Under the arch of the main door stepped a girl with black hair. In the first seconds of her appearance in the brilliant candlelight Galileo fell under a compulsion.
At first she did not see him. She was laughing at something one of the other girls had said.
What Galileo looked for in female company, beyond sheer difference, was some kind of liveliness. He liked laughing. There were some who were in high spirits during the sexual act, who made it a kind of child’s play, a dance that friends did that made them laugh as well as come—there was some dash to the act, so that the dust in the blood was sent flying, the lanterns sparked, the gilt flaked, the whole world shone as if wet.
Just so this girl seemed to his eye. She had that spark. Her features were not regular, her hair was black as a crow’s, and she had the classic Venice girl’s figure, fish-fed and lush, long-legged and strong. She laughed at her companion as Galileo crossed the room to get closer to her. She had thick eyebrows that almost met over her nose, and beneath them her eyes were a rich brown starred with black radial lines, like stones. Feline grace, high spirits, black hair—then also wide shoulders, a fine neck and collarbones, nice breasts, perfect brown skin, strong arms. Fluid in movement, dancing through the room.
He got in her orbit, among some of her friends that he knew from previous parties, and he was ready and waiting for their jokes about the crazy professor. As he made his sallies against her friends, she saw his regard for her and smiled. Then she reversed the flow of her movement in the room, and before long was at his side, where they could talk under the noise of everyone else. Marina Gamba, she said. Daughter of a merchant who worked on the Riva de’ Sette Martiri; a fish market owner, Galileo gathered. She had lots of sisters and brothers, and did not get along with her mother, so lived with cousins near her parents, on the Calle Pedrocchi, and enjoyed her evenings out. Galileo knew the type perfectly well—fish market girl by day, party girl by night. No doubt illiterate, possibly unable even to add, although if she helped in the market she may have learned that. But she had a shy, sly sideways glance that suggested a wit sharp but not mean. All good. He wanted her.
By the time the party moved upstairs to the palazzo’s altana she was behind him, shoving him up the stairs with friendly pokes to the butt, and at the turn in the stairs, where there was a long window embrasure overlooking the canal, he reached back and pulled her after him. They collided there in a quick groping embrace. She was as bold as one could want, and they never made it up the stairs, moving in stages out to the long gallery fronting the Grand Canal on the second floor, skipping along it to a somewhat private couch at its far end, a couch Galileo knew well, having used it for this purpose before. Possibly she had too. There they could lie together and kiss and fondle under their clothes, which came apart or down in just the right ways. The couch was not quite long enough, but its cushions could be thrown in the corner behind it, and they did that and rolled around on them in a wild tangle. She was good at that, and she laughed at his wild-eyed ardor.
So all was well and more than well, and he had her on his lap riding him naked and most rapturous, when he leaned back into one of Sagredo’s big pillows and encountered one of the many creatures of the house—something small and furry with needlelike teeth, which had been stirred from its sleep and now bit him on the left ear. He roared as quietly as he could, and tried to pull the thing off without losing his ear or the rhythm of the lovemaking with Marina, who it seemed to him had closed her eyes on his distress to focus on her pleasure, which looked to be in its final accelerando. From the corner of his left eye Galileo could not make out exactly what kind of creature it was—perhaps a weasel or fox or baby hedgehog, hopefully not just a rat, but no matter. He turned his head and buried the creature between Marina’s breasts, which were flying up and down so dramatically that he hoped the creature would become interested and transfer its toothy grip. Feeling the creature, Marina opened her eyes and yelped, then laughed and slapped at it, hitting his face instead. He grabbed a breast and pulled her back toward him, while with the other he pulled at the twitching body of the thing. All three of them rolled off the cushions onto the floor, but Marina kept the rhythm going and even redoubled the pace. They both came in the wildness of this, at which point Galileo shouted, “Giovan! Cesco! Come save me from your damned menagerie!”
He managed to detach the animal by holding its snout shut. Feeling this it convulsed free and instantly disappeared, and the two lovers lay there in the bloody afterglow.
“Giovanni! Francesco! Never mind.”
They lay there. Briefly she licked his blood from his neck. She teased him about being the mad professor, in the same way they all did, but then, when they started to make love again, she added a joke about how he might be able use his military compass to calculate the most pleasurable angles their bodies together might form, which made him hoot with laughter.
“Well, why not?” she said, grinning. “They say you have made it so complicated that anything can be calculated. Too many things.”
“What do you mean, too many?”
“That’s what they say, that you larded it down like your big belly here. They say you made it so hard no one can even understand it—”
“What!”
“That’s what they say! They say no one can even understand it, that you have to take a class at the university for a year to learn it, and even then you can’t.”
“That’s a lie! Who says these things?”
“Everyone, of course. They say it’s so complicated that on a battlefield it would be faster to pace out the distances in question than to calculate them using your thing. They say that to use it you’d have to be smarter than Galileo himself, so it’s totally useless.” And she hooted with laughter at his expression, which combined dismay with pride.
“Absurd!” Galileo protested, although it was pleasing to think that people were saying he was too smart for something, even if it was for being sensible. He was also charmed by her insolence, and her knowledge of him and his affairs, not to mention her breasts and her smiling look.
So they laughed as they made love, the finest combination of emotions possible. All without any talk of an arrangement: just laughter. That’s the way it was with a certain kind of Venice girl. At one point, kissing her in the ear, Galileo thought, this is number two hundred and forty-eight, if you have not lost count. Maybe it was a good number to stop at.
At dawn they lay in the window embrasure, looking out at the slightly misting surface of the Grand Canal, calm as a mirror, only creased by the wake of a single gondola; the world turning pink overhead, still dusky blue underneath. In the dawn light she was ravishing, disheveled, relaxed all through her body, which lay pressed against him like a cat’s. Young but not too young. Twenty-one, she said when he asked. Certainly under twenty-five, anyway; and maybe as young as she said.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you?”
“Not yet.”
“You look like you should be hungry all the time,” nudging her hip against his belly. “You’re like a bear.”
“Are bears hungry all the time?”
“I think they must be.”
When they dressed and joined those coming downstairs to break their fast he shoved a little purse of scudi down the front of her blouse and kissed her briefly, saying, “A gift till I see you again,” one of his usual lines, and she said, “Thanks, maestro,” with another little nudge of the hip and a toss of the head to indicate what fun she had had.
On the barge back to Padua, Sagredo and Mercuriale laughed at him. Sagredo, who was coming out to stay at his place for a week, said, “She’s pretty.” Galileo shrugged them off. She was a Venice party girl, a loose woman, but in a Venetian way that was not so much prostitution as it was a kind of extension of Carnivale, and who could object to that. Next time he was in the city he would drop by her neighborhood and look her up. That could be arranged to be sooner rather than later. He could go back in with Sagredo, who was loo
king amused—pleased on his behalf, pleased at the world and its conjunctions. Always sensitive to looks, Galileo now recalled several Marina had given him in the night, from her first glance at him, to her amazed laughter at the little beast attacking them, to her look at their parting—sweet and knowing, smart and kind. Something happened inside him then, something new, unfamiliar, strange. Love fell on him like a wall. Sagredo laughed; he saw it happening.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carnival On Callisto
I was attacked with violent fever attended by extreme cold; and taking to my bed, I made my mind up that I was sure to die. Nature in me was utterly debilitated and undone; I had not strength enough to fetch my breath back if it left me; and yet my brain remained as clear and strong as it had been before my illness. Nevertheless, although I kept my consciousness, a terrible old man used to come to my bedside, and make as though he would drag me by force into a huge boat he had with him. This made me call out, and Signor Giovanni Gaddi, who was present, said, “The poor fellow is delirious, and has only a few hours to live.” His fellow, Mattio Franzesi, remarked: “He has read Dante, and in the prostration of his sickness this apparition has appeared to him.”
—The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini
ON THE TERRACE IN BELLOSGUARDO, Galileo lay sprawled over the tiles. Cartophilus had shoved blankets under him, and laid blankets over him, but he still lay there awkwardly, seemingly paralyzed, chest rising and falling in shallow irregular breaths. His feet and hands felt cold. La Piera came out with a jug of mulled wine.
“Can you get any of this in him?”
Cartophilus shook his head. “We’ll just have to wait.”
They floated among the stars, just Galileo and Hera, with dark Jupiter majestically scrolling beside them. Ahead of them a white half-moon, covered with a black craquelure, grew visibly larger. Galileo shook his head hard, shocked by such a vivid immersion in his seldom-remembered past. Marina …
“From that point on you saw her as often as you could?” Hera said, looking at the pad in her lap.
“That’s right,” he said.
“You had an understanding.”
“Yes.”
“You were in love.”
“I suppose so.”
It wasn’t a feeling he remembered very well. It hadn’t lasted long. But now it was right there in him, hard to deny. “Yes. But listen—you sent me back into my past, but—” He gestured at the teletrasporta, on the floor between them. “Where was the one in Italy? Where was Cartophilus?”
She regarded him calmly. “These experiences aren’t like your fiery alternative, where the entangler was in fact on hand, and I sent you back into yourself at that time. With the mnemonic helmet here, I don’t send you back into the past, but into your own mind. Everything that happens to us with a strong enough emotional charge is remembered in full. But that ability to record events turns out to be much stronger than our ability to recall them at will. Recollection is the weak link. So, I was a mnemosyne, yes. It’s a kind of doctor for the mind. Perhaps also what your priests do in confession. A kind of therapist. With the help of the mnemonic helmet I can locate memories in your brain and cause them to abreact in you.”
“You caused me to remember?”
“Yes.”
He touched her celatone. “All your machines … they make you into a sorceress.”
“Brain scanning and stimulation is not that hard. Let’s go back to Marina. You spent ten years with her and had three children with her, but you never married her, and when you moved to Florence, you left her behind.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why you did that?”
“We fought.”
“Do you know why you fought?”
“No.”
She was staring at him, and he looked away uncomfortably. He saw that one of the Jovian moons, either Ganymede or Callisto, was now a large half-moon. “We arrive, it seems.”
“Yes, I have to attend to the ship. Then we’ll continue. It’s important. Your mind is parcellated into many little archipelagoes. It’s partly you, partly the structure of feeling in your time. But you’re going to have to put yourself together, like a puzzle, if you want to live. Which means you’ll have to remember the pieces that matter.”
“How can I forget them?” Galileo complained. “Why do you think I can’t sleep at night?”
But now she was focused on piloting their craft toward the looming moon, running her forefingers over the pad in her lap. Again Galileo felt the pressure against him, pushing him into his chair. Ahead the moon grew even more quickly. To their right and behind them, space glowed and then seemed to split in a great arc, as if a red blade were slicing into the black firmament—a crescent thin as could be, but immense in circumference. The lit side of Jupiter was coming back into view. The crescent thickened quickly, revealing the latitudinal bands, which made it look like a piece of brocade. The whole great ball was shrinking perceptibly, although not as fast as the half-moon ahead of them was growing, which of course made sense in terms of perspective.
“This is Callisto?” His Moon IV had often seemed the brightest of the four.
“No, this is Ganymede. Our Ganymede’s home world, as you might have guessed. He and his followers came from the big city there, before they were exiled.”
The moon Ganymede bloomed in front of them; they were going to pass over the sunlit half of it. “That’s the city there, in that crater.” She pointed. “Memphis Facula. The dark area around it is called the Galileo Regio, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know.”
Galileo frowned at the jab, though in fact he was pleased. “Will we stop there?”
“No, we’re just passing by. We’re using Ganymede for a redirect and some sling. See there, the big star out there? That’s Callisto.”
They shot just over the surface of bright Ganymede. It was big and rocky, lined with an orthogonal crackle almost everywhere, also pockmarked with many round impact scars, like a smallpox survivor. There was an infinite litter of rocks and boulders scattered over the lined plains, which were in some places very dark, in other places a blasted brilliant white, though the landscape seemed basically level. Long strips of different kinds of terrain, lined or smooth or rocky, were laid beside and over each other like gallery carpets.
“The white areas are called palimpsests,” Hera said. “Now we’re over Osiris, that’s the big crater with the white marks radiating from it. And now we’re coming over Gilgamesh.”
“Why was Ganymede exiled from his world?” Galileo asked.
Her expression grew sad and forbidding. “He is a charismatic, the leader of a sect with a lot of power on Ganymede. The sect did something forbidden by Ganymede’s government. Strange to say, I think they made an incursion into the Ganymedean ocean. This is the biggest of the four moons, the biggest moon in the solar system, in fact, and it has the biggest ocean too, much bigger than Europa’s. The ice layer here is thicker too. So—something happened down there. Ganymede was at that time the Ganymede, a kind of religious leader, so that made it especially shocking, that he would initiate such a transgression.”
“You don’t know what happened?”
“No. Afterward I was assigned to be his mnemosyne, when he and his group were exiled to Io, but after a few sessions he refused to continue working with me, and the judgment has not been enforced. He has to be careful around me because of that, and pretends even to accommodate me, as when I joined you during the trip into Europa’s ocean. But in truth he keeps his distance.” She shook her head, watching the big moon gloomily as they angled swiftly away from it, then shot into the night toward Callisto. “Maybe he got somebody killed down there, or encountered something like what we ran into inside Europa. Whatever happened, he must have come to think it was a bad idea to make the incursion, judging by the way he tried to stop the Eu-ropans from doing the same.”
“So you think he found a creature in Ganymede’s ocean? Given there is one inside Europa,
it seems possible.”
“Yes, it does. But the government in Memphis Facula says there isn’t anything down there. None of the Ganymede’s people has ever said anything about their incursion, and he refused to work with me, as I said. He and his circle have moved to a more distant massif on Io.”
“Which is your world.”
“Yes. But it is the world of all exiles.”
“So you did not cure him.”
“No. In fact I may have made him worse. He hates me now.”
Again Galileo was surprised. “I will never hate you,” he said without intending to.
“Are you sure?” She glanced at him. “You sound like you’re on your way sometimes.”
“Not at all. To be helped is to offer a kind of love.”
She didn’t agree. “That feeling is often just the displacement we call transference. Which then leads to other reactions. In the end it’s lucky if you’re even civil afterward. That’s not what mnemonic therapy is about.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Maybe it’s just that I’m not a very good mnemosyne.”
“I can’t believe that either. Maybe your clients aren’t very good.” This made her laugh, briefly, but he persisted. “Surely living out here must make you all a little bit mad? Never to sit in a garden, never to feel the sun on your neck? We were never born for this,” waving at the stars surrounding them. “Or at least, it is only night here. Never to experience the day—you must all be at least a little bit insane.”
She pondered this. They flew through the stars and black space, Ganymede receding behind them, crescent Jupiter still bulking to one side, but shrinking—as small as Galileo had ever seen it, perhaps only ten times the size of his moon.