He floated down toward the peak of this broad mountain. There on the rim of the crater in its summit was a flat spot, mostly occupied by a round yellow-columned temple, open to space in the Delphic style.
He drifted down onto the yellow floor of this temple, landing easily. A square box made of something like lead or pewter lay on the ground beside him. His body weighed very little, as if he were standing in water. Overhead Jupiter bulked hugely in the starry black, every band and convolute swirl palpable to the eye. At the sight of it Galileo quivered like a horse in shock and fear.
On the other side of the box stood a knot of some dozen people, all staring at him. The stranger was now standing behind him.
“What’s this?” the stranger exclaimed angrily.
“You know what this is, Ganymede,” said a woman who emerged from the knot of people. Her voice, low and threatening, came to Galileo in language that was like a rustic old-fashioned Tuscan. She approached with a regal stride, and Galileo bowed without thinking to. She nodded his way, and said, “Welcome to Io; you are our guest here. We have met before, although you may not remember it very well. My name is Hera. One moment please, while I deal with your traveling companion.”
She stopped before the stranger, Ganymede, and looked at him as if measuring how far he would fall when she knocked him down. She was taller than Galileo and looked immensely strong, in form like one of Michelangelo’s men, her wide shoulders and muscular arms bursting from a pale yellow sleeveless blouse, made of something like silk. Pantaloons of the same material covered broad hips, thick long legs. She seemed both aged and young, female and male, in a mix that confused Galileo. Her gaze, as she looked from the stranger to Galileo and back again, was imperious, and he thought of the goddess Hera as described by Homer or Virgil.
“You stole our entangler,” Ganymede accused her, his voice coming to Galileo’s ears in an odd Latin. The Jovians’ mouths moved in ways that did not quite match what Galileo heard, and he supposed he was the beneficiary of invisible and very rapid translators. “What are you trying to do, start a war?”
Hera glared at him. “As if you haven’t already started it! You attacked the Europans in their own ocean. Now the council’s authority is shattered, and the factions are at each others’ throats.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” said Ganymede coldly.
As Galileo listened to them denounce each other, little flashes of imagery brought to him the idea of a voyage down into the subglacial ocean of Europa. He wondered what had happened, and what the situation here was. Ganymede’s indignation, suspiciously defensive to Galileo, was causing the man to thrust his narrow jaw out to the side, making his face look like a bent plow blade. “This is no joke! This is Galileo you’re kidnapping!”
“You’re the one who kidnaps him,” Hera replied. “I am rescuing him from you. Really your fixation on this particular analepsis is getting to be too much. Galileo of all people is no one to trifle with, and yet you use him just to scare the council with your rashness.”
Ganymede put his hands to his jaw and straightened it with a visible effort. His face was flushed a dark red. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“No doubt. But for now I want you to leave us alone. I am going to explain some things to our visitor here.”
“No!”
The people standing behind Hera now moved forward en masse. They were dressed in clothes similar to hers, were similarly big and brawny, and moved in a way that reminded Galileo of Cosimo’s armed retainers, the Swiss guards, when they were muscling in to keep the peace or remove someone no longer in Cosimo’s favor.
Hera nodded at them and said to Ganymede, “Stay here with my friends. You know Bia and Nike, if I am not mistaken.”
“I can’t allow this!”
“It’s not a question of what you allow or don’t. You have no authority on Io. This is our world.”
“This is nobody’s world! It’s a world of exiles and renegades, as you well know, being chief among them. My own group has taken refuge here.”
Hera said, “We let people live here who will, but we’ve been here the longest, and so we decide what happens here.” She went to Galileo’s side, and her friends moved as a group to stand between the two of them and the stranger.
Hera said to Galileo. “Welcome to Io. I was with you when they made their dive into the ocean of Europa. Do you remember that?”
“Not quite,” Galileo said uncertainly. Blue depths; a sound like a cry …
With a disgusted glance at Ganymede, she said, “Ganymede’s use of amnestics is crude, very much of a piece with the rest of his actions. I can perhaps return some of your memories to you later. But first I think it may be best to explain the situation to you a bit. Ganymede has not told you the full story. And some of what he’s told you is not true.”
She picked up the pewter box from the ground, and kept it in her arms as she led him away from the expostulating Ganymede and the group surrounding him. Despite Ganymede’s objections, Galileo followed her, interested to hear what she might say. He already knew that she was going to get what she wanted, no matter what. He had seen willful women before.
She was at least a hand taller than he was, maybe a head taller. Walking uncertainly at her side, bouncing up and down, he had to grasp her arm to keep from falling. He let go when his feet were under him, then almost fell and had to grab her again. After that, he held on to her upper arm as if to the trunk of a grapevine. She did not seem to mind, and it helped him to keep up with her. After a while he found himself helplessly making various erotic calculations having to do with her obvious strength (the box she carried looked heavy)—calculations that caused his eyes to widen and his heart to pound. It was a little hard to believe she was human.
“You are well named,” he murmured.
“Thank you,” she said. “We name ourselves when we are young, at our rite of passage. That was a long time ago.”
When they reached the far arc of the little temple, she paused. He let go of her arm. From here they had a view down the shattered sulphurous side of the great volcano they stood on—a view immensely tall, and so broad in extent that he could see a distinct curvature to the horizon, and at least a dozen smaller volcanoes, some of them steaming, others blasting great white geysers into the black sky.
Hera waved at the awesome prospect in a proprietary way. “This is Ra Patera, the biggest massif on Io. Io is what you call Moon One, the innermost of the big four. Ra Patera is far taller than the tallest mountains on Earth, bigger even than the biggest mountain on Mars. We are looking down the eastern flank toward Mazda Catena, that steaming crack in the side of the shield.” She pointed. “Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god, Mazda the Babylonian sun god.”
Galileo recalled the spotted surface of the sun as seen on the paper put under the telescope’s eyepiece. “It looks as if burnt by the sun, though we are so far from it. As hot as Hell.”
“It is hot. In many places, if you walked on the surface you would sink right into the rock. But the heat comes from inside, not from the sun. The whole moon flexes in the tidal stresses between Jupiter and Europa.”
“Tides?” Galileo said, thinking he had misunderstood. “But surely there are no oceans here.”
“By tides we mean the pull a body has on all the others around it. Every mass pulls everything else toward it, that’s just the way it is. The bigger the mass, the bigger the pull. So, Jupiter pulls us one way, and the other moons pull other ways. Mostly Europa, being so close.” She grimaced expressively. “We are caught between Jove and Europa. And all the pulls combine to warp Io continuously, first one way then another. We are therefore a hot world. Thirty times hotter than Earth, I have heard, and almost entirely molten, except for a very thin skin, and thicker islands of hardened magma like the one we stand on. The entire mass of Io has melted and been erupted onto its surface many times over.”