The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, “The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?”
The stranger reexamined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.
“Ah. Try it again,” the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. “Take another look.”
Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side; III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.
Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. Moon I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black—or so it seemed—because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.
The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity; I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended on it, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones—of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terra-cotta and bloodred, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter—all piled on all, one color pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.
The overlayering of so many colors made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.
He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. There on the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.
He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.
On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.
“What’s this?” the stranger exclaimed angrily.
“You know what this is, Ganymede,” said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, “Welcome to Io; you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your traveling companion.”
She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.
“You stole our entangler,” Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. “What are you trying to do, start a war?”
Hera glared at him. “As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, and the factions are at each others’ throats.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” said Ganymede coldly.
As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation, suspiciously defensive to Galileo, was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plow blade. “This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!”
“You’re the one who kidnaps him,” Hera replied. “I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.”
Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort. His face was flushed a dark red. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.”
“No!”
The people standing behind Hera now moved forward en masse. They were dressed in clothes similar to hers, were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favor.
Hera nodded at them and said to Ganymede, “Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.”
“I can’t allow this!”
“It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.”
“This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.”
Hera said, “We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and so we decide what happens here.” She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.
Hera said to Galileo. “Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?”
“Not quite,” Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry …
With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, “Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.”
She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and kept it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her, interested to hear what she might say. He already knew that she was going to get what she wanted, no matter what. He had seen willful women before.
SHE WAS AT LEAST A HAND TALLER than he was, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again. After that, he held on to her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy)—calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.
“You are well named,” he murmured.
“Thank you,” she said. “We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.”
When they reached the far arc of the little temple, she paused. He let go of
her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on—a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.
Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. “This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that steaming crack in the side of the shield.” She pointed. “Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.”
Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. “It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.”
“It is hot. In many places, if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.”
“Tides?” Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. “But surely there are no oceans here.”
“By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.” She grimaced expressively. “We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.”
Galileo struggled to imagine a world regurgitating itself, molten rock flowing inside to outside, then sinking down to be melted and thrown up again.
“There isn’t a single drop of water left,” Hera went on, “nor any of the other light and volatile elements you are used to on Earth.”
“What is it made of, then?”
“Silicates, mostly. A kind of rock, mostly melted. And a lot of sulphur. That’s the lightest element not to have been burnt off, and being the lightest, it tends not to sink but to froth on the surface, as you see.”
“Yes. It looks like burnt sulphur.” He had seen pots of the stuff, bubbling in an alembic. He sniffed, but smelled nothing.
“Mostly sulphur, yes, or sulphur salts and sulphur oxides. Here we are near the triple point for sulphur, so it vaporizes when it erupts out of the interior, literally explodes on exposure to the vacuum. It can shoot out of a geyser and land more than fifty miles away.”
“I don’t understand,” Galileo confessed.
“I know.” She gave him a glance. “You are brave to admit it. Although very few people really understand.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“Yes. Well, I’m not the one to tell you the details of the physics or chemistry involved. But I can tell you more about what you have seen here, and the person who brought you here. And why he and his group are acting as they are.”
“I would appreciate that very much,” Galileo said politely. It was always good to have potential alternative sources of patronage; sometimes one could then balance them, or pit them against each other, or otherwise use them to create a differential advantage, a leverage. “You said they brought me to Europa, and we descended into its ocean—it must be a very different world from here, I must say!—and they were hoping to stop others from descending, because that is a forbidden place. But we had something happen. Some kind of encounter. I almost remember; it was like a waking dream. I seem to recall we were somehow … hailed. By something living in the ocean. There was a noise, like wolves howling.”
“There was. Very good. I’m not surprised you remember it, despite the amnestics they gave you. Abreactions fire across the blocked areas by way of similar memories, so being here helps you to recall your previous visits.”
“Visits?”
“What I am surprised at is that Ganymede took you along on that incursion. It may be that he did not know the timing of the Europans’ descent, and had to include you in something that was not meant for you.”
“Ah.”
“I do know he’s been telling you that his group has brought you to our time to advise them on a matter of fundamental importance.”
“It seemed unlikely,” Galileo said with an unconvincing show of modesty.
She smiled briefly. “According to Ganymede, you are the first scientist, and as such, one of the most important people in history. Nevertheless, to ask your advice was not his reason to bring you here.”
“Then what was?”
She shrugged expressively, like a Tuscan would have. “Possibly he felt your presence would help him defend his actions on Europa. No one else on the council wanted to take the responsibility of interfering with the Europans. Ganymede took the position that what they were proposing was a dangerous contamination of a crucial study zone, so that stopping them would be the best scientific practice, and also the safest for humanity. He brought you forward in a prolepsis that he hoped would support that position.”
“Why should my presence matter?” Galileo wondered.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, frowning as she looked at him. “He’s created so many more analepses than anyone else that it’s hard to get a fix on what he is up to. I wonder if he mainly brings you here to change you, to cause you to do what he wants you to do back in your time. Even with the amnestics blocking your conscious memory, you are still changed here. Then again, when he has you here he flaunts his rashness with the entangler, and thus hopes to scare the council. Or perhaps he thinks you bolster his authority, as you are the first scientist. The patron saint of scientists, you might say. Or of Ganymede’s cult, anyway.”
“Archimedes was the first scientist, if you ask me.”
“Maybe so.” She frowned. “There were analeptic intrusions around Archimedes as well, actually. But you are the first modern scientist, the great martyr to science, the one everyone knows and remembers.”
“People don’t remember Archimedes?” Galileo asked incredulously, thinking: martyr?
She frowned. “I’m sure historians do. In any case, you are right to question Ganymede’s stated rationale. He may want your effect here in a prolepsis, or he may be shaping his analepsis by what he exposes you to here.”
Galileo mulled over the terms, which to him came from rhetoric. “A backward displacement?”
“Yes.”
“What year is it here, then?”
“Thirty twenty.”
“Thirty twenty? Three thousand years after Christ?”
“Yes.”
Galileo swallowed involuntarily. “That’s a long time off,” he said at last, trying to be bold. “Coming back to me is indeed an analepsis.” He recalled the stranger’s face in the market, his news of the telescope. From Alta Europa, Ganymede had said that first time. “How does that work? What does it mean?”
Again she frowned. “You are in need of an education in physics, but I am not the one to give it to you. Besides, there is no time. My seizure of his entangler, and of you, will be causing consequences, which may arrive soon to pester us. In the time we have, I want to talk to you about other things. Because now that they have made this analepsis into your time in Italy, it is likely to endure, and it will have effects on all the other temporalities entangled with it. Including your life, among other things. My feeling is that the more you know of the situation, the more you can resist the effects of Ganymede’s intervention. Which makes it safer for us, as our time is then likelier to endure in substantially its current form.”
“You mean it might not?”
“That’s why analepses are so dangerous. There are many t
emporal isotopes, of course, and they are all entangled, and braid together in ways that are impossible to comprehend, really, even if you are a mathematician specialized in temporal physics, to judge by what they say. What you need to know is that time is not simple or laminar, but a manifold of different potentialities that interpenetrate and influence each other. A common image is to think of it as a broad gravel riverbed with many braided channels, with the water running both upstream and downstream at once. The channels are temporal isotopes, and they cross each other, shift and flow, become oxbowed or even dry up, or become deeper and straighter, and so on. This is just an image to help us understand. Others speak of a kelp forest in the ocean, floating this way and that. Any image is inadequate to the reality, which involves all ten dimensions, and is impossible for us to conceptualize. However, to the extent that we understand, we see that your moment represents a big confluence, or a bend, or what have you.”
“So—I am important?”
Her eyebrows shot up; she was amused at him. He recognized the glance, felt he had seen it before. She gestured at the hellish surface gleaming below them. “Do you know how people came to be here?”
“Not at all.”
“Ultimately, we came here by conducting experiments and analyzing their results using mathematics. That is an idea, or a method, if you like, that changed forever the course of human history. And you were the one who had this idea, or invented this method, decisively and publicly, explaining the process so that all could understand it. You are Il Saggiatore, the Experimentalist. The first scientist. And so therefore everywhere, but especially here in the Galilean moons, you are much revered.”
“The Galilean moons?”
“That’s what we call the four big moons of Jupiter.”
“But I named them the Medicean Stars!”
She sighed. “So you did, but as I said to you before, this has always been regarded as a notorious example of science kissing the ass of power. No one but you ever called them that, and since your time very few people have remained interested in the sordid details of your supplications to a potential patron.”