Around him to left and right were not only swimming people and their masks, fur or feathers flowing wetly, but also some kind of rounded black bird that flicked by at great speed. Also a giant truncated fish, like a head without its body; and then dolphins, sinuous and supremely graceful; and something gray and rounded like a fat woman; and then a whole pod of enormous whales, black and smooth, their long flippers paddling lazily. Their eyes were as big as dinner plates, and seemed to regard the scene around them with intelligent curiosity. Soon after Galileo noticed them, a sound vibrated in his ear, a rising glissando that shot up and out of his range of hearing, then tore back down into it and dropped to a basso profundo so deep that his stomach vibrated uncomfortably. The low vibration was like the sound of the floor of the universe, buzzing its continuo under all.
With an effort he caught up to Hera’s side. “That’s the same cry we heard inside Europa,” he managed to say. Even talking did not seem to drown him. He breathed a few more times, tried it again. “Don’t you think?”
She tipped her head toward the whales. “Those are humpback whales,” she said. “They’re famous for their songs, which sometimes take them hours to sing. They can repeat them almost sound for sound. And it’s a strange thing, but their songs have been getting lower in tone ever since humans began recording them. No one knows why that is.”
“Could they be, I don’t know—in communication with the thing inside Europa?”
“Who knows? Everything is entangled, they say. What does your physics lesson from Aurora tell you?” And with a sharp pull she swam on.
He followed her, dodging the whales as best he could, watching the aquatic dance of the animals and the animal-headed humans. Growing confident in his breathing, he began to enjoy himself. He was struck by the beauty of all the ways creatures moved—all except for him, he had to admit. Even birds knew how to swim, indeed he saw that it was more natural to them than it was to people. Although these people could really swim. He tried to emulate them as best he could while still keeping his legs together. A bit of a dolphin kick seemed to work pretty well.
After a while Hera turned to him and said, “We’ll be crossing back into air soon. Take care.”
Which was all well and good, but what kind of care he was to take was completely unknown to Galileo, and in a moment he found himself falling, spilling and sliding down onto the wet floor of the gallery, gasping for air like a beached fish. Hera had landed on her feet, and was drying herself off before a blast of air, holding up their clothes before her. Galileo stood beside her and felt his body dry likewise in the hot wind pouring over them. Already he was somewhat habituated to her eagle head and statuesque white body. They were what they were. She was good to look at though. In her presence it was hard to imagine what else you might look at instead of her.
A person approached them with the grace of a dancer, smaller-breasted than most of the women, genitals some mix of female and male, the mask a head of a buzzard, wrinkled and droop-mouthed. Involuntarily Galileo drew his head back, and the buzzard laughed, a high giggle.
“Is this the Galileo?” it asked Hera, in what Galileo heard as Latin.
“I am Galileo,” Galileo answered sharply. “I can speak for myself.”
“So you can! You must be very proud.”
Galileo glanced down at its odd pudenda, painted magenta as if with lipstick. “And so must you,” he replied.
The buzzard ignored this. “What do you think of this thing inside Europa?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Something in the way Hera stood beside him confirmed his first impression not to trust this person. Never trust a buzzard. It seemed simple enough, although it could be said a buzzard was always quite forthright in its way. “Come hear what the others are saying about it!” it said now. “You really must.”
“We are on our way there,” Hera told it. “Come along,” Hera said to Galileo, taking him by the arm and walking away. Behind them he could just hear the vulture hermaphrodite say, “I must say, if that’s the smartest person of his time, it’s no wonder they’re in such trouble.”
“They?” a voice replied. Galileo turned and looked. It was Ganymede, taking a lion mask off of his narrow head and shaking his black hair. His body was long and willowy, very white. Beyond him, Galileo caught sight of a group of jackal-headed people skewering one of the real animals, some kind of an ox, with long spears—quickly he looked away, shocked at the vivid red of blood.
They came to a reddish semitransparent wall, which made Galileo fear they might pass through it and then float in fire, and be able to breathe it too; he didn’t think he could handle that. There were several open arches in this red wall, and once they had passed under one, Hera handed Galileo his clothes and truss, perfectly dry and ready to wear. Her singlet she shook out and put one leg into, and quickly she was dressed and had taken off her eagle mask. Galileo did likewise, buckling on his truss with a sigh. Others around them were arriving in the chamber and dressing, pulling off their masks, shaking out their hair. Galileo took off his boar mask and regarded its piggy face, then put it with the rest on a long table piled high with them—an awful sight, as if the jackals had boarded Noah’s ark and decapitated every living thing.
In the next chamber of the gallery, which ran again unbroken as far as they could see, Galileo and Hera joined a collection of people standing in groups of five or six. After their traverse of the carnival gallery, Galileo found all the exposed faces a little shocking; the reversal reversed had created its characteristic moment of estrangement, when normality was for a moment bizarre. It seemed to him then that if the goal was not to be too sexual, it would be more appropriate to conceal faces than bodies. These living souls with their foreheads, cheeks, eyebrows, hair, chins, mouths, were both much weirder than genitals and ever so much more expressive, more suggestive, more revealing. He glanced shyly at Hera, and she noticed his glance, and looked back at him curiously, wondering what he meant, and their gazes met for a second—and there she was: there they were. To look someone eye to eye, my Lord, what a shock! Eyes were indeed windows, as the Greeks had said; and mouths, my oh my, mouths that smiled, frowned, pursed, spoke. To share a gaze was a kind of intercourse. Maybe new souls were generated not with the fuck but the look. Indeed he had to look away from Hera to avoid feeling overwhelmed, to avoid making something new right then and there.
They continued around the arc of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, and passed under an archway into a segment of the gallery that was occupied entirely by Galileos. There were perhaps a hundred of them. Galileo stopped in his tracks at the sight.
“Oh, sorry,” Hera said, seizing his hand and dragging him onward. “This is just a game people play, a kind of Carnivale party group, which comes from living on the Galilean moons, I’m sure. No one will know you are the real item.”
The host of costumed Galileos was variously dressed in clothing more or less appropriate to his time, at least when seen from a distance; up close he could see how strange all the fabrics and cuts were. Their heads and bodies were all possible versions of his type, from men who looked just like the image he saw in the mirror all the way to grotesque parodies of his form. Even women were dressed as him and sporting false beards. All of the beards were gray: “Why do they all look so old?” Galileo complained.
“I suppose it’s because there is a famous portrait of you,” she said. “Most people think of that one when they think of you.”
“Horrible,” Galileo said. Indeed there were some of them that were particularly unsettling—like him but not, distorted somehow, as in the little images of him seen in the outside curves of spoons, or in certain nightmares. These were by far the most shocking to see. He tried to express this response to Hera, and she nodded without surprise.
“You have quickly discovered the uncanny valley,” she told him. “It was found long ago, when they were first developing machine intelligence, that people were willing to accept speech from crude boxes, and even from m
etal people, but that if you tried to create perfect simulacra of people, it could not be done well enough to fool the eye, and these were the speakers who were profoundly disturbing. Identity or difference were both acceptable, but between them lay an uncanny valley, where the partial resemblance creates a discord.”
“Please remove me from this uncanny valley,” Galileo begged her, averting his eyes. Some of these pseudo-Galileos were truly creepy, ugly to him in a sickening way. He looked down as she led him on through the next archway.
“You see why we have continued to contain our machine intelligences in boxes and desks and secretaries and the like,” she said as they left. “No one could stand the simulacra. Sometimes I think this practice deceives us in a different way, because we can’t imagine that mere boxes can have become as intelligent as they obviously have. So we fail to notice how powerful they have become—probably in many ways much more intelligent than we are. Almost all our technologies, including the ones with the strangest impacts on us, have at this point mostly been invented by machines.”
“I wondered about that,” Galileo said. “So your world makes no sense to you.”
“Well, the world hasn’t made sense since 1927. That hasn’t kept us from carrying on as if we understood it.”
“Yes, I can see that,” Galileo said, curbing an urge to look over his shoulder, thinking of Lot’s wife. “Well, whatever it takes not to end up feeling like I did in there,” gesturing behind them. “That was truly awful.”
“I thought you would have enjoyed it,” she said. “Surely it was one of your dreams, to be one of the most famous people in history?”
Galileo shrugged. “It only proves that when all your dreams come true, you realize that you were an idiot to have such dreams.”
She laughed, and led him under another archway into a new room. Here they had arrived at the meeting of the grand council of Jovian moons, the Synoekismus. It consisted of representatives from all the settlements in the Jovian system, Hera told him, and therefore theoretically numbered in the hundreds. There were only about a hundred people on hand, Galileo reckoned. Behind them he saw Ganymede entering the room as well, with a group of ten or twelve of his followers.
The Fourth Ring of Valhalla was in this part of its arc higher than the Third and Fifth Rings, and out the clear side walls of the high gallery they could see far in all directions. Inward, buildings erupted from the Third Ring like great fangs and molars; through them Galileo caught glimpses of the Second Ring, which appeared also to support buildings. Outward, the Fifth and Sixth Rings were lower and farther away, and the fifth range of hills was less excavated and occupied, it seemed, although gleaming incurves of window indicated that galleries existed in that range too. Over one section of the Fifth Ring, a lit portion of Jupiter loomed up over the horizon: a thick top half of a crescent, somewhat canted to the side, and only a few times bigger in the sky than Earth’s moon was at home.
This arc of the long gallery was mostly empty, but at its far end a knot of chairs had been arranged, all facing a dais. The order that the furniture implied was obviously not regarded as binding by the people in attendance, however, as they circulated in a manner similar to that of the festival back along the arc, or to that of any court, for that matter, everyone mingling and talking, until someone called out “Come to order, please!” and eventually everyone had clumped in two loud groups before the dais. The view out the glass walls, with their concentric ranges and the banded crescent spearing the night, was forgotten.
People in both of the two groups began shouting across a divide created by a clutch of very tall women—apparently guards charged with keeping order. A few furious men approached these guards to yell their insults even more vehemently at the other side, but no one made any serious attempt to get through the line and assault their antagonists. To Galileo it looked like a kind of masque, not dissimilar to certain after-dinner debates he had taken part in, although more immediately raucous.
And then, as sometimes happened at home, what began as a formal dispute fell over some unseen cliff into genuine anger. Perhaps, Galileo thought, these Jovians, these tall beautiful folk, deprived of the anchor of earth and wind and sunlight, were more choleric than people on Earth—the reverse of what he had at first assumed about them, given their angelic appearance. They shouted, faces red—Galileo caught brief snatches of Latin, and even Tuscan, but the translator in his ear was not coping with the cross talk, and so to him it was mostly babble. What was it that mattered so much to them that they became this furious, pampered as they were? Well, perhaps the pampering explained it; perhaps they were possessed by the same things that possessed the Italian nobility of his time—honor, pride of place, patronage or the loss of patronage. Power. Maybe even when all people were fed and clothed, these concerns with hierarchy and power never went away, so that people were always angry.
Galileo murmured some of these thoughts to Hera, and told her about the translation difficulty. She led him down the room to where he could hear better, and the cacophony resolved into the strange Latin Galileo had first heard from the mouth of Ganymede, in Venice so long ago.
And in fact it was Ganymede himself now speaking, standing in the middle of his crowd of supporters as tall and beaky as ever. His crow-black hair stood up, and his saturnine blade of a face had turned bright red with his expostulation.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a grating, disgusted voice. “You don’t have the imagination to picture the consequences. We’ve done a full analysis. We’re far beyond the little hellos that you’re bogged down in. There’s more to it than the contact the Europans made during their incursion.” He spoke now to a group dressed in pale blue, possibly the Europan legation. “You’ve touched the whisker of the beast,” Ganymede told them, “and now you think you know the whole thing. But you don’t. There’s more to it than what you’ve seen. I’ve told you privately the danger, and I don’t want to speak of it in public, because that would only add to it. But it is very real.”
A white-haired woman waved him away. “You have to forgive us if we proceed as if what happens in a manifold detected only by you is not sufficient grounds for changing our actions.”
“No,” Ganymede said grimly. “This is different. You ignore the potential effects of an interaction. That’s what people like you always do. You hide your eyes and never learn, and claim new things will bring new things, and are always surprised when events fit the patterns we’re made from. You never see the danger and you never count the risk. What if you turn out to be wrong? You can never imagine that, you are so full of yourself, so convinced you are tabula rasa. Now, this time, in this encounter—of humanity with a sentience that can’t be grasped, let us say—no specific human good can come of it. But the harm could kill the species. So it makes sense to beware! For the risk is absolute. You’re behaving like those men who set off the first atomic bomb, wondering as they did so if the explosion might not ignite the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Or the ones who started up a particle collider unsure whether a black hole would be generated that would suck the Earth into it. Like them, you’d risk all—for nothing.” Suddenly he was shouting. “We won’t let you take the risk!”
“I don’t see how your position is anything other than cowardice,” the white-haired woman said. “It’s simply fear of the future itself.”
Ganymede started to speak but stopped himself, eyes bulging out. Finally he said, “That’s what the people who ignited the atomic bomb said, I’m sure.” With an expression of extreme disgust he gestured wildly to his supporters, and led the way as they all stormed out of the chamber, angrily chattering to each other, some shouting final curses as they left.
“Could you not execute a prolepsis,” Galileo asked Hera in a low voice, “and see if his fears are confirmed?”
“No,” Hera said. “In theory, prolepsis is possible, but the energy required is more than we can muster. Sending the entanglers back analeptically cost us e
ntire planets, and prolepsis apparently requires far more energy than that.”
“I see. So—do you think Ganymede is right to be so afraid?”
“I don’t know. His is one of several competing efforts to understand what is going on inside Europa, and the physicists I’ve talked to say his group has been doing very advanced studies. Even exiled to Io, they have made progress others haven’t. And they are claiming something more than Europa is involved.”
“So there are different schools of understanding? Different factions?”
“There are always factions.”
Galileo nodded; it was certainly true in Italy.
“So,” Hera continued, “I don’t know. I was working with Ganymede, and fighting with him, as you have seen. And there are precedents to support what he is saying. Humans have generally not reacted well to encounters with higher civilizations. Collapses have occurred.”
Galileo shrugged. “I don’t see why it should matter.”
“That we might find out we are like bacteria on the floor of a world of gods?”
“When has it ever been different?”
She laughed at this. He glanced over and saw she was looking at him with a new surmise, as if at someone who was more interesting than she had thought. About time, as far as he was concerned.
“I suppose you yourself can serve as an example of a robust response to an encounter with a more advanced civilization,” she said with a little smile.
“I don’t see why,” he said. “I’m not sure I have done that.”
She laughed again, and led him to another moving staircase, which carried them up its long incline, through the gallery’s ceiling and onto the spine of the Fourth Ring. There her space boat stood waiting for them, apparently having been moved for her convenience. Or perhaps it was another craft just like hers. In any case, there were attendants on hand to welcome them into it and see them on their way.
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