She rolled her eyes as she set him down and dragged him with her, forcing him to step fast. “Those drugs Aurora gives you,” she said emphatically, “and the lessons, they do more than teach you our math. They change you. By the time you’re done, you won’t remember what I showed you before! Do you remember that? Do you remember how they burned you?”
“Of course I do! I’m not going to forget that. How could learning more mathematics cause anyone to forget that?”
“By changing you so that even if you do recall it, you lose your understanding of why it happened.”
“I never knew why it happened!” Galileo shouted, suddenly furious. He took a big swing at her, which she easily avoided. “I’m still trying to figure that out!” He swung again and caught her on the arm, but it was like hitting a tree. “Everything I’ve done since you showed it to me only seems to bring it closer! I’ve been destroyed. And it can get worse. That’s precisely one of the reasons I want to learn more!” And he yanked his arm free of her grasp.
She took it again, with a grip like an eagle’s. “You don’t understand. Your fate doesn’t have to do with the math and the physical theories. It has to do with your situation at home, and with you yourself—your nature or your characteristic responses. The kind of conclusions you draw, and how you react in a crisis. You are your own problem.“
She pulled him into the glass closet and let him go. Glowering, she poked buttons on the panel next to the door. “I guess I have to teach you that part, just as Aurora taught you physics.”
“But we were working here. They’re making an attempt to contact the thing inside Europa, and I was helping them.”
“That’s none of your business. And there are people who think they understand the thing already. Including Ganymede, in fact. He and his followers are the ones causing the problems.”
“How so?”
“They still consider the Europan thing a danger to us, a mortal danger.”
“But why? How could that be?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters!”
“Not to you it doesn’t. What matters for you is doing what you did in your time without getting burned for it. Do you want to be burned?”
“No! I just don’t see how me knowing more can change that.”
She shook her head, red-cheeked and still breathing hard, looking down at him with a grim expression. As they left the moving closet, now on the ground, she said, “You understand nothing. Especially your self. All that celebrated ceaseless activity of yours, performed in ignorance.”
“I know as much as any man! Indeed more than most. You know less than I about how the world works, even with fourteen centuries’ advantage. You have nothing to teach me.”
“There is no hatred like that of ignorance for knowledge,” she quoted him sardonically. “Especially self-knowledge. Do you want to be burned or not?”
“Not.”
“Come along, then.” She made a brief gesture at a new group of her retainers, waiting beside a long low boat, like a gondola. From behind them, the guard with the teletrasporta ran up and put it beside Hera.
“I need to join the grand council on Callisto,” Hera told Galileo as she gestured at the gondola. “The transit will take several hours. You will come along, and we can talk. There are some things you need to see in your life.”
“Spare me,” he said.
She wheeled and glared at him, face inches from his. “I will not spare you! I’ll put you through your life as many times as it takes.”
“As it takes for what?”
“For you to get it right.”
This was sounding bad.
For what has one been except what one has felt, and how shall there be any recognition unless one feels it anew?
—GEORGES POULET
HER RETAINERS HELPED HIM into the gondola. He sat next to the teletrasporta, Hera got in at the back, and after an acceleration so rapid the bow lifted out of the water, they threaded a course through slower boats and docked with a thump at a dead end in a side canal. Here another vertically sliding closet lifted them and the box right up to the ice ceiling and through it (in a brief burst of pure aquamarine) to the surface of Europa, under the huge sphere of Jupiter’s garish banded yellows. Hera then picked up the entangler and led Galileo to a craft shaped like a seedpod, no bigger than their gondola had been, but enclosed. She instructed him to strap himself into a large cushioned chair, snapping some of his restraints herself, then likewise strapping herself in. “One moment,” she said brusquely, and then he was pressed down into his chair, and they were slightly vibrating. Looking through a little window in their room he saw they were rising into space.
“Where are we going?”
“To Callisto, as I said. I have to attend the council meeting concerning this Europan creature, so I don’t really have time for you now, but when I heard what you were doing here it seemed all too possible you would wreck your life, and much that followed it as well. So right now it’s war on multiple fronts.”
She tapped at her console for a while, and suddenly their ship disappeared, so that it looked as if they sat in chairs on a small floor that was free-floating in space. They flew at great speed, judging by the shifting of Jupiter and the stars, although there was no other sensation of movement. Galileo, surprised by the view, observed the great gas giant with a new set of mathematical tools in his mind that allowed him to see the rich phyllotaxic folding of the convolutions at the band borders as illustrations of fluid dynamics in five dimensions at least, making the vast ball’s surface more textured than ever.
Hera too stared at it; the view seemed to calm her. Her breathing slowed, her cheeks and upper arms grew less red. Galileo, watching her as well as the Jovian system and the stars, thought about what he had learned during the math lesson.
He saw her fall asleep. She napped sitting up for quite a while. It was the first time Galileo had seen any of the Jovians asleep, and he watched her slack face with the same close attention he had given to the math tutorial. It was a human face, and as such, mesmerizing. For a while he too may have slept, because the next thing he knew she was tapping away at her console, and all the bands of the great planet had changed aspect. Its lit part was a crescent now, the terminator a clean curving line, the gibbous dark part very dark indeed. They were closer to it than Galileo could remember ever having been, so that it took up the space of perhaps a hundred Earthly moons, filling a big portion of the sky. The lit crescent, an astonishing arc of banded unctuous oranges, seemed to cut into the black sky from some more vivid universe.
“Are we nearing Callisto?” he asked, looking around in the black starry night. No moons were obvious to him.
“No,” she said. “It’s still out there a long way. A few hours.”
The crescent was becoming visibly more slender. They had to be moving at great speed.
“How is your ship invisible?”
“It’s not. The walls can be made into screens, and the image of what you would see if you were looking out through the ship is projected on them.”
Very great speed. The crescent became like an immense bow, about twice the size that Orion would need, narrow and richly colorful, laminated in the wrong direction, pulled back hard as if to let off a shot. It shrank toward darkness symmetrically from top and bottom. With a final blink it was gone. The sun was now completely eclipsed, and they were looking at the dark side of Jupiter. With none of the four Galileans in sight, it had to be that the dark side of the great planet was lit only by starlight, and perhaps Saturn if it were up there among the stars they could see. In any case it was a dim light—but not nothing, not blackness. He could still make out the latitudinal bands, even the taffeta folding of their borders. Now that the light was so subtle, he could see that the surface of the planet was not a solid liquid, like oil paint, but rather cloud tops of varying opacity or transparency, shaded a thousand different combinations of dim sulphur and orange, cream and brick. In places the surface was fluted like the underside of a cloud on certain windy days; elsewhere geysers spurted out into the space above the cloud tops, forming lines of puffs that paralleled the bands and were carried off east or west. He thought he could even see the movement of the clouds, the powerful winds of Jupiter.