“You have to give me something so I don’t remember so much of my life,” he reminded her.

“I tried a few things with the mnemonic, while you were remembering. I hope certain parts will be occluded for you now.”

People in the crowd saw Hera descending the stairs toward them. Some threw up their hands as if to say What next! or What have you done! or We already have enough problems! But Galileo saw that was a pretense; he saw that they were afraid. Some were chewing on knuckles; others were weeping without knowing it. Even in the ubiquitous green-blue light of the vast articulated cavern, most of them were white-faced with fear.

Watching Hera confer with them, Galileo heard snatches of a debate over who had the right to land or to forbid landing on Europa. He wandered down to the floating transparent globe that modeled the icy moon. The dark gray rocky core of the globe was surrounded by a transparent blue gel representing the ocean, all of which was held in a thin white shell that tinted the ocean below it to a pastel shade somewhat like the Earth’s sky. The outer shell was scored by faint lines representing the crack systems on the surface.

Inside this globe, the creature of the ocean was not rendered visible, although Galileo thought that tiny fluctuations in the blueness of the blue light might be intended to represent some manifestation of it. Down there under their feet—a mile down, a hundred miles down … He wanted to talk to Aurora, to see if anything new had come of the mathematical conversation with the sentience. The listening devices they had emplaced in the ocean were connected to sound repeaters within this floating globe, he assumed, as emanating from it he could hear, at a much reduced volume, the uncanny singing he remembered so well. The lowest sounds appeared to match the little shifts in blueness of the model’s ocean. He wondered if the color changes marked the spatial origin of the sounds.

“Why didn’t you stop him? You failed!” one of the locals was complaining to Hera. “You were supposed to keep him sequestered on Io!”

“We tried,” she countered, “unlike you. Where were you? It might have helped to have some numbers there, if you really wanted a quarantine.”

The argument persisted, grew louder—

Then the blue in the floating globe turned white at a point under the surface, near the upper part of it. That would be its north pole, no doubt. The blossom of incandescence propagated away from it in waves; they struck the solid mass of the core and rebounded toward the surface. Threads of white light coursed through the interior like lightning.

Then there was a tremble underfoot, and the ice around them groaned, sounding much like the creature within had sounded during their incursion. Perhaps the sentience had learned to sing by mimicking the natural creaks of its moon’s ice.

Then the sounds coming from the globe changed. The clustering glissandi coalesced to a single dissonant chord. The pitch dropped abruptly, down to a basso profundo so profound that Galileo heard it more in the gut than the ear. It groaned. As the awful sound lifted back into the range of the audible, it seemed to lift Galileo’s body with it, chelating him with a thousand claw tips, so that his skin crawled and the hair rose on his forearms and the back of his neck. He recalled the cries that had driven them up through the ice shell of the moon to the safety of the surface. That, however, had been an angry sound, like the roar of a lion. This one was pain and confusion. Then in a brief crescendo that spiked into his head just above his eyes, it changed to raw fear.

This lasted only a moment, thank God, for everything it felt Galileo felt. But it seemed the machine transferring the sound had damped the volume, reducing it to a lunatic whimper. That hurt in a different way—the sound of it too high, and somehow broken. The anguish pierced him right to the heart. He felt it fully himself, anguish like something he somehow recognized, something he had already felt …

Galileo found he had his nose to the floating globe, that he was embracing it and whimpering himself, muttering desolately, “No, no, no, no, no.” The pain in him was unbearable, like the stab of a cry of grief.

“What happened?” he said, wiping his face as Hera approached. “Has it changed?”

“Yes.” Her expression was grim.

“Has it been wounded?”

“Yes. As you can hear. Aurora tells me its messages have gone away.”

“Is she here in this quarter of the city? Can you take me to her?”

Hera nodded. “She’ll send an avatar.”

The people standing in the amphitheater looked crushed, heartbroken. Clearly the painful sounds affected everyone. Aurora herself suddenly appeared before them, also stricken, her nose to a screen before her as she tapped at the buttons on her table, muttering to herself, or to the alien beneath them.

“What’s happened?” Galileo exclaimed to her.

“Here—ohhh—”

“What?”

“Can’t you see? Look there!” Tapping at the screen at her hands, without ever moving her face. It looked like she wanted to dive through the screen. She held on to her desk’s edge as if to the railing of a ship. She moaned, oblivious of those around her.

“Its articulation is bad, the signals off sequence,” she whispered. “The equations are wrong. It’s as if it’s been drugged, or …”

“Or injured,” Galileo said. “Damaged.”

“Yes. It must be. The explosion included a big electromagnetic pulse, very powerful, especially in the area just under the blast. What did they do? And why did they do it?”

Galileo turned away. He had met a man once who had been struck on the left side of the head by a falling hoist beam in the Venetian Arsenale. The beam had sheared off; this was one of the incidents that had made him interested in strength of materials. The man had recovered in most senses, and been able to speak, but his speech was slurred, and he stuttered, babbled, forgot himself, repeated himself; and all with a huge grin, rendered horrible by his babble.

Behind them the meeting of Europans was ongoing, and the argument had become ferocious, with several people shouting at once. Gali leo saw again that through the centuries people had never gotten less emotional. Hera was one of the shouters. “I’m going to kill them,” she was insisting furiously. “The first mind we have ever encountered, and they attacked it!”

Chirrups and oscillating moans now came from the globe. The faces of the Europan councilors blanched or reddened, according to their humors. Too many people were shouting at once. In the cacophony nothing could be distinguished.

Then the gallery turned purple. The transparent aquamarine tones, so green in their blue, all shifted through aquamarine to a dusky purple.

Everyone stopped talking and stared around. Hera’s gaze fixed on Galileo: “What’s this?” she said.

A part of him warmed to see that out of all of them she had asked him, but the cold dread in his heart was not touched. “Let’s go outside and see,” he suggested, gesturing at their ceiling, which now pulsed through various shades of grape. He took her by the hand, pulled her toward the broad opening that led up to the surface.

In Europa’s light pull, she was quickly moving faster than he could go. After a moment they ran side by side. Then she took his hand again and pulled him along, and he could do nothing but focus on keeping his feet. She dragged him along as his mother had once dragged him out of church, after he had started to laugh at the sight of a swinging lamp. They burst through the diaphanous air barrier and ran up the broad ramp, out from under its ceiling and into the black night of the world. Overhead hung giant gibbous Jupiter—

But it was not the Jupiter he had grown used to during their flights among the Galileans. The Great Red Spot had been joined by scores more red spots, spinning in every band, from pole to pole. Most of the spots were horizontally linked, like bloodstones in necklaces. It was as if the planet had caught a pox, each of the new spots a livid brick red oval, spinning slowly but distinctly, squiggling like wet paint. Some spots straddled bands, and threw their convoluted boundaries into wild spurts and splashes of ruddy color. The dominant color of the stupendous planet had shifted from yellow to a plague of various reds, ranging from brick to blood. The light in the city below had therefore shifted from greens to purples.