“So you can! You must be very proud.”

Galileo glanced down at its odd pudenda, painted magenta as if with lipstick. “And so must you,” he replied.

The buzzard ignored this. “What do you think of this thing inside Europa?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Something in the way Hera stood beside him confirmed his first impression not to trust this person. Never trust a buzzard. It seemed simple enough, although it could be said a buzzard was always quite forthright in its way. “Come hear what the others are saying about it!” it said now. “You really must.”

“We are on our way there,” Hera told it. “Come along,” Hera said to Galileo, taking him by the arm and walking away. Behind them he could just hear the vulture hermaphrodite say, “I must say, if that’s the smartest person of his time, it’s no wonder they’re in such trouble.”

“They?” a voice replied. Galileo turned and looked. It was Ganymede, taking a lion mask off of his narrow head and shaking his black hair. His body was long and willowy, very white. Beyond him, Galileo caught sight of a group of jackal-headed people skewering one of the real animals, some kind of an ox, with long spears—quickly he looked away, shocked at the vivid red of blood.

They came to a reddish semitransparent wall, which made Galileo fear they might pass through it and then float in fire, and be able to breathe it too; he didn’t think he could handle that. There were several open arches in this red wall, and once they had passed under one, Hera handed Galileo his clothes and truss, perfectly dry and ready to wear. Her singlet she shook out and put one leg into, and quickly she was dressed and had taken off her eagle mask. Galileo did likewise, buckling on his truss with a sigh. Others around them were arriving in the chamber and dressing, pulling off their masks, shaking out their hair. Galileo took off his boar mask and regarded its piggy face, then put it with the rest on a long table piled high with them—an awful sight, as if the jackals had boarded Noah’s ark and decapitated every living thing.

In the next chamber of the gallery, which ran again unbroken as far as they could see, Galileo and Hera joined a collection of people standing in groups of five or six. After their traverse of the carnival gallery, Galileo found all the exposed faces a little shocking; the reversal reversed had created its characteristic moment of estrangement, when normality was for a moment bizarre. It seemed to him then that if the goal was not to be too sexual, it would be more appropriate to conceal faces than bodies. These living souls with their foreheads, cheeks, eyebrows, hair, chins, mouths, were both much weirder than genitals and ever so much more expressive, more suggestive, more revealing. He glanced shyly at Hera, and she noticed his glance, and looked back at him curiously, wondering what he meant, and their gazes met for a second—and there she was: there they were. To look someone eye to eye, my Lord, what a shock! Eyes were indeed windows, as the Greeks had said; and mouths, my oh my, mouths that smiled, frowned, pursed, spoke. To share a gaze was a kind of intercourse. Maybe new souls were generated not with the fuck but the look. Indeed he had to look away from Hera to avoid feeling overwhelmed, to avoid making something new right then and there.

They continued around the arc of the Fourth Ring of Valhalla, and passed under an archway into a segment of the gallery that was occupied entirely by Galileos. There were perhaps a hundred of them. Galileo stopped in his tracks at the sight.

“Oh, sorry,” Hera said, seizing his hand and dragging him onward. “This is just a game people play, a kind of Carnivale party group, which comes from living on the Galilean moons, I’m sure. No one will know you are the real item.”

The host of costumed Galileos was variously dressed in clothing more or less appropriate to his time, at least when seen from a distance; up close he could see how strange all the fabrics and cuts were. Their heads and bodies were all possible versions of his type, from men who looked just like the image he saw in the mirror all the way to grotesque parodies of his form. Even women were dressed as him and sporting false beards. All of the beards were gray: “Why do they all look so old?” Galileo complained.

“I suppose it’s because there is a famous portrait of you,” she said. “Most people think of that one when they think of you.”

“Horrible,” Galileo said. Indeed there were some of them that were particularly unsettling—like him but not, distorted somehow, as in the little images of him seen in the outside curves of spoons, or in certain nightmares. These were by far the most shocking to see. He tried to express this response to Hera, and she nodded without surprise.

“You have quickly discovered the uncanny valley,” she told him. “It was found long ago, when they were first developing machine intelligence, that people were willing to accept speech from crude boxes, and even from metal people, but that if you tried to create perfect simulacra of people, it could not be done well enough to fool the eye, and these were the speakers who were profoundly disturbing. Identity or difference were both acceptable, but between them lay an uncanny valley, where the partial resemblance creates a discord.”

“Please remove me from this uncanny valley,” Galileo begged her, averting his eyes. Some of these pseudo-Galileos were truly creepy, ugly to him in a sickening way. He looked down as she led him on through the next archway.

“You see why we have continued to contain our machine intelligences in boxes and desks and secretaries and the like,” she said as they left. “No one could stand the simulacra. Sometimes I think this practice deceives us in a different way, because we can’t imagine that mere boxes can have become as intelligent as they obviously have. So we fail to notice how powerful they have become—probably in many ways much more intelligent than we are. Almost all our technologies, including the ones with the strangest impacts on us, have at this point mostly been invented by machines.”

“I wondered about that,” Galileo said. “So your world makes no sense to you.”

“Well, the world hasn’t made sense since 1927. That hasn’t kept us from carrying on as if we understood it.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Galileo said, curbing an urge to look over his shoulder, thinking of Lot’s wife. “Well, whatever it takes not to end up feeling like I did in there,” gesturing behind them. “That was truly awful.”

“I thought you would have enjoyed it,” she said. “Surely it was one of your dreams, to be one of the most famous people in history?”

Galileo shrugged. “It only proves that when all your dreams come true, you realize that you were an idiot to have such dreams.”

She laughed, and led him under another archway into a new room. Here they had arrived at the meeting of the grand council of Jovian moons, the Synoekismus. It consisted of representatives from all the settlements in the Jovian system, Hera told him, and therefore theoretically numbered in the hundreds. There were only about a hundred people on hand, Galileo reckoned. Behind them he saw Ganymede entering the room as well, with a group of ten or twelve of his followers.

The Fourth Ring of Valhalla was in this part of its arc higher than the Third and Fifth Rings, and out the clear side walls of the high gallery they could see far in all directions. Inward, buildings erupted from the Third Ring like great fangs and molars; through them Galileo caught glimpses of the Second Ring, which appeared also to support buildings. Outward, the Fifth and Sixth Rings were lower and farther away, and the fifth range of hills was less excavated and occupied, it seemed, although gleaming incurves of window indicated that galleries existed in that range too. Over one section of the Fifth Ring, a lit portion of Jupiter loomed up over the horizon: a thick top half of a crescent, somewhat canted to the side, and only a few times bigger in the sky than Earth’s moon was at home.