“The ground is melting?”

“Yes. We have to hurry.”

“I’m trying.”

But they began to sink farther into the ground as they stepped on it, as if they traversed mud that grew deeper and softer. Very sticky mud, too. Hera’s craft was now visible on the horizon, but they could no longer run. They had to pull up hard at the end of each step to free their feet from the viscous surface, then step forward and sink back into it again. First they were sinking in to their boot tops, then their ankles. Then their shins. The yellow ground, looking granular and knobby with rubble, was quivering and quaking, pulsing under them like a live thing. Soon they were struggling forward, knee deep in it. Knee deep, in the melting surface of Io!

“We keep sinking further in,” Galileo pointed out.

“Just keep walking!”

“I am, of course, but you see how it is.”

“Shove your legs forward hard at first, then they’ll move easier after that.”

Now they were struggling through viscous rock that reached to the tops of their knees.

“Will our suits melt?”

“No. But we do need to stay above the surface.”

“Obviously.”

She wasn’t listening to him. They were wading forward through the molten surface now, thigh deep and working hard. Her craft was still a long way off.

Finally she stopped and pulled something out of her suit.

“Here,” she said, looking around and conferring in a low voice with her colleagues. “I’ve got a sheet here I can sit on, that will keep me afloat long enough for my friends to get here to pick me up. But I don’t know if it will hold both of us up long enough, so I’m going to use the entangler to send you back to your time.”

“But what about you?”

“I’ll use the sheet and float by myself, like I said. We’re not that much denser than the sulphur.”

“Are you sure?” Galileo exclaimed, wondering if she were preparing to die.

“I’m sure.” She cast a thin silver sheet out over the lava, and they crawled onto it, rolling quickly to the middle to keep the edge of the sheet from shoving too far down into the melting rock. They huddled together in the center of the sheet, and Galileo could see that the friction of the sheet spread over the rock would hold them up, for a while anyway.

“Get in the field of the entangler,” she said as she pulled the box from the pack on the back of her space suit. She patted the sheet before her.

They sat cross-legged, knees touching, sinking rather slowly into the sheet. She placed the flat square box between them and tapped at its surface. Finally she looked up, and they regarded each other face-to-face through their faceplates.

“Maybe you should come back with me,” Galileo said.

“I need to stay here. I’ve got to deal with all this. The situation is completely fucked up, as you see.”

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yes. My people are on their way. They’ll be a while, but they’ll get here in time, if you aren’t weighing me down. Now get ready to go back. I don’t have any amnestics with me, so you will remember all this. It will be strange. It could be bad, but—” She shrugged. There was no alternative.

“You’ll bring me back when you can?”

Again a brief moment, a shared look—

“Yes,” she said. “Now,” tapping the teletrasporta, “go.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Always Already

We aren’t even here but in a real here Elsewhere—a long way off. Not a place To go but where we are: there. Here is there. This is not a real world.

—WILLIAM BRONK, The Metaphor of Physical Space

LAID OUT IN THE GARDEN SHIVERING, Galileo looked around himself. There he was, looking around himself. It was just before sunrise, at Bellosguardo. In the dawn light, the citrons on their branches glowed like little Ios.

Cartophilus was sitting on the ground beside him, wrapped in a blanket. He had thrown another one over Galileo’s supine form. Galileo croaked at him; Cartophilus nodded and gave him a cup of watered-down wine. Galileo sat up and drank it, then gestured for more. Cartophilus refilled the cup from a jug.

Galileo drank some more. He blinked, looking around him, sniffing, then crumbling a clod of dirt in his hand. He regarded the citron bush curiously, leaning toward the big terra-cotta pot containing it.

“How long was I gone?”

“All night.”

“That’s all?”

“Did it feel longer?”

“Yes.”

Cartophilus shrugged. “You were gone longer than usual.”

Galileo was staring at him.

Cartophilus sighed. “She didn’t give you the amnestic.”

“No. They were too busy fighting. I left Hera on Io, sinking into lava! Do you know her?”

“I know her.”

“Good. I want to go back and help. Can you send me back now?”

“Not now, maestro. You need to eat, and get some rest.”

Galileo considered it. “I suppose I need to give her time to get out of that fix, anyway. If she can. But soon.”

Cartophilus nodded.

Galileo poked him with a finger. “This stranger of yours, the Ganymede—did you know he is a kind of Savonarola? That his cult is reviled by the rest of the Jovians, and that now they are fighting?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” Cartophilus gestured at the teletrasporta. “I can see here what happens to you there, if I stay in the complementary field. As for Ganymede, I am not one of his people anymore. I just tend the device. I stay with it. Things around Jupiter are always changing. The people in power aren’t the same. Their attitude toward entanglement is not the same.”

“How long have you been keeping this end of the teletrasporta?”

“Too long.”

“How long?” Galileo insisted.

Cartophilus waggled his hand. “Let’s not talk about it now, maestro. I’ve been up all night, I’m tired.”

Galileo yawned hugely. “Me too. I’m thrashed. Help me up. But later we are going to talk.”

“I’m sure.”

That winter Galileo’s illnesses struck him worse than ever, and he stayed in bed for months, often writhing and moaning. Sometimes he shouted furiously, others he shuddered epileptically, or spoke in Latin as if in conversation with someone invisible, sounding engaged and curious, surprised, humble, even supplicatory—all tones his voice never contained when he spoke to the living, when he was always so peremptory and sure.

“He speaks with the angels,” the servant Salvadore ventured. The boy was often too frightened to go into his room. Giuseppe thought it was funny.

“He just doesn’t want to work,” La Piera muttered. She would barge in no matter his state, and demand that he eat, that he drink tea, that he lay off the wine. When he was conscious of her presence he would curse her, his voice hoarse and dry. “You sound just like my mother. My mother in the disgusting form of a cook shaped like a cannonball.”

“Now who sounds like your mother? Drink something or die whining.”

“Fuck off. Leave me. Leave the drink and go. I had a real life once! I got to speak with real people! Now here I am, trapped with a bunch of pigs.”

Some days he sat upright in bed and wrote feverishly, page after page. The things he said and wrote got stranger and stranger. In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he changed the subject abruptly and wrote:

The open book of heaven contains such profound mysteries and such sublime concepts that the labor and studies of hundreds of the sharpest minds, in uninterrupted investigation for thousands of years, have not yet completely fathomed them. This idea haunts me.