Galileo's Dream

The looping glissandos first heard in the Europan ocean filled his mind. Long ups, steep downs, even wild excursions sideways, it seemed, in tone and in texture, or some realm of sound he had never known. The howl of the wolves in the hills at night; the sound of the whales in the aquarium gallery on Callisto; the only sob he had ever heard from his father, choked and desperate, one time as he rushed from the house into the street. There was an ear in his mind, cringing at sounds that only he heard.

The clouds grew diffuse and created in their midst an enormous spherical transparent space. They floated now in a bubble as big as a world, as big as Earth. There in the middle of the space with them hung a little Europa, vivid and solid against the distant clouds. It looked to be several hours of travel away from them; he had seen it look that way on one of his transits with Hera. Underneath it, the clouds coalesced to a version of one segment of the banded monster itself. One could see past the bands, deep into it. Ropes of smoke emerged from the upper clouds, coalescing into imago versions of the other moons: then the clouds outside the transparent sphere went dark, disappearing in a universal night; then sparks appeared in the blackness, stabilizing after a while to the constellations he was familiar with. There to the east tilted fulgurous Orion. The stars seemed to be staring down at the Jovian system from outside it, as in the model of concentric shells.

Galileo was still perfectly aware that they had descended into the vast cloudbanks of Jupiter, and that now they must be moving with the clouds at enormous speed, the speed of cannonballs shot from cannons. But as he had argued in the Dialogo, once you were moving with a system, you could not feel that movement. What he saw now appeared still, and was an imago or emblem, presumably created for them by the mind within the planet. Jove was speaking to them, in other words, in images it thought they would comprehend. Like God’s light striking stained glass—and indeed Jove’s emblematic stars shed rays of fulgur that were like shards of crystal, and the black of its rendered space was in some places obsidian, in others velvet. And the four moons were like round chips of semiprecious stone, topaz and turquoise, jade and malachite. It was stained glass expanded into three dimensions.

Then the Europan imago pulsed and went semitransparent, which made visible within it clouds of tiny spinning lights, like a glass jar filled with fireflies. The moon Ganymede also clarified to transparency, and it too had fireflies in it. Galileo wondered again what Ganymede had found in Ganymede to frighten him so, to put him under such a compulsion to stop the Europans’ descent into Europa. Had he already hurt one child of Jove, or been hurt by it? Had he seen the connection to Jupiter and beyond, seen a Jovian doom that would fall on them all?

Part of the lapidary imago of Jupiter then became transparent, revealing within it many darting flocks of lights—flocks infinitely more various and layered than Europa’s or Ganymede’s. The points of light inside the giant were as numerous as all the stars in the rest of the sky. Their swirling filled the great sphere so completely that its outer surface was visible as an interweaving of horizontal currents of light, banded in ways similar to the gas clouds they usually saw.

Aurora’s voice was somewhere in him, whispering to itself about belts and zones, the meaningful patterns in the south equatorial belt plumes, the inexplicable way that alternating latitude bands of wind could hold firm in both directions over years and even centuries. So strange, Aurora said, to think that one could have said, I live on Jupiter at forty degrees north, therefore I will have winds of two hundred miles an hour from the east, as I did yesterday, and a thousand years ago. And this all a matter of gas clouds. It never seemed right. It makes sense that it was organized, that it was mentation.

But there were storms too, Galileo said to her in his mind. And pulsing spurts, and festoons and barges, and all the other patterned movements we saw.

Yes, she said, and spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling.

The woodwind glissando of the whale’s cry.

Then time seemed to shatter, and the whale’s eerie cry rasped through him in reverse, setting his nerves all ashudder. He heard a hundred whale songs offset each from the next, forward in time, backward, sideways. He was floating out into the other unperceivable spatial dimensions, becoming larger as he also subtilized and made inward spiral turns into himself. An abrupt inflation, as if he were three seconds into his own new universe—

The light-fizzing imago of Jupiter had shrunk to the size of a pearl, its satellites like pinheads.

“Look,” Hera said aloud. “The solar system. The galaxy. We move out logarithmically.”

A swirl of stars lay in a spiral swath before them. There was a polyphonic singing, mostly lower than he could usually hear, but he heard now many octaves lower than he was used to. The Milky Way was now granulated star by star, like a fling of crystal sand across the black. Millions of white dots, foam racing up a beach in moonlight—a broken wave of stars, tossed on the beach of the cosmos. Still expanding into both the big and small, Galileo saw with utmost atomic clarity that each star was its own flock of bright swirling points, pulsing inside its burning sphere. Wherever Galileo directed his attention, the stars in that field resolved into clouds of minute firefly lights, spinning in complex patterns. Together they sailed majestically in a galactic weave that also seemed to pulse and blink. He was in all ten dimensions now, in the manifold of manifolds, as he always had been; but now he sensed all of them at once, and yet could still make a clear gestalt of the whole. The pulsing lights were the thoughts of thinking beings, and together they made a larger mind, the great chain of being scaling up to the cosmos itself. A living cosmos, singing something in concert. The wolf’s howl in the night.

As Galileo regarded what he could only think was the mind of God, he lost all sense of his three-dimensional space and felt himself spinning and spiraling in the manifold of manifolds, spanning all times. Every fire from the tiniest chip of firefly light to the blazing pebbles of the galaxies bloomed a trail and arced forward, so that he saw lines rather than points, and felt rather than saw a densely woven latticework into which he too was woven, like a cosmic chrysanthemum of white lines filling a blackness felt rather than seen, heard in a song beyond hearing. Still watching the lines, he felt and heard the ways in which the ten dimensions warped, stretched, bowed, and shrunk, the whole breathing in and out and also almost holding still, all at once. His sight was whole, his touch-immersion whole, his hearing whole, while also coextensive with the ten dimensions. The manifold of manifolds moved, breathed, sideways or at an angle to time, singing a fugue with parts out of different dimensions. All the temporal isotopes were flickering in and out of their braids of potentiality, blooming and collapsing, systole and diastole. At the merging with this he rose into an existential sublime, a true ecstasy or ex stasis blooming in his consciousness, and he felt the familiar ringing, always before so faint, now all in all, the culmination of the fugue. All things remain in God, he said, but no one heard. He understood then the solitary nature of transcendence, since wholeness was one. He was entirely alone and by himself, he realized: the manifold of manifolds was another one of the secret lives. It was some kind of moving eternity, encompassing an infinity of universes. Everything was always changing, always: so it was change itself that was eternal. Eternity too had a history, eternity too evolved, strove to change and even to improve, in some sense beyond human comprehension—in growth, complexification, metamorphosis. In any case, eternal change. A ten-dimensional organism, pulsing with granular light like the finest snow, everywhere entangled, all points both discrete like the points in Euclid’s definition and yet also part of a whole plenum, flowing in curves, in glissandi still audible in him, a majestic dense chorus of whales and wolves and heartbroken souls, louder and louder, a kind of red loon’s cry—