“Someone has to carry the load,” Cartophilus muttered in Tuscan. “Not everyone can be a virtuoso like you, Signor, and fly off when the bad times come. Skip away like a fucking dilettante.”
The stranger ignored this. On the roof’s little altana, with the telescope on its tripod, he put a fingertip to the eyepiece and swung it into Jovian alignment; it came to rest with a refinement that seemed all its own. Again Galileo felt a jolt of the sensation that this had happened before—what the French would later name déjà vu.
And indeed the telescope was somehow already aligned. The stranger gestured at it. Galileo moved his stool next to the eyepiece of the glass and sat. He looked through it.
Jupiter was a big banded ball near the center of the glass, strikingly handsome, colorful within its narrow range. There was a red spot in the middle of the southern hemisphere, curling in the oval shape of a standing eddy in a river. A Jovian Charybdis—and was he going there to meet his own Scylla? For a long time he looked at the great planet, so full and round and banded. It cast its influence over him in just the way an astrologer would have expected it to.
But nothing else happened. He sat back, looked at the stranger.
Who was frowning heavily. “Let me check it.” He looked at the side of the telescope, straightened up, blinked several times. He looked over at Cartophilus, who shrugged.
“Not good,” Cartophilus said.
“Maybe it’s Hera,” the stranger said darkly.
Cartophilus shrugged again. Clearly this was the stranger’s problem.
They stood there in silence. It was a chill evening. Long minutes passed. Galileo bent down and looked at Jupiter again. It was still in the middle of the lens. He swallowed hard. This was stranger than dreaming. “This is not just a telescopio,” he said, almost remembering now. Blue people, angels … “It’s something like a, a tele-avanzare. A teletrasporta.”
The stranger and Cartophilus looked at each other. Cartophilus said, “The amygdala can never be fully suppressed. And why shouldn’t he know?”
The stranger reexamined the boxy side of the device. Cartophilus sat down on the floor beside it, stoical.
“Ah. Try it again,” the stranger said, a new tone in his voice. “Take another look.”
Galileo looked. Moon I was just separating from Jupiter on its west side; III and IV were out to the east. An hour must have passed since the two visitors had arrived.
Moon I cleared Jupiter, gleamed bright and steady in the black. Sometimes it seemed the brightest of the four. They fluctuated in that regard. Moon I seemed to have a yellow tinge. It shimmered in the glass, and in the same moment Galileo saw that it was getting bigger and more distinct, and was mottled yellow, orange, and black—or so it seemed—because in that very same moment he saw that he was floating down onto it, dropping like a landing goose, at such the same angle as a goose that he extended his arms and lifted his feet forward to slow himself down.
The spheroid curve of Moon I soon revealed itself to be an awful landscape, very different to his vague memories of Moon II, which were of an icy purity; I was a waste of mounded yellow slag, all shot with craters and volcanoes. A world covered by Etnas. As he descended on it, the yellow differentiated into a hell’s carnival of burnt sulphur tones—of umbers and siennas and burnt siennas, of topaz and tan and bronze and sunflower and brick and tar, also the blacks of charcoal and jet, also terra-cotta and bloodred, and a sunset array of oranges, citron yellows, gilt, pewter—all piled on all, one color pouring over the others and being covered itself in a great unholy slag heap. Dante would have approved it as the very image of his burning circles of Hell.
The overlayering of so many colors made it impossible to gauge the terrain. What he had thought was a giant crater popped up and reversed itself, revealed as the top of a viscous pile bigger than Etna, bigger than Sicily itself.
He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. There on the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.
He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.
On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.
“What’s this?” the stranger exclaimed angrily.
“You know what this is, Ganymede,” said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, “Welcome to Io; you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your traveling companion.”
She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.
“You stole our entangler,” Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. “What are you trying to do, start a war?”
Hera glared at him. “As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, and the factions are at each others’ throats.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” said Ganymede coldly.
As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the 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, suspiciously defensive to Galileo, was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plow blade. “This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!”
“You’re the one who kidnaps 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 was 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!”
The people standing behind Hera now moved forward en masse. They were dressed in clothes similar to hers, were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favor.
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!”