“Sometimes I think I’m right,” Galileo said.

“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“And sometimes I am right. If you roll a ball off the edge of a table, it falls in a half parabola. In that I’m right.”

“And in that,” she muttered, “you too are dangerous.”

SHE LED HIM INTO HER SPACECRAFT. They were going to follow Ganymede back to Io, she said, where apparently he was headed. The idea was to stop him from leading his followers into anything rash. She appeared to be willing to coerce the Ganymedeans in this regard, with the help of her fellow Ionians. She spent the first hour of their flight talking over the matter with various voices that spoke from the pad on her lap.

Somewhere in that hour, Galileo fell asleep. How long he slept he was not sure; when he woke, she was asleep herself, her eyes darting about in tandem under closed lids. After that a long time passed, during which he found a little closet with a hollow chair into which he could attempt his difficult ablutions. In the midst of his effort, warm water filled the chamber up to his waist, where it became warmer and rumbled with vibrations that were apparently in phase with his peristalsis, as his excrement seemed to be drawn out of him. After that the water drew off and he was dried in a swirl of hot air, as clean as if he had bathed.

“Jesus,” he said. He opened the door and looked out at Hera, who was now awake. “You people don’t even shit naturally! Your shitting is midwifed by automatons.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

Galileo had to think that one over, and so did not answer. She passed him on the way into the little closet herself, and when she came back out, she shared with him a small meal that consisted of something like a compressed bread, sweet and substantial, and plain water.

“You were dreaming as you slept,” Galileo noted.

“Yes.” She frowned, thinking about it.

“Are dreams also entanglements?” Galileo asked, thinking about Aurora’s lessons.

“Yes, of course,” she replied. “Consciousness is always entangled, but when we are awake our present moment overwhelms all that. When you’re asleep then all the entangled moments become more obvious.”

“And you are entangled with?”

“Well, with other moments of your life, earlier or later. And with other people’s lives too. Different times, different minds, different phase patterns. All expressed rather weakly in the brain’s chemistry, and so perceived surreally in sleep’s lack of sensory input.”

“Dreams are dreamlike,” Galileo agreed. “And what were you dreaming of now?”

“It was something about when my family first moved to Io, when I was a girl. Only in the dream, Io was already occupied by animals that we killed for food. I suppose that was day residue from our panic spring. Recent experiences get enfolded in dreams, sometimes, and mix with the entangled times from elsewhere.”

“I see. So you moved to Io as a girl?”

“Yes, my mother was exiled from Callisto for fighting. The bubble technology that allows us to live on Io had just recently been developed, and people convicted of major crimes were just being sent there. My father and I went with her, and we were in one of the first groups there. I liked to greet the new arrivals.”

“And so you became a mnemosyne,” Galileo suggested. “You learned to like taking in damaged people, and healing them.”

“Maybe. Are we really so simple?”

“I think maybe so.”

She shook her head. “People did enjoy seeing me welcome them, I think.”

After that she sat there, fidgeting unhappily. Jupiter was growing bigger again; it appeared they would pass before the sunward side this time. Galileo asked what he thought was an innocent question about the time needed for the voyage from Callisto to Io; she snapped back at him that it was different for every trip, which was not really answering. A few moments later, glaring at him, she said, “We’ll be there soon. Still, we might as well continue your education in yourself. We’re all going to need it in the end.”

“I prefer my own self-knowledge,” Galileo insisted. “You can give up on your girlish ambition to rescue people.”

She glared at him. “Do you want to live?”

“I do, yes.”

“Then put this on.” Roughly she placed her celatone on his head, and he did not flinch away.

“Do you know what you’re sending me back to?” he asked.

“Not precisely. But different areas of the brain hold characteristic kinds of experience, located by the emotion that was the fixative. I’m going to look at nodes in the areas associated with embarrassment.”

“No,” Galileo groaned, and flinched as she touched the helmet.

His horrible mother ran into his terrible mistress there in the house on Via Vignali, and before Galileo even knew the old gorgon was visiting, the two women were screaming at each other in the kitchen. This was not unusual, and Galileo trotted in from the workshop cursing at the distraction but not overly concerned, only to find them in a real fight, scratching and pulling hair, kicking and punching, Marina even landing one of her big roundhouse swings to the head, a blow Galileo had felt on his own ear many times. All this with the children and servants there in the room watching, happily scandalized, squealing and shouting.

Galileo, ears burning, supremely angry with both of them, leaped into the fray and was rougher than he might have been as he grabbed Marina and hauled her back—so rough that his mother paused in her shrieking to berate him for his rudeness, while also seizing the chance to assault Marina yet again, so that he had to stop her too. And then there he was, trapped between the two of them in front of all the world and God, holding on to them by their hair, extended at his arms’ length from each other as they screamed and swung. Galileo was forced to ponder a little what might be his least undignified mode of escape. Luckily he had a jacket on so that his arms were not getting scratched by their furious mauling.

“You whore!”

“You bitch!”

“Be quiet,” he begged them, not wanting the household to notice how accurate both women were in their insults. It was almost funny, but he had long ago lost his ability to be amused by either of them. Aside from their nasty tempers, the debt burden they represented was enormous. Maybe if he released them both without warning, they would collide headfirst and kill each other. Two debts retired with a single collision! It was an elegant solution. Marina was the lighter of the two and would rebound farther, as he knew well from experiments with balls tied to strings, not to mention their own fights—

“Enough!” he commanded imperiously. “Save this shit for the Pul-cinella shows. If you don’t stop I’ll call the night watch and have you both thrown out of here!”

They were weeping with fury and the pain of being held back by their hair. When they didn’t expect it he let them go and turned to face his mother. “Go home,” he instructed her wearily. “Come back later.”

“I won’t leave! And I won’t come back!”

But finally she left, shouting down horrible curses on them all, and there was nothing Galileo could do but to deploy his usual defense, turning his back to her and waiting till she was gone.

Marina was more conciliatory—still angry of course, but also embarrassed. “I had to defend myself.”

“She’s almost sixty, for God’s sake.”

“So what? She’s crazy, and you know it.”

But then she desisted. She needed his money for her place around the corner, and so she left the room without further excoriations. Galileo stumped back out to the workshop and stood there, staring sightlessly at the complete cipollata that was his life.

—which abruptly became black space, the stars, the great swirling banded yellow globe. Hera sitting across from him, watching his face attentively.