This arc of the long gallery was mostly empty, but at its far end a knot of chairs had been arranged, all facing a dais. The order that the furniture implied was obviously not regarded as binding by the people in attendance, however, as they circulated in a manner similar to that of the festival back along the arc, or to that of any court, for that matter, everyone mingling and talking, until someone called out “Come to order, please!” and eventually everyone had clumped in two loud groups before the dais. The view out the glass walls, with their concentric ranges and the banded crescent spearing the night, was forgotten.
People in both of the two groups began shouting across a divide created by a clutch of very tall women—apparently guards charged with keeping order. A few furious men approached these guards to yell their insults even more vehemently at the other side, but no one made any serious attempt to get through the line and assault their antagonists. To Galileo it looked like a kind of masque, not dissimilar to certain after-dinner debates he had taken part in, although more immediately raucous.
And then, as sometimes happened at home, what began as a formal dispute fell over some unseen cliff into genuine anger. Perhaps, Galileo thought, these Jovians, these tall beautiful folk, deprived of the anchor of earth and wind and sunlight, were more choleric than people on Earth—the reverse of what he had at first assumed about them, given their angelic appearance. They shouted, faces red—Galileo caught brief snatches of Latin, and even Tuscan, but the translator in his ear was not coping with the cross talk, and so to him it was mostly babble. What was it that mattered so much to them that they became this furious, pampered as they were? Well, perhaps the pampering explained it; perhaps they were possessed by the same things that possessed the Italian nobility of his time—honor, pride of place, patronage or the loss of patronage. Power. Maybe even when all people were fed and clothed, these concerns with hierarchy and power never went away, so that people were always angry.
Galileo murmured some of these thoughts to Hera, and told her about the translation difficulty. She led him down the room to where he could hear better, and the cacophony resolved into the strange Latin Galileo had first heard from the mouth of Ganymede, in Venice so long ago.
And in fact it was Ganymede himself now speaking, standing in the middle of his crowd of supporters as tall and beaky as ever. His crow-black hair stood up, and his saturnine blade of a face had turned bright red with his expostulation.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a grating, disgusted voice. “You don’t have the imagination to picture the consequences. We’ve done a full analysis. We’re far beyond the little hellos that you’re bogged down in. There’s more to it than the contact the Europans made during their incursion.” He spoke now to a group dressed in pale blue, possibly the Europan legation. “You’ve touched the whisker of the beast,” Ganymede told them, “and now you think you know the whole thing. But you don’t. There’s more to it than what you’ve seen. I’ve told you privately the danger, and I don’t want to speak of it in public, because that would only add to it. But it is very real.”
A white-haired woman waved him away. “You have to forgive us if we proceed as if what happens in a manifold detected only by you is not sufficient grounds for changing our actions.”
“No,” Ganymede said grimly. “This is different. You ignore the potential effects of an interaction. That’s what people like you always do. You hide your eyes and never learn, and claim new things will bring new things, and are always surprised when events fit the patterns we’re made from. You never see the danger and you never count the risk. What if you turn out to be wrong? You can never imagine that, you are so full of yourself, so convinced you are tabula rasa. Now, this time, in this encounter—of humanity with a sentience that can’t be grasped, let us say—no specific human good can come of it. But the harm could kill the species. So it makes sense to beware! For the risk is absolute. You’re behaving like those men who set off the first atomic bomb, wondering as they did so if the explosion might not ignite the entire atmosphere of the Earth. Or the ones who started up a particle collider unsure whether a black hole would be generated that would suck the Earth into it. Like them, you’d risk all—for nothing.” Suddenly he was shouting. “We won’t let you take the risk!”
“I don’t see how your position is anything other than cowardice,” the white-haired woman said. “It’s simply fear of the future itself.”
Ganymede started to speak but stopped himself, eyes bulging out. Finally he said, “That’s what the people who ignited the atomic bomb said, I’m sure.” With an expression of extreme disgust he gestured wildly to his supporters, and led the way as they all stormed out of the chamber, angrily chattering to each other, some shouting final curses as they left.
“Could you not execute a prolepsis,” Galileo asked Hera in a low voice, “and see if his fears are confirmed?”
“No,” Hera said. “In theory, prolepsis is possible, but the energy required is more than we can muster. Sending the entanglers back analeptically cost us entire planets, and prolepsis apparently requires far more energy than that.”
“I see. So—do you think Ganymede is right to be so afraid?”
“I don’t know. His is one of several competing efforts to understand what is going on inside Europa, and the physicists I’ve talked to say his group has been doing very advanced studies. Even exiled to Io, they have made progress others haven’t. And they are claiming something more than Europa is involved.”
“So there are different schools of understanding? Different factions?”
“There are always factions.”
Galileo nodded; it was certainly true in Italy.
“So,” Hera continued, “I don’t know. I was working with Ganymede, and fighting with him, as you have seen. And there are precedents to support what he is saying. Humans have generally not reacted well to encounters with higher civilizations. Collapses have occurred.”
Galileo shrugged. “I don’t see why it should matter.”
“That we might find out we are like bacteria on the floor of a world of gods?”
“When has it ever been different?”
She laughed at this. He glanced over and saw she was looking at him with a new surmise, as if at someone who was more interesting than she had thought. About time, as far as he was concerned.
“I suppose you yourself can serve as an example of a robust response to an encounter with a more advanced civilization,” she said with a little smile.
“I don’t see why,” he said. “I’m not sure I have done that.”
She laughed again, and led him to another moving staircase, which carried them up its long incline, through the gallery’s ceiling and onto the spine of the Fourth Ring. There her space boat stood waiting for them, apparently having been moved for her convenience. Or perhaps it was another craft just like hers. In any case, there were attendants on hand to welcome them into it and see them on their way.
Above them a fiery blaze of light hurt his eyes. It looked like one of the Jovians’ spacecraft was shooting up into the black starry sky, headed toward Jupiter.
Hera’s look turned grim again. “That was Ganymede,” she said, gesturing upward. “He and his people are off to make more trouble. We’ll have to deal with him. There aren’t any police forces or weapons any more in the Jovian system, as a matter of principle. So situations like this are hard to deal with. But something has to be done. He means to stop the Europans. He thinks he’s right. There’s no one more dangerous than an idealist who thinks he’s right.”