Galileo's Dream (47 page)

“What?”

She hissed. “Whatever hit the surface just exploded again. Maybe its a reactor. There's an electromagnetic pulse that has registered that is—ah! See that bright white spot?” She tapped away quickly, then began cursing again. “A lot of them are in trouble now, on both sides. Hold on,” she ordered. “I'm taking us down fast.”

Their ship tilted forward, rocketed down toward the shattered icescape. Only in the last seconds before they would have impacted like a meteor did the invisible ship tilt and shudder and roar, throwing Galileo against his restraints.

Then they thumped down on the tawny ice. Hera began rattling out a long list of instructions to the ship and the various machine intelligences among its crew.

“Shouldn't you get the rest of your grand council involved in this?” Galileo asked.

“Yes.” She gave him a look. “But we'll meet with the Europan council for now.”

“Oh I see. Very good.”

“Very bad. We've failed to stop Ganymede. I don't know what he's done, but that was a big explosion. Possibly one of their ship engines.”

“When they crashed in?”

“Ordinarily that wouldn't be enough to do it. The engines are secured against almost any accident. But with some time and effort, it might be possible to override the protection.”

They disembarked from the ship, and he soon found out that she had landed them very close to an entry ramp into Rhadamanthys, the under-ice Venice. Down a broad white entrance, through a diaphanous barrier and into a broad ice gallery, where the pulsing blues interlocked in their patterns overhead. Soon they reached the edge of the canal they had taken before, and beside it was a sunken amphitheater where a small crowd of people gathered. This too looked familiar, and though he couldn't recall the specifics of any previous incident, he assumed there had been one, there on the far side of some amnestic he had ingested. Already seen …

“You have to give me something so I don't remember so much of my life,” he reminded her.

“I tried a few things with the mnemonic, while you were remembering. I hope certain parts will be occluded for you now.”

People in the crowd saw Hera descending the stairs toward them. Some threw up their hands as if to say What next! or What have you done! or We already have enough problems! But Galileo saw that was a pretense; he saw that they were afraid. Some were chewing on knuckles; others were weeping without knowing it. Even in the ubiquitous green-blue light of the vast articulated cavern, most of them were white-faced with fear.

Watching Hera confer with them, Galileo heard snatches of a debate over who had the right to land or to forbid landing on Europa. He wandered down to the floating transparent globe that modeled the icy moon. The dark gray rocky core of the globe was surrounded by a transparent blue gel representing the ocean, all of which was held in a thin white shell that tinted the ocean below it to a pastel shade somewhat like the Earth's sky. The outer shell was scored by faint lines representing the crack systems on the surface.

Inside this globe, the creature of the ocean was not rendered visible, although Galileo thought that tiny fluctuations in the blueness of the blue light might be intended to represent some manifestation of it. Down there under their feet—a mile down, a hundred miles down … He wanted to talk to Aurora, to see if anything new had come of the mathematical conversation with the sentience. The listening devices they had emplaced in the ocean were connected to sound repeaters within this floating globe, he assumed, as emanating from it he could hear, at a much reduced volume, the uncanny singing he remembered so well. The lowest sounds appeared to match the little shifts in blueness of the model's ocean. He wondered if the color changes marked the spatial origin of the sounds.

“Why didn't you stop him? You failed!” one of the locals was complaining to Hera. “You were supposed to keep him sequestered on Io!”

“We tried,” she countered, “unlike you. Where were you? It might have helped to have some numbers there, if you really wanted a quarantine.”

The argument persisted, grew louder—

Then the blue in the floating globe turned white at a point under the surface, near the upper part of it. That would be its north pole, no doubt. The blossom of incandescence propagated away from it in
waves; they struck the solid mass of the core and rebounded toward the surface. Threads of white light coursed through the interior like lightning.

Then there was a tremble underfoot, and the ice around them groaned, sounding much like the creature within had sounded during their incursion. Perhaps the sentience had learned to sing by mimicking the natural creaks of its moon's ice.

Then the sounds coming from the globe changed. The clustering glissandi coalesced to a single dissonant chord. The pitch dropped abruptly, down to a
basso profundo
so profound that Galileo heard it more in the gut than the ear. It
groaned
. As the awful sound lifted back into the range of the audible, it seemed to lift Galileo's body with it, chelating him with a thousand claw tips, so that his skin crawled and the hair rose on his forearms and the back of his neck. He recalled the cries that had driven them up through the ice shell of the moon to the safety of the surface. That, however, had been an angry sound, like the roar of a lion. This one was pain and confusion. Then in a brief crescendo that spiked into his head just above his eyes, it changed to raw fear.

This lasted only a moment, thank God, for everything it felt Galileo felt. But it seemed the machine transferring the sound had damped the volume, reducing it to a lunatic whimper. That hurt in a different way—the sound of it too high, and somehow broken. The anguish pierced him right to the heart. He felt it fully himself, anguish like something he somehow recognized, something he had already felt …

Galileo found he had his nose to the floating globe, that he was embracing it and whimpering himself, muttering desolately, “No, no, no, no, no.” The pain in him was unbearable, like the stab of a cry of grief.

“What happened?” he said, wiping his face as Hera approached. “Has it changed?”

“Yes.” Her expression was grim.

“Has it been wounded?”

“Yes. As you can hear. Aurora tells me its messages have gone away.”

“Is she here in this quarter of the city? Can you take me to her?”

Hera nodded. “She'll send an avatar.”

The people standing in the amphitheater looked crushed, heartbroken. Clearly the painful sounds affected everyone. Aurora herself suddenly appeared before them, also stricken, her nose to a screen before
her as she tapped at the buttons on her table, muttering to herself, or to the alien beneath them.

“What's happened?” Galileo exclaimed to her.

“Here—ohhh—”

“
What?”

“Can't you see? Look there!” Tapping at the screen at her hands, without ever moving her face. It looked like she wanted to dive through the screen. She held on to her desk's edge as if to the railing of a ship. She moaned, oblivious of those around her.

“Its articulation is bad, the signals off sequence,” she whispered. “The equations are wrong. It's as if it's been drugged, or …”

“Or injured,” Galileo said. “Damaged.”

“Yes. It must be. The explosion included a big electromagnetic pulse, very powerful, especially in the area just under the blast. What did they do? And why did they do it?”

Galileo turned away. He had met a man once who had been struck on the left side of the head by a falling hoist beam in the Venetian Arsenale. The beam had sheared off; this was one of the incidents that had made him interested in strength of materials. The man had recovered in most senses, and been able to speak, but his speech was slurred, and he stuttered, babbled, forgot himself, repeated himself; and all with a huge grin, rendered horrible by his babble.

Behind them the meeting of Europans was ongoing, and the argument had become ferocious, with several people shouting at once. Gali leo saw again that through the centuries people had never gotten less emotional. Hera was one of the shouters. “I'm going to kill them,” she was insisting furiously. “The first mind we have ever encountered, and they attacked it!”

Chirrups and oscillating moans now came from the globe. The faces of the Europan councilors blanched or reddened, according to their humors. Too many people were shouting at once. In the cacophony nothing could be distinguished.

Then the gallery turned purple. The transparent aquamarine tones, so green in their blue, all shifted through aquamarine to a dusky purple.

Everyone stopped talking and stared around. Hera's gaze fixed on Galileo: “What's this?” she said.

A part of him warmed to see that out of all of them she had asked
him, but the cold dread in his heart was not touched. “Let's go outside and see,” he suggested, gesturing at their ceiling, which now pulsed through various shades of grape. He took her by the hand, pulled her toward the broad opening that led up to the surface.

In Europa's light pull, she was quickly moving faster than he could go. After a moment they ran side by side. Then she took his hand again and pulled him along, and he could do nothing but focus on keeping his feet. She dragged him along as his mother had once dragged him out of church, after he had started to laugh at the sight of a swinging lamp. They burst through the diaphanous air barrier and ran up the broad ramp, out from under its ceiling and into the black night of the world. Overhead hung giant gibbous Jupiter—

But it was not the Jupiter he had grown used to during their flights among the Galileans. The Great Red Spot had been joined by scores more red spots, spinning in every band, from pole to pole. Most of the spots were horizontally linked, like bloodstones in necklaces. It was as if the planet had caught a pox, each of the new spots a livid brick red oval, spinning slowly but distinctly, squiggling like wet paint. Some spots straddled bands, and threw their convoluted boundaries into wild spurts and splashes of ruddy color. The dominant color of the stupendous planet had shifted from yellow to a plague of various reds, ranging from brick to blood. The light in the city below had therefore shifted from greens to purples.

Hera, head canted back, staggered and cried out at the sight. She grasped his shoulder to keep on her feet.

“What is it?” she cried.

“It's Jupiter,” Galileo said stupidly, but then clarified what he meant. “It's Jupiter itself, thinking. Like the thing underneath us, you see? The bands and the swirls have always been its thoughts. Now it's angry. Or grieving.”

“But why?”

“Because!” Galileo glanced at her in surprise; she was staring wildly at him. “Because we killed its daughter,” he suggested.

The Two Worlds

H
E WOKE SO STIFF HE COULD NOT MOVE,
feeling the pressure of full bowel and full bladder, which seemed to be in competition with each other to shove their way out of his second asshole. He was in his bed. Cartophilus was staring him in the face with his peculiar look—either knowing or intensely curious, it was impossible for Galileo to say.

“What?” Galileo croaked.

“You've been entangled, maestro.”

“Yes.” He thought about it while he made the effort to roll into a sitting position. “You know what happens to me when I'm gone, isn't that right, Cartophilus?”

“Yes. I see it here.” He gestured at his device.

“So you saw?”

Cartophilus nodded unhappily. “It keeps getting worse. That must
have been quite a noise. All of you were groaning and weeping near the end. It got so bad, I decided to bring you back. I hope I was right.”

“I don't know.” Galileo tried to hold on to what had happened. Life seen by lightning bolts—”I'll have to go back, I think.”

Then La Piera swept in with a basket of bread and citrons, followed by Giuseppe and Salvadore, who carried between them a pot of hot mulled wine flavored with grenadine. They in turn were followed by kitchen girls carrying bowls and cups and plates and implements, and flowers in vases. By way of several slow and articulated movements, groaning at each, Galileo stood. He stared at the faces surrounding him as if he had never seen them before. The syncope this time, La Piera told him, had lasted two days. He had to be starving.

“First help me out to the jakes,” he ordered the boys. “I need to make room for food first. God help me not to shit my guts out.”

In the days that followed, he was very subdued. “Things aren't clear,” he complained to Cartophilus. “I remember it only in bits and pieces. I think Hera must have done something to my mind. I can't make it hold together.”