Galileo's Dream (52 page)

After that he saw the slow restoration of Earth, and even sometimes the return of humans to space. They had been there briefly before, in the midst of the wars, when it had meant little or nothing; now their launch into the solar system was a burst toward fresh starts, as all kinds of groups went out to start anew on Mars, in the asteroids, around Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. This was their Accelerando, bursting away from Earth like a seedpod—people and potentialities everywhere expanding outward in what looked like Fibonacci spirals.

By this time all the histories looked much alike. Tiny moons were made into little worlds, the big planets altered toward something like gardened new Earths. As their powers grew, ventures were made into new dimensions, only partly understood, which then led them to the control of truly vast new sources of energy. The two outermost gas giants were destroyed to power thrusts into the entangled manifolds, including the technology that allowed analeptic introjections, the shift of consciousness and effective action backward in time. The idea to try changing some of their pasts, it seemed to Galileo, was born out of the trauma of the nightmare humankind had earlier unleashed on itself and the world. The hope was for restitution. If the past could be changed, it was possible that an amount of suffering and extinction beyond all telling might be averted, and humanity spared the cataclysm of its earlier self. Not only restitution, then, but redemption. But even that was very much in doubt.

Galileo came to in Hera's little ship. They were a finger or two closer to Jupiter, it seemed. He wiped the tears from his eyes and rubbed his face hard, feeling much as he had after the vision of his fiery alternative. The whole world put to the stake. It seemed he could taste the ashes in his mouth.

“The overall course of events,” he said to Hera, trying to hold his voice steady, “reminds me of one of my old experiments, where I placed two inclined planes in the shape of a V. However low the ball dropped, it rose back up to that same level. After all the years, and with all your powers, you've only just managed to get back up to the level where you started to fall.”

“Where
we
started to fall,” Hera corrected him grimly. “It's all one manifold, remember? It's all happening perpetually.”

This Galileo still could not grasp in his feelings, however, no matter how much he understood the mathematics involved—which was more than she did, probably. But she seemed to accept the paradoxical wholeness and multiple flows of time and history. She accepted the nonlocality, the fractured interweaving of potentialities, collapsing in and out of being in a continuous dance of past and future, a complex vector of
c
time and
e
time and antichronos, moments of being flickering in the triple wave.

“No wonder Ganymede tried to change things,” he said.

“Yes. But he may have tried too hard, and made things worse. In a way that you must be very familiar with.”

There was a light clang from below them. A small group of people in silver space suits entered Hera's command room, carrying someone who was in a suit like theirs but which was rigid, it appeared, so that they carried its occupant by the elbows. Behind the faceplate of the rigid suit's helmet, Ganymede's sweaty hatchet face glared out at them. His spittle dotted the inner surface of his faceplate, and he was still talking, though they could hear nothing of what he said.

His captors took off their helmets. One of them was Aurora, her face now flushed, so that she looked younger to Galileo than she had on Europa, perhaps forty or fifty; a woman in her prime, mature and alive. Galileo was surprised to see such a transformation, and wondered if she came from some different temporal isotope, an oxbow in which she was literally younger. But she appeared to recognize him, and in fact came over and gave him a brief hug. Like all the rest of them, she was considerably taller than he was.

“You,” Hera said to the imprisoned Ganymede. “Be prepared to face the Jovian, if you can. We're taking you to it.”

Ganymede spoke again, but made not a sound. Hera slapped his chest and suddenly he could be heard.

“—think it will notice our presence?”

“It already has. Be ready to explain yourself.”

Ganymede was then strapped onto one of the chairs behind Galileo's, his suit still rigid, his helmet left on his head.

There was a silence; no one knew what to say. Hera made the craft seem transparent again, and they flew toward Jupiter fully exposed to the sight of its awful metamorphosis.

The gas giant now occupied about a third of the black sky. It was so massive it was beginning to look like a plane rather than a sphere—a world they were falling onto—a god they now confronted, like mosquitoes hovering before a poxy moon face. The myriad new vortices had disrupted the huge surface so thoroughly that the heretofore obvious latitudinal bands were getting hard to make out. The once-beautiful
planet had become a great plain of boils, a choleric ocean of maelstroms.

“Where will you go?” Galileo asked Hera.

She shrugged and looked over at Aurora, who was staring at Jupiter as if in a trance. They all watched her as she regarded it.

Finally Aurora said, “Head into the Great Red Spot.”

Hera said, “Can you still tell which one it is?”

“Yes.”

As before in his transits with Hera, the ship's progress appeared slow.

“We look like a sperm headed for the egg,” Aurora said at one point. “I wonder if we will be fertile? And what might be born of it?”

“Are you in communication with Jupiter itself?” Galileo asked her.

“Yes, or what lives in it. But only in the same way we were in communication with the Europan sentience. The exchange is mathematical, and seems to indicate our interlocutor exists in other manifolds, so that this is a somewhat weak interaction for it. For those reasons, or others, we are having trouble establishing any system to convey meaning.”

“How did you know it wanted us to come up to it?”

“A kind of geometrical schematic. And then there were changes in Ganymede's ships that allowed us to capture them. We are being drawn there by logical inference, you might say. A tractor beam of logical inferences.”

Galileo said to her, “Can you give me some more of the learning drug that you gave me during the tutorials?”

She nodded, never taking her eyes from Jupiter. “I was thinking the same thing myself. Do you think it's wise?”

“Why not,” Galileo said. Anything to get the taste of your ashes out of my mouth, he didn't say. She handed him a tiny pill, which he swallowed dry. He wondered what effect it would have on her, augmented in her mentation as she already was by her machine earrings. He realized he had no idea what might be going on in her head, what kind of creature she was, and she was their leader now.

Time passed. A protraction of mind. Galileo's thoughts began to race and bloom, to sing in their polyphonic fugue. He watched the
godlike planet with its storm-racked surface slowly fill their entire sky. Space was now a black velvet ring bordering an immense mottled red plane. When Galileo looked behind his chair, he saw that the black was a dome, starry as before, but everything was now obscured by a flickering indigo mist, as if they flew within a giant spark.

They homed in on one of the biggest of the many red spots. The original, apparently. From where they were now, the texture of the Great Red Spot was much more articulated, revealing that it was not flat but rather an immense broad dome raised up from the surface of the planet, marked by finer and finer turbulences. Smaller whirlpools were still visible outside the great red one, some spinning clockwise like it and raised up like boils, others spinning counterclockwise and forming depressions like whirlpools. All these phenomena seemed to Galileo to be elaborations of the simplest forms. They were circles spun hard, until under the impetus of irregularities and each other they became elliptical shapes, spitting out colorful streamers at their edges. These shot away in parabolic paths, slowed in the resistance of gas clouds of umber and sulphur, then spiraled up into new red circles of their own, the characteristic eddying repeated across all the scales visible.

Hera was absorbed in a conversation with Aurora. Galileo got up and went over to Ganymede, looked into his helmet. Ganymede recognized him and looked startled at his presence.

“You have misunderstood why things went awry,” Galileo said to him. “Science needed more religion, not less. And religion needed more science. The two needed to become one. Science is a form of devotion, a kind of worship. You made a fundamental mistake, both in my time and your own.”

Ganymede tried to shake his head within the immobilized helmet, squashing first one narrow cheek then the other against it. His blade of a nose slightly tilted to his left, Galileo saw. “We each must play our part,” Ganymede said, the hoarse woodwind sound of his voice coming from the side of his helmet. “You have to understand that. You think you know enough to judge me, but you don't. If only you knew. I know you have been listening to Hera, that you take her view of things. But she has a perspective no broader than yours. Understand me: I come from a future time, as far from hers as hers is from you. I've seen what happens if we do not play our parts. I wish I could show you the future
that lies in wait if we interact with the gas giant and its children. It leads to extinction. I've seen it, I come from the end times. We know how to avoid it. I'm doing what has to be done.
And you must do the same.”

His eyes bugged out, they seemed the only part of his face fully free to move. They were little twinned worlds of their own, unmatched by anything else in their intensity. He continued: “The nonlocal entanglement of the manifold is total, everything part of everything else. It's all still happening, all still becoming. Each significant historical action collapses a wave function of potentialities, and alters the temporal vector. If you play your part, that of the first scientist martyred by religion, the impetus toward more scientific futures is profound. No matter what happens after that, the worst is only so dire. We arrive at this moment you now visit in your prolepsis—problematic, yes, but in recovery from the bad years, which are less bad than in the other flow of potentialities. And when you are brought here to this time, as I have done, we escape the worst consequences of the encounter with the alien mind.”

Aurora and Hera came over and now listened to him too. He said to Aurora, “Have you shown him what happens in the interval between his time and yours? Or did you just give him the mathematics?”

“It was a math tutorial,” Aurora said dryly.

Behind his face mask, Ganymede was sweating. He glared at her. “Why not give him the historical context? How does your mathematics matter, without that?”

Aurora said, “Mathematics was what humanity managed to do despite the disasters. Of course it matters. It was the only achievement that was real.”

“He needs to know the price that was paid.”

“He knows,” Hera said. “He experienced an overview just before you joined us.”

Ganymede, his gaze transfixing Galileo, said, “You know?”

“Yes,” Galileo confirmed. “I saw. It was a long descent, a desperate recovery. In short, for the most part, a nightmare.”

“Yes, precisely! But look: if you don't play your part and become the scientist martyred for telling the truth, then the religions persist in their primitive insanities, and the wars go on for many centuries longer.
Many
centuries! Those were the bad potentialities you saw, the
worst ones. The exterminations and counterexterminations proliferate and extend, until billions and billions of people have died. That's just how it is. The tide turns at your bend in the river. The precise initial conditions of the birth of science are simply that important to the human story. They are crucial. One start leads to struggle and then harmony, the other to catastrophe. So compared to that, what's a few minutes in the fire? You only remain conscious for a minute or two! In fact we could visit you beforehand and give you an anesthetic. You could experience it as if from the outside. And with those few moments give science the moral high ground for all time.”

“I don't see why,” Galileo protested. That his death could be good for humanity—it didn't make sense. Surely the reverse should be true.

“It doesn't matter whether you see why,” Ganymede insisted. “This is no theory or prediction, it is an analepsis!
I'm telling you what my time has seen
. We've seen it, we know what can be changed and what can't, and your condemnation is determinative. Without it, religious wars continue for centuries longer than with it, all across the field of potentialities. I know Hera has been telling you otherwise, telling you it doesn't matter, telling you that you can avoid it. But you can't. For the sake of the billions, for the sake of all the extinct species, you have to do it.”

“No,” Galileo said.

“But the billions!”

“I don't care. I refuse.”

But he was uneasy. Ganymede's eyes were almost bursting from his head in their desperation, they seemed almost to press against the glass of his face mask. If he had seen some pattern, some bifurcation in the possibilities …

Galileo said, “Aurora?”

“Aurora!” cried Ganymede. “You have to tell him!”

“Be quiet,” Galileo warned him, “or I will have Hera shut you up.”

Then he led Aurora to the farthest part of the cabin, behind Ganymede. Hera came along with them.

“Please, lady,” he said to Aurora. “Can you tell me if what he says is true? Can it matter so much, what I do?”

Aurora said, “It matters what all of us do. The manifold of manifolds is a complex of potentialities, each one implicate in all the others. They coexist, they come in and out of existence complementarily,
there are sums over history and wave function collapses, eddies, and oxbows. As you have seen.”