“It fills the ocean below us, but is not the ocean. The things like fish that you yourself saw, I believe—”
“I saw spirals of blue light, more like eels than fish.”
“Yes, well, these came from parts of a larger whole. Like brain cells of a sentience distributed across the group. But still it does not appear to be consciousness as we would recognize it. There is a kind of absence in its cognition, having to do with self-awareness and other-awareness. An absence that makes some suspect that what we are conversing with is part of a larger whole.”
“But what?”
“We don’t know. But there are people who want to find out.”
“Not all of you?”
“Oh no, not at all. There is a … disagreement. A very basic philosophical or religious disagreement. One might call it a dangerous disagreement.”
“Dangerous?” Galileo was apprehensive: “I was hoping you were all past that kind of thing by now.”
She shook her head. “We are human, and so we argue. And this is an argument that could lead to violence.”
Dissent among the Galileans. Well, he already knew that. Hera had kidnapped him, and Ganymede had rammed his ship into the Europans; he should not be surprised. It was people changing their nature that would have been surprising. “Actual violence?”
“People are much more likely to kill each other over ideas than over food,” she said. “It’s very clear in the historical record, a statistical fact.”
“Maybe,” Galileo ventured, “when food is secure, the grasp for certainty moves elsewhere.”
“Certainty,” she scoffed. “In the manifold of manifolds!” And she laughed.
As if to illustrate her point, out of the glass antechamber appeared Hera herself, ivory-armed and magnificent. She was trailed by her Swiss guard equivalent, a dozen bruisers even bigger than she.
Now she approached Galileo, shaking her head as if at a child who did not comprehend his transgression.
“You again!” he said sharply, angered by this look. “What is it this time?”
Then a loud group of locals spilled out of the next antechamber over. Hera saw them and said, “This rabble is trying to keep us from joining you, here in a public space. One moment—”
She and her gang ran at the Europans, and a brawl began. In Venice such a thing would have been dangerous, with knives pulled from sleeves. Here it was just shoving and shouting, and the occasional flailing roundhouse. Hera shouted, “You’ll be charged with assault! I hope you’ll get exile!”
“You’re the one who made the assault,” one of them shouted, and appealed to Aurora: “We did what we could. She stops at nothing.”
The mathematician regarded them without expression. “Then let her speak.”
Hera returned to Galileo’s side. “Take the entangler,” she said to her people, gesturing at the pewter box. She said to Aurora, “I’m the one who should have it, and you know it.” One of Hera’s guards went to the box and picked it up. Then without warning Hera grabbed Galileo by the arm, lifted him off his feet, and walked with him toward the glass closets, leaving a rear guard behind to protect her retreat.
“Kidnapping again?” Galileo inquired caustically, struggling to free himself from her grasp. It was galling that he could not even slow her down.
She rolled her eyes as she set him down and dragged him with her, forcing him to step fast. “Those drugs Aurora gives you,” she said emphatically, “and the lessons, they do more than teach you our math. They change you. By the time you’re done, you won’t remember what I showed you before! Do you remember that? Do you remember how they burned you?”
“Of course I do! I’m not going to forget that. How could learning more mathematics cause anyone to forget that?”
“By changing you so that even if you do recall it, you lose your understanding of why it happened.”
“I never knew why it happened!” Galileo shouted, suddenly furious. He took a big swing at her, which she easily avoided. “I’m still trying to figure that out!” He swung again and caught her on the arm, but it was like hitting a tree. “Everything I’ve done since you showed it to me only seems to bring it closer! I’ve been destroyed. And it can get worse. That’s precisely one of the reasons I want to learn more!” And he yanked his arm free of her grasp.
She took it again, with a grip like an eagle’s. “You don’t understand. Your fate doesn’t have to do with the math and the physical theories. It has to do with your situation at home, and with you yourself—your nature or your characteristic responses. The kind of conclusions you draw, and how you react in a crisis. You are your own problem.“
She pulled him into the glass closet and let him go. Glowering, she poked buttons on the panel next to the door. “I guess I have to teach you that part, just as Aurora taught you physics.”
“But we were working here. They’re making an attempt to contact the thing inside Europa, and I was helping them.”
“That’s none of your business. And there are people who think they understand the thing already. Including Ganymede, in fact. He and his followers are the ones causing the problems.”
“How so?”
“They still consider the Europan thing a danger to us, a mortal danger.”
“But why? How could that be?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters!”
“Not to you it doesn’t. What matters for you is doing what you did in your time without getting burned for it. Do you want to be burned?”
“No! I just don’t see how me knowing more can change that.”
She shook her head, red-cheeked and still breathing hard, looking down at him with a grim expression. As they left the moving closet, now on the ground, she said, “You understand nothing. Especially your self. All that celebrated ceaseless activity of yours, performed in ignorance.”
“I know as much as any man! Indeed more than most. You know less than I about how the world works, even with fourteen centuries’ advantage. You have nothing to teach me.”
“There is no hatred like that of ignorance for knowledge,” she quoted him sardonically. “Especially self-knowledge. Do you want to be burned or not?”
“Not.”
“Come along, then.” She made a brief gesture at a new group of her retainers, waiting beside a long low boat, like a gondola. From behind them, the guard with the teletrasporta ran up and put it beside Hera.
“I need to join the grand council on Callisto,” Hera told Galileo as she gestured at the gondola. “The transit will take several hours. You will come along, and we can talk. There are some things you need to see in your life.”
“Spare me,” he said.
She wheeled and glared at him, face inches from his. “I will not spare you! I’ll put you through your life as many times as it takes.”
“As it takes for what?”
“For you to get it right.”
This was sounding bad.
For what has one been except what one has felt, and how shall there be any recognition unless one feels it anew?
—GEORGES POULET
HER RETAINERS HELPED HIM into the gondola. He sat next to the teletrasporta, Hera got in at the back, and after an acceleration so rapid the bow lifted out of the water, they threaded a course through slower boats and docked with a thump at a dead end in a side canal. Here another vertically sliding closet lifted them and the box right up to the ice ceiling and through it (in a brief burst of pure aquamarine) to the surface of Europa, under the huge sphere of Jupiter’s garish banded yellows. Hera then picked up the entangler and led Galileo to a craft shaped like a seedpod, no bigger than their gondola had been, but enclosed. She instructed him to strap himself into a large cushioned chair, snapping some of his restraints herself, then likewise strapping herself in. “One moment,” she said brusquely, and then he was pressed down into his chair, and they were slightly vibrating. Looking through a little window in their room he saw they were ris
ing into space.
“Where are we going?”
“To Callisto, as I said. I have to attend the council meeting concerning this Europan creature, so I don’t really have time for you now, but when I heard what you were doing here it seemed all too possible you would wreck your life, and much that followed it as well. So right now it’s war on multiple fronts.”
She tapped at her console for a while, and suddenly their ship disappeared, so that it looked as if they sat in chairs on a small floor that was free-floating in space. They flew at great speed, judging by the shifting of Jupiter and the stars, although there was no other sensation of movement. Galileo, surprised by the view, observed the great gas giant with a new set of mathematical tools in his mind that allowed him to see the rich phyllotaxic folding of the convolutions at the band borders as illustrations of fluid dynamics in five dimensions at least, making the vast ball’s surface more textured than ever.
Hera too stared at it; the view seemed to calm her. Her breathing slowed, her cheeks and upper arms grew less red. Galileo, watching her as well as the Jovian system and the stars, thought about what he had learned during the math lesson.
He saw her fall asleep. She napped sitting up for quite a while. It was the first time Galileo had seen any of the Jovians asleep, and he watched her slack face with the same close attention he had given to the math tutorial. It was a human face, and as such, mesmerizing. For a while he too may have slept, because the next thing he knew she was tapping away at her console, and all the bands of the great planet had changed aspect. Its lit part was a crescent now, the terminator a clean curving line, the gibbous dark part very dark indeed. They were closer to it than Galileo could remember ever having been, so that it took up the space of perhaps a hundred Earthly moons, filling a big portion of the sky. The lit crescent, an astonishing arc of banded unctuous oranges, seemed to cut into the black sky from some more vivid universe.
“Are we nearing Callisto?” he asked, looking around in the black starry night. No moons were obvious to him.
“No,” she said. “It’s still out there a long way. A few hours.”
The crescent was becoming visibly more slender. They had to be moving at great speed.
“How is your ship invisible?”
“It’s not. The walls can be made into screens, and the image of what you would see if you were looking out through the ship is projected on them.”
Very great speed. The crescent became like an immense bow, about twice the size that Orion would need, narrow and richly colorful, laminated in the wrong direction, pulled back hard as if to let off a shot. It shrank toward darkness symmetrically from top and bottom. With a final blink it was gone. The sun was now completely eclipsed, and they were looking at the dark side of Jupiter. With none of the four Galileans in sight, it had to be that the dark side of the great planet was lit only by starlight, and perhaps Saturn if it were up there among the stars they could see. In any case it was a dim light—but not nothing, not blackness. He could still make out the latitudinal bands, even the taffeta folding of their borders. Now that the light was so subtle, he could see that the surface of the planet was not a solid liquid, like oil paint, but rather cloud tops of varying opacity or transparency, shaded a thousand different combinations of dim sulphur and orange, cream and brick. In places the surface was fluted like the underside of a cloud on certain windy days; elsewhere geysers spurted out into the space above the cloud tops, forming lines of puffs that paralleled the bands and were carried off east or west. He thought he could even see the movement of the clouds, the powerful winds of Jupiter.
Hera yawned; she had seen this marvel before. “We have time to do some work on you and your Italian existence. We might as well use it.”
“I don’t see why,” Galileo objected, feeling uneasy. “You didn’t want me learning more mathematics.”
“No, but now that you have, you should understand the context. You need to know your life. It doesn’t go away, so you either understand it or remain disabled by forgetfulness and repression.”
“So you are Mnemosyne,” Galileo said. “The muse of memory.”
“I was a mnemosyne.” She gave him a metallic helmet that resembled Aurora’s, or even his own celatone. “Here,” she said. “Put this on.”
Tentatively he placed it on his head. “What does this one do?”
“It helps you to return. Pay attention!”
And she tapped him on the head.
His mother was screaming at his father. Sunday morning, getting ready for church—a regular time for her to yell. Galileo was hiding his head under his Sunday shirt as he put it on. Not pulling it on, staying covered by it, apart.
“What do you mean be quiet? How can I be quiet when I have to go begging more credit from the landlord and the grocer and everyone? What would we do for a roof over our head if I didn’t spend every day spinning and carding and sewing until I go blind, while you moon over your lute!”
“I make a living,” Vincenzio protested. His defense was weak with long use: “I had an appointment at court, and may again soon. I teach classes, I have private students, commissions, articles, songs—”
“Songs? That’s right! You play your lute and I pay the bills. I work so you can strum your lute in the yard and dream about being a courtier. You dream and we suffer for it. Five children going ragged in the street, and you sit there playing your lute! I hate the sound of it!”
“It’s my living! What, would you steal my living? Would you steal my hands, my tongue?”
“A living you call this? Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio!”
Vincenzio sighed. He turned helplessly to his wide-eyed children, watching this scene as always. “Let’s go,” he begged her. “We’ll be late for mass.”
In the church, Galileo looked around. They did appear a bit shabbier than many of the others there. His uncle was a textile merchant, like so many in Florence, and provided his mother with piecework, and with his workers’ mistakes. While the priest sang the parts of the service set to music, his mother shot his father a black look that Vincenzio tried to ignore. It was not infrequent that she would loudly whisper something poisonously obscene right in church.
One of the acolytes lit a lantern suspended from the rafters overhead, and when he was done the lantern was slightly swinging on its chain. Back and forth, back and forth. Watching it closely, it seemed to Galileo that no matter how big or small an arc the lantern swung through, it took the same amount of time to do it. As the swings grew shorter, they seemed to slow down accordingly. He put his thumb to his other wrist, and pressed down on his pulse to count and see. Yes; no matter the size of the arc, the lantern took the same time to pass through it. That was interesting. There was a little ping in it that made him forget everything else.
He was in space, flying some distance from the dark banded ball that was the back side of Jupiter. He shuddered at the disorientation.
Hera had been studying her console, it appeared. Seeing his thoughts.
“Do you know what happens to a boy who sees his father consistently abused by his mother?” she said.
Galileo could not help but laugh. “Yes, I think I do.”
“I don’t mean, did you experience it. Obviously you did. I mean, did you ever consider what it did to you? How it impacted your later relations?”
“I don’t know.” Galileo turned his head away from her. The helmet was heavy on his head, and pricked at several places on his scalp. “Who can say? I never liked my mother, I know that. She was mean to all of us.”
“This has effects, of course. In a patriarchy, a woman dominating a man seems unnatural. A joke at best, at worst a crime. So, you disliked and feared your mother, and you lost respect for your father. You vowed it would never happen to you. You might even have wanted revenge. All the rest of your life was thereby affected. You were determined to be stronger than anyone. You were determined to stay clear of women, maybe hurt them if you could.”
“I had lots
of women.”
“You had sex with lots of women. It’s not what I’m talking about. Sex can be a hostile act. How many women did you have sex with?”
“Two hundred and forty-eight.”
“And so you were free of them, you thought, while still having heterosexual sex. It was a common behavior, easy to see and understand. But the psychology of your time was even more primitive than your physics. Temperaments, the four humors—”
“Those are very evident,” Galileo objected. “You see them in people.”
“You do. Were you often melancholy?”
“I had all the humors in full. Sometimes overfull. The balance sloshed around, depending on my circumstances. As a result I often slept poorly. Sometimes not at all. Loss of sleep was my main problem.”
“And sometimes you were melancholy.”
“Yes, sometimes. Black melancholy. My vital spirits are strong, and sometimes the humors are overproduced, and some get burnt and ascend to the brain in a vapor, rather than a liquid as they should. It’s these catarrhs that lead to abnormal moods. Particularly burnt black bile, that’s the catarrh that leads to a melancholy adust.”
“Yes.” She regarded him. “But it had nothing to do with your mother.”
“No.”
“It had nothing to do with your fear of women.”
“Not at all. I loved women!”
“You had sex with women. It’s not the same thing.”
“There was Marina,” Galileo said, then, hesitating: “I loved Marina. At least at first.”
“Let’s see about that. Let’s see how it began, and how it ended.”
“No—”
But she touched the side of the helmet.
He was at Sagredo’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, waiting for the party girls to show. Sagredo always invited some. Galileo liked all the different girls. Their variety had become something he lusted after—how each was big or small, dark or light, bold or diffident—but mainly, just different. As difference was what he had, difference was what he liked; for when it came to sex, people learned to like what they had. He kept count of them in his head, and could remember them all. There were so many kinds of beauty. So now he listened to Valerio play the lute, full of Sagredo’s wine and the food from the feast, and waited to see what the world would bring to him.