Galileo’s Dream

Affronted, Galileo said, ‘It was nothing of the sort!’

She laughed at him. ‘Sorry, but from our perspective it’s all too obvious. And always was, I’m sure. You failed to consider that major planetary bodies are not best named for one’s political patrons.’

‘What do you call them, then?’

‘They are named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.’

‘Collectively,’ Ganymede interjected, ‘they are called the Galilean moons.’

‘Well!’ Galileo said, taken aback. For a moment he was at a loss. Then he said, ‘That’s a good name, I must admit.’ After a moment’s confusion he added, ‘Not greatly different than a name like Medici, if I am not mistaken—’ with a bold look at Hera.

She laughed again. ‘The discoverer of something is not the same as the discoverer’s patron. His hoped-for patron, to be precise. Making the name a gross bit of flattery, a kind of bribe.’

‘Well, I couldn’t very well name them for myself,’ Galileo pointed out. ‘So I had to choose something useful, did I not?’

She shook her head, unconvinced. But she had stopped laughing at him.

When he saw a chance, Galileo drifted over to her so they could speak sotto voce again. ‘You all speak as if I am someone from your past,’ he noted. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your time is earlier than ours.’

Galileo struggled to comprehend this; he had been presuming that the stranger’s device had merely been transporting him across space. ‘What time is it here, then? What year?’

‘In your terms it is the year 3020.’

Galileo felt his mouth hanging open as he struggled to grasp this news. Transported not only to Europa, but to a time some fourteen hundred years after his own…Stunned, he said weakly, ‘That explains many things I did not understand.’

Her wicked smile again.

‘Of course it creates new mysteries as well,’ he added.

‘Indeed.’ She was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read. She was not an angel, or an otherworldly creature, but a human like him. A very imposing woman.

There was a ping, a small jolt, and the room tilted to the side. Ganymede pointed to a white globe, lit from within, floating in the corner of the room. ‘A globe of Europa,’ he said to Galileo. He explained that its whites were faintly shaded to indicate the temperature of the surface; most of it was pale blue, crisscrossed by many faint green lines. Galileo crossed the room to look more closely at it, checking automatically for geometrical patterns in the surface craquelure. Triangles, parallelograms, spicules, radiola, pentagons…Where the lines intersected, the greens sometimes turned yellow, and in a few cases the yellow shifted to orange.

‘The tides break the ice,’ Ganymede explained, ‘and convective upwellings fill some of the cracks in the ice, forming vertical zones like artesian wells, that can serve as channels down to the liquid ocean. On Ganymede we called them flues.’

‘Tides?’ Galileo asked. ‘How can there be tides?’

All the Jovians stared at him. Hera shook her head briefly, as if the explanation would be beyond Galileo’s understanding. Irritated, he looked to Ganymede, who shrugged uncomfortably.

‘Gravity, you see…Perhaps we can discuss it another time. Because now we have begun our journey into the interior. We descend by melting the ice as we go, to clear the flue.’

The craft tilted first at one angle then another. A large rectangular patch on the chamber’s wall was filled with glowing primary colours, as if a rainbow had been used for paint. Ganymede informed him that their vessel was represented by the black pendant in the middle of this rectangle, and flowing upward past it were ribbons of rainbow colour, orange strands closest to the black blob, yellow and green twining around them. Off to one side, a larger rectangle was apparently a window, giving them a view of what passed outside; this consisted of nothing but a field of the darkest blue imaginable, a blue so deep and pure that it captured Galileo’s eye, and exhibited small reticulations and lighter gleams, revealing perhaps that it was an icy slush. It gave him much less information than the other rectangle, the brilliant colours indicating temperatures as he was informed they did.

Down, down, down some more. The blue outside the window flowed upward more swiftly, and darkened even more. The temperature ‘picture’ likewise flowed. Otherwise there was only the hum of the vessel’s machines, the brush of its air. Once Galileo had dreamed of falling off a ship and sinking into the Adriatic. Now they were all dreaming together.

Ganymede hated the necessity of this dive, hated the very idea of an intrusion into the ocean under the ice, and it soon became clear that his crew shared his opinion. They eyed their pictures with grim expressions, and said little; Ganymede strode back and forth nervously behind them, consulting with them in turn.

On the rainbow panel a green potato-shaped patch moved upward; it looked like a boulder. Galileo asked about it.

‘A meteorite,’ Ganymede replied. ‘Space is full of rocks. The shooting stars you see in your night sky are rocks, often as small as sand grains, burning very brightly.’

‘Friction with air is enough to ignite rock?’

‘They are moving really very fast. Here on Europa there is no atmosphere, however, so whatever it encounters crashes straight into the ice. It happens a lot, but impact craters in ice quickly deform and flow back toward flatness.’

‘No atmosphere? What about the air we were breathing up there?’

‘We live inside bubbles of air, held in place by forces or materials.’

Their vessel stopped in its descent; it was interesting to Galileo how clearly he could feel the halt, subtle though it was.

Ganymede said, ‘Pauline, is everything going well?’

‘All is well,’ said a woman’s voice, apparently from within the walls of the vessel.

‘How soon will it be before we reach the ocean?’

‘If we maintain this speed it will be thirty minutes.’

‘Is the Ariadne thread unspooling cleanly?’

‘Yes.’

Ganymede said to Galileo, ‘The Ariadne thread is also a heating element, and will keep the central line of our flue liquid, to ease our return.’

They waited, absorbed in their thoughts. The light downward pull of Europa made the crew’s movements around the bridge fluid and slow, like dance in a dream. Galileo found it hard to keep his balance, it was somewhat like floating in a river.

He drifted to Hera’s side and said, ‘All these machines have to work for us to stay alive.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘It seems risky.’

‘It is. But because it is, we engineer for safety. Materials and power available are terrifically advanced compared to your time. And there is a principle called redundancy at the criticalities, do you know this term? Replacement systems are available in case of failures. Bad things still sometimes happen. But there you are. They do anywhere.’

‘But on Earth,’ Galileo objected, ‘on Earth, in the open air, the things you make don’t have to work for you to survive.’

‘Don’t they? Your clothing, your language, your weapons? They all have to work for you to stay alive, right? We are poor forked worms in this world. Only our technologies, and our teamwork, allow us to survive.’

Galileo pursed his lips. There might be some truth to what she said, but still he felt it obscured a real difference. ‘Worm or not,’ he said, and she was a rather magnificently shaped worm, he did not add, ‘you could stay alive on Earth, by breathing, eating, and staying warm. Granted these take effort, but you could make the effort. You have tools to help you, but they don’t have to remain unbroken for you to survive. A single man alone on an island could do it. There are no mechanical contrivances that surround you and protect you, like a fortress, that have to function successfully forever or else you very quickly die.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s like a sea voyage. You could not have your ship sink and survive.’

‘But you people never land. You sail on forever.’

‘Yes, that’s true. But it’s true for everyone, always.’

Galileo recalled standing in his garden at night, in the open air, under the stars. It was an experience this woman had never had. Possibly she could not imagine it. Possibly she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘You don’t know what it is to be free,’ he said, surprised. ‘You don’t know what it is to stand free in the open air.’

She shook her head impatiently. ‘Have it your way.’

‘I will.’

Again her amused glance, as if she were looking down on a child. She said, ‘You were famous for that, as I recall. Until…’

The voice Pauline interrupted to announce they were near the bottom of the ice layer, and were in what she called brash ice. They could hear floating chunks and clinkers striking the hull, a grinding noise full of scrapes and thuds.

Then they were moving freely, in water. Galileo had spent so much time on barges and ferries, and on a few well-remembered trips out into the Adriatic, that he recognized the feel in his feet. Such kinetic sensations were so slight as to disappear when one focused on them, but when focusing attention elsewhere, one became aware of the totality of the effect.

Ganymede said, ‘Pauline, search for the Europans’ flue, also any other vessels, of course. And give us an analysis of the water, please.’

Pauline reported the water was nearly pure, with trace amounts of salts, floating particulates, and dissolved gases. Some of the crew began tapping madly at glyphs on their desktops. Outside the window was omnipresent black. They might as well have been deep in the bowels of the Earth. Only one’s sense of movement suggested they were in a liquid.

Thus it was a great surprise to see a brief flash of cobalt blue in the window, like the random blue spark one sometimes saw crossing the inside of the eyelid.

‘What was that!’ Galileo said.

‘We call that Cherenkov radiation,’ Ganymede said.

‘Somebody’s patron?’ Galileo inquired, glancing at Hera.

‘The discoverer of the phenomenon,’ she said firmly.

Ganymede ignored their fencing. ‘There are tiny particles called neutrinos, which pour through our manifold in great numbers but very seldom interact with anything. Once in a while one hits a proton, which is a small but substantial part of an atom-hits a proton in such a way that the proton releases a muon, which is a very small component of a proton. If that happens in an ocean like this, the muon will fly through the water in such a way as to spark a short trail of light in the blue wavelength. We will see a few per minute.’

Another little flare of blue appeared, again like the flaws that plagued Galileo’s vision. ‘Like shooting stars,’ he noted.

‘Yes. A very subtle fire.’

‘A fire in water.’

‘Well, a light, let us say. Though some fires will burn in water, of course.’

Galileo tried to imagine that. Of course there were different kinds of fire. Blue streaks in blackness…This dream was testing him in all sorts of ways: could he find a way to test it back? Maybe answer the basic question: was this really happening? He looked around to see if there was something small that he could take and conceal in his coat. Stealing ideas from dreams-perhaps it wasn’t so unusual. Perhaps it was a fundamental mode of thought.

The next flick of blue light was followed by a blue ball, which rapidly expanded, then became a kind of diffuse polyhedron, shedding spicules and other radiola of blue light which then curved away from the polyhedron in spirals, some of them tight equable spirals, making cylindrical coils, others equiangular spirals, growing wildly outward in conic shapes. One of these flashed right by the window, and for a second or two their chamber pulsed sapphire.

Some of the crew cried out; then there was silence.

Galileo said, ‘What was that?’

Ganymede appeared astonished; he stood pressed against the window, his blade of a nose touching it.

He straightened up, expression black, ‘It’s here. I knew it. The anomalies made it very clear, I’ve been saying so all along.’ He turned to his crew. ‘We shouldn’t be here! Have the Europans shown up yet?’

‘We haven’t seen them,’ one replied.

‘Find their flue then! Get to it-we have to get to it before they do, to stop them!’

They turned back to their screens and their crowded desktops. After a time one said, ‘We’ve found it. We can hear them within it. They’re descending. We’re closing on it-wait. There they are. Two of them, just leaving their flue.’

Ganymede hissed. ‘Go!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ram them! Get under them and ram them from below! Full speed until you reach them, then get in position to shove them right back up the flue!’ He looked stricken, grim beyond telling. ‘We have to make them leave!’

‘How can you do that?’ Hera asked.

‘We’ll ram them until they turn back.’

‘Are you going to warn them?’

‘I don’t want to break radio silence. Who knows what effect it might have on what’s in here?’

‘What about the sound of collisions? What about the sounds and the exhaust from your engines?’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying to them! None of us should be here!’

Another blue conic spiral flashed by them. Ganymede read the screens and the desks. ‘That could be some kind of signal. Speech, or thought, in some language of light.’

‘Who would it speak to?’

‘The light may be secondary. Who knows who it talks to. I have my suspicions, but…’

‘Try numbers,’ Galileo suggested. ‘Display a triangle, see if it knows the Pythagorean theorem.’

Ganymede shook his head, visibly trying to remain patient. ‘That’s what the Europans will do, I’m afraid. Reckless interventions like that. They have no idea what they may be getting into.’

‘Is it some kind of fish?’

‘Not a fish. But on the floor of the ocean are layers of something. Perhaps a slime that is organized into larger structures.’

‘But how would a slime make light?’

Ganymede clutched his black hair in his hands. ‘Light from slime is bioluminescence,’ he said tightly. ‘Slime from light is photosynthesis. Both are very common. They’re like alchemical interactions.’

‘But alchemy doesn’t really work.’

‘Sometimes it does. Be quiet now. We have to get the Europans out of here.’

On the screen that had held the rainbow images of the flue, there stood now an image all in greys, in which near-white shapes defined an object much like their own vessel, shifting against a rumpled grey field. Ganymede took over at one desk and began to tap gently on the array of tabs and knobs. A solid bump, and then the screen showed nothing but the ghostly image of another ship. ‘Hold on,’ Ganymede ordered grimly, and began tapping harder than ever. ‘Pauline, keep the vectors such that we push it up into its flue.’

Then a loud bang and instant deceleration knocked them all forward and up into the air. When they fell back Galileo found himself in a heap of bodies in the corner, Hera under him. He got up and tried to give her a hand, but staggered back as the vessel tipped again.

The voice named Pauline said, ‘They’re in their flue now, but they can descend out of it again, of course.’

‘Go after the other one anyway. Wait, while we’re in contact with them, speak hull to hull and tell them to get back to the surface. Tell them if they don’t we’ll ram them hard enough to breach both ships. Tell them who we are and tell them I’ll do it.’

Suddenly a storm of blue flashes exploded in the window, and all the screens lit up as if with torn rainbows. The visual chaos was split by black lightning that somehow was just as devastating to the eyes as white lightning. Cries of alarm filled the air. Then the vessel lurched down and began to spin. Everyone had to hold on to something to stay upright; Galileo clutched Hera by the elbow, as high as his shoulder, and she held him up with that same arm, while grasping a chair back with her other hand. One of the crew clutched her desk while pointing at her screen with the other hand. Ganymede moved like an acrobat across the bucking deck, inspecting one screen and then another. The officers shouted at him over a high ringing tone. On the screens Galileo caught sight of a swirl of a steep conic spiral rising from the depths, now revealed to be immense, a matter of many miles. The blue light flashed in their chamber again.

‘It doesn’t want us here,’ Ganymede said. ‘Pauline, open radio contact with those ships. Send this: Get out! Get out! Get out!’

A high moan lofted up Galileo’s spine, leaving his short hairs as erect as a hedgehog’s. The sound resembled wolves howling at the moon. Often Galileo had heard them in the distance, late at night, when all the rest of the world slept. But the sound filling him now was to wolves’ howls as wolves’ howls were to human speech, a sound so uncanny that actual wolves would surely have run away whimpering. Fear turned his bowels watery. He saw all the others in the craft were just as afraid. He clutched Hera’s thick biceps, felt himself moaning involuntarily. It was too loud now for anyone to hear him; the superlupine howls became a keening shriek that seemed everywhere at once, both inside and outside him. The blue flashes were now inside the vessel, even inside his eyes, though they were squeezed shut.

‘Go!’ Hera shouted. Galileo wondered if anyone else could hear her. In any case the vessel was spiralling upward now, so forcefully that Galileo was knocked to his knees. Hera swung him up and around the way he would have swung a child, and plopped him into a chair; she staggered, almost landed on him, sat hard on the floor beside him. Black flashes still shot through them like lightning, through floor to ceiling, as if carrying them along in some stupendous explosion, aquatic but incorporeal, everything spiralling in a dizzying rise. It was like being in the grip of a living Archimedes’ screw. Up and up again, until there was an enormous crash, casting everyone up onto the ceiling, after which they flailed awkwardly down and thumped to the floor. They had struck the shell of ice capping the ocean, Galileo presumed, and it seemed the vessel might have cracked and everyone would soon drown. Then Galileo felt shoved toward the floor, indicating a new acceleration, as when rocked back on a bolting horse. The vessel itself now creaked and squealed, while the eerie shriek was muffled. The chamber was still bathed in flickers of blue fire. Ganymede, propped on both arms before the biggest table of screens and instruments, conferred in sharp tones with crew members holding on beside him. It seemed they were still trying to steer the thing.

Up they tumbled, turning and spinning this way and that, pitching and yawing but always moving up.

Ganymede said loudly, ‘Are the Europans ahead of us?’

‘There’s no sign of them.’ Pauline’s voice was small under the muffled shriek.

The shriek shot up the scale in a rising glissando, until it was no longer audible; but immediately a violent earache and headache assaulted Galileo. He shouted up at Ganymede, ‘Won’t we emerge too quickly, if we don’t slow down?’

Ganymede glanced at him, started tapping again on one of the desks.

Then the black on the screens turned blue, an indigo that lightened abruptly, and they shot up in a violent turquoise acceleration. Galileo’s head banged the floor of the vessel and he thrust an arm under Hera; the back of her head smacked his forearm, and it hurt, but she turned and saw he had saved her a knock.

On one screen splayed the starry black sky, under it the shattered white plain of Europa’s surface.

‘We’re going to fall!’

But they didn’t. The column of water under them had fountained out of its hole and then quickly frozen in place, so that it stood there as ice, supporting their vessel just as certain sandstone columns held up schist boulders in an area of the Alps. Icicles broke and clattered away from the vessel’s sides, shattering on the low frozen waves now surrounding the column. Black sky; white ice, tinted the oranges of Jupiter; their vessel, like a roc’s egg on a plinth.

‘How will we get down?’ Galileo inquired in the sudden silence. His ears buzzed and hurt, and he could see crew members holding their heads.

‘Something will come to us,’ said Ganymede.

Hera laughed just a touch wildly, detached Galileo’s fingers from her arm. ‘The Europans will come for us. The Council will come for us.’

‘I don’t care, if they get the others too.’

‘The others may have died inside.’

‘So be it. We’ll tell the Council what we did, and tell them they should have done it.’ He turned to one of his crew. ‘Prepare the entangler to send Signor Galileo back.’

The crewman, one of the pilots, bustled out of the chamber through a low door. Ganymede turned to speak to another of them.

Hera leaned over and said quickly in Galileo’s ear, ‘They will give you an amnestic, and you won’t remember any of this. Drink salt water the moment you wake. Do your alchemists have magnesium sulphate? Well, shit-you won’t remember this either. Here-’ she reached inside her tunic, pulled out a small tablet, gave it to him. ‘This is better than nothing. Hide it on you, and when you see it again, eat it!’ She glared at him, her nose inches from his, and pinched his arm hard. ‘Eat this! Remember!’

‘I’ll try,’ Galileo promised, slipping the pill in his sleeve and feeling his arm throb.

Ganymede towered over him. ‘Come, signor. There is no time to lose, we will soon be apprehended. The other ships may not have made it, in which case good riddance to them, but we will have a lot of explaining to do. Let me convey you back to your home.’

Galileo stood. As he passed Hera she pinched him again, this time on the butt. Eat the pill, he thought, ignoring her, and walked with Ganymede to the side of his thick perispicillum. Eat the pill.

‘Here,’ Ganymede said, and a mist from his hand hit Galileo’s face.

Chapter Six A Statue Would Have Been Erected

These confused and intermittent mental struggles slip through one’s fingers and escape by their subtleties and slitherings, not hesitating to produce a thousand chimeras and fantastic caprices little understood by themselves and not at all by their listeners. By these fancies the bewildered mind is bandied about from one phantasm to another, just as in a dream one passes from a palace to a ship and then to a grotto or beach, and finally, when one awakes and the dream vanishes (and for the most part all memory of it also), one finds that one has been idly sleeping and has passed the hours without profit of any sort.

-GALILEO, letter to Cosimo, 1611

And indeed he came out of this syncope as one wakes from a dream, agitated, gasping, struggling to remember as it squirted away; you could see it in his face. ‘No,’ he moaned, ‘come back…don’t forget…’

This time it was his newly hired housekeeper who discovered him: La Piera had arrived at last. ‘Maestro!’ she cried, leaning over to peer into his staring eye. ‘Wake up!’

He groaned, looked at her without recognition. She gave him a hand, hauled him to his feet. Though a braccio shorter, she was about as heavy as he was.

‘They told me you suffer from syncopes.’

‘I was dreaming.’

‘You were paralysed. I shouted, I pinched you, nothing. You were gone.’

‘I was gone.’ He shuddered like a horse. ‘I had a dream, or something. A vision. But I can’t remember it!’

‘That’s all right. You’re better off without dreams.’

He regarded her curiously. ‘Why do you say that?’

She shrugged her broad shoulders as she tugged his clothes into position, holding up a little pellet she pulled from his jacket and then pocketing it. ‘My dreams are crazy, that’s all. Burning things in the oven while all the fish on the table come to life and start biting me, or sliding out the door like eels. They’re always the same. Rubbish I say! Life is crazy enough as it is.’