Galileo's Dream

The great red spot was revealed more clearly than ever as a kind of thunderhead top rising out of the surface of the great planet, as big perhaps as the whole Earth, now palpably down below them, so that as they stood or sat in the cabin they looked down past their feet at it. Their ship descended until the turbulent brick-colored clouds of the overturned bowl’s top were just under them. The sky above was tinted indigo, the stars barely visible. No part of Jupiter beyond the red storm was visible to them.

The clouds below were not a uniform red, but rather shifting woven banners of salmon, brick, sand, copper, citron. There was no sign of anything aware of their presence. The little voice of Ganymede nattered on from his helmet, complaining still that he had been kidnapped, that approaching Jupiter was a fatal error, a stupid gesture likely to fry them all in radiation if it did not bring down death by ontological exposure, and so on. More than once Hera reached to him and turned down the volume coming from his helmet, but she never silenced him entirely.

The ship came to the surface of the Great Red Spot, floating just over a red sheet of clouds, which spun in a majestic rotation.

“What now?” demanded the little voice of Ganymede.

Hera was studying her screens.

“Down,” she said.

Their craft touched the cloud; they felt a little rocking side to side, front to back, like being in a boat in a tidal race.

“Down again.”

It got darker. The light became like that of certain smoky sunsets—dull yellows shading to the orange nearest brown, streaked with swirls of bronze, or an occasional patch of bright spun gold. There were no patterns Galileo could discern, though he stared into the murk wondering if something might emerge. Everywhere there were ripples, including a cobalt pattern like the ripples of a damasked blade. This S-folding was also a spirality, ruled by the Fibonacci series but made dynamic and strange by compression and torque—a chaotic mass of tightly curving lines.

Then he saw more shapes in the warp of color. Spicules that were like thorn balls, usually triradiate in form; various calymma, looking like masses of vesicles whipped into a stiff froth; also bubbles, free or suspended within cubes or tetrahedrons. Banners spiraling in all kinds of ways: in the spiral of Archimedes in which each unit or gnomon added was the same, making coiled cylinders like springs that rolled in the flow; also equiangular spirals, each gnomon bigger in a geometric progression, thus conical, nautiloid. Seeing them, Galileo tried to say to Aurora: Had the force of gravity varied as the cube rather than the square of the distance, the planets would have shot away, as their orbits would have become equiangular spirals. Then: See how the pattern breaks sequence there; it would need to be described by a new equation.

Aurora replied in his head: This is an organism. This is a mind, thinking. Its body is a swirling mass of gas clouds, elements intermixing. It’s not like us. At least not superficially. It’s some kind of whole. But so are we. To think that a body must be a colony, a mosaic of individual and separable characteristics—I could never believe there was more than a very small element of truth to that. We are nonlocal, we are all of a piece. Only a symmetry can beget asymmetry.

Galileo didn’t know what to say to that. He understood that even his very eyesight was cognition, that he was seeing what the great planet’s clouds displayed to them through his own experiences, over which Aurora’s tutorials were a light overlay. The patterns he saw now were riverine. They reminded him of the image of the temporal vector the Jovians used so frequently, braiding streambeds released in three mutually contradictory directions and moving in all of them, so that there were loops and eddies, oxbows and lost channels, and always a main channel snaking through, anastomosing perpetually in ever more complex ways. This was now being moved in time.

“It seems dangerous to go so deep,” he noted after a while. “Are you sure you will be able to get out again?”

“We’re here on sufferance,” Hera said. She too was staring at the cloudscape, but her mouth was still set in the scowl it had held ever since the moment she had learned Ganymede and his group had escaped from their Ionian compound. Possibly she was not seeing the changes in the patterns.

They continued to descend, deep into the clouds of Jupiter. There were hundreds of miles to go below them before the clouds would condense to something resembling a surface, a sludge of gas compressed to liquid. They wouldn’t be going there; the gravitational pull there was 240 times Earth’s pull, and though the ship might be able to escape from that, they would not. Galileo already felt heavier even than he did at home, even after the most shameless feasting.

Hera went to Ganymede and turned up the volume of his suit. She questioned him not in her guise as Mnemosyne, but as dread Atropos, inevitable and inflexible. “Why did you do it?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I want to know what you were thinking. And so does Jupiter.”

Galileo saw that she thought the planet might be listening, or reading their minds. If not, then it was for them alone. Atropos was putting Ganymede on trial.

But Ganymede only shrugged. “You don’t want to know, not really. You think you understand the world. You have your words and your categories and equations, and you think they have some correspondence with reality that you can trust. The idea that we are living in a bigger space than that doesn’t really penetrate, or isn’t taken seriously if it does. And yet there stands Galileo Galilei, proof that we live in a nonlocal manifold, in clouds of potentiality. This is reality, we can’t escape it. Consciousness is part of how it gets created.”

“I know that,” Hera said sharply. “I act on the basis of that knowledge. But you have been trying to collapse the wave function differently, not just with Galileo here, but in your assault on the Europan. You would change huge realms of possibility. I’m asking you why.”

“There are possibilities we should forestall if we can. They entail too much pain, they might even lead to the extinction of the species. If a certain kind of despair took root in us, then the end would be in us already. Whether we committed suicide or not, we would be dead.”

“This is always true,” Galileo interjected. “Despair is always there in potentia, an abyss under us. It takes courage to live. People with courage can stand all the reality there is.”

Ganymede tried to look his way, eyeballs bulging. “It would be good if that were true,” he said, “but it isn’t. A weight can come that crushes life. You don’t know that yet, but you will learn it.”

This he said with such certainty that Galileo shuddered, as if the cold draft of some bad futurity had just wafted through him and chilled him to the bone.

“The primitives that remained on Earth show what happens,” Ganymede said. “When they learn how far beyond them people are in power and understanding, the primitives always, always, always fall into despair. They will be crushed by awareness of your superiority, and they will die. Most of them will die within a few years of encountering you. Some will see you, understand what you mean, and die on purpose within a few days.”

“This is a paralogism,” Galileo said. “A false argument, based on syllogisms that have no real connection. And even good analogies are never proofs. These primitive people were looking at other people. The discrepancy in human fortune is what crushed them. If they were to encounter angels, or God, they would not react the same way.”

The man shook his head. “It is the awareness of superiority that does it.”

“We know God is superior.”

“God is only an idea you have, a kind of proleptic leap toward some future vision of humanity. It’s not a reality you face. Even so, the craven, abject cruelty of your time might be explainable as an artifact of your imagined superior being in the sky. You think there is a god and so you act like one to those supposedly below you. But if a god were to manifest itself in reality, you would be crushed like any primitive tribe.”

“Even if that were all true, which I do not grant,” Hera said, “why assume anything about the creature in Europa?”

“I make no assumptions. I’m quite sure of the nature of what we’ve encountered. The mathematics we’ve used to communicate with it spoke the situation clearly. There is a being inside Jupiter. This being, as you perhaps have deduced by the mathematics expressed in the changes in the planetary surface, is a much greater being than the one living in Europa. And the Jovian mind is in full contact with a congeries of other minds—minds so vast we cannot fully grasp any ideas of them, but only sense their presence. If humanity at large becomes aware of this realm of greater minds, beside which all human history is a bubble of foam on a sand grain, despair will quickly spread. It will be the end of humanity.”

“I don’t see why,” Galileo said.

“Because we don’t have the strength to stand such knowledge! You have no idea!”

“Of course I do.”

“We will be revealed to be pitifully stupid.”

“When has it ever been otherwise? We are as the fleas on fleas, compared to God and his angels. We have always known this.”

“No. The ideas of your time are merely delusions, protecting you from the knowledge of death. In your structure of feeling, you don’t have to face reality. It’s reality that crushes you.”

“You’re still trying to save the appearances,” Galileo said, suddenly understanding. “You’re trying to save the appearance that humans are at the center of things, just like the poor friars.”

“No. Listen, you’ve already felt what it would be like. Remember what it felt like when you heard the cry of the Europan, during our dive and then after it was hurt? How you couldn’t bear to hear it? That’s what it would be like, but all the time. That was the agony you were feeling. No human can bear it.”

Galileo remembered the overwhelming cry, felt the bulk of the manifold mathematics in his head. He hesitated. Who could say what the nonlocality of all things, the wholeness of the manifold of manifolds, really meant to humanity, locked as it was in its single manifold, its three spatial dimensions and its relentlessly unidirectional Time, in which everything was always becoming something else. Who could say? The end of reality? Extinction of the species? Maybe Ganymede knew things they didn’t. Maybe he was only speaking the truths no one else would say.

Then there was a shudder in their ship, and the sensation of falling fast, so fast they almost lifted off the floor. The smoky light darkened, then brightened. They appeared to have entered a thin spot in the clouds, the gases over them transparent, then lightening to a glare. Something was changing—