Galileo's Dream

Chapter twelve Carnival On Callisto

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.

“Maybe so,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve often thought that cultures can go insane in ways similar to an individual. That’s obvious in the record. Presumably it’s only an analogy, but the symptoms map pretty well. Paranoia, catatonia, suicidal or homicidal manias, or both at once—denial, post-trauma, anachronism—you see them all. History has been a bedlam, to tell the truth. Maybe we’re now permanently post-traumatic, given all that has happened. Here in the Jovian moons, it has inspired us to hold hard to peaceful ways for a long time. But that may be ending.”

They flew on in silence. Galileo recalled the memory of his first night with Marina. He felt various pricks of remorse, even a faint flush of sexual afterglow. They had had fun, once upon a time.

He was also shocked at the powers Hera had at her command, and how she was willing to use them. That she with her celatone could read his mind; that he himself could be made to read it, in a way so vivid that it was like reliving time itself, like a return to the past … Well, these people could voyage among the planets, and back and forth in time; of course they would also have tried to dive into themselves, penetrating the vast ocean that lay under every skull. Aurora’s tutorials had been another manifestation of that power, a different use of it.

It was a power that made Galileo more frightened of the Jovians than ever. Which didn’t really make sense, he knew. Remembering something vividly should not be more alarming than being transported across centuries. But one’s mind was a private place. And possibly this was simply a cumulative feeling. They could do so much. And yet, with all that power, what were they in the end? Just people. Unless of course there were aspects to them he was not even seeing. What did Aurora’s machine supplements really do to her mind, for instance? And was it possible she took infusions of the velocinestic all the time? What would happen if you did? Were there more things like that he hadn’t even been told about?

Before him the round surface of Moon IV continued to grow. It was illuminated almost in full. Callisto, they had named it. Another lover of Zeus, later turned into a bear. Its surface was flat but shattered, making it look somewhat like Europa. Scattered dark and light regions reminded Galileo of Ganymede, or Earth’s moon.

Then he saw emerging over the horizon a truly enormous impact crater. “What happened there?” he asked.

“Callisto ran into something big, as you see. A little moon or asteroid of some considerable size. It’s been calculated that if it had been only ten percent bigger, it might have knocked Callisto to pieces.”

The giant crater was multiringed—the first time Galileo had seen such a thing. The many concentric rings looked like the waves on a pond after a stone has been tossed in. They covered about a third of the half of the moon he could see. He counted eight rings, as in an archery target. White lights spangled the tops and sides of most of the crater walls, and the lights on the fourth ring out were so thick they made it a ring of diamonds.

Hera said, “The crater is called Valhalla, and the city is called the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. We’ll land there.”

As they descended Galileo saw that each ring was a circular mountain range as high as the Alps, or the mountains of the moon.

“The Jovian council meets here, you said?”

“Yes, the Synoekismus. The amalgamation of several communities into one.” She frowned as she said it.

“What does it debate?”

“What to do about the thing inside Europa. Again. Ganymede claims to understand it better than the Europans who are studying it. They don’t agree, naturally. They want to make another descent, but that is controversial elsewhere in the system, and Ganymede and his group are adamant against it. You have to understand, there is a lot of fear.”

“But why?”

“Why fear the other?” She laughed at him. “Come listen to the meeting with me, and judge for yourself. That’s what I allow you, that no one else here thinks you can handle.”

As her craft made its last descent, he marveled at the concentric ranges of what must have been a truly stupendous impact. The surface must have melted into a sea of rock, and waves then surged away from the point of impact just as on any other pond—and then the whole thing had frozen in place, set in stone for the eons. Earth’s moon had nothing like it, at least not on the side facing Earth. “So they built their city in these rings?”

“Yes, they make for a good prospect,” she said. “The planet is otherwise fairly flat, and people always appreciate a view. And it helps that most of it lies on the subJovian side. Most of the early settlements in the system were placed on the moons’ sub-Jovian sides, to be able to look at Jupiter, and to get its extra light.”

“It is somewhat dim out here.”

“I’ve read it’s about thirteen hundred times more light than full moonlight on Earth. That’s still thousands of times less than daylight on Earth, of course, but the human eye can see perfectly well by it. The pupil dilates and on we go. Still, the extra light and color coming off Jupiter were appreciated by the first settlers. And really it’s a mesmerizing thing to look at, as you now know. So they built on the sub-Jovian hemispheres. Then those who wanted to get away from the early centers migrated to the anti-Jovian sides of their moon, so each moon tends to have two antithetical cultures. All the sub-Jovian sides resemble each other in certain respects, or so it’s said, while the anti-Jovian settlements likewise seem to gather all those who oppose the first settlements. The Fourth Ring of Valhalla is special in that it is mostly sub-Jovian, but it’s so big that it straddles the terminator, and Jupiter stays permanently half-risen in the eastern sky. So, the Fourth Ring served as a meeting place of sorts, cosmopolitan and various, a kind of convivencia. Now it’s the biggest city in the system. People from the other moons gather here. It has a culture very different from the rest of Callisto’s cities. Most of those serve as the capital of little groups of settlements on the outer moons, or among the asteroids, or the outer solar system. They use the Fourth Ring as the meeting place.” Here she frowned in a way Galileo could not interpret. “It all makes it a rather wild place.”