She stared at him, shaking her head. “You still don’t get it.”

“Things at home aren’t so good,” Galileo went on, ignoring her. “But maybe His Holiness can help there too.”

She sighed. “What do you mean?”

“Well—my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I’m hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it’s bad for my daughters.”

“You are the one who put them in their situation, right?”

“Yes yes.” Then, trying to distract her: “What will you do when we get to Europa?”

She saw through him. “Distract me or not, you are still stuck in a situation you don’t understand.”

There was nothing he could say to that. “I don’t see that I’m much different than you,” he parried lamely.

She brushed that aside. “It has always been the same pope in charge when you are condemned to be burnt at the stake.”

This startled Galileo. “Of course,” he temporized. “But, if I could convince him to support the Copernican view, then surely …”

She only stared at him.

“I think it can work,” Galileo ventured. Then: “You said you would help.”

She only shook her head.

They seemed to float without moving. The great banded giant stood off to one side, impossible to believe. The whorls and eddies within each tawny band moved, slightly but visibly, and the imbricating borders where band met band moved even faster, their viscous colors crawling over each other like snakes. Hera’s transparent bubble of a craft only just shifted over this massive spectacle, such that its terminator, that smooth border of sunlight and shadow, rolled westward at a speed they barely could see. With close attention, one could spot the progressive illumination of new embroideries in the bands.

But all these stately contradances were as motions in some syrupy dream, and Galileo could see that Hera was impatient for action. She tapped at her console in her usual way, had several fraught conversations with absent colleagues he could not hear; then she fell silent, brooding over problems Galileo was not privy to.

“How long till we get there?” he asked.

“Hours. Europa is on the other side of Jupiter right now, unfortunately.”

“I see.”

Time passed; seconds, minutes: it became tangible, like something you could hold in your hands, or weigh on a scale. Protraction.

Finally she sighed. “Put the mnemonic back on. We might as well keep working. I can perhaps also block some of your memories from the life lesson you so rashly entered. So there are things you need to forget, and things you need to remember. Because you are still misunderstanding your situation at home.”

Galileo regarded her memory celatone uneasily. Mostly he feared what another immersion would reveal to him, but there was an awful fascination in it too. That the mind held within it such vivid scraps of the past—there was a majesty to that, full of pain and remorse—and a desire, despite all, for all the lost time somehow to come back. I want my life back! I want life back. And then also, to lay down so many memories so fully in the mind, and yet be unable ever to call them back—what were they, to be so oddly made? What could God have been thinking?

“Where will you send me?” he asked apprehensively. “What knowledge will you flay me with this time?”

“I don’t know. There’s so much to choose from, maybe we’ll just go spelunking. Your brain is full of trauma nodes.” She scanned her console screen, now apparently displaying maps of his brain, there visible to his sidelong glance in virulent pulsing rainbows. “Maybe we should continue with your relations with the women in your life.”

“No!”

“But yes. You don’t want to be one of those supposed scientific geniuses who is also in domestic life a jerk and a fool. There are enough of those already, or more than enough. It would be a shame if the first scientist were to be also the first of that crowd of assholes.”

This was interesting news, but also offensive. “I did my duty,” Galileo objected. “I took care of my family, I supported my sisters and my brother and their families, and my mother and my children, all the servants, all the artisans, all the students and hangers-on—the whole damned menagerie! I worked like a donkey! I wasted my life paying for my wastrel family.”

“Please. Self-pity is simply the reverse side of bravado, and just as unconvincing. That’s something you never seemed to learn. You lived a life of privilege that you took for granted. You started with a little bit of privilege and leveraged it upward, that’s all.”

“I worked like a donkey!”

“Not really. There were people who worked like donkeys—literally, in that they were porters and carried burdens for their living—but you weren’t one of them. Let’s see what your own mind tells you about that.”

Roughly she put the helmet on his head, and he did not really resist her. Where in his lost life would he return to?

With an odd look, perhaps of pity, almost of affection, a kind of indulgent amorevolezza that was very affecting to see in someone so amore-vole, so lovely, she reached out to touch him on the side of the head.

It was midsummer, very hot and humid, and the Count da Trento had invited Galileo’s colleague Bedini to his villa in Costozza, in the hills above Vincenza. Galileo, recently arrived in Padua with the entirety of his worldly possessions in a single trunk, had been introduced to everyone by Pinelli, over wine in Pinelli’s library of eighty thousand volumes. Bedini and Pintard were two of these new friends, and now, courtesy of Bedini’s noble friend, they were off to the hills together.

At the Villa Costozza, they joined their convivial host and did just what they would have done at home—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, while the count opened bigger and bigger bottles of wine, until they were hoisting fiascos and balthazars and small casks, and had eaten most of three geese, along with condiments, fruits, cheeses, and a great number of pies. And all on a day so hot that even here in the hills they were sweating greasily.

Finally the count was overcome, and staggered off to vomit like a Roman. The young professors groaned at the prospect, feeling stronger than that. It seemed if they jumped in one of the villa’s fountains or pools, they could immerse themselves to cool their stomachs and slow their bile. When he returned, the Count shook his head groggily as they proposed this. “I have something even better,” he said, and led them to a back room on the ground floor, where the villa had been dug into the hillside. In this room, the plaster wall did not meet the marble floor, and out of the black gap between wall and floor flowed a cold humid breeze, making the whole room as cool as an ice pantry. “It’s always like this,” the count mumbled, still gasping a little from his vomiting. “There’s a little spring somewhere down there. Please, be my guest. On days like this I simply lie on the floor. See, here are some pillows. I would join you, but I fear I must retire again,” and he stumbled off.

Laughing at him, the three drunk young men pulled off their clothes, groaning and joking and elbowing each other, and arranged the pillows as bedding and fell on them with happy moans and snorts. And there in the cool relief, after sliding right onto the marble and oohing and aahing like pigs in mud, all three of them fell asleep.

Galileo was hauled out of an ugly red dream by the count and his servants. “Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please! Wake up!”

“Qua—? Qua—?”

His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else’s groans. He wanted to speak, but couldn’t. The groans were his. Looking up as if from the bottom of a well, he felt a nausea so deep that it seemed if he vomited he would throw up his bones. Someone nearby was groaning in a truly heartrending way. Ah—he himself again. It was frigidly cold….