Galileo's Dream (31 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
“Things get ground up,” Galileo agreed. “Our bodies. Our lives.”
“That's the effect of being in a manifold made of three different motions.”
“It's hard to see.”
“Of course. We mainly experience time as a unified vector, much as we experience space as a plenum made up of the three spatial macro-dimensions. You don't usually see the plenum as length, breadth, and height, you simply experience space. Time is similarly triune but whole.”
“Like tides in a river mouth,” Galileo ventured. One time as a boy he had watched the seaweed flow first one way, then the other. And at the moment the tide changed: “Sometimes there is flow both ways, and the interference chop can be either obvious or subtle. And the water is always there.”
“There are interference patterns, yes. Other people talk about Penelope's Loom, and how we are all in our place of the tapestry busily embroidering it, and now the analepts are hopping back and re-embroidering certain parts. Anyway, time is not laminar. It shifts and flows, breaks up and eddies, percolates and resonates.”
“And you have learned to travel on these currents.”
“Yes, a little bit. We learned to shape a charge to create an eddy of antichronos, and push something along in it, and when that eddy touches
c
time again a complementary potentiality is created. That was enough to do a limited sort of time travel. We could perform analepses at certain resonant entanglements in the manifold. But it required very large applications of energy to make the first shift of the transference devices back in time. The required energies were so large that we were only able to move a few entanglers to bilocated past potentialities. Black holes sucked down large fractions of the gas of the
outer gas giants for each entangler sent back. After that they were in place to be used as portals for entanglements of consciousness. These entanglements require much smaller energies, being a sort of field of induced or potential dreaming. The entanglements create a complementary potential time with every analepsis and prolepsis, and for this reason and others, the entire process remained controversial throughout the time it was being actively pursued. Shifting ten or a dozen entanglers required the complete sacrifice of the two outermost gas giants. That was felt to be enough, or too much. So really, this was mostly a technology of about a century ago, when analepts were going back frequently, and sometimes fighting over their changes, as Ganymede did more than anyone. It has all since been reconsidered. By no means does everyone agree it was a good idea.”
“I should think not,” Galileo said. “Why did they do it at all?”
“Some wanted to retroject science analeptically into a time earlier than it had naturally appeared, in the hope of making human history a bit less dire.”
“Why bother, now that you are here?”
“The intervening years were more dire than you know. And we are not just here; we are there too. You are not really comprehending what I have told you. We are all connected and alive in the manifold of manifolds.”
Galileo shrugged. “Things still seem to happen one after the next.”
She shook her head. “In any case, what you see here is a damaged and traumatized humanity. It was felt for a while that work on the past could make that better. A kind of redemption.”
“I see ⦠I think. But, speaking of what you have taught meâthat's only eight dimensions, if I have not lost track. Five of space, and three of time.”
“Yes.”
“And the other two?”
“One is a truly implicate microdimension, inside all the rest. Each minim holds a universe in that dimension. Then all these and ours too exist inside a macromanifold, you might call it. This enfolds a multiplicity of universesâa kind of hyperspace of potentialities, well beyond human perception, although discoverable by observations of cosmically high energies, and of the background radiation. It's said that in this manifold there are as many existing or potential universes
as there are atoms in this universe, and some say even many orders of magnitude more than that, like 10
3000
.”
“That's a lot,” Galileo said.
“Yes, but it is still not infinity.”
Galileo sighed. He saw they were no longer flying, but in a room the size of a lecture hall in Padua. Aurora could point at one wall and mime writing, and equations appeared on the wall before them. She walked him through the mathematics of the tenth dimension, the manifold of manifolds, and Galileo, as he struggled to follow her, was comforted by the idea that even here her work was a kind of spatial geometry, things laid out in relationships, with proportions, just as always. Maybe that was for his sake, but it all fell into place. Everything could be explained: the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the strange billowing of the universe out from a single point that had never been anywhere. All the laws of nature, all the forces and particles, all the constants, and all the various manifestations of time, of being and becoming, their suprachronological travel in time, the bizarre giant reality of universal entanglement, were explained. It was a whole, a quivering organism, and God was indeed a mathematicianâa mathematician of such stupendous complexity, subtlety, and elegance, that the experience of contemplating Him was inhuman, beyond what any human feeling could encompass.
“My head hurts,” Galileo admitted.
“Then let's go back,” Aurora said.
As she was flying him back into the world, Galileo experienced a moment of selfish curiosity. In his first tutorial, he had gotten a glimpse of his hero Archimedes, as clearly as if he had been through the tele-trasporta and seen the Greek face-to-face, or even lived his life. Someone had mentioned something about Ganymede visiting Archimedes before he visited Galileo; perhaps that explained it. Now, with Aurora absorbed in a private conversation with her assistants, Galileo murmured a request to the teaching machine to show him the historical background of the astronomer Galileo Galilei.
Immediately he was cast into a space like that which had surrounded Archimedes; not a moment but a lifeâhis life. Instantly he was filled with his own life, in Florence, Pisa, Padua, then Bellos-guardo,
then a smaller house he didn't recognize, in a village. All of it filled him at once, fine-grained to the minute, and fearfully he cried out, “Stop! Take it away!”
Aurora now stood before him, looking surprised. “Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to know.”
“You thought you did. Now you will have to forget.”
“I hope I can! But I suppose you can give me an amnestic that will help me to deal with it?”
“No,” she said, looking at him curiously. “I can't. That's Hera's kind of thing. You will have to cope with whatever you learned yourself.”
Galileo groaned. He struggled up from his big reclining chair, Aurora's helmet on his head. He felt drained, frightened. The sensation of immediate powerful apprehension was still with him, but it all had to do with his life now. His pastâthe present momentâ
People were talking. Aurora and her assistants. For a time he lost the sense of it. Thoughts in language, like the voice speaking in him; they were such simple things, like the twittering of birds. Pretty, even sometimes beautiful, but nowhere near as
expressive
as mathematics. Now he tried hard to remember, he tried hard to forget; some of it was there and some of it was gone, but not in the ways he would have hoped. Nothing to be done about it. The tutorial had happened in him, it had left marks; it would remain somewhere in him, in what they called
e
time, or in that evanescent present that always bloomed at the edge of
c
. Or headed back through antichronos, all the way back to the curious boy looking at the lamp swinging in the cathedral. Memory as a kind of precognition.
He regarded Aurora freshly. An ancient woman, who had, he now knew, a knowledge of mathematics, and of the physical universe, that far, far,
far
transcended his. That was rather amazing. He had never thought that any such person could exist.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked her.
“I don't think so. I'm not sure I grasp the concept.” She hesitated. “Can we get something to eat? Are you hungry? Because I am.”
T
HEY SAT BESIDE A LOW TABLE
next to the far railing. It was an altana, it seemed to him; just as in Venice, they made their ground on their rooftops. He sat by the railing and looked at this Venice under its pulsing green-blue sky. On the table between them were plates of small cubes and slices of a vegetable substance unknown to Galileo, the bits flavored with ginger or garlic or various peppery spices he was not familiar with, which made his tongue buzz and his nose run. The water was berry-flavored; he drank deeply, feeling suddenly very thirsty. He surveyed the dim turquoise and cobalt buildings beneath them. Europa was a world of ice, Io was a world of fire. Were Ganymede and Callisto then earth and air?
“Have you had more conversation with the thing under us?” he asked Aurora. “You were telling me about it before. It seems to know gravity well, you said?”
“Yes.”
“What about the compound temporality, the vector of three times?”
“That's been hard to determine.”
“Show me the exchanges with it.”
Aurora smiled. “It's been eleven years since the ice was broached and the sentience confirmed. Most of the interactions have come to dead ends. But an abstract of it can be found here.”
She indicated their table, and Galileo looked at it and saw long strings of mathematical symbols and graphically organized information. The tutorial pulsed in his head like a kind of headache. He tried to pilot that knowledge into this new problem.
“Interesting,” he said at last. “What physically constitutes the sentience, do you know? Have you located the bodily source of its mind?”
“It fills the ocean below us, but is not the ocean. The things like fish that you yourself saw, I believeâ”
“I saw spirals of blue light, more like eels than fish.”
“Yes, well, these came from parts of a larger whole. Like brain cells of a sentience distributed across the group. But still it does not appear to be consciousness as we would recognize it. There is a kind of absence in its cognition, having to do with self-awareness and other-awareness. An absence that makes some suspect that what we are conversing with is part of a larger whole.”
“But what?”
“We don't know. But there are people who want to find out.”
“Not all of you?”
“Oh no, not at all. There is a ⦠disagreement. A very basic philosophical or religious disagreement. One might call it a dangerous disagreement.”
“Dangerous?” Galileo was apprehensive: “I was hoping you were all past that kind of thing by now.”
She shook her head. “We are human, and so we argue. And this is an argument that could lead to violence.”
Dissent among the Galileans. Well, he already knew that. Hera had kidnapped him, and Ganymede had rammed his ship into the Europans; he should not be surprised. It was people changing their nature that would have been surprising. “Actual violence?”
“People are much more likely to kill each other over ideas than over food,” she said. “It's very clear in the historical record, a statistical fact.”
“Maybe,” Galileo ventured, “when food is secure, the grasp for certainty moves elsewhere.”
“Certainty,” she scoffed. “In the manifold of manifolds!” And she laughed.
As if to illustrate her point, out of the glass antechamber appeared Hera herself, ivory-armed and magnificent. She was trailed by her Swiss guard equivalent, a dozen bruisers even bigger than she.
Now she approached Galileo, shaking her head as if at a child who did not comprehend his transgression.
“You again!” he said sharply, angered by this look. “What is it this time?”
Then a loud group of locals spilled out of the next antechamber over. Hera saw them and said, “This rabble is trying to keep us from joining you, here in a public space. One momentâ”
She and her gang ran at the Europans, and a brawl began. In Venice such a thing would have been dangerous, with knives pulled from sleeves. Here it was just shoving and shouting, and the occasional flailing roundhouse. Hera shouted, “You'll be charged with assault! I hope you'll get exile!”
“You're the one who made the assault,” one of them shouted, and appealed to Aurora: “We did what we could. She stops at nothing.”
The mathematician regarded them without expression. “Then let her speak.”
Hera returned to Galileo's side. “Take the entangler,” she said to her people, gesturing at the pewter box. She said to Aurora, “I'm the one who should have it, and you know it.” One of Hera's guards went to the box and picked it up. Then without warning Hera grabbed Galileo by the arm, lifted him off his feet, and walked with him toward the glass closets, leaving a rear guard behind to protect her retreat.
“Kidnapping again?” Galileo inquired caustically, struggling to free himself from her grasp. It was galling that he could not even slow her down.
She rolled her eyes as she set him down and dragged him with her, forcing him to step fast. “Those drugs Aurora gives you,” she said emphatically, “and the lessons, they do more than teach you our math.
They change you
. By the time you're done, you won't remember what I showed you before! Do you remember that? Do you remember how they burned you?”
“Of course I do! I'm not going to forget that. How could learning more mathematics cause anyone to forget that?”
“By changing you so that even if you do recall it, you lose your understanding of why it happened.”
“I never knew why it happened!” Galileo shouted, suddenly furious. He took a big swing at her, which she easily avoided. “I'm still trying to figure that out!” He swung again and caught her on the arm, but it was like hitting a tree. “Everything I've done since you showed it to me only seems to bring it closer! I've been destroyed. And it can get worse. That's precisely one of the reasons I want to learn more!” And he yanked his arm free of her grasp.
She took it again, with a grip like an eagle's. “You don't understand. Your fate doesn't have to do with the math and the physical theories. It has to do with your situation at home, and with you yourselfâyour nature or your characteristic responses. The kind of conclusions you draw, and how you react in a crisis.
You are your own problem
.“
She pulled him into the glass closet and let him go. Glowering, she poked buttons on the panel next to the door. “I guess I have to teach you that part, just as Aurora taught you physics.”
“But we were working here. They're making an attempt to contact the thing inside Europa, and I was helping them.”
“That's none of your business. And there are people who think they understand the thing already. Including Ganymede, in fact. He and his followers are the ones causing the problems.”
“How so?”
“They still consider the Europan thing a danger to us, a mortal danger.”
“But why? How could that be?”
“It doesn't matter.”
“Of course it matters!”
“Not to you it doesn't. What matters for you is doing what you did in your time without getting burned for it. Do you want to be burned?”
“No! I just don't see how me knowing more can change that.”
She shook her head, red-cheeked and still breathing hard, looking down at him with a grim expression. As they left the moving closet, now on the ground, she said, “You understand nothing. Especially
your self. All that celebrated ceaseless activity of yours, performed in ignorance.”
“I know as much as any man! Indeed more than most.
You
know less than I about how the world works, even with fourteen centuries' advantage. You have nothing to teach me.”
“There is no hatred like that of ignorance for knowledge,” she quoted him sardonically. “Especially self-knowledge. Do you want to be burned or not?”
“Not.”
“Come along, then.” She made a brief gesture at a new group of her retainers, waiting beside a long low boat, like a gondola. From behind them, the guard with the teletrasporta ran up and put it beside Hera.
“I need to join the grand council on Callisto,” Hera told Galileo as she gestured at the gondola. “The transit will take several hours. You will come along, and we can talk. There are some things you need to see in your life.”
“Spare me,” he said.
She wheeled and glared at him, face inches from his. “I will not spare you! I'll put you through your life as many times as it takes.”
“As it takes for what?”
“For you to get it right.”
This was sounding bad.