The Ionian woman, Hera, stood over him, as tall and massive as Zeus’s wife should be. She put out a hand, helped him to his feet; it must have been like pulling up a puppet that had had its strings cut. He almost tripped over the pewter box. She balanced him carefully, let him stand.
He wiped the tears from his face, glanced up at her full of shame and fear. She shrugged, uncomfortable and sympathetic. It was nothing to be ashamed of, the shrug seemed to say, not to like being burned at the stake. Also: not her fault. Only acquainting him with reality.
“But this is bad!” he said.
“Yes.”
“It cannot happen!”
“But it already has, as you will come to see.”
“But—you said there were different times, braided together?”
“Well, that’s right. You are quick. But in almost all the potentialities, this is what happens.”
He swallowed hard. “When?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I suppose not. Although, maybe …” He didn’t know what he meant well enough to finish the sentence.
After a silence she said, “You see now why you are revered.”
“I don’t see why,” Galileo objected. “Your Ganymede said it was because of my success! That it was because I invented the method of science, as a mathematical experimentalist.”
“Yes. And so he thinks we need you to succeed, you see. Or none of this will come to pass.”
“But surely that was not success!” A shudder rippled his muscles, as in frightened horses or dogs. “That was no triumph, if I am not mistaken!”
She said carefully, “In some people’s eyes, your success includes your immolation. Ganymede and his followers are among them. They have a fixation on you and your work, on what it meant to the rest of history. From that point on, they say, science began to dominate, and religion to recede. The secularization of the world began. Only that saves humanity from many centuries of darkness, in which science is perverted to the will of insane religions. So they think of you as the great martyr for science.”
“But why should science have to have a martyr?”
“That has been my point precisely.”
A wave of affection for this woman surged through Galileo. He took up her hand, feeling stabbed by hope. “Can you help me, then? Help me to escape that fate?”
She looked down at the sulphurous world that lay shattered below them, thinking it over. She was pondering his fate, becoming like Atropos again. He watched her avidly; she was suddenly beautiful to him, and he remembered a line from Castiglione: Beauty springs from God and is like a circle, the center of which is goodness.
“I think I can,” she said at last. He could not help kissing her hand. She looked at him speculatively. “It is probably true that you have to achieve what you will achieve, for the main channel of history to be as it has been. And it’s probably also true that that achievement is certain to get you in trouble with your theocracy.”
“I don’t see why!” This was already such a grievance with Galileo that he almost shouted this. He wrenched it into a plea. “There is no contradiction between science and Scripture! And even if there were—” for their very presence under the giant banded ball of Jupiter seemed to suggest something beyond the Bible’s purview, beyond what Scripture would countenance—”even if there were, as God made both nature and Scripture, the problem would then be with the details of the Scripture, or with our poor understanding of it. Because the two cannot disagree, as God made both, and He can’t be logically inconsistent. And the Earth goes around the sun, with all the rest of the planets. So as that is true, there is nothing blasphemous in it.”
“No. Of course not. But that was never the issue.”
She stopped, thought, sighed. “One question was, who gets to speak? Who has the authority to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality? This was what your Church objected to—that you asserted that you had the right to make statements about fundamental things. This was what you were saying, under all your details, which as often as not were wrong, or at least unsupported—that you had a right to your own opinion about reality, and that you had the right to say it in public, and argue for it against the views of theocrats.”
“So I was a kind of Protestant, you’re saying,” Galileo concluded glumly. “I might as well have gone north and become a Lutheran.”
“Maybe so.”
“And so … Well, in that case, I am doomed.”
“You are headed for trouble, that is certain, if you insist on asserting yourself in that way. Which is what you did, and which is precisely what made you a crucial figure in the human story. So that it is indispensable for you to make that assertion, and thus to be the first modern scientist.”
“And so burned at the stake, like Bruno!”
“Yes. But … the burning at the stake part, I would argue, is not the important part of your story. What is important is not the punishment, but the assertion.”
“You are good to think so, lady!” How he admired this woman’s intelligence! He could have kissed her feet at that moment, as he already had her hand; in fact he barely restrained himself as the urge came to throw himself to the ground before her. “And so, if … If …”
“If you could both make the assertion, and escape the consequences of it, somehow … Yes. It will be a close run thing, but I should think it would do. There are so many potentialities, after all. How the wave function collapses at any given moment is never completely determinative of what follows. There are inertias and instabilities, and many subsequent interventions. And if there are longer-term changes that follow, I think they could be good. The histories we have now are not such that a change in the centuries subsequent to yours would be such a bad idea. It might lessen the depth of the low point, and get us here with less suffering.”
“But it might change you out of existence?”
“But here we are,” she pointed out.
“But it might still happen?”
“Maybe. But how would that make our situation any different? We might always wink out of existence, at any time.”
Galileo shuddered at the thought. “And so you will help me?”
She regarded him curiously. She seemed almost to hesitate. But then:
“Yes. I will. It will have to be done carefully, you understand. The change will have to be subtly done. And there will be people who will try to prevent any such change, you understand. Ganymede and others.”
“I understand.”
She looked up suddenly, scowled at what she saw. Galileo followed her gaze, saw the star-studded black sky and nothing more. Except then he spotted a small cluster of moving lights, like fireflies. Reinforcements from Ganymede’s people, perhaps.
Hera said, “We should return you to Ganymede.”
“What should I say to him about this?”
She smiled, it seemed at his quickness to fall into conspiracy with her. “Whatever you like,” she said. “Here on Io, you are free to speak your mind. You can tell him everything I told you, if you like.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you. But should I tell him of our plan?”
“What do you think?”
“I would rather not. If his faction believes I must be burned for history to turn out as they want it, then they might try to keep it that way, not so?”
“Exactly.”
“Then we must keep our project a secret.”
“Ha!” she said. “I’m not good at keeping secrets. I speak my mind.”
“But you said you were going to help me!”
“I am going to help you. It’s just that I may choose not to do it in secret.”
“Ah. Well, then …” Galileo was confused. “They will send me back to my time?”