Galileo's Dream

Hera’s little craft and its cabin suddenly reappeared around them. Soon after that, Galileo felt weight returning to him, and he was pressed down into his chair. One screen on the wall served as a kind of window, but nothing but a patch of black starry sky appeared in it.

Hera landed them. Their door slid open, and they descended onto a broad terrazzo, white against the black of Callisto’s rock. They were on a flattened section of the spine of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. Inlaid into the spine was a long curving building, perhaps even a continuous gallery city, arcing all the way around the Fourth Ring. Certainly it went for as far as Galileo could see before curving behind the Third Ring: at least thirty degrees of its circumference, he reckoned. The crater wall had in effect been excavated and replaced by the city itself, which poked up out of the black rock in repeated towers and crenellations.

Hera led him to a broad staircase that descended into the crater wall. The stairs looked like white marble, though the stone was smoother and whiter than marble, something like ivory, and all the steps moved downward together under them, so that they stood on one and descended anyway. They had a long way to go, so far that the people below were the size of bugs. The curving gallery was broad as well as tall, with clear walls on both sides. Through the glass curves to each side he could see the concentric escarpments of the Third and Fifth Rings of Valhalla, the Third considerably closer to them than the Fifth, which only made sense, Galileo realized, if one visualized waves expanding on a pond. Long stretches of both escarpments had been excavated and walled by glass, in the same manner as the Fourth Ring, if less comprehensively.

Now the people on the gallery floor were the size of cats, and it was obvious most of them were naked, except for the big masks that covered every head. Either that, or they were not human.

“Carnivale,” Hera explained, seeing his startled look. “This crowd isn’t usually in this part of the circumference.”

“Ah.”

“The grand council meets farther along the arc. Their meeting is part of the larger festival.”

The stairs brought them to the gallery floor. The revelers indeed were wearing elaborate masks and nothing else. Human bodies, male and female, tall and full, white, pink, various shades of brown—but always topped by the heads of animals of one sort or another. Some of the animals were familiar to Galileo, others were fantastic creatures: big hairy heads with antlers, feathered human faces as broad as the shoulders that held them up, insectile wedges. More familiarly, he spotted fox heads, wolves, lions, leopards, rams, antelope; here was a heron; there the very disturbing sight of a monkey’s head on a woman’s body. There beyond her stood a medusa, making him shudder and look away. Then he saw a group of tall bodies that appeared to be headless, their furry faces looking out from their chests, as in the old tales of the Greeks. Those were strange enough to give Galileo pause; were their bodies also masks?

But taken all in all, it still was recognizably Carnivale. A lot of bare skin was part of the topsy-turvy of the festival, and he had often been disturbed or frightened by particularly skillful masks, encountered on bright piazzas or in shadowy canalsides. Here the exposure of flesh had been taken to its reductio ad absurdum. To Galileo, this and the masks in combination were what made the sights more disturbing than erotic, no matter the helpless tendency of his eye to track the women in view.

A group of jackal-headed people confronted them, preventing their progress with a restless stationary dance. Jackals, ravens, an elephant, all pressing in and surrounding them aggressively. One of the ravens held out an eagle mask to Hera:

“You must join the revel,” the raven said. “Pan rules here, and this is spring. Great Hera, here is your mask.”

Hera looked at Galileo. “It will be easiest if we comply,” she said. “The dionysiacs can get pretty annoying if you don’t join their panic. Do you mind?”

“It’s just Carnivale,” Galileo said roughly, feeling rattled.

Without further ado Hera pulled off her clothes—a kind of singlet it now appeared, coming off in a single piece, leaving her naked, magnificent, and oblivious to his discomfited gaze. Galileo turned aside and pulled down his homely pants and shirt, rags in this context, and then unbuckled his hernia truss, feeling like some kind of injured ape, hairy and small. After making a frank evaluation, Hera took his clothes and truss from him and held them with hers in one hand. One of the jackals handed him the head of a boar, its mouth open, its tusks pointing up murderously.

“A boar?” Galileo protested.

Hera stared at him now with a truly raptor intensity. “You are pigheaded,” she observed.

“I suppose,” Galileo said, thinking it over. “Well, I may be a boar, but I am never boring.” He put it on. It fit on his shoulders very comfortably, and he could see out of its eyes quite well, and breathe through it. Indeed it was meshing with him in ways he couldn’t even define at first, but then realized he was feeling its skin and hair, which was frightening. On the other hand, with it on he did not feel so exposed.

Hera’s eagle head was just right for her, although her figure was too massive for flight, her body very womanly and yet also tall, and muscled like a wrestler’s. A female torso that Michelangelo would have marveled at. Indeed all the people in the gallery looked as if the great Buonarroti had carved them, creating a set of ideal figures in the style of his heroic males, then touching them to life, as his God had his Adam. Compared to them Galileo was indeed a boar, lumpy and hairy and low.

Hera took him by the arm and, holding their clothes and his truss in her other hand, guided him through the crowd of revelers. Galileo stared through the boar’s eyelids, wondering if there were also lenses that sharpened his vision; wondering if he had been somehow transmogrified into the boar.

The air he breathed so easily was thin and fresh, perhaps a little bit intoxicating. He stared at the women’s bodies, his eyes as helpless as iron filings near a lodestone. Only after absorbing this sight repeatedly did he notice also the men and their demonstrative pricks, which were often circumcised, as if he walked among Jews and Mohammedans.

As Hera led him along, the animal heads spoke to them. People seemed to know Hera and to want to speak with her. She introduced Galileo as “a friend,” which they accepted without question, despite how odd he must have looked. They were all at ease, and included Galileo in their jokes, and laughed loudly. He began to relax, even to feel a little giddy and hilarious, so that he almost laughed too, but was afraid that if he did his guts would spill out and hang between his knees, a prospect that curbed his mirth very effectively. Despite this he was enjoying himself. Here Carnivale had been distilled to its essence, or expanded to its dream. Music filled the air, people sang in human words or in choruses of animal and bird cries; they ate and drank from high-piled tables, they danced—they even took part in a formal dance in which couples approached each other, touched genitals together briefly, as if in a greeting kiss, then moved on to another partner and repeated the gesture. Many of them had tied little ribbons or colored threads in their pubic hair, the women doing so in ways that exposed the flesh underneath, their private parts looking like orchids or irises. Quite a few of the men strode around with vigorous erections, making flowers of a different sort—lilies or snapdragons, although really they looked more like the noses of attentive dogs. Indeed it was remarkable how much character was revealed by all these exposed organs, which appeared friendly or austere, withdrawn or outgoing, not as an aspect of male or female, but of individual anatomy and presentation.

Some women clearly believed that their parts unadorned were attractive enough—a theory Galileo found he agreed with, no matter how much his eye was at first drawn to the variously bejeweled or threaded nests of hair framing startlingly revealed labia—while the men were both more obtrusive and less interesting to him, by the nature of his inclinations. And the ones with their sporty priapic erections looked after a time very suspicious, as if their owners had had recourse to some kind of effective aphrodisiac. Galileo did not like the obsequiousness of dogs either.

As he and Hera made their way through this dance, he frequently glanced sideways at her. Surely the mere fact of this carnival custom meant there still existed concepts of decorum that could be turned on their head; that was what Carnivale was for, a release of restraint, an overturning, a misrule, an upwelling of whatever was repressed by the everyday. But Hera appeared unabashed by her nakedness, or his, or anyone else’s. She spoke with acquaintances, introduced Galileo to some but not to others, all with the same demeanor she usually exhibited, severe but attentive. That this could be seen even on an eagle’s face was indicative of some quality in her nature. Behind her, outside the long curving windows that held them in their orbit, the Third and Fifth Rings of Valhalla arced to the close horizons as if looking in at them. Taken all together it was a strange sight.

“Is there a Lent to follow this Carnivale?”

“Some period of penance, you mean? No, I don’t think there is.”

Then as they continued their promenade among the perfect animal-headed humans, Galileo spotted a real tiger, which gave him a huge start. No one else was paying any particular attention to it, and the tiger did not seem to notice the humans. Soon after that Galileo spotted a trio of giant white-furred bears, awesome to witness, and then a troop of baboons. A stag, a wolverine … All the creatures were relaxed and oblivious, as if the people there were only another kind of animal in some peaceable kingdom, where all together went boldly on their way, and where humans, with their skin so luminous, their long muscles so smooth, the women’s figures so curvy, constituted somehow a natural royalty, even in such a magnificent host of beasts. The women of this world, he noted, were not like those of his time, or the female figures in Greek and Roman statues; they were longer-limbed, broader-shouldered. Humanity itself had changed over the centuries. And why not? It was almost four thousand years since the Greeks; and they were walking on one of the moons of Jupiter.

As they continued their circumnavigation, he noticed that the air was turning blue around them, and it felt humid. “Your head will allow you to breathe no matter the medium,” Hera told him. “Be ready to swim.”

Then suddenly, without any wall or other transition he could see, they were swimming, and far underwater at that. All the people ahead of them were horizontal, floating or swimming like fish in the sea. Water seemed to have coalesced around him, covering his piggish mask and filling his nostrils, and in a panic he stroked wildly upward, hoping for a surface.

“I told you, you can breathe,” Hera said to him, her usual rustic Tuscan still clear in his ears. “Your mask will help you. Just breathe, you’ll be fine.”

Galileo tried to reply, but he was too frightened to unclench his teeth. Finally, desperate for air, he breathed in water, and did not drown. It was air in his lungs, it seemed. He tried again and it was so. He was breathing air.

Hera was laid out horizontally now, stroking forward and away from him. He struggled to follow her, but he had never learned to swim, and in the blue liquid filling the gallery from floor to ceiling he could only flail, all the while tightening his buttocks so that his guts did not squirt out of his hernia. “Help!” he called through clenched teeth.

Hera heard him and stroked back gracefully, still holding their wet clothes in one hand. She then showed him how to move his arms, first straight and together ahead of him, then pulling out and back, like a turtle. It worked pretty well. And since he could breathe the water, it didn’t matter that he was slow. He followed her awkwardly, and could not help noting that when she kicked like a frog she briefly exposed her private parts in a startling way, like a mare pulsing in heat. He could not kick in the same way without spilling his guts.

Around him to left and right were not only swimming people and their masks, fur or feathers flowing wetly, but also some kind of rounded black bird that flicked by at great speed. Also a giant truncated fish, like a head without its body; and then dolphins, sinuous and supremely graceful; and something gray and rounded like a fat woman; and then a whole pod of enormous whales, black and smooth, their long flippers paddling lazily. Their eyes were as big as dinner plates, and seemed to regard the scene around them with intelligent curiosity. Soon after Galileo noticed them, a sound vibrated in his ear, a rising glissando that shot up and out of his range of hearing, then tore back down into it and dropped to a basso profundo so deep that his stomach vibrated uncomfortably. The low vibration was like the sound of the floor of the universe, buzzing its continuo under all.

With an effort he caught up to Hera’s side. “That’s the same cry we heard inside Europa,” he managed to say. Even talking did not seem to drown him. He breathed a few more times, tried it again. “Don’t you think?”

She tipped her head toward the whales. “Those are humpback whales,” she said. “They’re famous for their songs, which sometimes take them hours to sing. They can repeat them almost sound for sound. And it’s a strange thing, but their songs have been getting lower in tone ever since humans began recording them. No one knows why that is.”

“Could they be, I don’t know—in communication with the thing inside Europa?”

“Who knows? Everything is entangled, they say. What does your physics lesson from Aurora tell you?” And with a sharp pull she swam on.

He followed her, dodging the whales as best he could, watching the aquatic dance of the animals and the animal-headed humans. Growing confident in his breathing, he began to enjoy himself. He was struck by the beauty of all the ways creatures moved—all except for him, he had to admit. Even birds knew how to swim, indeed he saw that it was more natural to them than it was to people. Although these people could really swim. He tried to emulate them as best he could while still keeping his legs together. A bit of a dolphin kick seemed to work pretty well.

After a while Hera turned to him and said, “We’ll be crossing back into air soon. Take care.”

Which was all well and good, but what kind of care he was to take was completely unknown to Galileo, and in a moment he found himself falling, spilling and sliding down onto the wet floor of the gallery, gasping for air like a beached fish. Hera had landed on her feet, and was drying herself off before a blast of air, holding up their clothes before her. Galileo stood beside her and felt his body dry likewise in the hot wind pouring over them. Already he was somewhat habituated to her eagle head and statuesque white body. They were what they were. She was good to look at though. In her presence it was hard to imagine what else you might look at instead of her.

A person approached them with the grace of a dancer, smaller-breasted than most of the women, genitals some mix of female and male, the mask a head of a buzzard, wrinkled and droop-mouthed. Involuntarily Galileo drew his head back, and the buzzard laughed, a high giggle.

“Is this the Galileo?” it asked Hera, in what Galileo heard as Latin.

“I am Galileo,” Galileo answered sharply. “I can speak for myself.”

“So you can! You must be very proud.”

Galileo glanced down at its odd pudenda, painted magenta as if with lipstick. “And so must you,” he replied.

The buzzard ignored this. “What do you think of this thing inside Europa?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Something in the way Hera stood beside him confirmed his first impression not to trust this person. Never trust a buzzard. It seemed simple enough, although it could be said a buzzard was always quite forthright in its way. “Come hear what the others are saying about it!” it said now. “You really must.”

“We are on our way there,” Hera told it. “Come along,” Hera said to Galileo, taking him by the arm and walking away. Behind them he could just hear the vulture hermaphrodite say, “I must say, if that’s the smartest person of his time, it’s no wonder they’re in such trouble.”

“They?” a voice replied. Galileo turned and looked. It was Ganymede, taking a lion mask off of his narrow head and shaking his black hair. His body was long and willowy, very white. Beyond him, Galileo caught sight of a group of jackal-headed people skewering one of the real animals, some kind of an ox, with long spears—quickly he looked away, shocked at the vivid red of blood.

They came to a reddish semitransparent wall, which made Galileo fear they might pass through it and then float in fire, and be able to breathe it too; he didn’t think he could handle that. There were several open arches in this red wall, and once they had passed under one, Hera handed Galileo his clothes and truss, perfectly dry and ready to wear. Her singlet she shook out and put one leg into, and quickly she was dressed and had taken off her eagle mask. Galileo did likewise, buckling on his truss with a sigh. Others around them were arriving in the chamber and dressing, pulling off their masks, shaking out their hair. Galileo took off his boar mask and regarded its piggy face, then put it with the rest on a long table piled high with them—an awful sight, as if the jackals had boarded Noah’s ark and decapitated every living thing.

In the next chamber of the gallery, which ran again unbroken as far as they could see, Galileo and Hera joined a collection of people standing in groups of five or six. After their traverse of the carnival gallery, Galileo found all the exposed faces a little shocking; the reversal reversed had created its characteristic moment of estrangement, when normality was for a moment bizarre. It seemed to him then that if the goal was not to be too sexual, it would be more appropriate to conceal faces than bodies. These living souls with their foreheads, cheeks, eyebrows, hair, chins, mouths, were both much weirder than genitals and ever so much more expressive, more suggestive, more revealing. He glanced shyly at Hera, and she noticed his glance, and looked back at him curiously, wondering what he meant, and their gazes met for a second—and there she was: there they were. To look someone eye to eye, my Lord, what a shock! Eyes were indeed windows, as the Greeks had said; and mouths, my oh my, mouths that smiled, frowned, pursed, spoke. To share a gaze was a kind of intercourse. Maybe new souls were generated not with the fuck but the look. Indeed he had to look away from Hera to avoid feeling overwhelmed, to avoid making something new right then and there.

They continued around the arc of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, and passed under an archway into a segment of the gallery that was occupied entirely by Galileos. There were perhaps a hundred of them. Galileo stopped in his tracks at the sight.

“Oh, sorry,” Hera said, seizing his hand and dragging him onward. “This is just a game people play, a kind of Carnivale party group, which comes from living on the Galilean moons, I’m sure. No one will know you are the real item.”

The host of costumed Galileos was variously dressed in clothing more or less appropriate to his time, at least when seen from a distance; up close he could see how strange all the fabrics and cuts were. Their heads and bodies were all possible versions of his type, from men who looked just like the image he saw in the mirror all the way to grotesque parodies of his form. Even women were dressed as him and sporting false beards. All of the beards were gray: “Why do they all look so old?” Galileo complained.

“I suppose it’s because there is a famous portrait of you,” she said. “Most people think of that one when they think of you.”

“Horrible,” Galileo said. Indeed there were some of them that were particularly unsettling—like him but not, distorted somehow, as in the little images of him seen in the outside curves of spoons, or in certain nightmares. These were by far the most shocking to see. He tried to express this response to Hera, and she nodded without surprise.

“You have quickly discovered the uncanny valley,” she told him. “It was found long ago, when they were first developing machine intelligence, that people were willing to accept speech from crude boxes, and even from metal people, but that if you tried to create perfect simulacra of people, it could not be done well enough to fool the eye, and these were the speakers who were profoundly disturbing. Identity or difference were both acceptable, but between them lay an uncanny valley, where the partial resemblance creates a discord.”

“Please remove me from this uncanny valley,” Galileo begged her, averting his eyes. Some of these pseudo-Galileos were truly creepy, ugly to him in a sickening way. He looked down as she led him on through the next archway.

“You see why we have continued to contain our machine intelligences in boxes and desks and secretaries and the like,” she said as they left. “No one could stand the simulacra. Sometimes I think this practice deceives us in a different way, because we can’t imagine that mere boxes can have become as intelligent as they obviously have. So we fail to notice how powerful they have become—probably in many ways much more intelligent than we are. Almost all our technologies, including the ones with the strangest impacts on us, have at this point mostly been invented by machines.”

“I wondered about that,” Galileo said. “So your world makes no sense to you.”

“Well, the world hasn’t made sense since 1927. That hasn’t kept us from carrying on as if we understood it.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Galileo said, curbing an urge to look over his shoulder, thinking of Lot’s wife. “Well, whatever it takes not to end up feeling like I did in there,” gesturing behind them. “That was truly awful.”

“I thought you would have enjoyed it,” she said. “Surely it was one of your dreams, to be one of the most famous people in history?”

Galileo shrugged. “It only proves that when all your dreams come true, you realize that you were an idiot to have such dreams.”

She laughed, and led him under another archway into a new room. Here they had arrived at the meeting of the grand council of Jovian moons, the Synoekismus. It consisted of representatives from all the settlements in the Jovian system, Hera told him, and therefore theoretically numbered in the hundreds. There were only about a hundred people on hand, Galileo reckoned. Behind them he saw Ganymede entering the room as well, with a group of ten or twelve of his followers.

The Fourth Ring of Valhalla was in this part of its arc higher than the Third and Fifth Rings, and out the clear side walls of the high gallery they could see far in all directions. Inward, buildings erupted from the Third Ring like great fangs and molars; through them Galileo caught glimpses of the Second Ring, which appeared also to support buildings. Outward, the Fifth and Sixth Rings were lower and farther away, and the fifth range of hills was less excavated and occupied, it seemed, although gleaming incurves of window indicated that galleries existed in that range too. Over one section of the Fifth Ring, a lit portion of Jupiter loomed up over the horizon: a thick top half of a crescent, somewhat canted to the side, and only a few times bigger in the sky than Earth’s moon was at home.

This arc of the long gallery was mostly empty, but at its far end a knot of chairs had been arranged, all facing a dais. The order that the furniture implied was obviously not regarded as binding by the people in attendance, however, as they circulated in a manner similar to that of the festival back along the arc, or to that of any court, for that matter, everyone mingling and talking, until someone called out “Come to order, please!” and eventually everyone had clumped in two loud groups before the dais. The view out the glass walls, with their concentric ranges and the banded crescent spearing the night, was forgotten.

People in both of the two groups began shouting across a divide created by a clutch of very tall women—apparently guards charged with keeping order. A few furious men approached these guards to yell their insults even more vehemently at the other side, but no one made any serious attempt to get through the line and assault their antagonists. To Galileo it looked like a kind of masque, not dissimilar to certain after-dinner debates he had taken part in, although more immediately raucous.

And then, as sometimes happened at home, what began as a formal dispute fell over some unseen cliff into genuine anger. Perhaps, Galileo thought, these Jovians, these tall beautiful folk, deprived of the anchor of earth and wind and sunlight, were more choleric than people on Earth—the reverse of what he had at first assumed about them, given their angelic appearance. They shouted, faces red—Galileo caught brief snatches of Latin, and even Tuscan, but the translator in his ear was not coping with the cross talk, and so to him it was mostly babble. What was it that mattered so much to them that they became this furious, pampered as they were? Well, perhaps the pampering explained it; perhaps they were possessed by the same things that possessed the Italian nobility of his time—honor, pride of place, patronage or the loss of patronage. Power. Maybe even when all people were fed and clothed, these concerns with hierarchy and power never went away, so that people were always angry.

Galileo murmured some of these thoughts to Hera, and told her about the translation difficulty. She led him down the room to where he could hear better, and the cacophony resolved into the strange Latin Galileo had first heard from the mouth of Ganymede, in Venice so long ago.

And in fact it was Ganymede himself now speaking, standing in the middle of his crowd of supporters as tall and beaky as ever. His crow-black hair stood up, and his saturnine blade of a face had turned bright red with his expostulation.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a grating, disgusted voice. “You don’t have the imagination to picture the consequences. We’ve done a full analysis. We’re far beyond the little hellos that you’re bogged down in. There’s more to it than the contact the Europans made during their incursion.” He spoke now to a group dressed in pale blue, possibly the Europan legation. “You’ve touched the whisker of the beast,” Ganymede told them, “and now you think you know the whole thing. But you don’t. There’s more to it than what you’ve seen. I’ve told you privately the danger, and I don’t want to speak of it in public, because that would only add to it. But it is very real.”

A white-haired woman waved him away. “You have to forgive us if we proceed as if what happens in a manifold detected only by you is not sufficient grounds for changing our actions.”

“No,” Ganymede said grimly. “This is different. You ignore the potential effects of an interaction. That’s what people like you always do. You hide your eyes and never learn, and claim new things will bring new things, and are always surprised when events fit the patterns we’re made from. You never see the danger and you never count the risk. What if you turn out to be wrong? You can never imagine that, you are so full of yourself, so convinced you are tabula rasa. Now, this time, in this encounter—of humanity with a sentience that can’t be grasped, let us say—no specific human good can come of it. But the harm could kill the species. So it makes sense to beware! For the risk is absolute. You’re behaving like those men who set off the first atomic bomb, wondering as they did so if the explosion might not ignite the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Or the ones who started up a particle collider unsure whether a black hole would be generated that would suck the Earth into it. Like them, you’d risk all—for nothing.” Suddenly he was shouting. “We won’t let you take the risk!”

“I don’t see how your position is anything other than cowardice,” the white-haired woman said. “It’s simply fear of the future itself.”

Ganymede started to speak but stopped himself, eyes bulging out. Finally he said, “That’s what the people who ignited the atomic bomb said, I’m sure.” With an expression of extreme disgust he gestured wildly to his supporters, and led the way as they all stormed out of the chamber, angrily chattering to each other, some shouting final curses as they left.

“Could you not execute a prolepsis,” Galileo asked Hera in a low voice, “and see if his fears are confirmed?”

“No,” Hera said. “In theory, prolepsis is possible, but the energy required is more than we can muster. Sending the entanglers back analeptically cost us entire planets, and prolepsis apparently requires far more energy than that.”

“I see. So—do you think Ganymede is right to be so afraid?”

“I don’t know. His is one of several competing efforts to understand what is going on inside Europa, and the physicists I’ve talked to say his group has been doing very advanced studies. Even exiled to Io, they have made progress others haven’t. And they are claiming something more than Europa is involved.”

“So there are different schools of understanding? Different factions?”

“There are always factions.”

Galileo nodded; it was certainly true in Italy.

“So,” Hera continued, “I don’t know. I was working with Ganymede, and fighting with him, as you have seen. And there are precedents to support what he is saying. Humans have generally not reacted well to encounters with higher civilizations. Collapses have occurred.”

Galileo shrugged. “I don’t see why it should matter.”

“That we might find out we are like bacteria on the floor of a world of gods?”

“When has it ever been different?”

She laughed at this. He glanced over and saw she was looking at him with a new surmise, as if at someone who was more interesting than she had thought. About time, as far as he was concerned.

“I suppose you yourself can serve as an example of a robust response to an encounter with a more advanced civilization,” she said with a little smile.

“I don’t see why,” he said. “I’m not sure I have done that.”

She laughed again, and led him to another moving staircase, which carried them up its long incline, through the gallery’s ceiling and onto the spine of the Fourth Ring. There her space boat stood waiting for them, apparently having been moved for her convenience. Or perhaps it was another craft just like hers. In any case, there were attendants on hand to welcome them into it and see them on their way.

Above them a fiery blaze of light hurt his eyes. It looked like one of the Jovians’ spacecraft was shooting up into the black starry sky, headed toward Jupiter.

Hera’s look turned grim again. “That was Ganymede,” she said, gesturing upward. “He and his people are off to make more trouble. We’ll have to deal with him. There aren’t any police forces or weapons any more in the Jovian system, as a matter of principle. So situations like this are hard to deal with. But something has to be done. He means to stop the Europans. He thinks he’s right. There’s no one more dangerous than an idealist who thinks he’s right.”

“Sometimes I think I’m right,” Galileo said.

“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“And sometimes I am right. If you roll a ball off the edge of a table, it falls in a half parabola. In that I’m right.”

“And in that,” she muttered, “you too are dangerous.”

She led him into her spacecraft. They were going to follow Ganymede back to Io, she said, where apparently he was headed. The idea was to stop him from leading his followers into anything rash. She appeared to be willing to coerce the Ganymedeans in this regard, with the help of her fellow Ionians. She spent the first hour of their flight talking over the matter with various voices that spoke from the pad on her lap.

Somewhere in that hour, Galileo fell asleep. How long he slept he was not sure; when he woke, she was asleep herself, her eyes darting about in tandem under closed lids. After that a long time passed, during which he found a little closet with a hollow chair into which he could attempt his difficult ablutions. In the midst of his effort, warm water filled the chamber up to his waist, where it became warmer and rumbled with vibrations that were apparently in phase with his peristalsis, as his excrement seemed to be drawn out of him. After that the water drew off and he was dried in a swirl of hot air, as clean as if he had bathed.

“Jesus,” he said. He opened the door and looked out at Hera, who was now awake. “You people don’t even shit naturally! Your shitting is midwifed by automatons.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

Galileo had to think that one over, and so did not answer. She passed him on the way into the little closet herself, and when she came back out, she shared with him a small meal that consisted of something like a compressed bread, sweet and substantial, and plain water.

“You were dreaming as you slept,” Galileo noted.

“Yes.” She frowned, thinking about it.

“Are dreams also entanglements?” Galileo asked, thinking about Aurora’s lessons.

“Yes, of course,” she replied. “Consciousness is always entangled, but when we are awake our present moment overwhelms all that. When you’re asleep then all the entangled moments become more obvious.”

“And you are entangled with?”

“Well, with other moments of your life, earlier or later. And with other people’s lives too. Different times, different minds, different phase patterns. All expressed rather weakly in the brain’s chemistry, and so perceived surreally in sleep’s lack of sensory input.”

“Dreams are dreamlike,” Galileo agreed. “And what were you dreaming of now?”

“It was something about when my family first moved to Io, when I was a girl. Only in the dream, Io was already occupied by animals that we killed for food. I suppose that was day residue from our panic spring. Recent experiences get enfolded in dreams, sometimes, and mix with the entangled times from elsewhere.”

“I see. So you moved to Io as a girl?”

“Yes, my mother was exiled from Callisto for fighting. The bubble technology that allows us to live on Io had just recently been developed, and people convicted of major crimes were just being sent there. My father and I went with her, and we were in one of the first groups there. I liked to greet the new arrivals.”

“And so you became a mnemosyne,” Galileo suggested. “You learned to like taking in damaged people, and healing them.”

“Maybe. Are we really so simple?”

“I think maybe so.”

She shook her head. “People did enjoy seeing me welcome them, I think.”

After that she sat there, fidgeting unhappily. Jupiter was growing bigger again; it appeared they would pass before the sunward side this time. Galileo asked what he thought was an innocent question about the time needed for the voyage from Callisto to Io; she snapped back at him that it was different for every trip, which was not really answering. A few moments later, glaring at him, she said, “We’ll be there soon. Still, we might as well continue your education in yourself. We’re all going to need it in the end.”

“I prefer my own self-knowledge,” Galileo insisted. “You can give up on your girlish ambition to rescue people.”

She glared at him. “Do you want to live?”

“I do, yes.”

“Then put this on.” Roughly she placed her celatone on his head, and he did not flinch away.

“Do you know what you’re sending me back to?” he asked.

“Not precisely. But different areas of the brain hold characteristic kinds of experience, located by the emotion that was the fixative. I’m going to look at nodes in the areas associated with embarrassment.”

“No,” Galileo groaned, and flinched as she touched the helmet.

His horrible mother ran into his terrible mistress there in the house on Via Vignali, and before Galileo even knew the old gorgon was visiting, the two women were screaming at each other in the kitchen. This was not unusual, and Galileo trotted in from the workshop cursing at the distraction but not overly concerned, only to find them in a real fight, scratching and pulling hair, kicking and punching, Marina even landing one of her big roundhouse swings to the head, a blow Galileo had felt on his own ear many times. All this with the children and servants there in the room watching, happily scandalized, squealing and shouting.

Galileo, ears burning, supremely angry with both of them, leaped into the fray and was rougher than he might have been as he grabbed Marina and hauled her back—so rough that his mother paused in her shrieking to berate him for his rudeness, while also seizing the chance to assault Marina yet again, so that he had to stop her too. And then there he was, trapped between the two of them in front of all the world and God, holding on to them by their hair, extended at his arms’ length from each other as they screamed and swung. Galileo was forced to ponder a little what might be his least undignified mode of escape. Luckily he had a jacket on so that his arms were not getting scratched by their furious mauling.

“You whore!”

“You bitch!”

“Be quiet,” he begged them, not wanting the household to notice how accurate both women were in their insults. It was almost funny, but he had long ago lost his ability to be amused by either of them. Aside from their nasty tempers, the debt burden they represented was enormous. Maybe if he released them both without warning, they would collide headfirst and kill each other. Two debts retired with a single collision! It was an elegant solution. Marina was the lighter of the two and would rebound farther, as he knew well from experiments with balls tied to strings, not to mention their own fights—

“Enough!” he commanded imperiously. “Save this shit for the Pul-cinella shows. If you don’t stop I’ll call the night watch and have you both thrown out of here!”

They were weeping with fury and the pain of being held back by their hair. When they didn’t expect it he let them go and turned to face his mother. “Go home,” he instructed her wearily. “Come back later.”

“I won’t leave! And I won’t come back!”

But finally she left, shouting down horrible curses on them all, and there was nothing Galileo could do but to deploy his usual defense, turning his back to her and waiting till she was gone.

Marina was more conciliatory—still angry of course, but also embarrassed. “I had to defend myself.”

“She’s almost sixty, for God’s sake.”

“So what? She’s crazy, and you know it.”

But then she desisted. She needed his money for her place around the corner, and so she left the room without further excoriations. Galileo stumped back out to the workshop and stood there, staring sightlessly at the complete cipollata that was his life.

—which abruptly became black space, the stars, the great swirling banded yellow globe. Hera sitting across from him, watching his face attentively.

“Well?” she said.

“I pulled them apart. I kept them from fighting.”

“And why were they fighting? Why were they angry?”

“They were angry people. Choleric. They had so much yellow bile in them that if you pinched them your fingers would turn yellow.”

“Nonsense,” Hera said. “You know better than that. They were people just like you. Except that their minds were crimped, every day of their lives. Women in a patriarchy, what a fate. You know what I would have done if I were them? I would have killed you. I would have poisoned you or cut your throat with a kitchen knife.”

“Well.” Galileo regarded her uneasily. She towered over him, and her massive upper arms were like carved ivory. “You said that a time’s structure of feeling has a lot to do with how we are. Maybe you would have felt differently.”

“All humans have an equal amount of pride,” she said, “no matter how much it gets crushed or battered.”

“I don’t know if that’s true. Isn’t pride part of a structure of feeling?”

“No. It’s part of the integrity of the organism, the urge to life. A cellular thing, no doubt.”

“Cellular maybe. But people are all different.”

“Not in that.” She looked down at the screen in the pad on her lap. “There’s another trauma node near that one. This area of your amygdala is crowded.”

“But we seem to be approaching Io,” he pointed out hopefully.

Hera looked up. “True,” she said. She took her celatone from his head, which took a great weight off his shoulders. She patted him on the arm, as if to indicate that she still liked him despite his primitive circumstances and instincts. She even pointed out to him various features of her home moon as it grew to a fiery spotted yellow ball, floating before the great sunlit side of Jupiter. Both spheres were florid arrays, but their colors were different in tone, and mixed very differently over their surfaces. Jupiter was all pastel bands, its viscous eddies embroidering every border with gorgeous convolutions, like the side of a cut cabbage; while Io was an intensely sulfurous yellow ball, spotted by random spatter marks—mostly black or white or red, but including a broad orange ring around a whitish mound, which Hera said was the volcano massif called Pele Ra. She pointed out to him the shadow of Io on Jupiter’s face, so round and black it looked unnatural, like a beauty spot pasted on.

As they approached this hellish little ball that was her hometown, a blue aura began flickering around them. “What’s that?” Galileo asked.

“We are getting closer to Jupiter, which generates immensely powerful magnetic and radiation fields. We have to create fields to counteract them, or else we would quickly die. Moving at speed causes the two fields to interact, creating the aura you see.”

Galileo nodded carefully. Because of his mathematics tutorial from Aurora, he was pretty sure he understood the phenomenon better than Hera did. Probably it was best not to point this fact out, but her lack of awareness of it irked him. “Like ball lightning,” he said.

“To an extent.”

“Like the sparks you can make if you rub two pieces of amber together.”

She gave him a look. “Quit it.”

They flew close over the surface of the tortured moon, past the volcanic continent Ra Patera, where she had taken him during his previous visit. There were red rings around several of the volcanoes; Hera explained these were their plume deposits. “There are about four hundred active volcanoes.” Once past Ra, they continued their descent over slaggy plains that were the basic Ionian color—a burnt sulphur, greened in some places like old bronze, and pimpled everywhere by volcanoes. Some of these were tall cones, others long cracks; some were white as snow, others black as pitch. There was no correlation between morphology and color, so that it was impossible to grasp the lay of the land. An occasional impact crater added to the topographic confusion, until in many areas Galileo found it hard to determine up from down. The different minerals the volcanoes cast out, Hera told him, in plumes or rivers of different heights and viscosities, accounted for their disorienting and hideous variety. Most of the moon’s surface was too hot and viscous to build on, she told him, or even to walk over. “In lots of places if you tried to walk you would sink right into the ground.” Only the high massifs of dormant giant volcanoes stood far enough above the magmatic heat to cool down, serving as rock islands in an ocean of crusted lava.

When they came over the anti-Jovian side of the moon, Hera maneuvered her craft downward, slowing it until she could drop them vertically into the middle of a small but deep crater, filled with a lake of liquid orange lava. As they drifted down to the level of the crater’s rim, Galileo had a closer view over the surface of the moon beyond the crater, lumpy beyond belief. The resemblance of the landscape to his concept of hell was amazing. He remembered now; this was the landscape in which he had seen his fiery alternative. Yellow plumes of sulphur fountained high out of bubbling orange cracks and arced up against the black starry sky, falling in slow sheets of spume away from the upright columns. He had heard that the inner crater of Etna was like this one, its floor a fiery orange lava lake, crusting over with black excrescences that folded under in steaming noxious vapors. In the Inferno, Virgil had guided Dante into Hell by way of Etna, using caves and tunnels unfilled with lava. Now his own amazing Virgil was leading him down onto the real thing. Their little craft, transparent to them, held them hovering over the burning lake.

“What will you do here?” he asked.

“I’m hiding, waiting for my friends from Ra. We’ve decided to arrest Ganymede and his supporters. Their base is on Loki Patera, and it’s not going to be easy to make our approach without them seeing us and taking flight.”

“You need to surprise them.”

“Yes.”

“Because you intend to imprison them?”

“Well, at least to keep them on Io. Disable their ability to leave. Because of the threats Ganymede made, the Synoekismus has authorized us to take such an action. In fact they demanded we do it. Since the Ganymedeans have set up a base on Io, the council can pretend they’re our problem. Leave us to figure out how to do it. It’s causing a bit of a tactical disagreement right now among my cohort.”

“This Loki Patera, is it an active volcano, with a lake of molten rock in its crater?”

“Yes indeed. It’s one of the biggest calderas of all, and these days it’s sending up quite a sulphur plume.”

“And the interior of Io, you said it’s melted through and through?”

“Yes, that’s basically right. The pressure makes the core a kind of solid, of course.”

“So chambers of liquid rock link up below the surface, or pool together?

“I think so. I’m not sure how completely the interior is understood.”

“Or explored?”

“What do you mean?”

“These craft of yours are self-contained, right? They withstand the vacuum of space, as we see, and the ocean of Europa. Is the lava of Io any different, in a way that matters to your ship?”

“It’s hotter!”

“Does that matter, though? Wouldn’t your craft withstand the heat, and the pressure?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could ask your machine pilot, it would know. And it has systems of reckoning to locate itself in space, isn’t that right?”

“If I understand you correctly, yes.” She was now tapping madly at her pad, head tilted to listen to something Galileo couldn’t hear.

“So,” he continued, “nothing would prevent us from sinking down into the lava chambers below some volcano near Loki, and traversing the channels down there until you could come up out of the erupting crater of Loki, thus surprising Ganymede in his refuge?”

Hera laughed shortly, with a look at him that seemed to contain a new surmise. “Those math lessons have made you ingenious!”

“I was always ingenious,” he said, irritated.

“No doubt. But in this case, I’m not sure it would work.”

“Your mechanical pilot will be able to calculate these things, I am sure.”

She smiled. “I thought you didn’t like how dependent we are on our machines.”

“But you are whether I like it or not. And no matter where you go. And so, as you said, you have made them strong. Maybe strong enough for the inside of Io.”

“Maybe.”

She tapped away, while also talking to interlocutors elsewhere. A voice murmured in a language Galileo did not recognize.

Eventually she barked a short laugh. She piloted the craft down onto the burning lake, landing with a final little tilt back, like a goose or a swan.

“So I was right? The ship won’t burn?”

“Yes. No.”

She tapped on her pad, which reminded him of a spinet’s keyboard. Their craft sank into the lake of fire. Having been a space craft and a submarine craft, it was now a sublithic craft, a subsulphurine craft.

“The heat is apparently not as extreme as it looks,” Hera said, as if reassuring Galileo. “Molten sulphurs aren’t as hot as the basalt farther down. The craft has found that compared to Jupiter’s radiation, the protections required are not significant.” She shook her head. “You have to understand, people only began inhabiting Io when I was young. Before that the counterfields weren’t good enough. So the idea of going inside the moon hasn’t really occurred to anyone. Although apparently robotic research craft have already been down here, mapping Io’s internal flow patterns. So we’ll use what they found.”

“Can you make this whole room like a window again?”

Again she shook her head, trying to look amused. “If you like.” Suddenly he saw; she thought he was too ignorant to be afraid, while she, knowing more, was rattled by their situation. Making it look as if they were inside a clear bubble in the sulphur magma would not help her nerves. The Ionians were afraid of Io, no doubt with good reason. But he was pretty sure he remembered enough of Aurora’s lessons to judge their safety better than Hera could. At their levels of material and field strength, melted rock was not a difficult habitat.

She changed the walls of their chamber into a continuous screen, and now they seemed to float like a soap bubble in a liquid mix of yellow, orange, and red—the false colors arranged to indicate heat in a way immediately comprehensible. Patches of bright red flowed by their bubble’s ovoid space, darkening the angriest oranges, which shaded into the most violent of yellows. In theory it should not have been any more alarming to descend through molten rock than through frozen ice. But in fact it was.

“So your ship will follow channels to the underside of Loki, where we will get shot out of one of the sulphur plumes?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“We will disable their base’s power plant. That will force them to use their ships to power their settlement. Their ships will thus have to stay on Io.”

“You plan to disable their power plant? That’s all?”

She appeared to think he was being sarcastic. “They’ll be all right. Their ships will serve as emergency power. All will be well with them, but the ships will be confined to their base.”

“Couldn’t you disable their ships directly?”

The light surrounding them shifted all over the fiery portion of the spectrum, washing Hera’s face in color and making it appear as if she were in turn scowling, grimacing, frowning, glaring.

“You don’t understand,” she said at last. “Not all their ships will be in their settlement at any one time, and I want to create a situation where the ones on hand have to stay put.”

“But the ones at large will still be at large.”

“We think most will be on hand. And Ganymede is there.”

Their craft shuddered underfoot, canted to the side. The flowing ribbons of color on the screen had the look of a current, in which their craft struggled to make its way upstream. But the feeling of motion, which came entirely from tiny shifts underfoot, was now a confused juddering that did not add up to a coherent picture of progress in any given direction. Galileo guessed that first they had been falling toward the center of the moon, but were now bumping liquidly along, making their way against resistance. Then it seemed they were rising like a bubble in water, shimmying from side to side as differential resistances caused little horizontal slips. He put his hand to his chair, feeling unsettled almost to the point of nausea.

“Up?” he asked.

“Up. And I’ve got some of my cohort meeting us inside here. We’ll all come up together.”

The drag downward correlated with an acceleration of the yellow flow around them. Hera rubbed a fingertip over her console, watching the flow around them closely as she did.

“Hold on,” she said.

Galileo held on. “Won’t they notice us?”

“They’ll be assuming any approach will be visible,” Hera said, “and some of our colleagues are making an approach from space, to serve as decoys. There are no weapons per se in the Jovian system, as I said, but of course various lasers and explosives can be adapted to the task. We’ll hope that doesn’t go too badly for our decoys, and jump them from behind. This will be the first time they have been attacked from out of the plume of a nearby volcano.” She laughed.

Then he was shoved down at the floor, and understood that they were accelerating upward. The flows around them stabilized to pure yellow. It was like being inside a marigold, and he supposed that this meant they were now moving with the current they were in, but that the magma itself was accelerating in its channel as it approached its release into space. The push down increased in proportion to their speed upward, he was quite sure, even without the knowledge Aurora had given him. He was distracted for a moment as he tried to integrate the sensation with what he had learned during the alchemically enhanced lesson.

The pressure down became stronger. For a moment his body felt some bone-deep familiarity, and he realized they were in exactly the pull of the Earth, and he was feeling his true weight. But quickly he became heavier still—so much so that he let his head rest back in his chair, to keep from hurting his neck. Hera shifted the walls back to their usual gray, and the colors of the flow around them returned to the screens, some of which were filled with color, others with rapidly changing columns of numbers, but none gave him a sense of what was going on. He said, “Can you not display some sort of map that tells us where we are?”

“Oh, sorry. Of course.”

She tapped her console, and the screen in front of Galileo suddenly became like a cabinet holding a little Io. A green thread running from its interior to its surface pulsed brightly from within a tangle of orange intestines. Then the screen changed again, and he was looking at a cross section of the moon that cut the chimney of their volcanic channel, and the widening at its throat. Midthroat, a small cluster of bright green dots rose swiftly. “Your colleagues have joined us?”

“Some of them.”

Then the downward pressure ceased, and he even felt that he might float up and away from his chair, as when they were between moons. A push from below returned, very slight; then nothing; then a slight pressure from above. Hera tapped quickly, and suddenly the walls of the craft became a screen surrounding them again, giving them a view as if they flew freely in space. They were vaulting upward, already many miles above Io. Then they were arcing over the tawny fluxions of the surface. Loki Patera lay beside them and below, and the sulphur mist surrounding them was dotted with the silvery ovoid carapaces of the other ships in Hera’s fleet, floating down like spores after a mushroom explodes.

The fleet stayed in the drift of sulphur slurry, arranging itself as it fell until it was a phalanx, dropping in synchrony with one particular plume of the sulphur. Then in the final drop to the marigold slag on the lower flank of Loki, the whole fleet shot sideways out of the sulphur rain with startling rapidity, and in several heartbeats landed on the perimeter of a small cluster of buildings, apparently Ganymede’s Ionian base. Some of the craft blazed fire as they were touching down, striking buildings in the base and causing brief explosions that seemed as tiny as sparks against the backdrop of the stupendous plume of the volcano.

Galileo was watching all this so intently that he was shocked when a jarring halt to their descent smashed him into his chair.

“We’re down,” Hera said. “Come on.”

“Where to?” he said as he clambered up.

“Their power plant. That’s always the real seat of government.”

The grimness with which she said this gave Galileo the impression she had learned this truth in some personally disastrous way. But there was no time to inquire. She stuffed the pewter box of the tele-trasporta into a satchel-like compartment on the back of her space suit, and then they had the suits on and moved into the craft’s anteroom, putting on their space helmets, which reminded Galileo briefly of her memory celatone. Then they were out onto the blasted yellow of the Ionian mountainside.

Outside the craft, standing on the ground, Galileo looked around. Yellow sleet drifted down onto the slag a few miles away, splashing like rain when it struck. Out of this bizarre fountain shot twenty more sleek oval silver things, rocketing sideways with a dreamy speed. One of these craft tried to land right in the gap between two big low buildings of the settlement; a gate shut on it, and the craft buckled as it was caught. Hera shouted at the sight.

“Get their power off!” she snapped viciously, reminding Galileo of his mother. Uneasily he understood her as a general conducting a siege; no military officer he had ever met gave him the frisson of fear that he felt now as he regarded her. Imagine Giulia a general! The carnage would have been universal.

“Come on,” she snarled over her shoulder, and started running over the rugged plain toward the base. It had a kind of outer rock wall, it seemed, or was simply built on a broad low plateau. Galileo followed her toward it, struggling to keep up with her. She was big, and fleet of foot in a way he could not emulate, given the light pull of this moon, which caused him to launch up and forward with every stride, landing fearfully but again lightly, so that he could leap forward from one unsteady jaunt to the next, keeping his eye on Hera midleap, as it seemed to help his balance.

The slaggy plain of the volcano’s side was bigger than it looked. Silver craft still fell like stars out of the black sky. Behind them the towering yellow plume of the volcano rained down, plashing onto its previous spew. Figures in helmets, looking like white statues of the Swiss Guard, emerged from the gates of the city and pointed at them. Red afterimages suddenly crisscrossed Galileo’s vision, without him having seen anything to stimulate them in the first place. Hera stopped and held out a hand indicating he should stop too. In the general hissing silence, which was perhaps the rolling impact of the nearby plume striking him through his feet, he could not hear her voice. He could see that she was talking to him and that she thought he could hear her, but something must have gone wrong with his helmet, because there was no sound but the background hiss.

Abruptly she was off again. Galileo hurried after her, fearful of losing her and therefore his way.

They were approaching the village of silver buildings from an unexpected angle, it seemed, for the defenders were all focused on an attack from the other direction. Hera simply leaped forward onto two of these people, flying twenty or thirty feet before smashing into them like something thrown by a trebuchet. Down they went, while she bounced up and with a ferocious punch to the gut leveled another of them. Galileo followed her as fast as he could, but now she was really off, and no matter how hard he tried he could not keep up. He kept bounding off into space, and as he passed through a gate in a wall between two big buildings he crashed into an arch topping the gate, landing hard on his back and driving the wind out of him, and his guts out of his hernia too. He staggered back to his feet, stuck his fingers between his legs and shoved the truss up so that his guts would go back into his torso. After that he gave up on normal locomotion, instead making clumsy painful leaps forward, like a toad or a grasshopper, gasping all the while.

It was truly painful between his legs, but he was moving, and Hera was not far ahead of him when she finally came to a halt. He was mid-leap when he saw her stop and look to her left, and though he tried to twist in midair to dodge her, that of course didn’t work, and he bowled right into her back. It was like running into a wall, slightly padded; even as he was falling to the ground he was recalling the feel of the contact, the rocky substance of her ribs, the hard muscles of her bottom, with a layer of softness over the brick. Then he crashed down on his back and lay stunned at her heels, with his guts once again bulging out of his peritoneum. She had been knocked two or three steps forward by his impact, and in that moment a flash between them blasted him into a red blindness. Blinking through tears and the red bloom of bouncing afterimages, he saw her barking out orders without regard for him, as if he were her dog and had banged into the back of her knees while she was busy doing something.

By the time Galileo had shoved his guts back in and regained his feet, the local situation seemed to have come into compliance with her wishes. Defenders of the city lay twitching on a piazza they came to, looking like fish in the boxes at a market.

She grabbed him by the arm, and he indicated that he couldn’t hear what she was saying. She reached up and twisted at the outside of his helmet, under his right ear.

“Stand still,” she snapped.

“I’m trying!” he said. “At least I can hear you now.”

He shrugged free of her hold, which reminded him too much of his mother; the old witch had just such a clawlike grip. He swayed upright and held himself steady with a desperate effort of his whole body, glaring hotly at her. She was looking right back at him, both their faces behind clear faceplates that glowed with red numbers and diagrams in the corners, making it a literally red look that arced between them. Then the skin around her eyes crinkled; she was, for some reason, laughing at him.

“Your clumsiness saved my ass,” she said.

Galileo supposed she meant the flash that had blinded him. “I like your ass,” he said without thinking.

Her eyebrows rose. But she was still amused.

She returned to the business at hand. Her commands were still abrupt, but her tone was not so urgent. The situation was apparently in hand. The power station was occupied, she told him, the Gany-medean village therefore in their hands.

Then, listening to voices Galileo did not hear, her expression again blackened. She cursed and gave a quick series of orders under her breath.

“We didn’t shut them down fast enough,” she said grimly to Galileo. “Ganymede and his closest followers escaped. Six craft. Some of them are returning to attack us, presumably so that he can get clean away. We have to get back to the ship.”

“Lead on,” Galileo said.

Following her gamely back out of the city, he said, “Do you know where he’s going?”

“To Europa, I presume.”

“And who is attacking us now?”

“Some of his people. We have to get back to my ship as quick as we can.”

Outside the settlement, the black starry sky looked down on the scene, still eerily silent. The yellow plume to the east looked taller than a summer thunderhead. Even when an explosion flashed white and demolished one of the buildings behind them, there were no sounds, only a trembling underfoot. Galileo heard nothing but his own gasps, which seemed to come from outside his helmet, as if the cosmos itself were short of breath, and scared.

On the run back to her craft, the ground under his feet began to become sticky. It became like running on a viscous mud.

“Shit,” Hera said. “Apparently they set off some underground explosions just now. Big ones. One of my people say it’s the Swiss defense. The whole base will sink into the ground. A magma chamber has been breached, and it’s heating the ground in this area from below.”

“The ground is melting?”

“Yes. We have to hurry.”

“I’m trying.”

But they began to sink farther into the ground as they stepped on it, as if they traversed mud that grew deeper and softer. Very sticky mud, too. Hera’s craft was now visible on the horizon, but they could no longer run. They had to pull up hard at the end of each step to free their feet from the viscous surface, then step forward and sink back into it again. First they were sinking in to their boot tops, then their ankles. Then their shins. The yellow ground, looking granular and knobby with rubble, was quivering and quaking, pulsing under them like a live thing. Soon they were struggling forward, knee deep in it. Knee deep, in the melting surface of Io!

“We keep sinking further in,” Galileo pointed out.

“Just keep walking!”

“I am, of course, but you see how it is.”

“Shove your legs forward hard at first, then they’ll move easier after that.”

Now they were struggling through viscous rock that reached to the tops of their knees.

“Will our suits melt?”

“No. But we do need to stay above the surface.”

“Obviously.”

She wasn’t listening to him. They were wading forward through the molten surface now, thigh deep and working hard. Her craft was still a long way off.

Finally she stopped and pulled something out of her suit.

“Here,” she said, looking around and conferring in a low voice with her colleagues. “I’ve got a sheet here I can sit on, that will keep me afloat long enough for my friends to get here to pick me up. But I don’t know if it will hold both of us up long enough, so I’m going to use the entangler to send you back to your time.”

“But what about you?”

“I’ll use the sheet and float by myself, like I said. We’re not that much denser than the sulphur.”

“Are you sure?” Galileo exclaimed, wondering if she were preparing to die.

“I’m sure.” She cast a thin silver sheet out over the lava, and they crawled onto it, rolling quickly to the middle to keep the edge of the sheet from shoving too far down into the melting rock. They huddled together in the center of the sheet, and Galileo could see that the friction of the sheet spread over the rock would hold them up, for a while anyway.

“Get in the field of the entangler,” she said as she pulled the box from the pack on the back of her space suit. She patted the sheet before her.

They sat cross-legged, knees touching, sinking rather slowly into the sheet. She placed the flat square box between them and tapped at its surface. Finally she looked up, and they regarded each other face-to-face through their faceplates.

“Maybe you should come back with me,” Galileo said.

“I need to stay here. I’ve got to deal with all this. The situation is completely fucked up, as you see.”

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yes. My people are on their way. They’ll be a while, but they’ll get here in time, if you aren’t weighing me down. Now get ready to go back. I don’t have any amnestics with me, so you will remember all this. It will be strange. It could be bad, but—” She shrugged. There was no alternative.

“You’ll bring me back when you can?”

Again a brief moment, a shared look—

“Yes,” she said. “Now,” tapping the teletrasporta, “go.”