Galileo's Dream (18 page)

S
HE 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.

T
HE 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.