The gap-toothed grin. When God created the cosmos, He had had just that grin. He had put it on Mazzoleni to show Galileo how He had felt.
Combined results began to accrue. When a rolling ball fell off a horizontal plane into the air, the curve of its fall was a mix of two motions—first, the uniform speed of the horizontal motion, which did not diminish just because the ball left the tabletop, and second, the accelerating speed of its vertical fall, which was precisely the same as if it were falling without any horizontal motion—something they established by repeated testing. So the horizontal speed was uniform, while the downward speed was increasing as the square of the time elapsed, as already demonstrated. And the combination of those two was, by definition, half of a parabola. One could therefore describe the motion with a simple parabolic equation.
He stood looking at these equations he had written down, and at the numbers and sketched diagrams on the pages before it. His 116th work folio was almost completely filled.
“MAT-ZO-LEN-IIIIIIIIIII!”
The simian face of the ancient one. “Something good?”
“PAR-A-BO-LAAAAAA! Let me show you. This is something even you can understand.”
But first he had to dance around the table, out into the garden and back again, feeling bell-struck. All the world struck, all the world ringing inside him. Gong! Gong! Gong!
Black space; Hera’s face.
“So. Do you see what you did?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Do you understand the power of your apparatus, of your method?”
“You could seek the mathematics inside nature, and find it.”
“Yes. This is what you loved. This is what gave you joy.”
She sat back, watching him closely. “The inclined plane apparatus,” she went on, “allowed you to create events that in nature were compound, but now were teased apart. You had independent variables under your control. Each experiment was unique, but when the variables were the same, the results were the same. It was as if you were enacting the calculus in advance of the mathematics of the calculus—doing calculus as if it were geometry, or even mobile sculpture.
“And these events you staged—if anyone else were to stage them in the same way, they could not help but get the same results. You could take the various descriptions of motion that were competing in your time, and put them to the test, and the event itself would determine which of the explanations matched the results. Then, with your mathematical description in hand, you could predict what would happen in new situations. When you were right, this was something no one could ever revise. If we were to do it here and now, it would be just the same.”
“Well, but there is no pull downward here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes yes. It was a way of seeing the truth.”
“Not so fast. It was an accurate description of events at that scale. It was an abstraction with a concrete referent, which meant that no one could logically deny it. If someone were to assert that there was a different description for motion, then you could put it to the test, and show that they were wrong and you were right. You could in fact withdraw, and let motion speak for itself. Motion then speaks, and your rivals in explanation are silenced, without you having to say a word.”
“I liked that,” Galileo admitted. “I liked that very much.”
“Everyone does. And so we still speak of Galilean motion. We still have inclined planes in physics classrooms.”
“I like that too.”
“It was your chief joy.”
“Well, maybe,” Galileo temporized, thinking of all the other things he had enjoyed. He realized that he had loved his life.
“No. It was your chief joy, as revealed by your own mind. Remember that the mnemonic is a brain scanner that locates your most powerful memories by identifying and stimulating the largest coordinating clusters in the amygdala. The strongest memories make the biggest clumps, and they are always entrained with the strongest emotions, in particular the strongest pleasures and the strongest pains. The emotional component is determinative for intensity and permanence of memory. Thus, sexual release can be memorable or forgettable, depending on if it is attached to more complex feelings. To joy, for instance—that feeling you describe as being rung by a bell. And then physical pain, all your many ailments, most of which originated with the poisoned cellar that killed your weaker companions—pain leaves a mark, especially at first, when accompanied by dismay and fear. But much more powerful is shame—perhaps the strongest of the negative emotions. Although fear, humiliation … well. The point is, we have very emotional memories. So I have just been visiting your strongest memories, that’s all. This is what we find among the most pleasurable of your memories.”
“Not the telescope?”
“Of course not! That’s just the thing that Ganymede gave you. And by so doing, he bent your whole life in a new direction, until what you were martyred for and remembered for was a drama that overshadowed your real contribution, which was the inclined plane work. Your telescopic discoveries were just what anybody would see when they look through such a glass. And your astronomical theories were usually wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Galileo demanded.
“Your explanation of the comets? Your theory of the tides?”
“Well, but that isn’t fair,” Galileo objected. “The real explanation for the tides is ridiculous. That the Earth’s water moves because space itself is bending? It’s inexcusable.”
“And yet real.”
Gallileo sighed. “Maybe we need to be able to forget more than we need to remember,” he said, thinking of what she had said about emotions. About shame, and his catalog of bad looks.
“You need to remember what helps you, and forget things that don’t help you. But you have not achieved that. Few people have, I’ve found.”
“You did this to many people, I take it?”
“It was my work.” She shook her head unhappily. “It’s what I did, before this thing in Europa drew us all down into its maelstrom.”
“Is the creature really such a problem?”
She looked grim. “The debate over what to do about it is the problem. We are the problem. But the problem is tearing us apart.”
“As bad as that?”
She gave him one of her sharp looks. “You know better than most how people can fight over an idea.”
“Indeed. That’s what Aurora said too.”
“Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic. The results can be deadly. The Thirty Years’ War, isn’t that what they called the religious war that Europe was fighting during your time?”
“Thirty years?” Galileo exclaimed, dismayed.
“So I seem to remember. And here, now, it may be happening again.”
For a while they flew to Europa in silence, both of them locked in their thoughts. By now the equivalence of change of speed and the physical sensation of weight was firmly established in Galileo’s body and mind, so when he felt pressed back into his chair, he came out of his reverie.
“You’re speeding up?”
“Yes.” She was grim again. “Apparently Ganymede and his group are already there. Four ships in a tight orbit, just over the ice. There’s no good way to stop them now.”
Ahead of them bulked the white ball of Europa. Hera muttered viciously in a language he did not know, tapping hard at her control pad. “Come on!” she complained.
You must be patient, Galileo prevented himself from saying. Instead he asked, “Why does Ganymede want me to be burned at the stake, do you think? What difference would it make? Aren’t there so many potentialities that they all happen or not, cancel each other out or not, so that any one doesn’t matter?”
She looked at him with the expression he had seen before that he could not decipher. Pity? Affection? “All the temporal isotopes have effects down
stream. Think again of the braided channels of a river. Say you kick the bank of one stream so hard it crumbles, and the stream wears away the bank until it breaks into a nearby channel, and they both become so strong together that they cut a straighter line, take water from some channels, reroute others…. Well, so, Ganymede thinks you are at a crucial point, a big bend. He’s been obsessed with changing that bend for a long time. He keeps going back to it, I think. And I wonder if he doesn’t want the change he causes to be so profound it alters things even in our time too. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“But say I am burned—what’s different?”
“Maybe the more accurate question would be, what would be different if you weren’t burned?” She glanced at him, sensing his shudder. “After you, there is a deep divide between science and religion. A war of two cultures, two worldviews. And with you burned at the stake for stating an obvious physical fact, religion is thereafter discredited, even disgraced. The intellectual innovators of the world are secularized, science rises to dominate human culture, religion is seen as an archaic power system, like astrology, and it fades away.”
“But that’s not good. Why would anyone want that? That’s no different than these bastard priests who are attacking me!”
She regarded him carefully. “Interesting to see again the structure of feeling you grew up in. To us it seems clear that your religion was a kind of mass delusion, serving the powerful by justifying their hierarchy.”
Galileo shook his head. “The world is sacred. God made it all, as an expression of mathematical playfulness, perhaps, but however that may be, He did it.” She shrugged at this and he went on. “Besides, how can you say that science dominating civilization is such a good thing? Didn’t you tell me that your histories have been nightmares, that most cultures in most times, including your own, have been to one degree or another insane? Where’s the great advantage in that?”
“The question,” she said carefully, “is whether the alternatives are not even worse.”
This was sobering. Galileo thought it over. “Do you have a tutorial for the history of human affairs between my time and yours, like the one Aurora had for mathematics?”
“Of course,” Hera said, still brooding. “There are many. They describe different potentialities, or attempt to show the whole wave function. But there’s no time for that now. We’re approaching Europa.”
And in fact Europa stood directly before them, growing rapidly larger, blossoming like a white rose, its surface crackled like the ice on the Po just before it broke up in the spring. It was striking how for the longest time in their flights, their objectives remained at the same small size, only growing incrementally, and then in a final rush bloomed to the size of an entire world.
Now Hera was cursing again.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They’re landing,” she said, and pointed. “Just over the north pole.”
Galileo did not have a sense of orientation to apply to this. “You can see them?”
“Yes. There.” She pointed, and Galileo saw a cluster of tiny stars, very close to Europa’s white surface, swirling down toward it. “They’re landing, and the Europans are trying to stop them, but …”
“They don’t have cannons to fire at them?”
“Weapons have been forbidden, as I told you, but there are things that can be used as weapons, of course. Power systems, construction tools, field generators …” She shook her head as she watched her screen and listened to her interlocutors. “I wish they would generate a small black hole in their midst and suck them out of existence!” She cursed in the language that didn’t get translated.
A streak of brilliant white light shot down out of the quartet of firefly ships onto the surface of Europa, and she stopped in her tirade.
“What was that?” Galileo said.
“I don’t know. Possibly one of their ships flew right into the moon, like a meteorite. I don’t know how that could have happened, though. The pilot systems wouldn’t have allowed it, so there must have been an override, or …”
“What?”
She hissed. “Whatever hit the surface just exploded again. Maybe its a reactor. There’s an electromagnetic pulse that has registered that is—ah! See that bright white spot?” She tapped away quickly, then began cursing again. “A lot of them are in trouble now, on both sides. Hold on,” she ordered. “I’m taking us down fast.”
Their ship tilted forward, rocketed down toward the shattered icescape. Only in the last seconds before they would have impacted like a meteor did the invisible ship tilt and shudder and roar, throwing Galileo against his restraints.
Then they thumped down on the tawny ice. Hera began rattling out a long list of instructions to the ship and the various machine intelligences among its crew.
“Shouldn’t you get the rest of your grand council involved in this?” Galileo asked.
“Yes.” She gave him a look. “But we’ll meet with the Europan council for now.”
“Oh I see. Very good.”
“Very bad. We’ve failed to stop Ganymede. I don’t know what he’s done, but that was a big explosion. Possibly one of their ship engines.”
“When they crashed in?”
“Ordinarily that wouldn’t be enough to do it. The engines are secured against almost any accident. But with some time and effort, it might be possible to override the protection.”
They disembarked from the ship, and he soon found out that she had landed them very close to an entry ramp into Rhadamanthys, the under-ice Venice. Down a broad white entrance, through a diaphanous barrier and into a broad ice gallery, where the pulsing blues interlocked in their patterns overhead. Soon they reached the edge of the canal they had taken before, and beside it was a sunken amphitheater where a small crowd of people gathered. This too looked familiar, and though he couldn’t recall the specifics of any previous incident, he assumed there had been one, there on the far side of some amnestic he had ingested. Already seen …
“You have to give me something so I don’t remember so much of my life,” he reminded her.
“I tried a few things with the mnemonic, while you were remembering. I hope certain parts will be occluded for you now.”
People in the crowd saw Hera descending the stairs toward them. Some threw up their hands as if to say What next! or What have you done! or We already have enough problems! But Galileo saw that was a pretense; he saw that they were afraid. Some were chewing on knuckles; others were weeping without knowing it. Even in the ubiquitous green-blue light of the vast articulated cavern, most of them were white-faced with fear.
Watching Hera confer with them, Galileo heard snatches of a debate over who had the right to land or to forbid landing on Europa. He wandered down to the floating transparent globe that modeled the icy moon. The dark gray rocky core of the globe was surrounded by a transparent blue gel representing the ocean, all of which was held in a thin white shell that tinted the ocean below it to a pastel shade somewhat like the Earth’s sky. The outer shell was scored by faint lines representing the crack systems on the surface.
Inside this globe, the creature of the ocean was not rendered visible, although Galileo thought that tiny fluctuations in the blueness of the blue light might be intended to represent some manifestation of it. Down there under their feet—a mile down, a hundred miles down … He wanted to talk to Aurora, to see if anything new had come of the mathematical conversation with the sentience. The listening devices they had emplaced in the ocean were connected to sound repeaters within this floating globe, he assumed, as emanating from it he could hear, at a much reduced volume, the uncanny singing he remembered so well. The lowest sounds appeared to match the little shifts in blueness of the model’s ocean. He wondered if the color changes marked the spatial origin of the sounds.
“Why didn’t you stop him? You failed!” one of the locals was complaining to Hera. “You were supposed to keep him sequestered on Io!”
“We tried,” sh
e countered, “unlike you. Where were you? It might have helped to have some numbers there, if you really wanted a quarantine.”
The argument persisted, grew louder—
Then the blue in the floating globe turned white at a point under the surface, near the upper part of it. That would be its north pole, no doubt. The blossom of incandescence propagated away from it in waves; they struck the solid mass of the core and rebounded toward the surface. Threads of white light coursed through the interior like lightning.
Then there was a tremble underfoot, and the ice around them groaned, sounding much like the creature within had sounded during their incursion. Perhaps the sentience had learned to sing by mimicking the natural creaks of its moon’s ice.
Then the sounds coming from the globe changed. The clustering glissandi coalesced to a single dissonant chord. The pitch dropped abruptly, down to a basso profundo so profound that Galileo heard it more in the gut than the ear. It groaned. As the awful sound lifted back into the range of the audible, it seemed to lift Galileo’s body with it, chelating him with a thousand claw tips, so that his skin crawled and the hair rose on his forearms and the back of his neck. He recalled the cries that had driven them up through the ice shell of the moon to the safety of the surface. That, however, had been an angry sound, like the roar of a lion. This one was pain and confusion. Then in a brief crescendo that spiked into his head just above his eyes, it changed to raw fear.
This lasted only a moment, thank God, for everything it felt Galileo felt. But it seemed the machine transferring the sound had damped the volume, reducing it to a lunatic whimper. That hurt in a different way—the sound of it too high, and somehow broken. The anguish pierced him right to the heart. He felt it fully himself, anguish like something he somehow recognized, something he had already felt …
Galileo found he had his nose to the floating globe, that he was embracing it and whimpering himself, muttering desolately, “No, no, no, no, no.” The pain in him was unbearable, like the stab of a cry of grief.
“What happened?” he said, wiping his face as Hera approached. “Has it changed?”
Galileo's Dream Page 37
