In the Campo dei Fiori, one of the black Dominicans intoned in his ear. The pope had commanded that his punishment be inflicted with as great a clemency as possible, so there was to be no effusion of blood. How this squared with the blood pouring out of his mouth was a question he was never going to get to ask, for the priest was now explaining that this meant he was to be burned at the stake without first being eviscerated.

Many hands lifted him off the cart. The low underside of the clouds was rippled like a windblown field of wheat. He was dragged by the heels over to the pyre, and there stripped naked, the penitent’s white cloth thrown to the ground, although the iron muzzle was left on his head. His arms were pulled around the thick post of the stake and tied tightly at wrist and elbow. Like everyone, he had burned himself once or twice at stove or candle; it was hard to face the idea of his whole body immersed in that pain. Surely it would not last long.

The crowd was roaring. He tried to choke on his blood, tried to hold his breath and faint. Around him the Dogs of God chanted their imprecations. He did not see who lit the stack of kindling under him.

He smelled the smoke first, then felt fire on his toes. His feet tried to slide up the stake of their own accord, but his ankles were chained to a hole in the post. He had not noticed the chains before. In a few seconds the fire shot up and over his legs, became an agonizing burn all over them. His body tried to scream, and he choked on his own blood, began to drown, but did not faint. He smelled the roasting skin and meat of his own legs, a kitchen smell. Then there was nothing but the pain filling his skull and blinding him, red pain like a scream.

HE CRIED OUT. His mouth was free, his tongue whole. He lay on a smooth stone floor. The pain was now only a ghost of the agony it had been. An afterimage of it seemed to fill everything with a faint red haze.

He was back on the floor of the mountaintop temple, on Jupiter’s moon Io. He lay on the polished rock with his head clutched in his hands, the meaty stench of his burning still in his lungs, on his whole tongue—only not. It was the ghost of the stench only, a memory; it was in his mind only. But surely it was a memory he would never escape, no matter how hard he tried. Every time he ate roast meat—

His palate was whole, and he swallowed nothing but his own snot and saliva, pouring down his throat like blood. He felt sick to his stomach. He had been weeping hard, and his body was covered with a cold sweat. He sat up, held his jaw in his hands. The taste of blood was gone, except in his mind.

The Ionian woman, Hera, stood over him, as tall and massive as Zeus’s wife should be. She put out a hand, helped him to his feet; it must have been like pulling up a puppet that had had its strings cut. He almost tripped over the pewter box. She balanced him carefully, let him stand.

He wiped the tears from his face, glanced up at her full of shame and fear. She shrugged, uncomfortable and sympathetic. It was nothing to be ashamed of, the shrug seemed to say, not to like being burned at the stake. Also: not her fault. Only acquainting him with reality.

“But this is bad!” he said.

“Yes.”

“It cannot happen!”

“But it already has, as you will come to see.”

“But—you said there were different times, braided together?”

“Well, that’s right. You are quick. But in almost all the potentialities, this is what happens.”

He swallowed hard. “When?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I suppose not. Although, maybe …” He didn’t know what he meant well enough to finish the sentence.

After a silence she said, “You see now why you are revered.”

“I don’t see why,” Galileo objected. “Your Ganymede said it was because of my success! That it was because I invented the method of science, as a mathematical experimentalist.”

“Yes. And so he thinks we need you to succeed, you see. Or none of this will come to pass.”

“But surely that was not success!” A shudder rippled his muscles, as in frightened horses or dogs. “That was no triumph, if I am not mistaken!”

She said carefully, “In some people’s eyes, your success includes your immolation. Ganymede and his followers are among them. They have a fixation on you and your work, on what it meant to the rest of history. From that point on, they say, science began to dominate, and religion to recede. The secularization of the world began. Only that saves humanity from many centuries of darkness, in which science is perverted to the will of insane religions. So they think of you as the great martyr for science.”

“But why should science have to have a martyr?”

“That has been my point precisely.”

A wave of affection for this woman surged through Galileo. He took up her hand, feeling stabbed by hope. “Can you help me, then? Help me to escape that fate?”

She looked down at the sulphurous world that lay shattered below them, thinking it over. She was pondering his fate, becoming like Atropos again. He watched her avidly; she was suddenly beautiful to him, and he remembered a line from Castiglione: Beauty springs from God and is like a circle, the center of which is goodness.

“I think I can,” she said at last. He could not help kissing her hand. She looked at him speculatively. “It is probably true that you have to achieve what you will achieve, for the main channel of history to be as it has been. And it’s probably also true that that achievement is certain to get you in trouble with your theocracy.”

“I don’t see why!” This was already such a grievance with Galileo that he almost shouted this. He wrenched it into a plea. “There is no contradiction between science and Scripture! And even if there were—” for their very presence under the giant banded ball of Jupiter seemed to suggest something beyond the Bible’s purview, beyond what Scripture would countenance—”even if there were, as God made both nature and Scripture, the problem would then be with the details of the Scripture, or with our poor understanding of it. Because the two cannot disagree, as God made both, and He can’t be logically inconsistent. And the Earth goes around the sun, with all the rest of the planets. So as that is true, there is nothing blasphemous in it.”

“No. Of course not. But that was never the issue.”

She stopped, thought, sighed. “One question was, who gets to speak? Who has the authority to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality? This was what your Church objected to—that you asserted that you had the right to make statements about fundamental things. This was what you were saying, under all your details, which as often as not were wrong, or at least unsupported—that you had a right to your own opinion about reality, and that you had the right to say it in public, and argue for it against the views of theocrats.”

“So I was a kind of Protestant, you’re saying,” Galileo concluded glumly. “I might as well have gone north and become a Lutheran.”

“Maybe so.”

“And so … Well, in that case, I am doomed.”

“You are headed for trouble, that is certain, if you insist on asserting yourself in that way. Which is what you did, and which is precisely what made you a crucial figure in the human story. So that it is indispensable for you to make that assertion, and thus to be the first modern scientist.”

“And so burned at the stake, like Bruno!”

“Yes. But … the burning at the stake part, I would argue, is not the important part of your story. What is important is not the punishment, but the assertion.”

“You are good to think so, lady!” How he admired this woman’s intelligence! He could have kissed her feet at that moment, as he already had her hand; in fact he barely restrained himself as the urge came to throw himself to the ground before her. “And so, if … If …”