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‘Yes, I remember-but that was months ago! Where have you been?’
‘Now I am here.’
‘I’ve seen some amazing things!’ Galileo could not help saying.
‘You still wish to look through what I have?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He let the stranger and his servant in the gate, his unease written all over his face. ‘Come out to the terrace. I was there when you knocked, looking at Jupiter. Jupiter has four stars orbiting it, did you know that?’
‘Four moons. Yes.’
Galileo looked disappointed, also disturbed; how had the stranger been able to see them?
The stranger said, ‘Perhaps you would enjoy to see them through my instrument.’
‘Yes, of course. What is its power of magnification?’
‘It varies.’ He gestured at his servant. ‘Let me show you.’
The man’s ancient servant looked familiar. He wheezed unhappily under his load. On the terrace Galileo reached out to help him lower the satchel, briefly holding him above the elbow and against the back; under his coat the man felt like nothing but skin and bone. He slipped out from under the strap of the long bag carelessly, before Galileo had quite gotten hold of it, and it hit the tiles with a thump.
‘It’s heavy!’ Galileo said.
The two visitors pulled a massive tripod from the satchel, and arranged it next to Galileo’s instrument; then they drew a big spyglass out of the case. Its tube was made of a dull grey metal, like pewter, and they held it by both ends to lift it. It was about twice the length of Galileo’s tube, and three times the diameter, and clicked onto the top of its tripod with a distinct snap.
‘Where did you get that thing?’ Galileo asked.
The stranger shrugged. He glanced at Galileo’s tube, then spun his on its tripod with a light flick of the wrist. It stopped moving when it came to much the same angle as Galileo’s, and with a small smile the stranger gestured at the instrument.
‘Be my guest, please. Have a look.’
‘You don’t want to sight it?’
‘It is aimed at Jupiter. At the moon that you will call Number Two.’
Galileo stared at him, confused and a little afraid. Was the thing supposed to be self-sighting? The man’s claim made no sense.
‘Take a look and see,’ the stranger suggested.
There was no reply to that: it was what he had been saying himself, to Cremonini and everyone. Just look! Galileo moved his stool over to the new device, sat down, leaned forward. He looked into the eyepiece.
The thing’s field of vision was packed with stars, and seemed large, perhaps twenty or thirty times what Galileo saw through his glass. At its centre what he took to be one of the moons of Jupiter gleamed like a round white ball, marked by faint lines. It was bigger than Jupiter itself was in Galileo’s glass. The harder Galileo looked, the more obviously spheroid the white moon became, and its striations more visible. It stood out like a snowball against the stars, which burned in their various intensities against a depth of velvet black.
It appeared that the white ball, clearer than ever to his sight, had faintly darker areas, somewhat like Earth’s moon; but more prominent by far was its broken network of intersecting lines, like the craquelure on an old painting, or the ice on the Venetian lagoon in cold winters after several tides had cracked it. Galileo’s fingers reached for a quill that was not there, wanting to draw what he saw. In some places the lines appeared in parallel clusters, in others they rayed out like fireworks, and these two patterns overlapped and shattered each other repeatedly.
One crackle pattern clarified for him, gleamed in exquisite detail. Focusing on it appeared to increase the enlargement accordingly, until it filled the lens of the eyepiece. A wave of dizziness passed through his whole body; it felt like he was falling up toward the white moon. He lost his balance. He felt himself pitch forward, head first into the device.
Things fall in parabolic arcs: but he wasn’t falling. He flew, up and forward-outward-head tilted back to see where he was going. The plain of shattered white ice bloomed right before his eyes. Or below him-maybe he was falling. His stomach flipflopped as his sense of up and down reversed itself.
He didn’t know where he was.
He gasped for air. He was drifting downward, now; he was upright again; his sense of balance returned just as distinctly as sight returned when you closed and then opened your eyes-something definitive. It was an immense relief, the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.
He stood on ice. The ice was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows; sunset colours, autumn colours. He looked up-
A giant banded orange moon loomed in a black starry sky. It was many times bigger than the moon in Earth’s sky, and its horizontal bands were various pale oranges and yellows, umbers and creams. The borders of the bands curled over and into each other. On the moon’s lower quarter a brick red oval swirl marred the border of a terra cotta band and a cream band. The opaque plain of ice he stood on was picking up these colours. He put his fist up with his thumb stuck out: at home his thumb covered the moon; this one was seven or eight times that wide. Suddenly he understood it was Jupiter itself up there. He was standing on the surface of the moon he had been looking at.
Behind him someone politely cleared his throat. Galileo turned; it was the stranger, standing beside a spyglass like the one he had invited Galileo to look through. Perhaps it was the same one. The air was cool and thin-bracing somehow, like a wine or even a brandy. Galileo’s balance was uncertain, and he felt oddly light on his feet.
The stranger was looking curiously at Galileo. Beyond him on the nearby horizon stood a cluster of tall slender white towers, like a collection of campaniles. They looked to be made of the same ice as the moon’s surface.
‘Where are we?’ Galileo demanded.
‘We are on the second moon of Jupiter, which we call Europa.’
‘How came we here?’
‘What I told you was my spyglass is actually a kind of portal system. A transference device.’
Galileo’s thoughts darted about in rushes faster than he could register. Bruno’s idea that all the stars were inhabited-the steel machinery in the Arsenale-
‘Why?’ he said, trying to conceal his fear.
The stranger swallowed; his Adam’s apple, like another great nose he had ingested, bobbed under the shaved skin of his neck. ‘I am acting for a group here that would like you to speak to the council of moons. A group like the Venetian Senate, you might say. Pregadi, you call those senators. Invitees. Here you are a pregadi. My group, which was originally from Ganymede, would like to meet you, and they would like you to speak to the general council of Jovian moons. We feel it is important enough that we were willing to disturb you like this. I offered to be your escort.’
‘My Virgil,’ Galileo said. He could feel his heart pounding in him.
The stranger did not seem to catch the reference. ‘I am sorry to startle you in this manner. I did not feel that I could explain it to you in Italy. I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of snatching you away like this. And the shock of it. You are looking rather amazed.’
Galileo shut his mouth, which had in fact been hanging open. He felt his dry tongue stick to the dry roof of his mouth. His feet and hands were cold. He recalled suddenly that in his dreams his feet were often cold, even to the point that sometimes he stumped about in boots of ice, and woke to find his blankets had ridden up. Now he looked at his feet, shuddering. They were still in their ordinary leather shoes, looking incongruous on the tinted ice of this world. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger, bit the inside of his lip: he certainly seemed awake. And usually the thought that he might be dreaming was enough to wake him, if dreaming he was. But here he stood, in crisp thin air, breathing fast, heart thumping as it rarely did any more-as it used to when he was young, and frightened by something. Now he did not feel the fear, exactly, but only his body’s response to it. His mind perhaps did not quite believe all this, but his body had to. Maybe he had died and this was heaven, or purgatory. Maybe purgatory orbited Jupiter. He recalled his facetious lecture on the geography of Dante, in which he had calculated the size of Hell by the ratio of Lucifer’s arm to the height of Virgil-
‘But this is too strange!’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry for the shock it must have caused you. It was felt that your recent observations through your spyglass would help you to understand and accept this experience. It was felt that you might be the first human capable of understanding the experience.’
‘But I don’t understand it,’ Galileo had to admit, pleased though he was to be considered first at anything.
The stranger regarded him. ‘A lack of understanding must be a feeling you are used to,’ he suggested, ‘given the state of your research into physical forces.’
‘That’s different,’ Galileo said.
But it was a little bit true, when he thought about it: not understanding was a familiar sensation. At home he never had any trouble admitting it, no matter what people said to the contrary. In fact he was the only one bold enough to admit how little he understood! He had insisted on it!
But here there was no need to insist. He was flummoxed. He looked up again at Jupiter, wondered how far away they were from it. There were too many unknowns to be able to figure it out. Its dark part, a thin crescent, was very dark. The gibbous part, well-lit by the distant sun, was strongly marked by its fat horizontal bands. The borders looked like viscous pours of oil paint, curling and overlapping but never quite mixing. It almost seemed he could see the colours move.
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, 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 further 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, because underneath his studied (or stunned) calm, there swelled something very like terror. Perhaps it was only the memory of Bruno.
‘You appear to be cold,’ the stranger noted. ‘You are shivering. Perhaps I can lead you to the city?’ Pointing 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 Moon II was probably not as big as the Earth, perhaps more the size of the 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, 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 here 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 colour. 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 furthest,’ Galileo ventured, thinking of the distant Alps on a clear day.
‘No,’ the stranger said. ‘The different colours 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 colour.’
‘I suppose it is. Some spaces in here are illuminated 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.’
‘We are only people, as I’m afraid you will soon learn.’
The stranger led him to an amphitheatre, 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 theatres he had seen. The bottom dozen rows of seats were occupied, and in front of them other people were standing on a round stage. They all wore loose blouses and pantaloons that were blue, pale yellow, or the Jovian tones of Galileo’s group. At the centre of the stage stood a white glowing sphere 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 amphitheatre, 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 him. For a moment they were motionless, and many of them looked startled, even disapproving.
‘They look surprised to see us,’ Galileo noted. ‘Perhaps a bit baffled, or abashed.’
The stranger nodded. ‘They want to be sheep, and so should be sheepish. Come on.’
As they descended further, some of the ones dressed in orange and 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 Galileo assumed so: they were dressed in the same kind of blouses and pantaloons as the men. If a 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 immense 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 grew general, and 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 Ganymedeans addressed him. ‘Most illustrious Galileo,’ the Latin in his ear exclaimed, as the 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 the need of a truly 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 in his ear was Tuscan Italian, somewhat oldfashioned, 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 in mind 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?’
