One crackle pattern clarified for him, gleaming in exquisite detail. Focusing on it appeared to increase the enlargement accordingly, until it filled the lens of the eyepiece. A wave of dizziness passed through his whole body; it felt like he was falling up toward the white moon. He lost his balance. He felt himself pitch forward, headfirst into the device.
Things fall in parabolic arcs; but he wasn’t falling. He flew, up and forward—outward—head tilted back to see where he was going. The plain of shattered white ice bloomed right before his eyes. Or below him; maybe he was falling. His stomach flopped as his sense of up and down reversed itself.
He didn’t know where he was.
He gasped for air. He was drifting downward; now he was upright again. His sense of balance returned just as distinctly as sight returned when you closed and then opened your eyes—something definitive. It was an immense relief and the most precious thing in the world, just that simple sense of up and down.
He stood on ice that was an opaque white, much tinted by oranges and yellows: sunset colors, autumn colors. He looked up—
A giant banded orange moon loomed in a black starry sky. It was many times bigger than the moon in Earth’s sky, and its horizontal bands were various pale oranges and yellows, umbers and creams. The borders of the bands curled over and into each other. On the moon’s lower quarter, a brick red oval swirl marred the border of a terra-cotta band and a cream band. The opaque plain of ice he stood on was picking up these colors. He put his fist up with his thumb stuck out. At home, his thumb covered the moon; this one was seven or eight times that wide. Suddenly he understood it was Jupiter itself up there. He was standing on the surface of the moon he had been looking at.
Behind him, someone politely cleared his throat. Galileo turned; it was the stranger, standing beside a spyglass like the one he had invited Galileo to look through. Perhaps it was the same one. The air was cool and thin—bracing somehow, like a wine or even a brandy. Galileo’s balance was uncertain, and he felt lighter on his feet.
The stranger was looking curiously at Galileo. Beyond him on the nearby horizon stood a cluster of tall, slender white towers, like a collection of campaniles. They looked to be made of the same ice as the moon’s surface.
“Where are we?” Galileo demanded.
“We are on the second moon of Jupiter, which we call Europa.”
“How came we here?”
“What I told you was my spyglass is actually a kind of portal system. A transference device.”
Galileo’s thoughts darted about faster than he could register. Bruno’s idea that all the stars were inhabited, the steel machinery in the Arsenale—
“Why?” he said, trying to conceal his fear.
The stranger swallowed. His Adam’s apple, like another great nose he had ingested, bobbed under the shaved skin of his neck. “I am acting for a group here that would like you to speak to the council of moons. A group like the Venetian senate, you might say. Pregadi, you call those senators. Invitees. Here you are a pregadi. My group, which was originally from Ganymede, would like to meet you, and they would like you to speak to the general council of Jovian moons. We feel it is important enough that we were willing to disturb you like this. I offered to be your escort.”
“My Virgil,” Galileo said. He could feel his heart pounding.
The stranger did not seem to catch the reference. “I am sorry to startle you in this manner. I did not feel that I could explain it to you in Italy. I hope you will forgive me the impertinence of snatching you away like this. And the shock of it. You are looking rather amazed.”
Galileo shut his mouth, which had in fact been hanging open. He felt his dry tongue stick to the dry roof of his mouth. His feet and hands were cold. He recalled suddenly that in his dreams his feet were often cold, even to the point that sometimes he stumped about in boots of ice, and woke to find his blankets had ridden up. Now he looked at his feet, shuddering. They were still in their ordinary leather shoes, looking incongruous on the tinted ice of this world. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger, bit the inside of his lip. He certainly seemed awake. And usually the thought that he might be dreaming was enough to wake him, if dreaming he was. But here he stood, in crisp thin air, breathing fast, his heart thumping as it rarely did anymore—as it used to when he was young, and frightened by something. Now he did not feel the fear, exactly, but only his body’s response to it. His mind perhaps did not quite believe all this, but his body had to. Maybe he had died and this was heaven, or purgatory. Maybe purgatory orbited Jupiter. He recalled his facetious lecture on the geography of Dante, in which he had calculated the size of Hell by the ratio of Lucifer’s arm to the height of Virgil—
“But this is too strange!” he said.
“Yes. I’m sorry for the shock it must have caused you. It was felt that your recent observations through your spyglass would help you to understand and accept this experience. It was felt that you might be the first human capable of understanding the experience.”
“But I don’t understand it,” Galileo had to admit, pleased though he was to be considered first at anything.
The stranger regarded him. “A lack of understanding must be a feeling you are used to,” he suggested, “given the state of your research into physical forces.”
“That’s different,” Galileo said.
But it was a little bit true, when he thought about it; not understanding was a familiar sensation. At home he never had any trouble admitting it, no matter what people said to the contrary. In fact he was the only one bold enough to admit how little he understood! He had insisted on it.
But here there was no need to insist. He was flummoxed. He looked up again at Jupiter, and wondered how far away they were from it. There were too many unknowns to be able to figure it out. Its dark part, a thin crescent, was very dark. The gibbous part, well-lit by the distant sun, was strongly marked by its fat horizontal bands. The borders looked like viscous pours of oil paint, curling and overlapping but never quite mixing. It almost seemed he could see the colors move.
In the sky over his right shoulder gleamed what he took to be the sun—a chip of the utmost brilliance, like fifty stars clumped together into a space not much bigger than the other stars. As on Earth, one could not look at it for long. The sight of it so small made it evident that all the stars could be suns, maybe each with its own set of planets, just as the misfortunate Bruno had claimed. World upon world, each with its own people, like the stranger here, a Jovian it seemed. It was an astounding thought. The memory of Bruno, on the other hand, burned at the stake for saying there were such worlds, gave everything he saw a faint undercurrent of terror. He did not want to know these things.
“Is the Earth visible from here?” he asked, scanning the stars around the sun, looking for something like a blue Venus, or perhaps from out here it would be more like a blue Mercury, small and very near the sun…. Many of the stars overhead, however, were tinted red or blue, sometimes yellow, even green. What might have been Mars could have been Arcturus—no, there was Arcturus, beyond the curve of the Big Dipper. The constellations, he noted, were all the same from this vantage, as they would be only if the stars were very much farther away than the planets.
The stranger was also scanning the sky; but then he shrugged. “Maybe there,” he said, pointing at a bright white star. “I am not sure. The sky here changes fast, as you know.”
“How long is the day here?”
“The rotation is eighty-eight hours, the same as its orbital time around Jupiter, which you are on the verge of determining. Like Earth’s moon, it is tidally locked.”
“Tides?”
“Gravitational tides. There is a—a tidal force exerted by every mass. A bending of space, rather. It is difficult to explain. It would go better if other things were explained to you first.”