“Which is your world.”

“Yes. But it is the world of all exiles.”

“So you did not cure him.”

“No. In fact I may have made him worse. He hates me now.”

Again Galileo was surprised. “I will never hate you,” he said without intending to.

“Are you sure?” She glanced at him. “You sound like you’re on your way sometimes.”

“Not at all. To be helped is to offer a kind of love.”

She didn’t agree. “That feeling is often just the displacement we call transference. Which then leads to other reactions. In the end it’s lucky if you’re even civil afterward. That’s not what mnemonic therapy is about.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Maybe it’s just that I’m not a very good mnemosyne.”

“I can’t believe that either. Maybe your clients aren’t very good.” This made her laugh, briefly, but he persisted. “Surely living out here must make you all a little bit mad? Never to sit in a garden, never to feel the sun on your neck? We were never born for this,” waving at the stars surrounding them. “Or at least, it is only night here. Never to experience the day—you must all be at least a little bit insane.”

She pondered this. They flew through the stars and black space, Ganymede receding behind them, crescent Jupiter still bulking to one side, but shrinking—as small as Galileo had ever seen it, perhaps only ten times the size of his moon.

“Maybe so,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve often thought that cultures can go insane in ways similar to an individual. That’s obvious in the record. Presumably it’s only an analogy, but the symptoms map pretty well. Paranoia, catatonia, suicidal or homicidal manias, or both at once—denial, post-trauma, anachronism—you see them all. History has been a bedlam, to tell the truth. Maybe we’re now permanently post-traumatic, given all that has happened. Here in the Jovian moons, it has inspired us to hold hard to peaceful ways for a long time. But that may be ending.”

They flew on in silence. Galileo recalled the memory of his first night with Marina. He felt various pricks of remorse, even a faint flush of sexual afterglow. They had had fun, once upon a time.

He was also shocked at the powers Hera had at her command, and how she was willing to use them. That she with her celatone could read his mind; that he himself could be made to read it, in a way so vivid that it was like reliving time itself, like a return to the past … Well, these people could voyage among the planets, and back and forth in time; of course they would also have tried to dive into themselves, penetrating the vast ocean that lay under every skull. Aurora’s tutorials had been another manifestation of that power, a different use of it.

It was a power that made Galileo more frightened of the Jovians than ever. Which didn’t really make sense, he knew. Remembering something vividly should not be more alarming than being transported across centuries. But one’s mind was a private place. And possibly this was simply a cumulative feeling. They could do so much. And yet, with all that power, what were they in the end? Just people. Unless of course there were aspects to them he was not even seeing. What did Aurora’s machine supplements really do to her mind, for instance? And was it possible she took infusions of the velocinestic all the time? What would happen if you did? Were there more things like that he hadn’t even been told about?

Before him the round surface of Moon IV continued to grow. It was illuminated almost in full. Callisto, they had named it. Another lover of Zeus, later turned into a bear. Its surface was flat but shattered, making it look somewhat like Europa. Scattered dark and light regions reminded Galileo of Ganymede, or Earth’s moon.

Then he saw emerging over the horizon a truly enormous impact crater. “What happened there?” he asked.

“Callisto ran into something big, as you see. A little moon or asteroid of some considerable size. It’s been calculated that if it had been only ten percent bigger, it might have knocked Callisto to pieces.”

The giant crater was multiringed—the first time Galileo had seen such a thing. The many concentric rings looked like the waves on a pond after a stone has been tossed in. They covered about a third of the half of the moon he could see. He counted eight rings, as in an archery target. White lights spangled the tops and sides of most of the crater walls, and the lights on the fourth ring out were so thick they made it a ring of diamonds.

Hera said, “The crater is called Valhalla, and the city is called the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. We’ll land there.”

As they descended Galileo saw that each ring was a circular mountain range as high as the Alps, or the mountains of the moon.

“The Jovian council meets here, you said?”

“Yes, the Synoekismus. The amalgamation of several communities into one.” She frowned as she said it.

“What does it debate?”

“What to do about the thing inside Europa. Again. Ganymede claims to understand it better than the Europans who are studying it. They don’t agree, naturally. They want to make another descent, but that is controversial elsewhere in the system, and Ganymede and his group are adamant against it. You have to understand, there is a lot of fear.”

“But why?”

“Why fear the other?” She laughed at him. “Come listen to the meeting with me, and judge for yourself. That’s what I allow you, that no one else here thinks you can handle.”

As her craft made its last descent, he marveled at the concentric ranges of what must have been a truly stupendous impact. The surface must have melted into a sea of rock, and waves then surged away from the point of impact just as on any other pond—and then the whole thing had frozen in place, set in stone for the eons. Earth’s moon had nothing like it, at least not on the side facing Earth. “So they built their city in these rings?”

“Yes, they make for a good prospect,” she said. “The planet is otherwise fairly flat, and people always appreciate a view. And it helps that most of it lies on the subJovian side. Most of the early settlements in the system were placed on the moons’ sub-Jovian sides, to be able to look at Jupiter, and to get its extra light.”

“It is somewhat dim out here.”

“I’ve read it’s about thirteen hundred times more light than full moonlight on Earth. That’s still thousands of times less than daylight on Earth, of course, but the human eye can see perfectly well by it. The pupil dilates and on we go. Still, the extra light and color coming off Jupiter were appreciated by the first settlers. And really it’s a mesmerizing thing to look at, as you now know. So they built on the sub-Jovian hemispheres. Then those who wanted to get away from the early centers migrated to the anti-Jovian sides of their moon, so each moon tends to have two antithetical cultures. All the sub-Jovian sides resemble each other in certain respects, or so it’s said, while the anti-Jovian settlements likewise seem to gather all those who oppose the first settlements. The Fourth Ring of Valhalla is special in that it is mostly sub-Jovian, but it’s so big that it straddles the terminator, and Jupiter stays permanently half-risen in the eastern sky. So, the Fourth Ring served as a meeting place of sorts, cosmopolitan and various, a kind of convivencia. Now it’s the biggest city in the system. People from the other moons gather here. It has a culture very different from the rest of Callisto’s cities. Most of those serve as the capital of little groups of settlements on the outer moons, or among the asteroids, or the outer solar system. They use the Fourth Ring as the meeting place.” Here she frowned in a way Galileo could not interpret. “It all makes it a rather wild place.”

The things of the world at all times have their own counterpart with ancient times.