“Well,” the old woman said, “it’s true that a different perspective on the problem might bring new insights. You are well remembered here on the Galilean moons, as you might well imagine. I believe Ganymede entangled you into this time for other reasons of his own, but some here think you might bring a certain freshness to our local problem too. Others feel your context is just a handicap, and that you can be of no help. In any case, while it’s possible the Europan sentience exists in a mathematical moment roughly corresponding to your own, I think it is more likely that it senses principally in different manifolds than we do. That may form the basis of the problem. Mathematicians with a philosophical bent are having a heated discussion of the ontological and epistemological questions brought up by the situation, as you can imagine.”
“It may think it is dealing with a simpler mentality than it,” Galileo suggested ironically. “Like you think you are doing with me.”
“It is capable of generating very complicated geometrical patterns,” she said, “conveyed to us by sound arranged in a binary code. But there are gaps that suggest it lives in some of the other manifolds.”
Galileo didn’t know what this meant. “The creature must be blind, no? It was really dark in there.”
“It may sense parts of the spectrum not visible to us that would serve as equivalents to our sight. We continue to work out codes of communication in which it sings to us information that we can display as visual patterns for our own comprehension. So in that sense you could say that it sees, I think. Indeed, when we sent to it a schematic of the gravitational patterns created by all the bodies in the Jovian system, it sent us corrections that make us think it knows very subtle aspects of gravitation, aspects like gravitons and gravitinos, which are apparent only when seen in the context of the full manifold of manifolds theory. For us, working with that model is only a recent development. So this is rather thought provoking.”
Then there was an eruption of shouting at the vertical antechamber. It proved to be Hera and a retinue of followers, bulling their way through Ganymede’s crowd. Hera was in the lead, angry and unstoppable.
“Oh dear,” Aurora said. “She appears unhappy.”
Galileo snorted. “Is she ever otherwise?”
Aurora laughed. Hera approached and loomed over them, her white arms thick, bare, muscular, and tensed, as if she were only just restraining herself from thrashing them both, and Aurora’s assistants as well.
“I hope you have not been disturbed by this wandering ghost?” she inquired of Aurora.
“Not at all,” Aurora replied, looking amused. “It was our pleasure to converse with such a famous person.”
“Do you know that such conversations can be dangerous? That you may alter the manifold analeptically enough to change us all, perhaps right out of existence?”
“I don’t think anything that happens to Galileo here could have that kind of impact,” Aurora said.
“You have no way of judging.”
“Measured inertias of temporal isotopies give me a grasp of the chances involved,” Aurora said, in a tone that suggested Hera could form no such grasp.
“Ganymede is trying to use Galileo to change things,” Hera replied. “So he must think it works.”
“Perhaps so. But I don’t think what happens to Galileo here is properly located to make any such change. Besides, Galileo has always had a remarkably strong sense of proleptic intuition. Indeed, when judged by that rubric, of anticipating future developments, I’ve read commentaries that rate him as the third smartest physicist of all time.”
“Third,” Galileo scoffed. “Who are these supposed other two?”
“The second was a man named Einstein, the first a woman named Bao.”
“A woman?” Galileo said.
Hera shot him a look so full of contempt and pity, disgust and embarrassment that Galileo cringed, unfortunately shifting his balance on the slick floor such that his feet shot out sideways and he crashed down. By chance his bounce off the floor returned him right to his feet, where he could only blush and smooth down his jacket sleeves as if nothing had happened.
“Come with me,” she said to him peremptorily.
He followed her, greatly apprehensive, but aware that if he didn’t cooperate she would drag him away. “What is it?” he complained.
She glared at him. “Leave us,” she ordered her retainers, “and keep anyone else from following.”
She took him by the arm and pulled him with her as one would drag along a reluctant five-year-old. Under her fingers a shock tingled up his arm and all along that side of his body, from his ear to his foot.
Ganymede then emerged from a knot of his retainers on the other side of the terrace, and hurried over to them. Hera cursed under her breath and said to Galileo, “Stay put.”
She went to Ganymede and confronted him, and they argued in undertones that Galileo could not hear. When Hera returned to his side, she wore a look of grim satisfaction. “Come,” she said again, and pulled him across the terrace. “He’s not supposed to be on Europa at all anymore, so he can’t stop us.”
From the railing on this side of the terrace they looked down on a veritable maze of white rooftops cut by canals.
“Do you not remember what I showed you last time you were here?” she demanded of him.
“Yes, I remember!”
“Why did you come here then?”
“I wanted some answers, “Galileo said mulishly. “I told Ganymede to take me to someone who could give me answers, answers that you had not given me.”
She was not moved by this. “You can tell him to give you anything you want, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it. Understand me: he wants you to end in just the way I showed you ending. In the fire.”
“Yes yes, but look. I took the preparation you gave me last time, but they made me breathe the mist you warned me against. I remembered part of what you showed me—certainly the, the essentials. So I went back and did everything I could to make sure that that event could never come to pass. But it didn’t work. In fact it only made things worse! Now I have been forbidden even to mention the Copernican theory. And yet there it rests, at the base of everything else. It’s God’s truth, and a rather elementary truth at that—and we have finally perceived it, yet I can’t say a word about it! If I say anything at all, that could be it. And I have enemies watching my every breath. I might as well cut my tongue out of my head!”
She shook her head. “You can find ways to say what you want to say. Meanwhile, you have to consider what will happen if your understanding is brought up to our time, and then you return to your own time. If you try to counteract that, and take the strong amnestics and forget everything, you will forget the fate you are trying to avoid. You may walk into your fiery alternative unaware. If, on the other hand, you take anamnestics like those I gave you before, and preserve your memory of this visit, you will know too much. Your work will be skewed, and you may change things in ways that would be disastrous to your future, and ours too. You will put yourself on the horns of a dilemma, or in the clutches of a double bind.”
“Can’t you give me a preparation that would keep some memories and suppress others?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“It seemed that it did. In my last few years, I remembered this, but it was only a very partial memory, like a dream. I remembered the fire, and you warning me, but it was all confused.”
“Possibly so, but there is no way of controlling it so finely as to be sure. Memory is very diffuse in the brain, it relies on multiple systems in concert. It’s quite a feat to manipulate it as much as we do. You can’t take the chance of knocking out too much.”
Galileo threw up his hands. “But I want to know things; I’m made to know things! And I don’t see how knowing more can possibly harm me! If you are trying to help, as you say you are, then help! But don’t help me by telling me to stay more ignorant, because I won’t accept that. I’m sick of being told not to know things!”