La Piera hustled off with a shrug; convents were like that, the shrug said. But she was angry too. “I’ll come along,” she said as she reappeared.

On the way over the hills to San Matteo, it was easy to feel that all this had happened before, because it had. His feet had made the very track through the grass that they now followed. It all just kept happening. Sky as gray as rain.

Over at San Matteo, they found things even worse than Maria Celeste had reported, which was not unusual, but this time far beyond anything previous. Not just the mother abbess but also Arcangela had lost her mind, and on the very same night. Arcangela had apparently heard the abbess screaming in her suicidal hysteria, and in response had begun banging her head against the wall of her room. She had done that until she fell insensible. Now she was conscious, but refusing to speak even to her own sister, who was clinging to Galileo’s arm now, red-eyed with fear and grief, frustration, and sleeplessness. All around her was nothing but weeping and lamentation, as all the sisters demanded her attention at once.

Seeing it, Galileo lost his temper and said to them loudly, “It’s like a henhouse with a fox inside it, except there’s no fox, so you should all shut up! What kind of Christians are you anyway?”

This last sentiment started Maria Celeste crying too, and Galileo enfolded her in his arms. They looked like a bear holding a scarecrow pulled from its pole. She wept on his broad chest, into his beard. “What happened?” he asked again helplessly. “Why?”

She composed herself, and led him back to the dispensary as she told him the story. The mother abbess had been more and more anxious, upset about problems that she would not confess to anyone. At the same time, Suor Arcangela had stopped speaking entirely. The latter had happened before, of course, and although it was a cause for concern, there was nothing they could do about it, as they knew from long experience. “So we were limping along the best we could, when last night the full moon brought on a lunacy in the mother abbess. She was heard crying out, and when we went to her chambers to see what was wrong, we found her slashing her arms with one of the kitchen knives, and moaning. In the uproar we didn’t hear Arcangela yelling in her room,”—a private room that Galileo had paid for, to keep her out of the dormitory at night, where she had trouble sleeping, and disrupted the others as well. “When we finally heard Arcangela, I was the first one there, and I found her—pounding her forehead, hard, against the wall! The bricks had cut her and she was bleeding. It was a cut on the forehead, you know how those bleed. Her face was covered with it. And she still wouldn’t speak. It took four of us to get her to stop beating her brains out, and now she is restrained on her bed. She’s just begun to talk again. But all she does is beg to be let free.”

“You poor girl.” Galileo followed the shivering Maria Celeste to his younger daughter’s room.

Arcangela saw him in the doorway and turned her battered head away. She was tied to the mattress with innumerable strips of cloth.

Then: “Please,” she begged the wall. “Let me go.”

“But how can we,” Galileo asked her, “when you harm yourself like this? What would you have us do?”

She would not answer him.

After sunset, in the last hour of light, they headed back to Bellos-guardo. It was clear to all of them that no matter Maria Celeste’s courage and ability, they had left behind a convent in desperate disarray. On the trail over the hills, Galileo was full of heavy sighs. That night he sat at the table before his roast capon and bottle of wine, and barely ate. La Piera moved around slowly, cleaning up with as little noise as possible.

“Fetch Cartophilus to me,” Galileo said at last.

A few minutes later the old man stood before him in the lantern light. Clearly he had been asleep.

“What can I do, maestro?”

“You know what you can do,” Galileo replied, with a look as black as any of Arcangela’s. The family resemblance in that moment was startling.

Cartophilus knew when Galileo could not be denied. He ducked his head and nodded as he left the room.

That night when Galileo was out on the back terrace, looking stubbornly through his telescope at his little Jovian clock in the sky, Cartophilus emerged from the workshop, carrying the pewter box that held the teletrasporta under one arm.

“You’ll send me to Hera?” Galileo said.

Cartophilus nodded. “I’m pretty sure she still has the other end of it.”

When Cartophilus had prepared the box, Galileo stood next to it. He looked up at Jupiter, so bright up there near the zenith. Suddenly it bloomed.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Fear of the Other

In order to produce a significant shift in the collective psyche, it would require a great many more people than are at present able to integrate their animality into their conscious mind. At present, powerful women who reject the Eve complex, and males who are ridding themselves of misogyny, tend to trigger or inflame the misogyny of those caught in the Thanatos complex. There is simply not a powerful enough female or feminine object of the ego ideal to pull women away from the patriarchal archetypal structures that maintain misogyny, let alone pull men away. The next movement in the evolution of the collective psyche has to be a spiral return to the archetypal mother.

—J. C. SMITH, Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy

BLACK SPACE, the dense spangle of stars. The great bulk of Jupiter, almost entirely sunlit, surreally present to the eye, crawling phyllotaxically with its hundreds of colors and thousands of convolutions—

He was sitting in his chair in Hera’s little space boat, which was again rendered invisible—a kind of Plato’s cave through which the cosmos poured in. Below and behind them, the virulent ball that was Io jumped out of the starry blackness.

“You’re back,” she noted. Her teletrasporta lay on the floor beside his chair. “Good.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Europa, of course.” She looked at him. “We’re still trying to keep Ganymede and his people away.”

“You got off the melting land, I see.”

“Yes, I was picked up by my people pretty soon after you left. Good that you did leave, though. It was touch and go.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know, a few hours maybe.”

Galileo blew out through his lips. “Pah.”

“What?”

“For me that was a few years ago.”

She laughed. “Proof again that time is not a steady progression, that it fluctuates and eddies, and we are in different channels. I hope you have been well?”

“Not at all!”

“How so?”

“I was sick. And I remembered what was happening here, and also what will happen to me there. It was all in me at once. Not only what you showed me, the fire I mean, but also, I have to confess—I used Aurora’s tutorial to take a look at my life, the last time I was with her. To see the science. I didn’t know it would be so—comprehensive. It wasn’t just someone’s account. I was there. Only it was all at once.”

“Ah.”

“I didn’t think it would matter, but when I went back home, I seemed to be dislocated somehow. Not in the moment, but a bit behind it, or before. I knew what was going to happen. It was bad. Unsustainable. Can you—can you help me with that, lady?”

“Maybe.”

He shuddered, remembering, then brightened. “On the other hand, there’s a new pope, a man who has been like a patron to me. I think I can get him to lift the ban on discussing Copernicus. I think it’s even possible to persuade him to approve the Copernican view, to make it the Church’s understanding, so that the Church itself will support it. And then I’ll be safe.”