Galileo's Dream

“I know what his punishment should be,” Galileo said to Hera again.

Ganymede appeared to have been struck dumb by the encounter with Jupiter. He stared out of his face mask and would not speak—would not or could not. Possibly the Jovian mind had inflicted some damage on him. The look in his eye suggested to Galileo that he was angry or shocked, or perhaps furiously insane. Something bad. And he would not give them the satisfaction of his thoughts—although it was not clear what satisfaction they could have. Galileo himself was baffled, and Hera appeared unhappy with the experience she had forced Ganymede to submit to.

But now Galileo thought he knew.

That there was a mind in Jupiter greater than the mind in Europa, and connected to vast minds elsewhere, was what Ganymede had been claiming all along, though somewhat discreetly, as he had not wanted the fact widely known. He had learned of it somehow—possibly in his early incursions into the oceans of Ganymede, possibly during his existence in some future time; there was no way to tell—although Galileo wanted Hera to look into his past using her memory celatone, if she could. But however he learned it, he had been aware of the Jovian mind, and so his mad look could now be saying I told you so. Or perhaps he was simply overwhelmed. Galileo did not fully understand himself what he had seen in Jupiter. The cosmos, alive with thought, yes. But he could not recapture the huge feelings he had felt on experiencing this reality. Something big had happened in him, but it was all confused now, obscured by the merging with Hera afterward, by his return to Italy. It was not something he was going to be able to understand.

Ganymede stared at them.

Galileo said, “You wounded Europa, the child of Jupiter, deliberately. You tried to kill it. To think that the first otherwordly creature encountered by humanity should be attacked and injured by us is beyond deplorable.” Suddenly he thought of all the bad faith, the back-stabbing, the hatred of the ignorant for all that was new, and he stuck his face nearly onto the prisoner’s faceplate and bellowed, “It’s a crime forever!”

Ganymede’s eyes flinched. Possibly it was just a reflex, for no sign of remorse appeared in his stony expression. To emphasize his point Galileo struck the side of the man’s helmet, sending him flying. From the floor Ganymede looked up at an angle to see Galileo. Galileo took a step toward him, suddenly furious. “You lie and you cheat and you stab in the back! All you cowards are alike. You try to kill anything you find different, because it frightens you!”

Suddenly Ganymede spoke. “I raised you up from nothing,” he said, his voice like bronze. “You were a second-rate math teacher in a second-rate life. I made you Galileo.”

“I made me Galileo,” Galileo said. “You only fucked me up. You’re trying to get me killed. You should have left me alone.”

“I wish I had.”

“Jupiter has spoken to us. …” Hera said.

Galileo nodded, returned to the point. “The Jovian mind looked into us, and so knows now who the criminal is. It knows we are not as depraved and murderous a species as it might have suspected. It might even know that some of us tried to prevent your rash act.”

Ganymede glowered from the floor. Hera saw this expression, so full of hate, and said to him, “You attacked the alien because of what we might have learned from it. You judged humanity to be cowardly, and so you acted like a coward.”

The prisoner only grimaced.

Hera said, “We’ll take you back to Europa, and turn you over to the people there. They can decide how to deal with you. Although I don’t know what they can do that would be appropriate.”

“Restitution,” Galileo said.

They all looked at him.

“He wanted restitution, and now he will get it.” He looked to Aurora. “You told me what you can do across the temporal manifolds, and what you can’t do. You described the energy costs. If you had enough energy at your disposal, and used it, could you not effect changes nearer than the resonance entanglement with my time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Some of you have gone back and interfered with me, so that what happens to me is different than what would have happened if you hadn’t visited me. So why couldn’t you change this awful deed your Ganymede has committed? Why couldn’t you send him back to a time before he did it, and then prevent him from doing it?”

Aurora said, “Entanglement is easiest at the triple interferences in the wave patterns in the temporal manifold. Inside the first positive interference, it takes much more energy to establish an entanglement. It would take a truly stupendous amount of energy to move an entangler to a time so close to ours.”

Galileo pondered the math she had taught him, swimming hazily in his memory. Overlapping concentric waves on a pond … “But it’s not impossible,” he concluded. “Send him back even to before he entered Ganymede’s ocean, before his exile, and stop him there. That you could do, yes? It would only be a matter of the amount of energy brought to bear?”

She considered it, perhaps venturing into her machine augmentations to do so. “Yes, but the energy might be impossible to marshal.”

“Use the gas of an outer gas giant, as you did when you sent back the first teletrasportas.”

“What if those gas giants are all alive, like Jupiter?”

“The vision it just gave us indicated they are not. There are three giants left outside Saturn, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. Uranus, Neptune, and Hades.”

“Any one of which would provide enough potential energy to power a short analepsis into Ganymede’s past,” Galileo said.

“Possibly.”

Galileo turned to Hera. He pointed at Ganymede. “Send him back,” he said. “Send him back, and make him change what he did before.”

“It might kill him.”

“Even so.”

“It might change things such that all this voyage goes away,” she said, looking at Aurora. “All that we have done since his attack could be lost.”

“It’s lost anyway,” Galileo pointed out. “Everything is always changing.”

She shook her head. “In the e time—”

“But even there. Alas.”

They shared a gaze.

“Remember for me,” Galileo said.

“And you for me,” she replied. She gave him the smallest of smiles, looking him in the eye. Galileo saw it and said to himself: remember.

He glanced at Ganymede, but Ganymede was staring up at the ceiling of the ship’s cabin, or through it to infinity. Whether he was looking for atonement or just another chance to do the job, Galileo couldn’t tell. Real hopes are one of the seven secret lives.