“Maybe so,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve often thought that cultures can go insane in ways similar to an individual. That’s obvious in the record. Presumably it’s only an analogy, but the symptoms map pretty well. Paranoia, catatonia, suicidal or homicidal manias, or both at once—denial, post-trauma, anachronism—you see them all. History has been a bedlam, to tell the truth. Maybe we’re now permanently post-traumatic, given all that has happened. Here in the Jovian moons, it has inspired us to hold hard to peaceful ways for a long time. But that may be ending.”
They flew on in silence. Galileo recalled the memory of his first night with Marina. He felt various pricks of remorse, even a faint flush of sexual afterglow. They had had fun, once upon a time.
He was also shocked at the powers Hera had at her command, and how she was willing to use them. That she with her celatone could read his mind; that he himself could be made to read it, in a way so vivid that it was like reliving time itself, like a return to the past … Well, these people could voyage among the planets, and back and forth in time; of course they would also have tried to dive into themselves, penetrating the vast ocean that lay under every skull. Aurora’s tutorials had been another manifestation of that power, a different use of it.
It was a power that made Galileo more frightened of the Jovians than ever. Which didn’t really make sense, he knew. Remembering something vividly should not be more alarming than being transported across centuries. But one’s mind was a private place. And possibly this was simply a cumulative feeling. They could do so much. And yet, with all that power, what were they in the end? Just people. Unless of course there were aspects to them he was not even seeing. What did Aurora’s machine supplements really do to her mind, for instance? And was it possible she took infusions of the velocinestic all the time? What would happen if you did? Were there more things like that he hadn’t even been told about?
Before him the round surface of Moon IV continued to grow. It was illuminated almost in full. Callisto, they had named it. Another lover of Zeus, later turned into a bear. Its surface was flat but shattered, making it look somewhat like Europa. Scattered dark and light regions reminded Galileo of Ganymede, or Earth’s moon.
Then he saw emerging over the horizon a truly enormous impact crater. “What happened there?” he asked.
“Callisto ran into something big, as you see. A little moon or asteroid of some considerable size. It’s been calculated that if it had been only ten percent bigger, it might have knocked Callisto to pieces.”
The giant crater was multiringed—the first time Galileo had seen such a thing. The many concentric rings looked like the waves on a pond after a stone has been tossed in. They covered about a third of the half of the moon he could see. He counted eight rings, as in an archery target. White lights spangled the tops and sides of most of the crater walls, and the lights on the fourth ring out were so thick they made it a ring of diamonds.
Hera said, “The crater is called Valhalla, and the city is called the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. We’ll land there.”
As they descended Galileo saw that each ring was a circular mountain range as high as the Alps, or the mountains of the moon.
“The Jovian council meets here, you said?”
“Yes, the Synoekismus. The amalgamation of several communities into one.” She frowned as she said it.
“What does it debate?”
“What to do about the thing inside Europa. Again. Ganymede claims to understand it better than the Europans who are studying it. They don’t agree, naturally. They want to make another descent, but that is controversial elsewhere in the system, and Ganymede and his group are adamant against it. You have to understand, there is a lot of fear.”
“But why?”
“Why fear the other?” She laughed at him. “Come listen to the meeting with me, and judge for yourself. That’s what I allow you, that no one else here thinks you can handle.”
As her craft made its last descent, he marveled at the concentric ranges of what must have been a truly stupendous impact. The surface must have melted into a sea of rock, and waves then surged away from the point of impact just as on any other pond—and then the whole thing had frozen in place, set in stone for the eons. Earth’s moon had nothing like it, at least not on the side facing Earth. “So they built their city in these rings?”
“Yes, they make for a good prospect,” she said. “The planet is otherwise fairly flat, and people always appreciate a view. And it helps that most of it lies on the subJovian side. Most of the early settlements in the system were placed on the moons’ sub-Jovian sides, to be able to look at Jupiter, and to get its extra light.”
“It is somewhat dim out here.”
“I’ve read it’s about thirteen hundred times more light than full moonlight on Earth. That’s still thousands of times less than daylight on Earth, of course, but the human eye can see perfectly well by it. The pupil dilates and on we go. Still, the extra light and color coming off Jupiter were appreciated by the first settlers. And really it’s a mesmerizing thing to look at, as you now know. So they built on the sub-Jovian hemispheres. Then those who wanted to get away from the early centers migrated to the anti-Jovian sides of their moon, so each moon tends to have two antithetical cultures. All the sub-Jovian sides resemble each other in certain respects, or so it’s said, while the anti-Jovian settlements likewise seem to gather all those who oppose the first settlements. The Fourth Ring of Valhalla is special in that it is mostly sub-Jovian, but it’s so big that it straddles the terminator, and Jupiter stays permanently half-risen in the eastern sky. So, the Fourth Ring served as a meeting place of sorts, cosmopolitan and various, a kind of convivencia. Now it’s the biggest city in the system. People from the other moons gather here. It has a culture very different from the rest of Callisto’s cities. Most of those serve as the capital of little groups of settlements on the outer moons, or among the asteroids, or the outer solar system. They use the Fourth Ring as the meeting place.” Here she frowned in a way Galileo could not interpret. “It all makes it a rather wild place.”
The things of the world at all times have their own counterpart with ancient times.
—MACHIAVELLI, The Discourses
HERA’S LITTLE CRAFT AND ITS CABIN suddenly reappeared around them. Soon after that, Galileo felt weight returning to him, and he was pressed down into his chair. One screen on the wall served as a kind of window, but nothing but a patch of black starry sky appeared in it.
Hera landed them. Their door slid open, and they descended onto a broad terrazzo, white against the black of Callisto’s rock. They were on a flattened section of the spine of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. Inlaid into the spine was a long curving building, perhaps even a continuous gallery city, arcing all the way around the Fourth Ring. Certainly it went for as far as Galileo could see before curving behind the Third Ring: at least thirty degrees of its circumference, he reckoned. The crater wall had in effect been excavated and replaced by the city itself, which poked up out of the black rock in repeated towers and crenellations.
Hera led him to a broad staircase that descended into the crater wall. The stairs looked like white marble, though the stone was smoother and whiter than marble, something like ivory, and all the steps moved downward together under them, so that they stood on one and descended anyway. They had a long way to go, so far that the people below were the size of bugs. The curving gallery was broad as well as tall, with clear walls on both sides. Through the glass curves to each side he could see the concentric escarpments of the Third and Fifth Rings of Valhalla, the Third considerably closer to them than the Fifth, which only made sense, Galileo realized, if one visualized waves expanding on a pond. Long stretches of both escarpments had been excavated and walled by glass, in the same manner as the Fourth Ring, if less comprehensively.
Now the people on the gallery floor were the size of cats, and it was obvious most of them were naked, except for the big masks that covered every head. Either that
, or they were not human.
“Carnivale,” Hera explained, seeing his startled look. “This crowd isn’t usually in this part of the circumference.”
“Ah.”
“The grand council meets farther along the arc. Their meeting is part of the larger festival.”
The stairs brought them to the gallery floor. The revelers indeed were wearing elaborate masks and nothing else. Human bodies, male and female, tall and full, white, pink, various shades of brown—but always topped by the heads of animals of one sort or another. Some of the animals were familiar to Galileo, others were fantastic creatures: big hairy heads with antlers, feathered human faces as broad as the shoulders that held them up, insectile wedges. More familiarly, he spotted fox heads, wolves, lions, leopards, rams, antelope; here was a heron; there the very disturbing sight of a monkey’s head on a woman’s body. There beyond her stood a medusa, making him shudder and look away. Then he saw a group of tall bodies that appeared to be headless, their furry faces looking out from their chests, as in the old tales of the Greeks. Those were strange enough to give Galileo pause; were their bodies also masks?
But taken all in all, it still was recognizably Carnivale. A lot of bare skin was part of the topsy-turvy of the festival, and he had often been disturbed or frightened by particularly skillful masks, encountered on bright piazzas or in shadowy canalsides. Here the exposure of flesh had been taken to its reductio ad absurdum. To Galileo, this and the masks in combination were what made the sights more disturbing than erotic, no matter the helpless tendency of his eye to track the women in view.
A group of jackal-headed people confronted them, preventing their progress with a restless stationary dance. Jackals, ravens, an elephant, all pressing in and surrounding them aggressively. One of the ravens held out an eagle mask to Hera:
“You must join the revel,” the raven said. “Pan rules here, and this is spring. Great Hera, here is your mask.”
Hera looked at Galileo. “It will be easiest if we comply,” she said. “The dionysiacs can get pretty annoying if you don’t join their panic. Do you mind?”
“It’s just Carnivale,” Galileo said roughly, feeling rattled.
Without further ado Hera pulled off her clothes—a kind of singlet it now appeared, coming off in a single piece, leaving her naked, magnificent, and oblivious to his discomfited gaze. Galileo turned aside and pulled down his homely pants and shirt, rags in this context, and then unbuckled his hernia truss, feeling like some kind of injured ape, hairy and small. After making a frank evaluation, Hera took his clothes and truss from him and held them with hers in one hand. One of the jackals handed him the head of a boar, its mouth open, its tusks pointing up murderously.
“A boar?” Galileo protested.
Hera stared at him now with a truly raptor intensity. “You are pigheaded,” she observed.
“I suppose,” Galileo said, thinking it over. “Well, I may be a boar, but I am never boring.” He put it on. It fit on his shoulders very comfortably, and he could see out of its eyes quite well, and breathe through it. Indeed it was meshing with him in ways he couldn’t even define at first, but then realized he was feeling its skin and hair, which was frightening. On the other hand, with it on he did not feel so exposed.
Hera’s eagle head was just right for her, although her figure was too massive for flight, her body very womanly and yet also tall, and muscled like a wrestler’s. A female torso that Michelangelo would have marveled at. Indeed all the people in the gallery looked as if the great Buonarroti had carved them, creating a set of ideal figures in the style of his heroic males, then touching them to life, as his God had his Adam. Compared to them Galileo was indeed a boar, lumpy and hairy and low.
Hera took him by the arm and, holding their clothes and his truss in her other hand, guided him through the crowd of revelers. Galileo stared through the boar’s eyelids, wondering if there were also lenses that sharpened his vision; wondering if he had been somehow transmogrified into the boar.
The air he breathed so easily was thin and fresh, perhaps a little bit intoxicating. He stared at the women’s bodies, his eyes as helpless as iron filings near a lodestone. Only after absorbing this sight repeatedly did he notice also the men and their demonstrative pricks, which were often circumcised, as if he walked among Jews and Mohammedans.
As Hera led him along, the animal heads spoke to them. People seemed to know Hera and to want to speak with her. She introduced Galileo as “a friend,” which they accepted without question, despite how odd he must have looked. They were all at ease, and included Galileo in their jokes, and laughed loudly. He began to relax, even to feel a little giddy and hilarious, so that he almost laughed too, but was afraid that if he did his guts would spill out and hang between his knees, a prospect that curbed his mirth very effectively. Despite this he was enjoying himself. Here Carnivale had been distilled to its essence, or expanded to its dream. Music filled the air, people sang in human words or in choruses of animal and bird cries; they ate and drank from high-piled tables, they danced—they even took part in a formal dance in which couples approached each other, touched genitals together briefly, as if in a greeting kiss, then moved on to another partner and repeated the gesture. Many of them had tied little ribbons or colored threads in their pubic hair, the women doing so in ways that exposed the flesh underneath, their private parts looking like orchids or irises. Quite a few of the men strode around with vigorous erections, making flowers of a different sort—lilies or snapdragons, although really they looked more like the noses of attentive dogs. Indeed it was remarkable how much character was revealed by all these exposed organs, which appeared friendly or austere, withdrawn or outgoing, not as an aspect of male or female, but of individual anatomy and presentation.
Some women clearly believed that their parts unadorned were attractive enough—a theory Galileo found he agreed with, no matter how much his eye was at first drawn to the variously bejeweled or threaded nests of hair framing startlingly revealed labia—while the men were both more obtrusive and less interesting to him, by the nature of his inclinations. And the ones with their sporty priapic erections looked after a time very suspicious, as if their owners had had recourse to some kind of effective aphrodisiac. Galileo did not like the obsequiousness of dogs either.
As he and Hera made their way through this dance, he frequently glanced sideways at her. Surely the mere fact of this carnival custom meant there still existed concepts of decorum that could be turned on their head; that was what Carnivale was for, a release of restraint, an overturning, a misrule, an upwelling of whatever was repressed by the everyday. But Hera appeared unabashed by her nakedness, or his, or anyone else’s. She spoke with acquaintances, introduced Galileo to some but not to others, all with the same demeanor she usually exhibited, severe but attentive. That this could be seen even on an eagle’s face was indicative of some quality in her nature. Behind her, outside the long curving windows that held them in their orbit, the Third and Fifth Rings of Valhalla arced to the close horizons as if looking in at them. Taken all together it was a strange sight.
“Is there a Lent to follow this Carnivale?”
“Some period of penance, you mean? No, I don’t think there is.”
Then as they continued their promenade among the perfect animal-headed humans, Galileo spotted a real tiger, which gave him a huge start. No one else was paying any particular attention to it, and the tiger did not seem to notice the humans. Soon after that Galileo spotted a trio of giant white-furred bears, awesome to witness, and then a troop of baboons. A stag, a wolverine … All the creatures were relaxed and oblivious, as if the people there were only another kind of animal in some peaceable kingdom, where all together went boldly on their way, and where humans, with their skin so luminous, their long muscles so smooth, the women’s figures so curvy, constituted somehow a natural royalty, even in such a magnificent host of beasts. The women of this world, he noted, were not like those of his time, or the female figures
in Greek and Roman statues; they were longer-limbed, broader-shouldered. Humanity itself had changed over the centuries. And why not? It was almost four thousand years since the Greeks; and they were walking on one of the moons of Jupiter.
As they continued their circumnavigation, he noticed that the air was turning blue around them, and it felt humid. “Your head will allow you to breathe no matter the medium,” Hera told him. “Be ready to swim.”
Then suddenly, without any wall or other transition he could see, they were swimming, and far underwater at that. All the people ahead of them were horizontal, floating or swimming like fish in the sea. Water seemed to have coalesced around him, covering his piggish mask and filling his nostrils, and in a panic he stroked wildly upward, hoping for a surface.
“I told you, you can breathe,” Hera said to him, her usual rustic Tuscan still clear in his ears. “Your mask will help you. Just breathe, you’ll be fine.”
Galileo tried to reply, but he was too frightened to unclench his teeth. Finally, desperate for air, he breathed in water, and did not drown. It was air in his lungs, it seemed. He tried again and it was so. He was breathing air.
Hera was laid out horizontally now, stroking forward and away from him. He struggled to follow her, but he had never learned to swim, and in the blue liquid filling the gallery from floor to ceiling he could only flail, all the while tightening his buttocks so that his guts did not squirt out of his hernia. “Help!” he called through clenched teeth.
Hera heard him and stroked back gracefully, still holding their wet clothes in one hand. She then showed him how to move his arms, first straight and together ahead of him, then pulling out and back, like a turtle. It worked pretty well. And since he could breathe the water, it didn’t matter that he was slow. He followed her awkwardly, and could not help noting that when she kicked like a frog she briefly exposed her private parts in a startling way, like a mare pulsing in heat. He could not kick in the same way without spilling his guts.
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