As Galileo regarded what he could only think was the mind of God, he lost all sense of his three-dimensional space and felt himself spinning and spiraling in the manifold of manifolds, spanning all times. Every fire from the tiniest chip of firefly light to the blazing pebbles of the galaxies bloomed a trail and arced forward, so that he saw lines rather than points, and felt rather than saw a densely woven latticework into which he too was woven, like a cosmic chrysanthemum of white lines filling a blackness felt rather than seen, heard in a song beyond hearing. Still watching the lines, he felt and heard the ways in which the ten dimensions warped, stretched, bowed, and shrunk, the whole breathing in and out and also almost holding still, all at once. His sight was whole, his touch-immersion whole, his hearing whole, while also coextensive with the ten dimensions. The manifold of manifolds moved, breathed, sideways or at an angle to time, singing a fugue with parts out of different dimensions. All the temporal isotopes were flickering in and out of their braids of potentiality, blooming and collapsing, systole and diastole. At the merging with this he rose into an existential sublime, a true ecstasy or ex stasis blooming in his consciousness, and he felt the familiar ringing, always before so faint, now all in all, the culmination of the fugue. All things remain in God, he said, but no one heard. He understood then the solitary nature of transcendence, since wholeness was one. He was entirely alone and by himself, he realized: the manifold of manifolds was another one of the secret lives. It was some kind of moving eternity, encompassing an infinity of universes. Everything was always changing, always: so it was change itself that was eternal. Eternity too had a history, eternity too evolved, strove to change and even to improve, in some sense beyond human comprehension—in growth, complexification, metamorphosis. In any case, eternal change. A ten-dimensional organism, pulsing with granular light like the finest snow, everywhere entangled, all points both discrete like the points in Euclid’s definition and yet also part of a whole plenum, flowing in curves, in glissandi still audible in him, a majestic dense chorus of whales and wolves and heartbroken souls, louder and louder, a kind of red loon’s cry—

GALILEO FOUND HIMSELF sitting on the floor. Hera was still standing, although she was holding on to her chair like a sailor holding a plank after the ship has gone down. The terror in her eyes was new to Galileo; he was shocked to see it. He felt that he could not speak, that a spike had stabbed up through his tongue—or worse, speared down through his skull and pricked just that part of the mind that initiated speech. There was a roaring in his ears. He looked at her console screen, trying to think, trying to remember. What had happened? He held on to her thick leg like a child clutching its mother.

Spun gold went white. Shapes coalesced in the unspeakable glare: eyes, tumbling bodies, whole worlds or something more. Spinning whorls of stars, fireworks in his head, pain in every nerve at once—or had it been joy? Ex stasis. Rushing up, out, in. Into a center that was a pinprick of the most fulgurous black, piercing his eye, mind, and soul, sucking him into it. Then a syncope; all was still, cold, dead. Was that how it had ended? What came before was a blur, a dizzy feeling. There had been an awesome roar of the sublime; within it, the tiny ringing of a bell. He had been the bell. Then something had pricked, like a pin through a castle wall, and no more Galileo. A syncope came like sleep, like blessed sleep.

Then Galileo was gone again, but a consciousness remained, cosmic and manifold. The sun was a star, the stars all suns. Each held a mind that was as vast and bright as the sun in the noonday sky. You could not look at it, but saw only its light on paper. A kind of angel—or the being, ever so much greater than an angel, that the idea of an angel had been invented to suggest. The sky was filled with trillions of such minds, and clusters of them swirled in whirlpools of their own weight, were drawn down into themselves continuously. At their centers they compressed to nothing, and their substance was sucked away, into other universes in other dimensions. They were all entangled throughout the manifolds. Present, past, future, eternity, all became one and then transmuted elsewhen. Which meant …

A wolf’s mournful howl, a whale’s eerie glissando. Time splintered and Galileo was back again in the midst of it. An eddy in time; Jupiter reiterating a point, in a loop of grief, an ecstasy, another entangled moment. Which meant …

He stopped trying to understand. This took an immense effort, it was utterly contrary to him, the hardest thing he had ever done. The work of Oelilag: give up trying. Folding inside out. Just exist, he commanded himself, just see. But it was too big to see, too bright, it blinded him to try. A whirlpool of infinite minds, an infinity of whirlpools. One could not compare infinities, he felt that clearly. There were an infinite number of starry whirlpools, and in each an infinite number of minds. Kepler had suggested this was the case, and Bruno had claimed it outright. Bruno had died for saying it. Galileo did not want to die. The world was too astonishing to die for saying something, no matter what it was.

Although it was also true that there was a sort of universal syncope, in which death did not obtain. It was not heaven, but ecstasy, ex stasis, out of one’s tiny individual body into the universal body, the manifold of manifolds. All the possibilities came true. All things remained in God—he sang this phrase, held to it in his mind. It became all he had to hold on to, his floating plank in the tossing sea of stars. All things remain in God.

And yet decisions are made, the wave functions collapse. Consciousness and the manifold are entangled. There was a voice, like a pin through a castle wall. Release me, oh Jove.

Then another return to the consciousness of being Galileo. He struggled in his head, completely exhausted, thinking, Hello! I’m here! Let me go! Where are you? Who are you?

It was his faithful dog, nuzzling his face.

No, it was Hera. She held his face in her big hands.

“What happened?” Galileo croaked. Something filled him—an ocean of clouds inside his chest, stuffing him with a feeling he did not recognize. A feeling that made him want to weep, for what he did not know, and yet he was too confused even for tears. But it had to do with her presence. If he had gone through this without her, if she hadn’t been there at his side, it would have been insupportable. It was too much to bear alone.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking him in the eye. There was a tenderness in her look, an amorevolezza, as Maria Celeste was always putting it, that he had not known existed in her. Perhaps she had been going through something similar in the period of ex stasis. No doubt she had. We all go through the same things! Her face was streaked with tears. She leaned in toward him until their faces were aligned nose to nose. The tips of their noses touched as if kissing, their eyes were as mirrors to the complementary other, her irises a deep living field of flecks and streaks, like rounds of polished jasper or the insides of two flowers, the black holes of her pupils lightly pulsing in and out, reminding him of something just seen in his recent shattering. Her eyes floated in toward his until they were as big as the surface of Jupiter, filled with warmth, their affection coursing into him.

Then her eyes simply moved into his eyes. They merged as if touching in a mirror, two as one. Jove will be jealous, Galileo tried to say, but her eyes stopped him, and he yielded to her, falling up as in the nights of his youth, into the wild girls of Venice. Her fractured stone irises bloomed like emblems of his feelings. This was the entangled cosmos they always inhabited, but now felt. Amorevolezza, eros, agape—one made love the way one pronounced a word, the way one made a sentence. He had never made love with someone he knew to be his equal, someone as strong and as full and as smart as he, and that thought pierced him, swept him away on such a wave of grief and love that he might have felt fear, if it were not for her eyes, telling him all was perfectly well. Their eyes merged entirely and he saw what she saw, and felt their ex tasis as a tall thick chord, a harmonic. The mother goddess inside him.