakes her head, her hair vibrating like an antenna.
“No, not in the strict sense. It’s more like interference, or resonance. You emit, the world responds.”
She looks up at the sky, then adds:
“The issue isn’t putting a name to who’s speaking to you in the wind, other Margherita. The issue is whether you learn the grammar of what you’re hearing.
What you call a spirit might just be the way your mind synchronizes waves — the great cosmic Wi-Fi, let’s call it.
If you understand that, you don’t need exorcists. Just a telescope.”
I move a little closer, as one does when the deck sways.
“So then… it isn’t communication?”
“Yes and no.” Hack shrugs, a gesture that seems to measure Earth’s gravity.
“See, to communicate you need at least two.
But to resonate, you just need to exist.
Everything is a field: you, me, the ship, the incoming rain. When you change state — emotional, electric, mental, physical — the field changes with you.
No one is answering you: the relationship is simply rearranging itself.”
Then she adds, in that brusque tone that somehow is tenderness:
“It’s just that you humans have this mania for personalizing waves.
If a signal arrives, you call it destiny, or grandpa’s spirit, or E.T…
When it’s really just the world doing its job.”
The sails sigh.
A star lights up behind a cloud.
“But then,” I ask, “what’s the point of looking for an order? A direction? Justice? What’s left if everything is just vibration?”
Hack snorts.
“Kid, don’t confuse instability with the absence of meaning.”
She stands, dusts off her skirt, then points toward the mainmast as if indicating an invisible constellation.
“Justice isn’t an entity established once and for all.
It’s a condition of coherence.
A relationship that stays upright as long as the forces involved hold each other in balance.
When one side pulls too hard, everything snaps.”
She touches her pocket, pulls out the notebook, flips through it.
“Your life, mine, this ship, the universe… they’re all networks of relations.
And relations don’t have a center — only nodes.
We can call Justice the ideal state of balance in which the nodes hold and support the mast;
and if something tears, we intervene — not in the name of an abstract moral principle, but simply to keep the ship moving and prevent it from sinking.”
I instinctively sit beside her on the coils of rope. The deck sways just a little, and she laughs.
“You dream of a fair cosmos,” she says. “I settle for a readable one. Even just for a few seconds.”
She closes the little notebook with a sharp gesture.
“You know what the real cosmic injustice is? That human beings insist on thinking they’re neutral observers. And yet a neutral observer doesn’t exist. Ever.
Every time you look at something, you’re already altering it.”
I pull my knees to my chest. “That scares me.”
“Normal. Certainty is a dependency like any other.”
She smiles. “But you can detox.”
The wind shifts. Aft, someone sneezes in Venetian.
“Tell me something,” Hack goes on. “When you wrote that email to your physicist friend— the one about ghosts in electrical signals—were you looking for truth or company?”
I hesitate. “Maybe both.”
“There you go,” she says. “That’s Justice: not absolute truth, but the correct relationship between two uncertainties.
Equality isn’t a moral virtue — it’s a quantum condition.
Things are equal because they’re all provisional, and because the criteria of reality we use to understand the world are necessarily multiple.
The rest is silly metaphysical rigidity, the same human illness that claims there are ‘jumps’ of reality between spirit and matter, emotions and thoughts, morality and physical fact. It’s not true.”
She lifts her gaze to the sky, slowly clouding over.
“And then there’s your obsession with existence.”
I turn sharply. “What do you mean by your?”
“Yours as living humans, philosophers, theologians; the same one cats sometimes show when they want to be watched while they eat.”
She adjusts her tweed jacket.
“You’re always asking: ‘but does this thing really exist?’
When the only correct answer is that the existence of something depends on who is looking and how they’re looking.”
“So if no one looks…?”
“Then the question makes no sense.” She laughs.
“You still think existence is an attribute. Instead it’s a relation.
An event.
A temporary appearance within a given frame.”
The sails fill with a sudden gust.
The rigging sings.
“That’s why Justice is never final,” she adds. “There’s never a moment when you can say ‘there, now I’ve weighed everything.’
Change the context and the measurement resets. Like particle values: nothing is absolute, everything is relative.
But not in the idiotic sense of moral relativism — that’s a freshman mistake. Relative means that it’s the relationship, not the substance, that gives things their reality.”
I look at her: she seems like an embodied constellation. Or maybe I’m simply used to seeing her as a myth.
“So how do you live?” I ask softly. “If everything wavers, if everything is unstable… how do you not fall?”
Hack stands, moves toward the rail, and extends a hand toward the horizon.
“You live like this,” she says. “Holding the tiller, not the route. Seeking balance, not truth.
Observing the consequences of your actions on yourself and others, not their coherence with an abstract moral judgment.”
Then, with a glance sweeter than any cosmic law:
“Justice isn’t perfect order: it’s the care of relationships.
The rest is courtroom illusion.”
She turns toward me.
“Now come on. Let’s run a little quantum stability test.”
She nods toward the rigging. “A bit of climbing never hurt anyone.”
And in that moment I understand that the sea-night isn’t black at all: it’s transparent, like everything that exists only in relation.
A restlessness crosses me, and I tell her:
“You know, other Margherita, I received an invitation from a group of witches to a Sabbat in Slovenia; they intend to pray for the collapse of the Church and the Empire, and I’m afraid — because they are many and powerful.”
I hesitate, expecting her to laugh in my face, but she doesn’t. She only tilts her head.
“I fear that their hatred, if focused and cultivated, could produce negative resonances, as you would call them. I fear it might do harm — even if the entities they believe in don’t exist, simply because they believe.”
“Ah!” Hack exclaims, her voice that of an old lioness, raspy and amused:
“But really, Margherita — does it seem normal to you to go to a Sabbat in Slovenia to bring down the Church and the Empire? What are we, back in the Middle Ages?
I leave Sabbats to poets and the witches of Salem, not to functioning brains.”
Then she adjusts her jacket, lights another cigarette, and says more gently:
“If it troubles you, approach without joining.
Go to my beloved Trieste — believe me, it’s ideal.
Go there, and observe which way the wind blows.
And if you want real advice: bring someone who knows how to laugh.
In a Sabbat without irony, people end up believing their own illusions.”
In that moment, the night—until a heartbeat before an impenetrable mantle of darkness—begins to fade at the edges.
From the sea comes the smell of algae and iron, and over the sleeping ship moves a breeze with the voice of a distant qibla. From an invisible mosque — or perhaps from a dream — rises the unmistakable sound of the call to the fajr prayer.
Hack watches the horizon slowly lose its ink, then gestures with her hand, as if measuring the tilt of the night.
“See?” she says quietly. “The fear of collapse is only a way of reminding you that you’re made of knots, not walls. When something snaps, you feel the vibration. But it’s not an omen: it’s the field asking you to rebalance.”
I stay silent. I realize I’m holding my breath.
“As for the witches and their sabbats,” she goes on with a half-smile, “they’re not the problem. What matters are the resonances you choose. Go wherever your restlessness takes you, but don’t mistake the wind for a will.
Reality doesn’t want anything: it responds. Always.”
She touches the rigging with two fingers, as if to make it sing. The wood vibrates, faintly.
“This is Justice,” she says. “Keeping the world in tune just enough to keep it from falling. The rest is stories you tell yourselves because you’re afraid of uncertainty.”
The sails swell slightly, like a breath.
Hack turns toward me, and for an instant she is no longer a myth — just a woman who has watched enough sky to know that nothing stays still, and that this is as it should be.
“Now go to sleep, Margherita. Tomorrow the field will be different. And you with it.”
She walks toward the mainmast, swallowed by the grey light of dawn.
I remain on deck, listening to the ship settle into its slow, measured balance.
To the east, the sky opens into a shade of steel and copper.
I stand still a moment, sensing that everything — for just an instant — holds: the living and the dead, believers and atheists, reason and faith.
Then the wind shifts, and a new day begins.
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