In the sky over his right shoulder gleamed what he took to be the sun—a chip of the utmost brilliance, like fifty stars clumped together into a space not much bigger than the other stars. As on Earth, one could not look at it for long. The sight of it so small made it evident that all the stars could be suns, maybe each with its own set of planets, just as the misfortunate Bruno had claimed. World upon world, each with its own people, like the stranger here, a Jovian it seemed. It was an astounding thought. The memory of Bruno, on the other hand, burned at the stake for saying there were such worlds, gave everything he saw a faint undercurrent of terror. He did not want to know these things.
“Is the Earth visible from here?” he asked, scanning the stars around the sun, looking for something like a blue Venus, or perhaps from out here it would be more like a blue Mercury, small and very near the sun…. Many of the stars overhead, however, were tinted red or blue, sometimes yellow, even green. What might have been Mars could have been Arcturus—no, there was Arcturus, beyond the curve of the Big Dipper. The constellations, he noted, were all the same from this vantage, as they would be only if the stars were very much farther away than the planets.
The stranger was also scanning the sky; but then he shrugged. “Maybe there,” he said, pointing at a bright white star. “I am not sure. The sky here changes fast, as you know.”
“How long is the day here?”
“The rotation is eighty-eight hours, the same as its orbital time around Jupiter, which you are on the verge of determining. Like Earth’s moon, it is tidally locked.”
“Tides?”
“Gravitational tides. There is a—a tidal force exerted by every mass. A bending of space, rather. It is difficult to explain. It would go better if other things were explained to you first.”
“No doubt,” Galileo said shortly. He was struggling to keep his mind empty of fear by focusing on these questions.
“You appear to be cold,” the stranger noted. “You are shivering. Perhaps I can lead you to the city?” He pointed at the white towers.
“I will be missed at home.” Perhaps. It sounded feeble.
“When you return, only a short time will have passed. It will look like what you call a syncope, or a catalepsy. Cartophilus will take care of that end. Don’t worry about that now. Since I have disturbed you by bringing you this far, we might as well accomplish what was intended, and bring you to the council.”
This too would serve as a distraction from his fear, no doubt, and the calm part of him was curious. So Galileo said, “Yes, whatever you like.” It felt like grasping at a branch from out of a whirlpool. “Lead on.”
Despite the effort to stay calm, his emotions blew through him like gusts in a storm. Fear, suspense—the terror underneath everything—but also a sharp exhilaration. The first man who could have understood this experience. Which was a voyage among the stars.
I primi al mondo.
They approached the white towers, which still appeared to be made of ice. He and the stranger had walked for perhaps an hour, and the bottoms of the towers had appeared to him in half an hour, so this moon was probably not as big as the Earth—perhaps more the size of Earth’s moon. The horizon looked very close by. The ice they crossed had been minutely pitted everywhere, also streaked by lighter or darker rays, and occasionally marked by very low circular hills. It seemed basically white, and only tinted yellow by the light of Jupiter.
To one side of the white towers, an arc of pale aquamarine appeared across the whiteness. The stranger led him to this arc, which proved to be a broad rampway cut into the ice, dropping at a very slight angle, down to where it cut under an arch or doorway into a long wide chamber.
They descended. The chamber under the ice roof had broad white doors, like city gates. At the bottom of the ramp they waited before these. Then the gates went transparent, and a group of people dressed in blouses and pantaloons of Jovian hues stood before them, in what seemed a kind of vestibule. The stranger touched Galileo lightly on the back of the arm, and led him into this antechamber. They passed under another arch. The group fell in behind them without a word. Their faces appeared old but young. The space of the room made a gentle curve to the left, and beyond that they came to a kind of overlook, with broad steps descending before them. From there they could see an entire cavern city stretching to the near horizon, all of it tinted a greenish blue, under a high ceiling of opaque ice of the same color. The light was subdued, but more than enough to see by; it was quite a bit brighter than the light of the full moon on Earth. A hum or distant roar filled his ears.
“Blue light goes farthest,” Galileo ventured, thinking of the distant Alps on a clear day.
“No,” the stranger said. “The different colors are waves of different lengths, red longer, blue shorter. The shorter the wavelength, the more light tends to bounce off things, even ice or water, or air.”
“A pretty color,” Galileo said, surprised, trying to think what the stranger meant when he said that light moved in waves, and whether that might account for some of the optical bounce between two lenses that he had noted in their work on the glass.
“I suppose it is. They illuminate some spaces in here with artificial light sources, to make things brighter and give them the full spectrum.” He indicated a building that glowed like a yellow lantern in the distance. “But mostly they leave it like this.”
“It makes you look like angels.”
“Yet we are only people, as I’m afraid you will soon learn.”
The stranger led him to an amphitheater, sunk into the surface of the city floor so that it was not visible until they came to the curved rim of the highest seats. Looking down into it, Galileo saw resemblances to Roman theaters he had seen. The bottom dozen rows of seats were occupied, and there were other people standing on the round stage. They all wore loose blouses and pantaloons that were blue, pale yellow, or the Jovian tones of Galileo’s group. At the center of the stage, a white glowing sphere stood on a pedestal. Faint black lines crisscrossing it gave Galileo the impression that it might be a globe representing the moon they stood on.
“The council?” Galileo asked.
“Yes.”
“What would you have me say?”
“Speak as the first scientist. Tell them not to kill what they study. Nor to kill themselves by studying it.”
The stranger led Galileo down steps into the amphitheater, now firmly holding him by the upper arm. Galileo felt again the strange lack of his proper weight; he bounced as he would have if standing neck-deep in a lake.
The stranger stopped several steps above the group and made a loud announcement in a language Galileo did not recognize. Only slightly delayed, he also heard the man’s voice say in Latin, “I present to you Galileo Galilei, the first scientist.”
Everyone looked up at them. For a moment they were motionless, and many of them looked startled, even disapproving.
“They look surprised to see us,” Galileo noted.
The stranger nodded. “They want to be sheep, and so should be sheepish. Come on.”
As they descended farther, some of the ones dressed in orange or yellow bowed. Galileo bowed in return, as he would have before the Venetian senate—which this group somewhat resembled, in that they appeared elderly, and somehow used to authority. Many of them were women, however, or so Galileo guessed; they were dressed in the same kind of blouses and pantaloons as the men. If a northern monastery and convent had merged their populations, and could only express their wealth in the fine cloth of their simple habits, they might look like this.
Despite the scattering of respectful bows, several among the group were now objecting to the stranger’s interruption. One woman, wearing yellow, spoke in the language Galileo didn’t recognize, and again he heard a Latin translation in his ears—Latin in a man’s voice, accented like the stranger’s. It said, “This is another illegal incursion. You have no right to interrupt the council’s session, and such a dangerous prolepsis as this will
not be allowed to change the debate. In fact it is a criminal action, as you know very well. Call the guards!”
The stranger continued to guide Galileo down the steps and onto the circular stage, until they were among the people standing there. Almost all of them were considerably taller than Galileo, and he looked up at them, amazed at their faces, so thin and pale—beautifully healthy, but manifesting signs of both youth and age in mixtures very strange to his eye.
Galileo’s guide loomed over the protesting woman, and he spoke down to her, but addressed the entire group, in their language, so that again Galileo heard a slightly delayed translation in his ear. “Who gets to speak is only contested by cowards. My people come from Ganymede, and we assert the right to speak for it, to help determine what people do in the Jovian system.”
“You no longer represent Ganymede,” the woman said.
“I am the Ganymede, as my people will attest. I will speak. The prohibition against descending into the Europan ocean was made for very important reasons, and the Europans’ current push to rescind that prohibition ignores several different kinds of danger. We will not allow it to happen!”
“Are you and your group part of the Jovian council or not?” the woman shot back.
“We are, of course.”
“But the matter has been discussed and decided, and your position has lost to that of the majority.”
“No!” others around them cried.
Many there then spoke up at once, and the debate quickly became a shouting match. People jostled around, contracting into knots like rival gangs in a piazza, growing red-faced with expostulation. The Latin in Galileo’s ear broke up into overlapping shouts: “Decided already—We asked him to speak!—We will have you removed!—Cowards! Anarchists!—We want the Galileo to speak to this matter!”
Galileo raised his hand like a student in a class. “What matter do you discuss?” he said loudly. “Why have you brought me here?”
In the pause that followed, one of the stranger’s Ganymedeans addressed him. “Most illustrious Galileo,” the Latin in his ear exclaimed, as this man bowed to him respectfully. He continued in his own tongue, which was translated in Galileo’s ear as: “—first scientist, father of physics, we here among the moons of Jupiter have encountered a scientific problem so fundamental and important that some of us feel we need someone with your original mind, someone unprejudiced by all that has happened since your time, someone with your supreme intelligence and wisdom, to help us decide how to deal with it.”
“Ah, well,” Galileo said. “There you have it, then.”
One woman laughed at this. She was big and statuesque, dressed in yellow. In the midst of all the arguing, she looked partly irritated, partly amused. The others began their raucous debate again, many becoming vehement, and in the din of all the squabbling she circled around to his left side, opposite the stranger. She leaned down toward him (she stood almost a foot taller than he), and spoke rapidly in his ear, in her own language, but what he heard afterward was Tuscan Italian, somewhat old-fashioned, like that of Machiavelli, or even Dante.
“You don’t believe any of that shit, do you?”
“Why should I not?” Galileo replied sotto voce, in Tuscan.
“Don’t be so sure your companion has your best interests here, no matter that you are the great martyr to science.”
Galileo, not liking the sound of that, said quickly, “What do you think my interests here are?”
“The same as anywhere,” she said with a sly smile. “Your own advancement, right?”
In the midst of a fierce harangue at his foes, the stranger looked over and noticed the woman and Galileo in conversation. He stopped arguing with the others and wagged a finger at her. “Hera,” he warned her, “leave him alone.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You are not the one to be telling people to leave Signor Galileo alone, it seems to me.” This was still translated to Galileo in Tuscan.
The stranger frowned heavily, shook his head. “You have nothing at stake here. Leave us alone.” He returned to addressing the entire group, which was now quieting to hear what was going on.
“This is the one who began it all,” the stranger boomed, while in his other ear Galileo heard the woman’s voice in Tuscan, saying, “He means, this is the one I chose to begin it all.”
The stranger continued without further sotto voce commentary from the woman he had called Hera. “This is the man who began the investigation of nature by means of experiment and mathematical analysis. From his time to ours, using this method, science has made us what we are. When we have ignored scientific methods and findings, when the archaic structures of fear and control have reexerted themselves, stark disaster has followed. To abandon science now and risk a hasty destruction of the object of study would be stupid. And the result could be much worse than that—much worse than you imagine!”
“You have already made this argument, and lost it,” a red-faced man said firmly. “The Europan interior can be investigated using an improved clean protocol, and we will learn what we have wanted to learn for many years. Your view is antiquated, your fears unfounded. What you did on Ganymede has damaged your understanding.”
The stranger shook his head vehemently. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I am only affirming what the scientific committee assigned to the problem has already said. Who’s being unscientific now, them or you?”
A general debate erupted again, and under its noise Galileo said to the tall woman, “What is it that my patron and his allies want to forbid?”
She leaned in to him to reply, in Italian again. “They don’t want anyone to dive into the ocean under the ice here. They fear what might be encountered there, if I understand the Ganymede correctly.”
Then a group of men dressed in the blue shade of clothing came bouncing down the steps on the other side of the amphitheater. A senator dressed in the same color gestured at them and cried at the stranger, “Your objection has already been overruled! And you are breaking the law with this incursion. It’s time to put a stop to it.” He shouted up at the newcomers, “Eject these people!”
The stranger grabbed Galileo by the arm and hustled him in the other direction. His allies closed behind them, and they raced up the steps two at a time. Galileo almost tripped, then felt himself being lifted by the people on each side of him. They held him under the elbows and carried him.
At the top of the steps, out of the hole of the amphitheater, they could suddenly see across the expanse of the blue city again, looking cold under its green-blue ceiling, the people on its broad strada so distant they were the size of mice. “To the ships,” the stranger declared, and took Galileo by the arm. As he hustled Galileo away, he said to him, “It’s time to return you to your home, before they do something we will all regret. I’m sorry they would not listen to you. I think if you had been able to judge the situation, you would have sided with us and made our point clear. I’ll call on you again when I am more sure you will be listened to. You are not done here!”
They came to the broad ramp rising out of the city, through its gates and onto the yellowy surface. People dressed in blue stood in their way, and with a roar the stranger and his group rushed at them. A brisk fight ensued, and Galileo, staggering in the absence of his proper weight, dodged around little knots of brawlers. If he had been dreaming, he would have happily started throwing punches himself, for in his dreams he was much more audacious and violent than in life. So it was a measure of how different this was from a dream, how real it was, that he held back. He wasn’t even sure which side he should have been supporting. So he skidded through the fray as if on the frozen Arno, waving his arms as needed to restore his balance. Suddenly in his gyrations, the stranger and another man snatched him up by the arms and hustled him away.
Some distance from the melee, the stranger’s companions had set up the big spyglass, and were making final adjustments to it. It was either the same one that had stoo
d on Galileo’s terrace, or one just like it.
“Stand next to it, please,” the stranger said. “Look into the eyepiece, please. Quickly. But before that—breathe this first—”
And he held a small censer up and sprayed a cold mist into Galileo’s face.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Phases of Venus
In order not to burden too much the transmigrating souls, Fate interposes the drinking from the Lethean river in the midst of the mutations, so that through oblivion they may be protected in their affections and eager to preserve themselves in their new state.
—GIORDANO BRUNO, Spaccio del la Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast)
GALILEO WOKE LYING ON THE GROUND NEXT to his spyglass, the stool tipped over beside him. The night sky was lightening in the east, and Mazzoleni was tugging at his shoulder.
“Maestro, you should go to bed.”
“What?”
“You were in some kind of a trance. I came out before, but I couldn’t wake you.”
“I—I had a dream, I think.”
“It seemed more like a trance. One of your syncopes.”
“Maybe so.”
On the long list of Galileo’s mysterious maladies, one of the most mysterious was a tendency to fall insensible for intervals that ranged from minutes to three or four hours, his muscles rigid the entire time. His physician friend, the famous Fabrizio d’Acquapendente, had been unable to treat these syncopes, which in most people were accompanied by fits or racking seizures. Only a few sufferers like Galileo became simply paralyzed.
“I feel strange,” Galileo said now.
“You’re probably sore.”
“I had a dream, I think. I can’t quite remember. It was blue. I was talking with blue people. It was important somehow.”
“Maybe you spotted angels through your glass.”
Galileo's Dream Page 6
