Galileo's Dream (51 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
W
ITH THE
D
IALOGO
FINISHED AND IN PUBLICATION,
Galileo was happy to see an invitation to a banquet come from the Grand Duchess Christina. She had not been sending these to him as often as before, and when they had come Galileo had been too harried to be pleased. Now he was happy to accept and attend.
In the antechamber to the great dining salon of the Medici palazzo, Galileo made his way through the crowd of courtiers to the drinks table and was given a tall gold goblet filled with new wine. He greeted Picchena and all the rest of his acquaintances at the court, and was circulating and talking with them when the Grand Duchess Christina, as distinguished and regal as ever, called him over to the open French doors leading out to the terrace and formal garden. “Signor Galileo, please come here. I want you to meet a new friend of mine.”
The friend was Hera of Io, from Jupiter.
Galileo clapped both hands to his chest; hopefully this resembled his usual flamboyant court mannerisms enough that it did not look too bizarre, because he was helpless to stop himselfâhe simply had to press down on his pounding heart, to keep it from breaking his ribs
and flying free. It was definitely her, right out of his dreams: a woman quite tall but otherwise ordinary enough, fair-haired, fine featured, well dressed in the style of the court, a bit stout in such raiment. She had the same intelligent look in her eye as always, now curious to see his reaction to her presence, both concerned and amusedâa very familiar look.
“Well met, my lady,” he managed to croak as he took up and kissed her offered hand. It felt chill.
“It's my honor,” she said. “I read your
Sidereus Nuncius
when I was young, and thought it very interesting.”
Here in Italy she called herself Countess Alessandra Bocchineri Buonamici. She was Sestilia Galilei's long-lost older sister, she said, and the diplomat Giovanfrancesco Buonamici's wife. Here she spoke Tuscan with all the fluency of a Florentine, her voice richer and more vibrant than the internal translator's had been. Galileo mouthed some typical phrases of courtly small talk, feeling Christina's eye on them. Knowing his confusion, Alessandra did most of the talking. He learned that she spoke French and Latin, and played the spinet, and wrote poems, and corresponded with her friends in Paris and London. Count Buonamici was her third husband, she informed him; the first two had died when she was quite a bit younger. He could only nod. It was a common story; the plague in the last decade had killed half the people of Milan, and almost as many everywhere else. People died here. But not on Jupiterâ
“I will seat you two next to each other at the banquet,” Christina declared, happy to see them hitting it off.
“Many thanks, Your Beautiful Highness,” Galileo said, and bowed.
When Christina had left them alone in the doorway, Galileo swallowed hard and said, “You remind me of someone?”
Her oak-colored eyes crinkled at the corners. “I should think so,” she said. “Perhaps you can escort me out to the terrace. I would like to take the air before we eat.”
“Of course.” Galileo felt a strange kind of pleasure growing in him, fearful but romantic, uncanny but familiar. To
know
she was realâit made him shudder.
Out on the terrace there were some other couples, and the two of them talked in distracted semicoherence about Florence and Venice, Tasso and Ariosto. He spoke for Ariosto's warmth while she defended
Tasso's depth, and neither were surprised to find they came down on opposite sides of the question. Her husband had just been assigned to a posting in Germany, she said; she would have to leave quite soon.
“I understand,” he said uncertainly.
She asked about his work, and Galileo described the problems he was having with the publication of his book.
“Perhaps you could delay publication?” she asked. “Just by a year or two, until things calm down?”
“No,” Galileo said. “The printing has already begun. And I have to publish. The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned. I've already waited fourteen years, or even forty.”
“Yes,” she said. “And yet.”
A crease appeared between her eyebrows as she considered him. She took his hand and led him around a corner of the palazzo, to a long bench against the wall in the dark. She asked him to sit down, and then reached out and touched him.
The LookI do not wish, Your Excellency, to engulf myself inadvertently in a boundless sea from which I might never get back to port, nor in trying to solve one difficulty do I wish to give rise to a hundred more, as I fear may have already happened in sailing but this little way from shore.
âG
ALILEO
,
Il S
AGGIATORE
H
E STOOD ON THE FRACTURED ICE,
under the livid gas giant. Hera stood beside him, looking uncharacteristically abashed. “Sorry to intrude like that,” she said, “but you went away without warning.”
“Cartophilus took me away. He said it looked like I was in distress.”
“We all were,” she said. “We still are.” She gestured up at writhing Jupiter. “I need your help.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I need yours.”
The gas giant was still roiling in the sky, great red spots all over it, many of them swirling into each other and casting off convoluted squiggling ribbons.
Hera said, “Aurora's people have captured Ganymede and his
group. She's getting messages from Jupiter itself, she says, and because of them, she wants to take Ganymede physically up there, to Jupiter.”
“To
Jupiter? But why?”
“That's what I want your help to find out. At this point you appear to have a better understanding with Aurora than anyone else,” shooting a sharp glance at him. “All she'll say to me is that we need to hurry if we want to be part of it. I thought you would want to be here, and as you had disappeared, I went to see.”
“I'm glad you did. It was good to see you there.” This was true beyond his ability to explain, even to himself.
She nodded and led him to her ship, which was where they had left it, on the ice outside the gate of Rhadamanthys. He climbed up after her and strapped himself into his chair. This place was like a room in his mind now, a closet where many memories from his past were housed, along with the conversations with Hera. Here he had seen the dark side of Jupiter, and its new crescent slicing into the starry black.
She tapped at her pad and said, “It seems you were right about the breakout of storms. Jupiter, or whatever lives in Jupiter, is upset. Aurora says we need to let it know that the attack on Europa was an aberration, a criminal act that we abhor. She says we must go there to make that clear. It's responding to her now, and she says it appears to want to contact the mind of the one responsible for the ⦔
“For the damage,” Galileo suggested.
“Yes.” She shuddered, tapped on her pad, and the ship rose until they were pressed back hard into their chairs. “I guess it can do what it wants with him.”
“It might kill him.”
“So be it.”
“It might kill all of us.”
“I know. I can send you back if you want.” She gestured at the box of her teletrasporta, there between them on the floor of the cabin.
“Not yet.”
On the window screen he could see that other ships were also rising over the now ruddy curve of Europa, silver pips surrounding them above and below. Hera spoke at speed to her unseen interlocutors. He saw a new crater wall that looked as though it were blanketed by diamond dust; this was where Ganymede's ship had crash-landed, presumably.
All the ships were staying well away from the hole, which still spewed a faint talcum into spaceânot at speed, as with the sulphur geysers of Io, but as if the planet were breathing out frost on a cold morning. Hopefully it was not its last breath.
Galileo was thrown forward against his restraints by an abrupt deceleration. Their viewscreen showed that they had been docked by another ship so alike in appearance that it seemed to be the image of theirs in a mirror. Hera was both talking and tapping at her pad. Galileo felt or heard the antechamber doors opening and shutting. The other ship pulled away.
“To Jupiter,” Hera said.
A sharp acceleration up. On the screen Jupiter lay ahead of them, spotted like a pox victim. Poor young Ferdinando had looked like that in 1626. The rest of their little fleet was nowhere to be seen. After a period of silent flight, heading up to the hectic sphere, now more awesome than ever, Galileo said, “Can you give me the tutorial that tells me what happened between my time and yours? Something compressed? Because I think I need to know.”
“Yes.” She handed him her celatone. “It will go fast. It will be a sum over histories, as it is called, showing you many potentialities at once, in the braided stream format. It will all come on you in a synaptic bloom. Those can be confusing, and give you a headache.”
Galileo put the heavy helmet on his skull. Marina's faceâthe old dragonâa ball falling through space in a swift curveâ
Then there it was. Voices speaking in Latin overlapped in his head, as if several Plutarchs spoke at the same time, but mostly it was an instantaneous flood of images. Galileo was on the Earth and even in it. He was everywhere. He looked, he listened, but more than anything else he felt the ferocious tempests in Europe after his time, felt how the early advances in math and physics that he had learned from Aurora, so beautiful and inspiring, were somehow intertwined and complicit with a continuous tale of war and spoilation. It didn't have to be that way, and there were fragile strands in which it seemed not to have happened, but the main broad channel of history was filled with blood. Humanity's increasing power over nature meant more powerful weapons, of course, along with more powerful medicines. Populations
bloomed, the whole world was explored and settled, the primitive peoples killed off, those less primitive enslaved or conquered and turned into client states of the European powers. Even Italy coalesced into a single state, as Machiavelli had so much desired, although late in the imperial moment and at a point where their only colony was poor Abyssinia. But none of that mattered. All over the world, newly growing populations were at each others' throatsâfighting, killing, dying. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was carved up entirely into industrial empires; people were enslaved in factories and cities. Galileo felt their lives: not one in ten of them even tended a garden. “They live like ants,” he groaned.
In the next period, the wars between empires grew massiveâevery part of civilization so mechanized, cruel, and powerful, that a point came where entire nations of people were gathered up and fed into roaring furnaces and destroyed. Billions died. Sickened, appalled, Galileo watched on with a shrunken heart as all nature was then in effect fed to the furnaces to feed a rapacious humanity that quickly rebounded from the deaths and became superabundant again, like an infestation of maggots, a sporulating mass of suffering beasts. In such conditions, war and pestilence were constant, no matter the progress in mathematics and technology. Total war was more the rule than the exception; army against army was rare. Marking all the potentialities and mocking all their potential, innumerable natural and human catastrophes broke out all across the time streams, until in Galileo's mind the Earth appeared not unlike the maelstrom-strewn face of Jupiter, a planet red with blood. It came to the point where it was an open question how much of humanity could surviveâand all this in a supposedly scientific world, with continual advances in their technologies and their potential physical control over nature. It was horrifying to witness, as if a race between creation and destruction had both sides succeeding at once and accelerating all the while, creating in their conjunction something unexpected and monstrous.
Galileo moaned as he experienced all this, as it blossomed all at once and entire in his memory, something he always seemed to have known. The inherent anger, the depth of hatred, the potential for evil; he had always known, always seen it. At any point the monsters could break out. Again he saw that he was being shown not just one single history but a superposition of many of them, following the same metapattern
but all collapsing into chaos to one degree or another, so that he was being flooded with many bad potentialities at once. Some were bad, others were horrific, a few were stark apocalyptic.
He saw further, saw then that the centuries after those were always a miserable desperate struggle, in which a much reduced and demoralized humanity tried to get by in the wreckage of the world. Having ruined so much, being so many fewer, and yet also becoming quickly more powerful, also more chastened and realistic, people began patching things up. Some recoveries went better than others. Nature itself was robust, and its harrowed surviving forms proliferated as always. For humanity, it was slower and less steady. So much had been lost; Galileo felt in his stomach the iron ball of despair that had dragged down every single version of these generations' efforts. Shattered, traumatized, frightened, they did what they could. Science itself proved as robust as any other living survivor, as tough as some jungle vine spreading through the tropics. A new paradigm, born of exhaustion as much as hope, led them into an array of emergency landscape restorations. Centuries of various duration told of a dogged and heroic effort to rebuild some minimal scaffolding for the future. It was all done for the future. A human civilization that was now aware of the dangers that the extinction of any species posed for all of them did what it could to restore the natural fauna and flora of the Earth, and the underlying chemistry of the ocean and air, so badly poisoned. Here they were aided by the fecundity of life, its resilience; and in this era science finally was directed entirely at the problem of restitution, and put foremost in humanity's judgment of its efforts. Now it seemed that there was a strong channel in these braiding streams that ran clear toward something healthy. In these worlds some of the huge menagerie of extinct species were returned, reconstituted or engineered from what germs and seeds remained of them.