Galileo’s Dream

As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the extraordinary idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation sounded suspiciously defensive to Galileo, and was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plough blade. ‘This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!’

‘You’re the one who kidnapped him,’ Hera replied. ‘I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.’

Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort, his face flushed a dark red. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’

‘No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.’

‘No!’

At this the people standing behind Hera moved forward en masse. They wore clothes similar to hers, and were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards in particular, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favour.

Hera nodded at them, and said to Ganymede, ‘Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.’

‘I can’t allow this!’

‘It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.’

‘This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.’

Hera said, ‘We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and we decide what happens here.’ She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.

Hera said to Galileo. ‘Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?’

‘Not quite,’ Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry…

With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, ‘Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.’

She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and held it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her. Galileo was interested to hear what she might say; and he already knew that she was going to get what she wanted no matter what. He had seen wilful women before.

She was at least a hand taller than he, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again; after that he held onto her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy), calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.

‘You are well named,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.’

When they reached the far side of the little temple she paused. He let go of her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on, a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.

Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. ‘This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that rupture crack in the side of the shield, down there steaming.’ She pointed. ‘Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.’

Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. ‘It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.’

‘It is hot. In many places if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside Io, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.’

‘Tides?’ Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. ‘But surely there are no oceans here.’

‘By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.’ She grimaced expressively. ‘We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.’