I have not communicated this to anyone else, but I felt obliged to inform Your Eminence immediately, for I hope His Holiness and Your Eminence will be satisfied that in this manner the case has been brought to a point where it may be settled without difficulty. The Tribunal will maintain its reputation, the culprit can be treated with kindness, and, whatever the final outcome, he will know the favor done to him, with all the consequent gratitude one wants in this. I am thinking of examining him today to obtain the said confession. After obtaining it, I hope the only thing left for me will be to question him about his intention and allow him to present a defense. With this done, he could be granted imprisonment in his own house, as hinted to me by Your Eminence, to whom I now offer my most humble reverence,

Your Eminence’s most humble and most obedient servant

Fra. Vinc. Maculano Di Firenzuola

Confession of sin; examination concerning intentions; the guilty party’s defense of his actions; the pronouncement of punishment. These were the formalized steps taken in heresy trials. They all had to be taken.

That night in the empty dormitory, Galileo groaned, shouted, whimpered, cursed. When Cartophilus went to his little room and asked if there was anything he could do, Galileo threw a cup at him.

Later in the night, however, the moans grew to shrieks, and Cartophilus hustled to the old man’s room, alarmed. The maestro did not answer either calls or knocks on his door, but instead went suddenly silent.

Cartophilus forced the door open, and entered into the dark room holding a candle before him.

Galileo pounced on him, held him fast. The candle fell and went out. In the dark the old astronomer growled, “Send me to Hera.”

Cartophilus did it. He made the entanglement, then got the old man slumped onto his bed, half on the floor, almost as if praying. A foam of spittle drooled from Galileo’s open mouth, and his open eyes stared fixed at nothingness. Another syncope to be endured; Cartophilus shook his head, muttered under his breath.

He pulled a blanket over the inert body. He closed the door, went back and sat on the bed by Galileo’s side, checking the old man’s pulse, which was slow and steady. He gazed into the little screen on the side of the box. There was no way to know how long he would be gone.

“I KNOW WHAT HIS PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE,” Galileo said to Hera again.

Ganymede appeared to have been struck dumb by the encounter with Jupiter. He stared out of his face mask and would not speak—would not or could not. Possibly the Jovian mind had inflicted some damage on him. The look in his eye suggested to Galileo that he was angry or shocked, or perhaps furiously insane. Something bad. And he would not give them the satisfaction of his thoughts—although it was not clear what satisfaction they could have. Galileo himself was baffled, and Hera appeared unhappy with the experience she had forced Ganymede to submit to.

But now Galileo thought he knew.

That there was a mind in Jupiter greater than the mind in Europa, and connected to vast minds elsewhere, was what Ganymede had been claiming all along, though somewhat discreetly, as he had not wanted the fact widely known. He had learned of it somehow—possibly in his early incursions into the oceans of Ganymede, possibly during his existence in some future time; there was no way to tell—although Galileo wanted Hera to look into his past using her memory celatone, if she could. But however he learned it, he had been aware of the Jovian mind, and so his mad look could now be saying I told you so. Or perhaps he was simply overwhelmed. Galileo did not fully understand himself what he had seen in Jupiter. The cosmos, alive with thought, yes. But he could not recapture the huge feelings he had felt on experiencing this reality. Something big had happened in him, but it was all confused now, obscured by the merging with Hera afterward, by his return to Italy. It was not something he was going to be able to understand.

Ganymede stared at them.

Galileo said, “You wounded Europa, the child of Jupiter, deliberately. You tried to kill it. To think that the first otherwordly creature encountered by humanity should be attacked and injured by us is beyond deplorable.” Suddenly he thought of all the bad faith, the back-stabbing, the hatred of the ignorant for all that was new, and he stuck his face nearly onto the prisoner’s faceplate and bellowed, “It’s a crime forever!”

Ganymede’s eyes flinched. Possibly it was just a reflex, for no sign of remorse appeared in his stony expression. To emphasize his point Galileo struck the side of the man’s helmet, sending him flying. From the floor Ganymede looked up at an angle to see Galileo. Galileo took a step toward him, suddenly furious. “You lie and you cheat and you stab in the back! All you cowards are alike. You try to kill anything you find different, because it frightens you!”

Suddenly Ganymede spoke. “I raised you up from nothing,” he said, his voice like bronze. “You were a second-rate math teacher in a second-rate life. I made you Galileo.”

“I made me Galileo,” Galileo said. “You only fucked me up. You’re trying to get me killed. You should have left me alone.”

“I wish I had.”

“Jupiter has spoken to us. …” Hera said.

Galileo nodded, returned to the point. “The Jovian mind looked into us, and so knows now who the criminal is. It knows we are not as depraved and murderous a species as it might have suspected. It might even know that some of us tried to prevent your rash act.”

Ganymede glowered from the floor. Hera saw this expression, so full of hate, and said to him, “You attacked the alien because of what we might have learned from it. You judged humanity to be cowardly, and so you acted like a coward.”

The prisoner only grimaced.

Hera said, “We’ll take you back to Europa, and turn you over to the people there. They can decide how to deal with you. Although I don’t know what they can do that would be appropriate.”

“Restitution,” Galileo said.

They all looked at him.

“He wanted restitution, and now he will get it.” He looked to Aurora. “You told me what you can do across the temporal manifolds, and what you can’t do. You described the energy costs. If you had enough energy at your disposal, and used it, could you not effect changes nearer than the resonance entanglement with my time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Some of you have gone back and interfered with me, so that what happens to me is different than what would have happened if you hadn’t visited me. So why couldn’t you change this awful deed your Ganymede has committed? Why couldn’t you send him back to a time before he did it, and then prevent him from doing it?”

Aurora said, “Entanglement is easiest at the triple interferences in the wave patterns in the temporal manifold. Inside the first positive interference, it takes much more energy to establish an entanglement. It would take a truly stupendous amount of energy to move an entangler to a time so close to ours.”

Galileo pondered the math she had taught him, swimming hazily in his memory. Overlapping concentric waves on a pond … “But it’s not impossible,” he concluded. “Send him back even to before he entered Ganymede’s ocean, before his exile, and stop him there. That you could do, yes? It would only be a matter of the amount of energy brought to bear?”

She considered it, perhaps venturing into her machine augmentations to do so. “Yes, but the energy might be impossible to marshal.”

“Use the gas of an outer gas giant, as you did when you sent back the first teletrasportas.”

“What if those gas giants are all alive, like Jupiter?”