Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Above them a fiery blaze of light hurt his eyes. It looked like one of the Jovians’ spacecraft was shooting up into the black starry sky, headed toward Jupiter.

  Hera’s look turned grim again. “That was Ganymede,” she said, gesturing upward. “He and his people are off to make more trouble. We’ll have to deal with him. There aren’t any police forces or weapons any more in the Jovian system, as a matter of principle. So situations like this are hard to deal with. But something has to be done. He means to stop the Europans. He thinks he’s right. There’s no one more dangerous than an idealist who thinks he’s right.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m right,” Galileo said.

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

  “And sometimes I am right. If you roll a ball off the edge of a table, it falls in a half parabola. In that I’m right.”

  “And in that,” she muttered, “you too are dangerous.”

  SHE LED HIM INTO HER SPACECRAFT. They were going to follow Ganymede back to Io, she said, where apparently he was headed. The idea was to stop him from leading his followers into anything rash. She appeared to be willing to coerce the Ganymedeans in this regard, with the help of her fellow Ionians. She spent the first hour of their flight talking over the matter with various voices that spoke from the pad on her lap.

  Somewhere in that hour, Galileo fell asleep. How long he slept he was not sure; when he woke, she was asleep herself, her eyes darting about in tandem under closed lids. After that a long time passed, during which he found a little closet with a hollow chair into which he could attempt his difficult ablutions. In the midst of his effort, warm water filled the chamber up to his waist, where it became warmer and rumbled with vibrations that were apparently in phase with his peristalsis, as his excrement seemed to be drawn out of him. After that the water drew off and he was dried in a swirl of hot air, as clean as if he had bathed.

  “Jesus,” he said. He opened the door and looked out at Hera, who was now awake. “You people don’t even shit naturally! Your shitting is midwifed by automatons.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

  Galileo had to think that one over, and so did not answer. She passed him on the way into the little closet herself, and when she came back out, she shared with him a small meal that consisted of something like a compressed bread, sweet and substantial, and plain water.

  “You were dreaming as you slept,” Galileo noted.

  “Yes.” She frowned, thinking about it.

  “Are dreams also entanglements?” Galileo asked, thinking about Aurora’s lessons.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “Consciousness is always entangled, but when we are awake our present moment overwhelms all that. When you’re asleep then all the entangled moments become more obvious.”

  “And you are entangled with?”

  “Well, with other moments of your life, earlier or later. And with other people’s lives too. Different times, different minds, different phase patterns. All expressed rather weakly in the brain’s chemistry, and so perceived surreally in sleep’s lack of sensory input.”

  “Dreams are dreamlike,” Galileo agreed. “And what were you dreaming of now?”

  “It was something about when my family first moved to Io, when I was a girl. Only in the dream, Io was already occupied by animals that we killed for food. I suppose that was day residue from our panic spring. Recent experiences get enfolded in dreams, sometimes, and mix with the entangled times from elsewhere.”

  “I see. So you moved to Io as a girl?”

  “Yes, my mother was exiled from Callisto for fighting. The bubble technology that allows us to live on Io had just recently been developed, and people convicted of major crimes were just being sent there. My father and I went with her, and we were in one of the first groups there. I liked to greet the new arrivals.”

  “And so you became a mnemosyne,” Galileo suggested. “You learned to like taking in damaged people, and healing them.”

  “Maybe. Are we really so simple?”

  “I think maybe so.”

  She shook her head. “People did enjoy seeing me welcome them, I think.”

  After that she sat there, fidgeting unhappily. Jupiter was growing bigger again; it appeared they would pass before the sunward side this time. Galileo asked what he thought was an innocent question about the time needed for the voyage from Callisto to Io; she snapped back at him that it was different for every trip, which was not really answering. A few moments later, glaring at him, she said, “We’ll be there soon. Still, we might as well continue your education in yourself. We’re all going to need it in the end.”

  “I prefer my own self-knowledge,” Galileo insisted. “You can give up on your girlish ambition to rescue people.”

  She glared at him. “Do you want to live?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Then put this on.” Roughly she placed her celatone on his head, and he did not flinch away.

  “Do you know what you’re sending me back to?” he asked.

  “Not precisely. But different areas of the brain hold characteristic kinds of experience, located by the emotion that was the fixative. I’m going to look at nodes in the areas associated with embarrassment.”

  “No,” Galileo groaned, and flinched as she touched the helmet.

  His horrible mother ran into his terrible mistress there in the house on Via Vignali, and before Galileo even knew the old gorgon was visiting, the two women were screaming at each other in the kitchen. This was not unusual, and Galileo trotted in from the workshop cursing at the distraction but not overly concerned, only to find them in a real fight, scratching and pulling hair, kicking and punching, Marina even landing one of her big roundhouse swings to the head, a blow Galileo had felt on his own ear many times. All this with the children and servants there in the room watching, happily scandalized, squealing and shouting.

  Galileo, ears burning, supremely angry with both of them, leaped into the fray and was rougher than he might have been as he grabbed Marina and hauled her back—so rough that his mother paused in her shrieking to berate him for his rudeness, while also seizing the chance to assault Marina yet again, so that he had to stop her too. And then there he was, trapped between the two of them in front of all the world and God, holding on to them by their hair, extended at his arms’ length from each other as they screamed and swung. Galileo was forced to ponder a little what might be his least undignified mode of escape. Luckily he had a jacket on so that his arms were not getting scratched by their furious mauling.

  “You whore!”

  “You bitch!”

  “Be quiet,” he begged them, not wanting the household to notice how accurate both women were in their insults. It was almost funny, but he had long ago lost his ability to be amused by either of them. Aside from their nasty tempers, the debt burden they represented was enormous. Maybe if he released them both without warning, they would collide headfirst and kill each other. Two debts retired with a single collision! It was an elegant solution. Marina was the lighter of the two and would rebound farther, as he knew well from experiments with balls tied to strings, not to mention their own fights—

  “Enough!” he commanded imperiously. “Save this shit for the Pul-cinella shows. If you don’t stop I’ll call the night watch and have you both thrown out of here!”

  They were weeping with fury and the pain of being held back by their hair. When they didn’t expect it he let them go and turned to face his mother. “Go home,” he instructed her wearily. “Come back later.”

  “I won’t leave! And I won’t come back!”

  But finally she left, shouting down horrible curses on them all, and there was nothing Galileo could do but to deploy his usual defense, turning his back to her and waiting till she was gone.

  Marina was more conciliatory—still angry of course, but also embarrassed. “I had to defend myself.”

  “She’s almost sixty, for God’s sake.”

  “So what? She�
��s crazy, and you know it.”

  But then she desisted. She needed his money for her place around the corner, and so she left the room without further excoriations. Galileo stumped back out to the workshop and stood there, staring sightlessly at the complete cipollata that was his life.

  —which abruptly became black space, the stars, the great swirling banded yellow globe. Hera sitting across from him, watching his face attentively.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I pulled them apart. I kept them from fighting.”

  “And why were they fighting? Why were they angry?”

  “They were angry people. Choleric. They had so much yellow bile in them that if you pinched them your fingers would turn yellow.”

  “Nonsense,” Hera said. “You know better than that. They were people just like you. Except that their minds were crimped, every day of their lives. Women in a patriarchy, what a fate. You know what I would have done if I were them? I would have killed you. I would have poisoned you or cut your throat with a kitchen knife.”

  “Well.” Galileo regarded her uneasily. She towered over him, and her massive upper arms were like carved ivory. “You said that a time’s structure of feeling has a lot to do with how we are. Maybe you would have felt differently.”

  “All humans have an equal amount of pride,” she said, “no matter how much it gets crushed or battered.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true. Isn’t pride part of a structure of feeling?”

  “No. It’s part of the integrity of the organism, the urge to life. A cellular thing, no doubt.”

  “Cellular maybe. But people are all different.”

  “Not in that.” She looked down at the screen in the pad on her lap. “There’s another trauma node near that one. This area of your amygdala is crowded.”

  “But we seem to be approaching Io,” he pointed out hopefully.

  Hera looked up. “True,” she said. She took her celatone from his head, which took a great weight off his shoulders. She patted him on the arm, as if to indicate that she still liked him despite his primitive circumstances and instincts. She even pointed out to him various features of her home moon as it grew to a fiery spotted yellow ball, floating before the great sunlit side of Jupiter. Both spheres were florid arrays, but their colors were different in tone, and mixed very differently over their surfaces. Jupiter was all pastel bands, its viscous eddies embroidering every border with gorgeous convolutions, like the side of a cut cabbage; while Io was an intensely sulfurous yellow ball, spotted by random spatter marks—mostly black or white or red, but including a broad orange ring around a whitish mound, which Hera said was the volcano massif called Pele Ra. She pointed out to him the shadow of Io on Jupiter’s face, so round and black it looked unnatural, like a beauty spot pasted on.

  As they approached this hellish little ball that was her hometown, a blue aura began flickering around them. “What’s that?” Galileo asked.

  “We are getting closer to Jupiter, which generates immensely powerful magnetic and radiation fields. We have to create fields to counteract them, or else we would quickly die. Moving at speed causes the two fields to interact, creating the aura you see.”

  Galileo nodded carefully. Because of his mathematics tutorial from Aurora, he was pretty sure he understood the phenomenon better than Hera did. Probably it was best not to point this fact out, but her lack of awareness of it irked him. “Like ball lightning,” he said.

  “To an extent.”

  “Like the sparks you can make if you rub two pieces of amber together.”

  She gave him a look. “Quit it.”

  They flew close over the surface of the tortured moon, past the volcanic continent Ra Patera, where she had taken him during his previous visit. There were red rings around several of the volcanoes; Hera explained these were their plume deposits. “There are about four hundred active volcanoes.” Once past Ra, they continued their descent over slaggy plains that were the basic Ionian color—a burnt sulphur, greened in some places like old bronze, and pimpled everywhere by volcanoes. Some of these were tall cones, others long cracks; some were white as snow, others black as pitch. There was no correlation between morphology and color, so that it was impossible to grasp the lay of the land. An occasional impact crater added to the topographic confusion, until in many areas Galileo found it hard to determine up from down. The different minerals the volcanoes cast out, Hera told him, in plumes or rivers of different heights and viscosities, accounted for their disorienting and hideous variety. Most of the moon’s surface was too hot and viscous to build on, she told him, or even to walk over. “In lots of places if you tried to walk you would sink right into the ground.” Only the high massifs of dormant giant volcanoes stood far enough above the magmatic heat to cool down, serving as rock islands in an ocean of crusted lava.

  When they came over the anti-Jovian side of the moon, Hera maneuvered her craft downward, slowing it until she could drop them vertically into the middle of a small but deep crater, filled with a lake of liquid orange lava. As they drifted down to the level of the crater’s rim, Galileo had a closer view over the surface of the moon beyond the crater, lumpy beyond belief. The resemblance of the landscape to his concept of hell was amazing. He remembered now; this was the landscape in which he had seen his fiery alternative. Yellow plumes of sulphur fountained high out of bubbling orange cracks and arced up against the black starry sky, falling in slow sheets of spume away from the upright columns. He had heard that the inner crater of Etna was like this one, its floor a fiery orange lava lake, crusting over with black excrescences that folded under in steaming noxious vapors. In the Inferno, Virgil had guided Dante into Hell by way of Etna, using caves and tunnels unfilled with lava. Now his own amazing Virgil was leading him down onto the real thing. Their little craft, transparent to them, held them hovering over the burning lake.

  “What will you do here?” he asked.

  “I’m hiding, waiting for my friends from Ra. We’ve decided to arrest Ganymede and his supporters. Their base is on Loki Patera, and it’s not going to be easy to make our approach without them seeing us and taking flight.”

  “You need to surprise them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you intend to imprison them?”

  “Well, at least to keep them on Io. Disable their ability to leave. Because of the threats Ganymede made, the Synoekismus has authorized us to take such an action. In fact they demanded we do it. Since the Ganymedeans have set up a base on Io, the council can pretend they’re our problem. Leave us to figure out how to do it. It’s causing a bit of a tactical disagreement right now among my cohort.”

  “This Loki Patera, is it an active volcano, with a lake of molten rock in its crater?”

  “Yes indeed. It’s one of the biggest calderas of all, and these days it’s sending up quite a sulphur plume.”

  “And the interior of Io, you said it’s melted through and through?”

  “Yes, that’s basically right. The pressure makes the core a kind of solid, of course.”

  “So chambers of liquid rock link up below the surface, or pool together?

  “I think so. I’m not sure how completely the interior is understood.”

  “Or explored?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These craft of yours are self-contained, right? They withstand the vacuum of space, as we see, and the ocean of Europa. Is the lava of Io any different, in a way that matters to your ship?”

  “It’s hotter!”

  “Does that matter, though? Wouldn’t your craft withstand the heat, and the pressure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could ask your machine pilot, it would know. And it has systems of reckoning to locate itself in space, isn’t that right?”

  “If I understand you correctly, yes.” She was now tapping madly at her pad, head tilted to listen to something Galileo couldn’t hear.

  “So,” he continued, “nothing would prevent us
from sinking down into the lava chambers below some volcano near Loki, and traversing the channels down there until you could come up out of the erupting crater of Loki, thus surprising Ganymede in his refuge?”

  Hera laughed shortly, with a look at him that seemed to contain a new surmise. “Those math lessons have made you ingenious!”

  “I was always ingenious,” he said, irritated.

  “No doubt. But in this case, I’m not sure it would work.”

  “Your mechanical pilot will be able to calculate these things, I am sure.”

  She smiled. “I thought you didn’t like how dependent we are on our machines.”

  “But you are whether I like it or not. And no matter where you go. And so, as you said, you have made them strong. Maybe strong enough for the inside of Io.”

  “Maybe.”

  She tapped away, while also talking to interlocutors elsewhere. A voice murmured in a language Galileo did not recognize.

  Eventually she barked a short laugh. She piloted the craft down onto the burning lake, landing with a final little tilt back, like a goose or a swan.

  “So I was right? The ship won’t burn?”

  “Yes. No.”

  She tapped on her pad, which reminded him of a spinet’s keyboard. Their craft sank into the lake of fire. Having been a space craft and a submarine craft, it was now a sublithic craft, a subsulphurine craft.

  “The heat is apparently not as extreme as it looks,” Hera said, as if reassuring Galileo. “Molten sulphurs aren’t as hot as the basalt farther down. The craft has found that compared to Jupiter’s radiation, the protections required are not significant.” She shook her head. “You have to understand, people only began inhabiting Io when I was young. Before that the counterfields weren’t good enough. So the idea of going inside the moon hasn’t really occurred to anyone. Although apparently robotic research craft have already been down here, mapping Io’s internal flow patterns. So we’ll use what they found.”