Galileo's Dream

CHAPTER SEVEN The Other Galileo

“Yes, I’m ready,” Galileo replied, his blood jolting through him so that his fingers throbbed. He was afraid. But he was curious too. He said to the stranger, “Let’s go up to the altana.”

Cartophilus carried the massive telescope up the outside stairs, bent double under the load. “Local gravity getting to you at last?” the stranger asked acerbically.

“Someone has to carry the load,” Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. “Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, Signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fucking dilettante.”

The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt a jolt of the sensation that this had happened before—what the French would later name déjà vu.

And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.

Jupiter was a big banded ball near the center of the glass, strikingly handsome, colorful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis—and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.

But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.

Who was frowning heavily. “Let me check it.” He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.

“Not good,” Cartophilus said.

“Maybe it’s Hera,” the stranger said darkly.

Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.

They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked at Jupiter again. It was still in the middle of the lens. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. “This is not just a telescopio,” he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels … “It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.”

The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, “The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?”

The stranger reexamined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.

“Ah. Try it again,” the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. “Take another look.”

Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side; III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.

Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. Moon I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black—or so it seemed—because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.

The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity; I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended on it, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones—of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terra-cotta and bloodred, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter—all piled on all, one color pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.

The overlayering of so many colors made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.

He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. There on the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.

He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.

On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.

“What’s this?” the stranger exclaimed angrily.

“You know what this is, Ganymede,” said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, “Welcome to Io; you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your traveling companion.”

She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.

“You stole our entangler,” Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. “What are you trying to do, start a war?”

Hera glared at him. “As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, and the factions are at each others’ throats.”

“That has nothing to do with me,” said Ganymede coldly.

As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation, suspiciously defensive to Galileo, was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plow blade. “This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!”

“You’re the one who kidnaps him,” Hera replied. “I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.”

Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort. His face was flushed a dark red. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.”

“No!”

The people standing behind Hera now moved forward en masse. They were dressed in clothes similar to hers, were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favor.

Hera nodded at them and said to Ganymede, “Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.”

“I can’t allow this!”

“It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.”

“This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.”

Hera said, “We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and so we decide what happens here.” She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.

Hera said to Galileo. “Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?”

“Not quite,” Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry …

With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, “Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.”

She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and kept it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her, interested to hear what she might say. He already knew that she was going to get what she wanted, no matter what. He had seen willful women before.

She was at least a hand taller than he was, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again. After that, he held on to her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy)—calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.

“You are well named,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” she said. “We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.”

When they reached the far arc of the little temple, she paused. He let go of her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on—a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.

Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. “This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that steaming crack in the side of the shield.” She pointed. “Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.”

Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. “It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.”

“It is hot. In many places, if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.”

“Tides?” Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. “But surely there are no oceans here.”

“By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.” She grimaced expressively. “We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.”

Galileo struggled to imagine a world regurgitating itself, molten rock flowing inside to outside, then sinking down to be melted and thrown up again.

“There isn’t a single drop of water left,” Hera went on, “nor any of the other light and volatile elements you are used to on Earth.”

“What is it made of, then?”

“Silicates, mostly. A kind of rock, mostly melted. And a lot of sulphur. That’s the lightest element not to have been burnt off, and being the lightest, it tends not to sink but to froth on the surface, as you see.”

“Yes. It looks like burnt sulphur.” He had seen pots of the stuff, bubbling in an alembic. He sniffed, but smelled nothing.

“Mostly sulphur, yes, or sulphur salts and sulphur oxides. Here we are near the triple point for sulphur, so it vaporizes when it erupts out of the interior, literally explodes on exposure to the vacuum. It can shoot out of a geyser and land more than fifty miles away.”

“I don’t understand,” Galileo confessed.

“I know.” She gave him a glance. “You are brave to admit it. Although very few people really understand.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“Yes. Well, I’m not the one to tell you the details of the physics or chemistry involved. But I can tell you more about what you have seen here, and the person who brought you here. And why he and his group are acting as they are.”

“I would appreciate that very much,” Galileo said politely. It was always good to have potential alternative sources of patronage; sometimes one could then balance them, or pit them against each other, or otherwise use them to create a differential advantage, a leverage. “You said they brought me to Europa, and we descended into its ocean—it must be a very different world from here, I must say!—and they were hoping to stop others from descending, because that is a forbidden place. But we had something happen. Some kind of encounter. I almost remember; it was like a waking dream. I seem to recall we were somehow … hailed. By something living in the ocean. There was a noise, like wolves howling.”

“There was. Very good. I’m not surprised you remember it, despite the amnestics they gave you. Abreactions fire across the blocked areas by way of similar memories, so being here helps you to recall your previous visits.”

“Visits?”

“What I am surprised at is that Ganymede took you along on that incursion. It may be that he did not know the timing of the Europans’ descent, and had to include you in something that was not meant for you.”

“Ah.”

“I do know he’s been telling you that his group has brought you to our time to advise them on a matter of fundamental importance.”

“It seemed unlikely,” Galileo said with an unconvincing show of modesty.

She smiled briefly. “According to Ganymede, you are the first scientist, and as such, one of the most important people in history. Nevertheless, to ask your advice was not his reason to bring you here.”

“Then what was?”

She shrugged expressively, like a Tuscan would have. “Possibly he felt your presence would help him defend his actions on Europa. No one else on the council wanted to take the responsibility of interfering with the Europans. Ganymede took the position that what they were proposing was a dangerous contamination of a crucial study zone, so that stopping them would be the best scientific practice, and also the safest for humanity. He brought you forward in a prolepsis that he hoped would support that position.”

“Why should my presence matter?” Galileo wondered.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, frowning as she looked at him. “He’s created so many more analepses than anyone else that it’s hard to get a fix on what he is up to. I wonder if he mainly brings you here to change you, to cause you to do what he wants you to do back in your time. Even with the amnestics blocking your conscious memory, you are still changed here. Then again, when he has you here he flaunts his rashness with the entangler, and thus hopes to scare the council. Or perhaps he thinks you bolster his authority, as you are the first scientist. The patron saint of scientists, you might say. Or of Ganymede’s cult, anyway.”

“Archimedes was the first scientist, if you ask me.”

“Maybe so.” She frowned. “There were analeptic intrusions around Archimedes as well, actually. But you are the first modern scientist, the great martyr to science, the one everyone knows and remembers.”

“People don’t remember Archimedes?” Galileo asked incredulously, thinking: martyr?

She frowned. “I’m sure historians do. In any case, you are right to question Ganymede’s stated rationale. He may want your effect here in a prolepsis, or he may be shaping his analepsis by what he exposes you to here.”

Galileo mulled over the terms, which to him came from rhetoric. “A backward displacement?”

“Yes.”

“What year is it here, then?”

“Thirty twenty.”

“Thirty twenty? Three thousand years after Christ?”

“Yes.”

Galileo swallowed involuntarily. “That’s a long time off,” he said at last, trying to be bold. “Coming back to me is indeed an analepsis.” He recalled the stranger’s face in the market, his news of the telescope. From Alta Europa, Ganymede had said that first time. “How does that work? What does it mean?”

Again she frowned. “You are in need of an education in physics, but I am not the one to give it to you. Besides, there is no time. My seizure of his entangler, and of you, will be causing consequences, which may arrive soon to pester us. In the time we have, I want to talk to you about other things. Because now that they have made this analepsis into your time in Italy, it is likely to endure, and it will have effects on all the other temporalities entangled with it. Including your life, among other things. My feeling is that the more you know of the situation, the more you can resist the effects of Ganymede’s intervention. Which makes it safer for us, as our time is then likelier to endure in substantially its current form.”

“You mean it might not?”

“That’s why analepses are so dangerous. There are many temporal isotopes, of course, and they are all entangled, and braid together in ways that are impossible to comprehend, really, even if you are a mathematician specialized in temporal physics, to judge by what they say. What you need to know is that time is not simple or laminar, but a manifold of different potentialities that interpenetrate and influence each other. A common image is to think of it as a broad gravel riverbed with many braided channels, with the water running both upstream and downstream at once. The channels are temporal isotopes, and they cross each other, shift and flow, become oxbowed or even dry up, or become deeper and straighter, and so on. This is just an image to help us understand. Others speak of a kelp forest in the ocean, floating this way and that. Any image is inadequate to the reality, which involves all ten dimensions, and is impossible for us to conceptualize. However, to the extent that we understand, we see that your moment represents a big confluence, or a bend, or what have you.”

“So—I am important?”

Her eyebrows shot up; she was amused at him. He recognized the glance, felt he had seen it before. She gestured at the hellish surface gleaming below them. “Do you know how people came to be here?”

“Not at all.”

“Ultimately, we came here by conducting experiments and analyzing their results using mathematics. That is an idea, or a method, if you like, that changed forever the course of human history. And you were the one who had this idea, or invented this method, decisively and publicly, explaining the process so that all could understand it. You are Il Saggiatore, the Experimentalist. The first scientist. And so therefore everywhere, but especially here in the Galilean moons, you are much revered.”

“The Galilean moons?”

“That’s what we call the four big moons of Jupiter.”

“But I named them the Medicean Stars!”

She sighed. “So you did, but as I said to you before, this has always been regarded as a notorious example of science kissing the ass of power. No one but you ever called them that, and since your time very few people have remained interested in the sordid details of your supplications to a potential patron.”

“I see.” He paused. “Well, the Galileans is just as good a name, I suppose.”

“Yes.” She had several different looks of amusement, he was finding.

He considered all that she had said. “Martyr?” he asked, despite himself.

Now her look grew truly serious. She stared into his eyes, and he saw that her pupils were dilated, the oak brown of her irises a vivid ring between glossy blacks and whites. “Yes. I suppose we call these moons the Galileans to memorialize what happened to you. No one has ever forgotten the price you paid for insisting on the reality of this world.”

Galileo, thoroughly spooked, blurted, “What do you mean?”

She said nothing.

Now a kind of dread began to fill his stomach. “Do I want to know?”

“You do not want to know,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking I’m going to tell you anyway.”

She surveyed him in what now struck him as a cold way. “They are giving you amnestics before sending you back into your own time, while underneath that shaping what you learn here, trying to influence your actions at home in a certain direction. But I am thinking that I could give you an anamnestic to counteract their treatment, and teach you some other things, and if you therefore remember what you learn here, it might have a very good effect on your actions. It might change things, in your time and after. That could be dangerous. But then again, there is much since then that needs changing.”

She pointed at the pewter box she had taken from Ganymede, now lying on the polished yellow floor between them.

“What is that?” he quavered, feeling a squirt of fear slide through him.

“That’s what the entangler really looks like. The other entangler, in Italy, is at the event I want to show you.” She took him by the shoulders and moved him next to it, and said coldly, like inflexible Atropos, “I’m going to put you back there.” And she crouched and touched a tab on the side of the box.

The pain was such that he would have screamed immediately, but an iron muzzle clamped an iron gag into his mouth. A spike wrapped in the gag nailed his tongue up into his palate. It was as much as he could do to swallow the blood pouring into his mouth fast enough not to choke on it. His heart was racing, and when he saw and comprehended where he was, it beat even harder. Surely it would burst with the strain.

The hooded brothers of the Company of Saint John the Beheaded, also known as the Company of Mercy and Pity, had just finished strapping the muzzle and gag onto his head. Now they lifted him up onto the back of a cart. They were outside the Castel Sant’Angelo, down on the banks of the Tiber. The horses in harness jerked forward under the lash of the whip, and he tried to hold his head upright to keep it from hitting the sides of the cart. The cartwheels ground over the paving stones at a walking pace. Dominican monks flanked the cart and led the way. These Dogs of God barked at him as they went, hectoring him to recant, to confess his sins, to go to God with a clean conscience. I confess! he wanted to say. I recant, no question about it. The streets were lined on both sides with a ragged crowd, many falling in behind as they passed, joining the procession into the city. In all the shouting there was no chance anyone would hear his moans. It was assumed that he was past speech, he could see that in their eyes, which were feasting on the sight of him and of the cart, and needed no sound other than their own raw roar. He stopped trying to speak. Even to moan was to choke on blood, to drown on it. Perhaps he could choke on purpose at just the right time.

Slowly they crossed the city, from the great prison on the Tiber to the Campo dei Fiori, the Square of Flowers. Low dark clouds scudded overhead on a stiff wind. Priests in black prayed at him and tossed holy water on him, or thrust their crucifixes in his face. He preferred the hooded and impassive Dominicans to these grotesque faces, twisted by hatred. No hatred was like that of the ignorant for the learned—though now he saw that even greater was the hatred of the damned for the martyr. They saw the end they knew would eventually engulf them for their sins. Today they rejoiced that it was happening to someone else, but they knew their time would come and would be eternal, and so their fear and hatred exploded out of them, putting the lie to their pretended joy.

In the Campo dei Fiori, one of the black Dominicans intoned in his ear. The pope had commanded that his punishment be inflicted with as great a clemency as possible, so there was to be no effusion of blood. How this squared with the blood pouring out of his mouth was a question he was never going to get to ask, for the priest was now explaining that this meant he was to be burned at the stake without first being eviscerated.

Many hands lifted him off the cart. The low underside of the clouds was rippled like a windblown field of wheat. He was dragged by the heels over to the pyre, and there stripped naked, the penitent’s white cloth thrown to the ground, although the iron muzzle was left on his head. His arms were pulled around the thick post of the stake and tied tightly at wrist and elbow. Like everyone, he had burned himself once or twice at stove or candle; it was hard to face the idea of his whole body immersed in that pain. Surely it would not last long.

The crowd was roaring. He tried to choke on his blood, tried to hold his breath and faint. Around him the Dogs of God chanted their imprecations. He did not see who lit the stack of kindling under him.

He smelled the smoke first, then felt fire on his toes. His feet tried to slide up the stake of their own accord, but his ankles were chained to a hole in the post. He had not noticed the chains before. In a few seconds the fire shot up and over his legs, became an agonizing burn all over them. His body tried to scream, and he choked on his own blood, began to drown, but did not faint. He smelled the roasting skin and meat of his own legs, a kitchen smell. Then there was nothing but the pain filling his skull and blinding him, red pain like a scream.

He cried out. His mouth was free, his tongue whole. He lay on a smooth stone floor. The pain was now only a ghost of the agony it had been. An afterimage of it seemed to fill everything with a faint red haze.

He was back on the floor of the mountaintop temple, on Jupiter’s moon Io. He lay on the polished rock with his head clutched in his hands, the meaty stench of his burning still in his lungs, on his whole tongue—only not. It was the ghost of the stench only, a memory; it was in his mind only. But surely it was a memory he would never escape, no matter how hard he tried. Every time he ate roast meat—

His palate was whole, and he swallowed nothing but his own snot and saliva, pouring down his throat like blood. He felt sick to his stomach. He had been weeping hard, and his body was covered with a cold sweat. He sat up, held his jaw in his hands. The taste of blood was gone, except in his mind.

The Ionian woman, Hera, stood over him, as tall and massive as Zeus’s wife should be. She put out a hand, helped him to his feet; it must have been like pulling up a puppet that had had its strings cut. He almost tripped over the pewter box. She balanced him carefully, let him stand.

He wiped the tears from his face, glanced up at her full of shame and fear. She shrugged, uncomfortable and sympathetic. It was nothing to be ashamed of, the shrug seemed to say, not to like being burned at the stake. Also: not her fault. Only acquainting him with reality.

“But this is bad!” he said.

“Yes.”

“It cannot happen!”

“But it already has, as you will come to see.”

“But—you said there were different times, braided together?”

“Well, that’s right. You are quick. But in almost all the potentialities, this is what happens.”

He swallowed hard. “When?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I suppose not. Although, maybe …” He didn’t know what he meant well enough to finish the sentence.

After a silence she said, “You see now why you are revered.”

“I don’t see why,” Galileo objected. “Your Ganymede said it was because of my success! That it was because I invented the method of science, as a mathematical experimentalist.”

“Yes. And so he thinks we need you to succeed, you see. Or none of this will come to pass.”

“But surely that was not success!” A shudder rippled his muscles, as in frightened horses or dogs. “That was no triumph, if I am not mistaken!”

She said carefully, “In some people’s eyes, your success includes your immolation. Ganymede and his followers are among them. They have a fixation on you and your work, on what it meant to the rest of history. From that point on, they say, science began to dominate, and religion to recede. The secularization of the world began. Only that saves humanity from many centuries of darkness, in which science is perverted to the will of insane religions. So they think of you as the great martyr for science.”

“But why should science have to have a martyr?”

“That has been my point precisely.”

A wave of affection for this woman surged through Galileo. He took up her hand, feeling stabbed by hope. “Can you help me, then? Help me to escape that fate?”

She looked down at the sulphurous world that lay shattered below them, thinking it over. She was pondering his fate, becoming like Atropos again. He watched her avidly; she was suddenly beautiful to him, and he remembered a line from Castiglione: Beauty springs from God and is like a circle, the center of which is goodness.

“I think I can,” she said at last. He could not help kissing her hand. She looked at him speculatively. “It is probably true that you have to achieve what you will achieve, for the main channel of history to be as it has been. And it’s probably also true that that achievement is certain to get you in trouble with your theocracy.”

“I don’t see why!” This was already such a grievance with Galileo that he almost shouted this. He wrenched it into a plea. “There is no contradiction between science and Scripture! And even if there were—” for their very presence under the giant banded ball of Jupiter seemed to suggest something beyond the Bible’s purview, beyond what Scripture would countenance—”even if there were, as God made both nature and Scripture, the problem would then be with the details of the Scripture, or with our poor understanding of it. Because the two cannot disagree, as God made both, and He can’t be logically inconsistent. And the Earth goes around the sun, with all the rest of the planets. So as that is true, there is nothing blasphemous in it.”

“No. Of course not. But that was never the issue.”

She stopped, thought, sighed. “One question was, who gets to speak? Who has the authority to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality? This was what your Church objected to—that you asserted that you had the right to make statements about fundamental things. This was what you were saying, under all your details, which as often as not were wrong, or at least unsupported—that you had a right to your own opinion about reality, and that you had the right to say it in public, and argue for it against the views of theocrats.”

“So I was a kind of Protestant, you’re saying,” Galileo concluded glumly. “I might as well have gone north and become a Lutheran.”

“Maybe so.”

“And so … Well, in that case, I am doomed.”

“You are headed for trouble, that is certain, if you insist on asserting yourself in that way. Which is what you did, and which is precisely what made you a crucial figure in the human story. So that it is indispensable for you to make that assertion, and thus to be the first modern scientist.”

“And so burned at the stake, like Bruno!”

“Yes. But … the burning at the stake part, I would argue, is not the important part of your story. What is important is not the punishment, but the assertion.”

“You are good to think so, lady!” How he admired this woman’s intelligence! He could have kissed her feet at that moment, as he already had her hand; in fact he barely restrained himself as the urge came to throw himself to the ground before her. “And so, if … If …”

“If you could both make the assertion, and escape the consequences of it, somehow … Yes. It will be a close run thing, but I should think it would do. There are so many potentialities, after all. How the wave function collapses at any given moment is never completely determinative of what follows. There are inertias and instabilities, and many subsequent interventions. And if there are longer-term changes that follow, I think they could be good. The histories we have now are not such that a change in the centuries subsequent to yours would be such a bad idea. It might lessen the depth of the low point, and get us here with less suffering.”

“But it might change you out of existence?”

“But here we are,” she pointed out.

“But it might still happen?”

“Maybe. But how would that make our situation any different? We might always wink out of existence, at any time.”

Galileo shuddered at the thought. “And so you will help me?”

She regarded him curiously. She seemed almost to hesitate. But then:

“Yes. I will. It will have to be done carefully, you understand. The change will have to be subtly done. And there will be people who will try to prevent any such change, you understand. Ganymede and others.”

“I understand.”

She looked up suddenly, scowled at what she saw. Galileo followed her gaze, saw the star-studded black sky and nothing more. Except then he spotted a small cluster of moving lights, like fireflies. Reinforcements from Ganymede’s people, perhaps.

Hera said, “We should return you to Ganymede.”

“What should I say to him about this?”

She smiled, it seemed at his quickness to fall into conspiracy with her. “Whatever you like,” she said. “Here on Io, you are free to speak your mind. You can tell him everything I told you, if you like.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you. But should I tell him of our plan?”

“What do you think?”

“I would rather not. If his faction believes I must be burned for history to turn out as they want it, then they might try to keep it that way, not so?”

“Exactly.”

“Then we must keep our project a secret.”

“Ha!” she said. “I’m not good at keeping secrets. I speak my mind.”

“But you said you were going to help me!”

“I am going to help you. It’s just that I may choose not to do it in secret.”

“Ah. Well, then …” Galileo was confused. “They will send me back to my time?”

“Yes.”

“And give me a preparation to make me forget what happened here, you said?”

“Yes.”

“But you can give me something to counteract their preparation?”

Her eyebrows bunched together as she thought it over. She glanced at him sidelong. “Yes,” she said, “I can. For every amnestic there are anamnestics. Although I am not so sure you will like remembering this. I can try to modulate your short-term memory, so that you remember just the outlines of it, and the feeling. But as I don’t know which amnestic they will be using, it will be tricky. I can try to counteract the whole class of drug I think they will use.” She spoke quietly into the back of her hand. “My people will give me what I think you will need. You must expect some confusion to result, whether it works or not.”

“Just so I don’t forget!”

“No. What I give you, you will take now, in advance of their application. Then hold your breath right before they send you back. He shoots a mist into your face at the last moment. If you are successful, the result should be that you remember all this fairly well. The anamnestics are quite effective, you will see. Hopefully not in a way that proves intolerable to you.”

“Good. And—will you bring me back here to you, at some point, if you can? I feel that if I am to succeed in my effort at home, I need to learn more.”

She laughed at that. “This is what you are always saying, yes?”

“So you’ll bring me back?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’ll try?”

“Maybe. Don’t mention that to Ganymede. That should be arrheton—not to be spoken of.”

Then vessels like sealed boat hulls, standing on pillars of fire, descended around them. Hera took him by the arm and led him across the smooth yellow stone parquet of the round temple to where her people were holding the stranger and his small group. Ganymede, still there, glared at them both, his eyes burning with such curiosity that Galileo had to look away for fear his new knowledge would squirt out of him by a glance alone. Meanwhile Hera took his hand and palmed him a small pill. She leaned down to his face: “Swallow it now,” she murmured in his ear, then gave him a kiss on the cheek. He brought his hand up to his face as if to touch hers, and as she withdrew he tossed the pill in his mouth and swallowed it. It had a bitter taste, like unripe limes.

Hera had turned to the Ganymede and his newly arrived supporters, who were looking angry. She gave the pewter box to Ganymede and announced, “Here, you can have him. But let him go back where he belongs.”

“We would have long before, if it weren’t for you,” Ganymede said furiously, and then Galileo was surrounded by the stranger’s associates, and Ganymede was holding the box before him, and he held his breath tightly. But one of them noticed what he was doing and tapped him hard in the solar plexus, waited for him to suck in his breath after the involuntary exhalation, then sprayed the mist in his face.