Galileo's Dream

  Hera said, “Aurora’s people have captured Ganymede and his group. She’s getting messages from Jupiter itself, she says, and because of them, she wants to take Ganymede physically up there, to Jupiter.”

  “To Jupiter? But why?”

  “That’s what I want your help to find out. At this point you appear to have a better understanding with Aurora than anyone else,” shooting a sharp glance at him. “All she’ll say to me is that we need to hurry if we want to be part of it. I thought you would want to be here, and as you had disappeared, I went to see.”

  “I’m glad you did. It was good to see you there.” This was true beyond his ability to explain, even to himself.

  She nodded and led him to her ship, which was where they had left it, on the ice outside the gate of Rhadamanthys. He climbed up after her and strapped himself into his chair. This place was like a room in his mind now, a closet where many memories from his past were housed, along with the conversations with Hera. Here he had seen the dark side of Jupiter, and its new crescent slicing into the starry black.

  She tapped at her pad and said, “It seems you were right about the breakout of storms. Jupiter, or whatever lives in Jupiter, is upset. Aurora says we need to let it know that the attack on Europa was an aberration, a criminal act that we abhor. She says we must go there to make that clear. It’s responding to her now, and she says it appears to want to contact the mind of the one responsible for the …”

  “For the damage,” Galileo suggested.

  “Yes.” She shuddered, tapped on her pad, and the ship rose until they were pressed back hard into their chairs. “I guess it can do what it wants with him.”

  “It might kill him.”

  “So be it.”

  “It might kill all of us.”

  “I know. I can send you back if you want.” She gestured at the box of her teletrasporta, there between them on the floor of the cabin.

  “Not yet.”

  On the window screen he could see that other ships were also rising over the now ruddy curve of Europa, silver pips surrounding them above and below. Hera spoke at speed to her unseen interlocutors. He saw a new crater wall that looked as though it were blanketed by diamond dust; this was where Ganymede’s ship had crash-landed, presumably. All the ships were staying well away from the hole, which still spewed a faint talcum into space—not at speed, as with the sulphur geysers of Io, but as if the planet were breathing out frost on a cold morning. Hopefully it was not its last breath.

  Galileo was thrown forward against his restraints by an abrupt deceleration. Their viewscreen showed that they had been docked by another ship so alike in appearance that it seemed to be the image of theirs in a mirror. Hera was both talking and tapping at her pad. Galileo felt or heard the antechamber doors opening and shutting. The other ship pulled away.

  “To Jupiter,” Hera said.

  A sharp acceleration up. On the screen Jupiter lay ahead of them, spotted like a pox victim. Poor young Ferdinando had looked like that in 1626. The rest of their little fleet was nowhere to be seen. After a period of silent flight, heading up to the hectic sphere, now more awesome than ever, Galileo said, “Can you give me the tutorial that tells me what happened between my time and yours? Something compressed? Because I think I need to know.”

  “Yes.” She handed him her celatone. “It will go fast. It will be a sum over histories, as it is called, showing you many potentialities at once, in the braided stream format. It will all come on you in a synaptic bloom. Those can be confusing, and give you a headache.”

  Galileo put the heavy helmet on his skull. Marina’s face—the old dragon—a ball falling through space in a swift curve—

  Then there it was. Voices speaking in Latin overlapped in his head, as if several Plutarchs spoke at the same time, but mostly it was an instantaneous flood of images. Galileo was on the Earth and even in it. He was everywhere. He looked, he listened, but more than anything else he felt the ferocious tempests in Europe after his time, felt how the early advances in math and physics that he had learned from Aurora, so beautiful and inspiring, were somehow intertwined and complicit with a continuous tale of war and spoilation. It didn’t have to be that way, and there were fragile strands in which it seemed not to have happened, but the main broad channel of history was filled with blood. Humanity’s increasing power over nature meant more powerful weapons, of course, along with more powerful medicines. Populations bloomed, the whole world was explored and settled, the primitive peoples killed off, those less primitive enslaved or conquered and turned into client states of the European powers. Even Italy coalesced into a single state, as Machiavelli had so much desired, although late in the imperial moment and at a point where their only colony was poor Abyssinia. But none of that mattered. All over the world, newly growing populations were at each others’ throats—fighting, killing, dying. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was carved up entirely into industrial empires; people were enslaved in factories and cities. Galileo felt their lives: not one in ten of them even tended a garden. “They live like ants,” he groaned.

  In the next period, the wars between empires grew massive—every part of civilization so mechanized, cruel, and powerful, that a point came where entire nations of people were gathered up and fed into roaring furnaces and destroyed. Billions died. Sickened, appalled, Galileo watched on with a shrunken heart as all nature was then in effect fed to the furnaces to feed a rapacious humanity that quickly rebounded from the deaths and became superabundant again, like an infestation of maggots, a sporulating mass of suffering beasts. In such conditions, war and pestilence were constant, no matter the progress in mathematics and technology. Total war was more the rule than the exception; army against army was rare. Marking all the potentialities and mocking all their potential, innumerable natural and human catastrophes broke out all across the time streams, until in Galileo’s mind the Earth appeared not unlike the maelstrom-strewn face of Jupiter, a planet red with blood. It came to the point where it was an open question how much of humanity could survive—and all this in a supposedly scientific world, with continual advances in their technologies and their potential physical control over nature. It was horrifying to witness, as if a race between creation and destruction had both sides succeeding at once and accelerating all the while, creating in their conjunction something unexpected and monstrous.

  Galileo moaned as he experienced all this, as it blossomed all at once and entire in his memory, something he always seemed to have known. The inherent anger, the depth of hatred, the potential for evil; he had always known, always seen it. At any point the monsters could break out. Again he saw that he was being shown not just one single history but a superposition of many of them, following the same metapattern but all collapsing into chaos to one degree or another, so that he was being flooded with many bad potentialities at once. Some were bad, others were horrific, a few were stark apocalyptic.

  He saw further, saw then that the centuries after those were always a miserable desperate struggle, in which a much reduced and demoralized humanity tried to get by in the wreckage of the world. Having ruined so much, being so many fewer, and yet also becoming quickly more powerful, also more chastened and realistic, people began patching things up. Some recoveries went better than others. Nature itself was robust, and its harrowed surviving forms proliferated as always. For humanity, it was slower and less steady. So much had been lost; Galileo felt in his stomach the iron ball of despair that had dragged down every single version of these generations’ efforts. Shattered, traumatized, frightened, they did what they could. Science itself proved as robust as any other living survivor, as tough as some jungle vine spreading through the tropics. A new paradigm, born of exhaustion as much as hope, led them into an array of emergency landscape restorations. Centuries of various duration told of a dogged and heroic effort to rebuild some minimal scaffolding for the future. It was all done for the future. A human civilization that was now aware of the dangers that
the extinction of any species posed for all of them did what it could to restore the natural fauna and flora of the Earth, and the underlying chemistry of the ocean and air, so badly poisoned. Here they were aided by the fecundity of life, its resilience; and in this era science finally was directed entirely at the problem of restitution, and put foremost in humanity’s judgment of its efforts. Now it seemed that there was a strong channel in these braiding streams that ran clear toward something healthy. In these worlds some of the huge menagerie of extinct species were returned, reconstituted or engineered from what germs and seeds remained of them.

  After that he saw the slow restoration of Earth, and even sometimes the return of humans to space. They had been there briefly before, in the midst of the wars, when it had meant little or nothing; now their launch into the solar system was a burst toward fresh starts, as all kinds of groups went out to start anew on Mars, in the asteroids, around Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. This was their Accelerando, bursting away from Earth like a seedpod—people and potentialities everywhere expanding outward in what looked like Fibonacci spirals.

  By this time all the histories looked much alike. Tiny moons were made into little worlds, the big planets altered toward something like gardened new Earths. As their powers grew, ventures were made into new dimensions, only partly understood, which then led them to the control of truly vast new sources of energy. The two outermost gas giants were destroyed to power thrusts into the entangled manifolds, including the technology that allowed analeptic introjections, the shift of consciousness and effective action backward in time. The idea to try changing some of their pasts, it seemed to Galileo, was born out of the trauma of the nightmare humankind had earlier unleashed on itself and the world. The hope was for restitution. If the past could be changed, it was possible that an amount of suffering and extinction beyond all telling might be averted, and humanity spared the cataclysm of its earlier self. Not only restitution, then, but redemption. But even that was very much in doubt.

  Galileo came to in Hera’s little ship. They were a finger or two closer to Jupiter, it seemed. He wiped the tears from his eyes and rubbed his face hard, feeling much as he had after the vision of his fiery alternative. The whole world put to the stake. It seemed he could taste the ashes in his mouth.

  “The overall course of events,” he said to Hera, trying to hold his voice steady, “reminds me of one of my old experiments, where I placed two inclined planes in the shape of a V. However low the ball dropped, it rose back up to that same level. After all the years, and with all your powers, you’ve only just managed to get back up to the level where you started to fall.”

  “Where we started to fall,” Hera corrected him grimly. “It’s all one manifold, remember? It’s all happening perpetually.”

  This Galileo still could not grasp in his feelings, however, no matter how much he understood the mathematics involved—which was more than she did, probably. But she seemed to accept the paradoxical wholeness and multiple flows of time and history. She accepted the nonlocality, the fractured interweaving of potentialities, collapsing in and out of being in a continuous dance of past and future, a complex vector of c time and e time and antichronos, moments of being flickering in the triple wave.

  “No wonder Ganymede tried to change things,” he said.

  “Yes. But he may have tried too hard, and made things worse. In a way that you must be very familiar with.”

  There was a light clang from below them. A small group of people in silver space suits entered Hera’s command room, carrying someone who was in a suit like theirs but which was rigid, it appeared, so that they carried its occupant by the elbows. Behind the faceplate of the rigid suit’s helmet, Ganymede’s sweaty hatchet face glared out at them. His spittle dotted the inner surface of his faceplate, and he was still talking, though they could hear nothing of what he said.

  His captors took off their helmets. One of them was Aurora, her face now flushed, so that she looked younger to Galileo than she had on Europa, perhaps forty or fifty; a woman in her prime, mature and alive. Galileo was surprised to see such a transformation, and wondered if she came from some different temporal isotope, an oxbow in which she was literally younger. But she appeared to recognize him, and in fact came over and gave him a brief hug. Like all the rest of them, she was considerably taller than he was.

  “You,” Hera said to the imprisoned Ganymede. “Be prepared to face the Jovian, if you can. We’re taking you to it.”

  Ganymede spoke again, but made not a sound. Hera slapped his chest and suddenly he could be heard.

  “—think it will notice our presence?”

  “It already has. Be ready to explain yourself.”

  Ganymede was then strapped onto one of the chairs behind Galileo’s, his suit still rigid, his helmet left on his head.

  There was a silence; no one knew what to say. Hera made the craft seem transparent again, and they flew toward Jupiter fully exposed to the sight of its awful metamorphosis.

  The gas giant now occupied about a third of the black sky. It was so massive it was beginning to look like a plane rather than a sphere—a world they were falling onto—a god they now confronted, like mosquitoes hovering before a poxy moon face. The myriad new vortices had disrupted the huge surface so thoroughly that the heretofore obvious latitudinal bands were getting hard to make out. The once-beautiful planet had become a great plain of boils, a choleric ocean of maelstroms.

  “Where will you go?” Galileo asked Hera.

  She shrugged and looked over at Aurora, who was staring at Jupiter as if in a trance. They all watched her as she regarded it.

  Finally Aurora said, “Head into the Great Red Spot.”

  Hera said, “Can you still tell which one it is?”

  “Yes.”

  As before in his transits with Hera, the ship’s progress appeared slow.

  “We look like a sperm headed for the egg,” Aurora said at one point. “I wonder if we will be fertile? And what might be born of it?”

  “Are you in communication with Jupiter itself?” Galileo asked her.

  “Yes, or what lives in it. But only in the same way we were in communication with the Europan sentience. The exchange is mathematical, and seems to indicate our interlocutor exists in other manifolds, so that this is a somewhat weak interaction for it. For those reasons, or others, we are having trouble establishing any system to convey meaning.”

  “How did you know it wanted us to come up to it?”

  “A kind of geometrical schematic. And then there were changes in Ganymede’s ships that allowed us to capture them. We are being drawn there by logical inference, you might say. A tractor beam of logical inferences.”

  Galileo said to her, “Can you give me some more of the learning drug that you gave me during the tutorials?”

  She nodded, never taking her eyes from Jupiter. “I was thinking the same thing myself. Do you think it’s wise?”

  “Why not,” Galileo said. Anything to get the taste of your ashes out of my mouth, he didn’t say. She handed him a tiny pill, which he swallowed dry. He wondered what effect it would have on her, augmented in her mentation as she already was by her machine earrings. He realized he had no idea what might be going on in her head, what kind of creature she was, and she was their leader now.

  Time passed. A protraction of mind. Galileo’s thoughts began to race and bloom, to sing in their polyphonic fugue. He watched the godlike planet with its storm-racked surface slowly fill their entire sky. Space was now a black velvet ring bordering an immense mottled red plane. When Galileo looked behind his chair, he saw that the black was a dome, starry as before, but everything was now obscured by a flickering indigo mist, as if they flew within a giant spark.

  They homed in on one of the biggest of the many red spots. The original, apparently. From where they were now, the texture of the Great Red Spot was much more articulated, revealing that it was not flat but rather an immense broad dome raised up from the surface o
f the planet, marked by finer and finer turbulences. Smaller whirlpools were still visible outside the great red one, some spinning clockwise like it and raised up like boils, others spinning counterclockwise and forming depressions like whirlpools. All these phenomena seemed to Galileo to be elaborations of the simplest forms. They were circles spun hard, until under the impetus of irregularities and each other they became elliptical shapes, spitting out colorful streamers at their edges. These shot away in parabolic paths, slowed in the resistance of gas clouds of umber and sulphur, then spiraled up into new red circles of their own, the characteristic eddying repeated across all the scales visible.

  Hera was absorbed in a conversation with Aurora. Galileo got up and went over to Ganymede, looked into his helmet. Ganymede recognized him and looked startled at his presence.

  “You have misunderstood why things went awry,” Galileo said to him. “Science needed more religion, not less. And religion needed more science. The two needed to become one. Science is a form of devotion, a kind of worship. You made a fundamental mistake, both in my time and your own.”

  Ganymede tried to shake his head within the immobilized helmet, squashing first one narrow cheek then the other against it. His blade of a nose slightly tilted to his left, Galileo saw. “We each must play our part,” Ganymede said, the hoarse woodwind sound of his voice coming from the side of his helmet. “You have to understand that. You think you know enough to judge me, but you don’t. If only you knew. I know you have been listening to Hera, that you take her view of things. But she has a perspective no broader than yours. Understand me: I come from a future time, as far from hers as hers is from you. I’ve seen what happens if we do not play our parts. I wish I could show you the future that lies in wait if we interact with the gas giant and its children. It leads to extinction. I’ve seen it, I come from the end times. We know how to avoid it. I’m doing what has to be done. And you must do the same.”