Hera was absorbed in a conversation with Aurora. Galileo got up and went over to Ganymede, looked into his helmet. Ganymede recognized him and looked startled at his presence.
“You have misunderstood why things went awry,” Galileo said to him. “Science needed more religion, not less. And religion needed more science. The two needed to become one. Science is a form of devotion, a kind of worship. You made a fundamental mistake, both in my time and your own.”
Ganymede tried to shake his head within the immobilized helmet, squashing first one narrow cheek then the other against it. His blade of a nose slightly tilted to his left, Galileo saw. “We each must play our part,” Ganymede said, the hoarse woodwind sound of his voice coming from the side of his helmet. “You have to understand that. You think you know enough to judge me, but you don’t. If only you knew. I know you have been listening to Hera, that you take her view of things. But she has a perspective no broader than yours. Understand me: I come from a future time, as far from hers as hers is from you. I’ve seen what happens if we do not play our parts. I wish I could show you the future that lies in wait if we interact with the gas giant and its children. It leads to extinction. I’ve seen it, I come from the end times. We know how to avoid it. I’m doing what has to be done. And you must do the same.”
His eyes bugged out, they seemed the only part of his face fully free to move. They were little twinned worlds of their own, unmatched by anything else in their intensity. He continued: “The nonlocal entanglement of the manifold is total, everything part of everything else. It’s all still happening, all still becoming. Each significant historical action collapses a wave function of potentialities, and alters the temporal vector. If you play your part, that of the first scientist martyred by religion, the impetus toward more scientific futures is profound. No matter what happens after that, the worst is only so dire. We arrive at this moment you now visit in your prolepsis—problematic, yes, but in recovery from the bad years, which are less bad than in the other flow of potentialities. And when you are brought here to this time, as I have done, we escape the worst consequences of the encounter with the alien mind.”
Aurora and Hera came over and now listened to him too. He said to Aurora, “Have you shown him what happens in the interval between his time and yours? Or did you just give him the mathematics?”
“It was a math tutorial,” Aurora said dryly.
Behind his face mask, Ganymede was sweating. He glared at her. “Why not give him the historical context? How does your mathematics matter, without that?”
Aurora said, “Mathematics was what humanity managed to do despite the disasters. Of course it matters. It was the only achievement that was real.”
“He needs to know the price that was paid.”
“He knows,” Hera said. “He experienced an overview just before you joined us.”
Ganymede, his gaze transfixing Galileo, said, “You know?”
“Yes,” Galileo confirmed. “I saw. It was a long descent, a desperate recovery. In short, for the most part, a nightmare.”
“Yes, precisely! But look: if you don’t play your part and become the scientist martyred for telling the truth, then the religions persist in their primitive insanities, and the wars go on for many centuries longer. Many centuries! Those were the bad potentialities you saw, the worst ones. The exterminations and counterexterminations proliferate and extend, until billions and billions of people have died. That’s just how it is. The tide turns at your bend in the river. The precise initial conditions of the birth of science are simply that important to the human story. They are crucial. One start leads to struggle and then harmony, the other to catastrophe. So compared to that, what’s a few minutes in the fire? You only remain conscious for a minute or two! In fact we could visit you beforehand and give you an anesthetic. You could experience it as if from the outside. And with those few moments give science the moral high ground for all time.”
“I don’t see why,” Galileo protested. That his death could be good for humanity—it didn’t make sense. Surely the reverse should be true.
“It doesn’t matter whether you see why,” Ganymede insisted. “This is no theory or prediction, it is an analepsis! I’m telling you what my time has seen. We’ve seen it, we know what can be changed and what can’t, and your condemnation is determinative. Without it, religious wars continue for centuries longer than with it, all across the field of potentialities. I know Hera has been telling you otherwise, telling you it doesn’t matter, telling you that you can avoid it. But you can’t. For the sake of the billions, for the sake of all the extinct species, you have to do it.”
“No,” Galileo said.
“But the billions!”
“I don’t care. I refuse.”
But he was uneasy. Ganymede’s eyes were almost bursting from his head in their desperation, they seemed almost to press against the glass of his face mask. If he had seen some pattern, some bifurcation in the possibilities …
Galileo said, “Aurora?”
“Aurora!” cried Ganymede. “You have to tell him!”
“Be quiet,” Galileo warned him, “or I will have Hera shut you up.”
Then he led Aurora to the farthest part of the cabin, behind Ganymede. Hera came along with them.
“Please, lady,” he said to Aurora. “Can you tell me if what he says is true? Can it matter so much, what I do?”
Aurora said, “It matters what all of us do. The manifold of manifolds is a complex of potentialities, each one implicate in all the others. They coexist, they come in and out of existence complementarily, there are sums over history and wave function collapses, eddies, and oxbows. As you have seen.”
“So things can change. I mean, by way of your analepses, using the entangler.”
“Yes.”
“And so Ganymede? When he said he came from your future—that he has seen the times to come beyond yours—is he telling the truth?”
Hera answered. “We don’t know. He’s been saying that for a long time. But there’s a lot of confusion around his cult on Ganymede. He led them into Ganymede’s ocean before they started objecting to the Europans going into theirs. No one is sure what that means. And we see no other signs of analepsis from out of our future. We only know he is a charismatic to his group, and they do what he says. He has made many analepses—more than anyone else, we think—and each one collapses a wave function and creates a new stream, and influences all the rest. Some people have been trying to stop him. And that process, that struggle, has led us all here.”
They were closing on Jupiter’s cloudy surface, which looked now like the side of an entirely different kind of universe, space itself everywhere dense with color flowing. It was time for Ganymede to face his judgment; time for all of them to face the Other.
Galileo who has entered the aetherial spaces, cast light on unknown stars, and plunged into the inner recesses of the planets—
—URBAN VIII, LETTER TO GRAND DUKE FERDINANDO II
(written by CIAMPOLI)
THE GREAT RED SPOT WAS REVEALED more clearly than ever as a kind of thunderhead top rising out of the surface of the great planet, as big perhaps as the whole Earth, now palpably down below them, so that as they stood or sat in the cabin they looked down past their feet at it. Their ship descended until the turbulent brick-colored clouds of the overturned bowl’s top were just under them. The sky above was tinted indigo, the stars barely visible. No part of Jupiter beyond the red storm was visible to them.
The clouds below were not a uniform red, but rather shifting woven banners of salmon, brick, sand, copper, citron. There was no sign of anything aware of their presence. The little voice of Ganymede nattered on from his helmet, complaining still that he had been kidnapped, that approaching Jupiter was a fatal error, a stupid gesture likely to fry them all in radiation if it did not bring down death by ontological exposure, and so on. More than once Hera reached to him and turned down the volume coming from his helmet, but she never silenced him entirely.