—MACHIAVELLI, The Discourses

HERA’S LITTLE CRAFT AND ITS CABIN suddenly reappeared around them. Soon after that, Galileo felt weight returning to him, and he was pressed down into his chair. One screen on the wall served as a kind of window, but nothing but a patch of black starry sky appeared in it.

Hera landed them. Their door slid open, and they descended onto a broad terrazzo, white against the black of Callisto’s rock. They were on a flattened section of the spine of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla. Inlaid into the spine was a long curving building, perhaps even a continuous gallery city, arcing all the way around the Fourth Ring. Certainly it went for as far as Galileo could see before curving behind the Third Ring: at least thirty degrees of its circumference, he reckoned. The crater wall had in effect been excavated and replaced by the city itself, which poked up out of the black rock in repeated towers and crenellations.

Hera led him to a broad staircase that descended into the crater wall. The stairs looked like white marble, though the stone was smoother and whiter than marble, something like ivory, and all the steps moved downward together under them, so that they stood on one and descended anyway. They had a long way to go, so far that the people below were the size of bugs. The curving gallery was broad as well as tall, with clear walls on both sides. Through the glass curves to each side he could see the concentric escarpments of the Third and Fifth Rings of Valhalla, the Third considerably closer to them than the Fifth, which only made sense, Galileo realized, if one visualized waves expanding on a pond. Long stretches of both escarpments had been excavated and walled by glass, in the same manner as the Fourth Ring, if less comprehensively.

Now the people on the gallery floor were the size of cats, and it was obvious most of them were naked, except for the big masks that covered every head. Either that, or they were not human.

“Carnivale,” Hera explained, seeing his startled look. “This crowd isn’t usually in this part of the circumference.”

“Ah.”

“The grand council meets farther along the arc. Their meeting is part of the larger festival.”

The stairs brought them to the gallery floor. The revelers indeed were wearing elaborate masks and nothing else. Human bodies, male and female, tall and full, white, pink, various shades of brown—but always topped by the heads of animals of one sort or another. Some of the animals were familiar to Galileo, others were fantastic creatures: big hairy heads with antlers, feathered human faces as broad as the shoulders that held them up, insectile wedges. More familiarly, he spotted fox heads, wolves, lions, leopards, rams, antelope; here was a heron; there the very disturbing sight of a monkey’s head on a woman’s body. There beyond her stood a medusa, making him shudder and look away. Then he saw a group of tall bodies that appeared to be headless, their furry faces looking out from their chests, as in the old tales of the Greeks. Those were strange enough to give Galileo pause; were their bodies also masks?

But taken all in all, it still was recognizably Carnivale. A lot of bare skin was part of the topsy-turvy of the festival, and he had often been disturbed or frightened by particularly skillful masks, encountered on bright piazzas or in shadowy canalsides. Here the exposure of flesh had been taken to its reductio ad absurdum. To Galileo, this and the masks in combination were what made the sights more disturbing than erotic, no matter the helpless tendency of his eye to track the women in view.

A group of jackal-headed people confronted them, preventing their progress with a restless stationary dance. Jackals, ravens, an elephant, all pressing in and surrounding them aggressively. One of the ravens held out an eagle mask to Hera:

“You must join the revel,” the raven said. “Pan rules here, and this is spring. Great Hera, here is your mask.”

Hera looked at Galileo. “It will be easiest if we comply,” she said. “The dionysiacs can get pretty annoying if you don’t join their panic. Do you mind?”

“It’s just Carnivale,” Galileo said roughly, feeling rattled.

Without further ado Hera pulled off her clothes—a kind of singlet it now appeared, coming off in a single piece, leaving her naked, magnificent, and oblivious to his discomfited gaze. Galileo turned aside and pulled down his homely pants and shirt, rags in this context, and then unbuckled his hernia truss, feeling like some kind of injured ape, hairy and small. After making a frank evaluation, Hera took his clothes and truss from him and held them with hers in one hand. One of the jackals handed him the head of a boar, its mouth open, its tusks pointing up murderously.

“A boar?” Galileo protested.

Hera stared at him now with a truly raptor intensity. “You are pigheaded,” she observed.

“I suppose,” Galileo said, thinking it over. “Well, I may be a boar, but I am never boring.” He put it on. It fit on his shoulders very comfortably, and he could see out of its eyes quite well, and breathe through it. Indeed it was meshing with him in ways he couldn’t even define at first, but then realized he was feeling its skin and hair, which was frightening. On the other hand, with it on he did not feel so exposed.

Hera’s eagle head was just right for her, although her figure was too massive for flight, her body very womanly and yet also tall, and muscled like a wrestler’s. A female torso that Michelangelo would have marveled at. Indeed all the people in the gallery looked as if the great Buonarroti had carved them, creating a set of ideal figures in the style of his heroic males, then touching them to life, as his God had his Adam. Compared to them Galileo was indeed a boar, lumpy and hairy and low.

Hera took him by the arm and, holding their clothes and his truss in her other hand, guided him through the crowd of revelers. Galileo stared through the boar’s eyelids, wondering if there were also lenses that sharpened his vision; wondering if he had been somehow transmogrified into the boar.

The air he breathed so easily was thin and fresh, perhaps a little bit intoxicating. He stared at the women’s bodies, his eyes as helpless as iron filings near a lodestone. Only after absorbing this sight repeatedly did he notice also the men and their demonstrative pricks, which were often circumcised, as if he walked among Jews and Mohammedans.

As Hera led him along, the animal heads spoke to them. People seemed to know Hera and to want to speak with her. She introduced Galileo as “a friend,” which they accepted without question, despite how odd he must have looked. They were all at ease, and included Galileo in their jokes, and laughed loudly. He began to relax, even to feel a little giddy and hilarious, so that he almost laughed too, but was afraid that if he did his guts would spill out and hang between his knees, a prospect that curbed his mirth very effectively. Despite this he was enjoying himself. Here Carnivale had been distilled to its essence, or expanded to its dream. Music filled the air, people sang in human words or in choruses of animal and bird cries; they ate and drank from high-piled tables, they danced—they even took part in a formal dance in which couples approached each other, touched genitals together briefly, as if in a greeting kiss, then moved on to another partner and repeated the gesture. Many of them had tied little ribbons or colored threads in their pubic hair, the women doing so in ways that exposed the flesh underneath, their private parts looking like orchids or irises. Quite a few of the men strode around with vigorous erections, making flowers of a different sort—lilies or snapdragons, although really they looked more like the noses of attentive dogs. Indeed it was remarkable how much character was revealed by all these exposed organs, which appeared friendly or austere, withdrawn or outgoing, not as an aspect of male or female, but of individual anatomy and presentation.