Galileo’s Dream. Kim Stanley Robinson

making cylindrical coils, others equiangular spirals, growing wildly outward in conic shapes. One of these flashed right by the window, and for a second or two their chamber pulsed sapphire.

      Some of the crew cried out; then there was silence.

      Galileo said, ‘What was that?’

      Ganymede appeared astonished; he stood pressed against the window, his blade of a nose touching it.

      He straightened up, expression black, ‘It’s here. I knew it. The anomalies made it very clear, I’ve been saying so all along.’ He turned to his crew. ‘We shouldn’t be here! Have the Europans shown up yet?’

      ‘We haven’t seen them,’ one replied.

      ‘Find their flue then! Get to it-we have to get to it before they do, to stop them!’

      They turned back to their screens and their crowded desktops. After a time one said, ‘We’ve found it. We can hear them within it. They’re descending. We’re closing on it-wait. There they are. Two of them, just leaving their flue.’

      Ganymede hissed. ‘Go!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ram them! Get under them and ram them from below! Full speed until you reach them, then get in position to shove them right back up the flue!’ He looked stricken, grim beyond telling. ‘We have to make them leave!’

      ‘How can you do that?’ Hera asked.

      ‘We’ll ram them until they turn back.’

      ‘Are you going to warn them?’

      ‘I don’t want to break radio silence. Who knows what effect it might have on what’s in here?’

      ‘What about the sound of collisions? What about the sounds and the exhaust from your engines?’

      ‘That’s what I’ve been saying to them! None of us should be here!’

      Another blue conic spiral flashed by them. Ganymede read the screens and the desks. ‘That could be some kind of signal. Speech, or thought, in some language of light.’

      ‘Who would it speak to?’

      ‘The light may be secondary. Who knows who it talks to. I have my suspicions, but…’

      ‘Try numbers,’ Galileo suggested. ‘Display a triangle, see if it knows the Pythagorean theorem.’

      Ganymede shook his head, visibly trying to remain patient. ‘That’s what the Europans will do, I’m afraid. Reckless interventions like that. They have no idea what they may be getting into.’

      ‘Is it some kind of fish?’

      ‘Not a fish. But on the floor of the ocean are layers of something. Perhaps a slime that is organized into larger structures.’

      ‘But how would a slime make light?’

      Ganymede clutched his black hair in his hands. ‘Light from slime is bioluminescence,’ he said tightly. ‘Slime from light is photosynthesis. Both are very common. They’re like alchemical interactions.’

      ‘But alchemy doesn’t really work.’

      ‘Sometimes it does. Be quiet now. We have to get the Europans out of here.’

      On the screen that had held the rainbow images of the flue, there stood now an image all in greys, in which near-white shapes defined an object much like their own vessel, shifting against a rumpled grey field. Ganymede took over at one desk and began to tap gently on the array of tabs and knobs. A solid bump, and then the screen showed nothing but the ghostly image of another ship. ‘Hold on,’ Ganymede ordered grimly, and began tapping harder than ever. ‘Pauline, keep the vectors such that we push it up into its flue.’

      Then a loud bang and instant deceleration knocked them all forward and up into the air. When they fell back Galileo found himself in a heap of bodies in the corner, Hera under him. He got up and tried to give her a hand, but staggered back as the vessel tipped again.

      The voice named Pauline said, ‘They’re in their flue now, but they can descend out of it again, of course.’

      ‘Go after the other one anyway. Wait, while we’re in contact with them, speak hull to hull and tell them to get back to the surface. Tell them if they don’t we’ll ram them hard enough to breach both ships. Tell them who we are and tell them I’ll do it.’

      Suddenly a storm of blue flashes exploded in the window, and all the screens lit up as if with torn rainbows. The visual chaos was split by black lightning that somehow was just as devastating to the eyes as white lightning. Cries of alarm filled the air. Then the vessel lurched down and began to spin. Everyone had to hold on to something to stay upright; Galileo clutched Hera by the elbow, as high as his shoulder, and she held him up with that same arm, while grasping a chair back with her other hand. One of the crew clutched her desk while pointing at her screen with the other hand. Ganymede moved like an acrobat across the bucking deck, inspecting one screen and then another. The officers shouted at him over a high ringing tone. On the screens Galileo caught sight of a swirl of a steep conic spiral rising from the depths, now revealed to be immense, a matter of many miles. The blue light flashed in their chamber again.

      ‘It doesn’t want us here,’ Ganymede said. ‘Pauline, open radio contact with those ships. Send this: Get out! Get out! Get out!’

      A high moan lofted up Galileo’s spine, leaving his short hairs as erect as a hedgehog’s. The sound resembled wolves howling at the moon. Often Galileo had heard them in the distance, late at night, when all the rest of the world slept. But the sound filling him now was to wolves’ howls as wolves’ howls were to human speech, a sound so uncanny that actual wolves would surely have run away whimpering. Fear turned his bowels watery. He saw all the others in the craft were just as afraid. He clutched Hera’s thick biceps, felt himself moaning involuntarily. It was too loud now for anyone to hear him; the superlupine howls became a keening shriek that seemed everywhere at once, both inside and outside him. The blue flashes were now inside the vessel, even inside his eyes, though they were squeezed shut.

      ‘Go!’ Hera shouted. Galileo wondered if anyone else could hear her. In any case the vessel was spiralling upward now, so forcefully that Galileo was knocked to his knees. Hera swung him up and around the way he would have swung a child, and plopped him into a chair; she staggered, almost landed on him, sat hard on the floor beside him. Black flashes still shot through them like lightning, through floor to ceiling, as if carrying them along in some stupendous explosion, aquatic but incorporeal, everything spiralling in a dizzying rise. It was like being in the grip of a living Archimedes’ screw. Up and up again, until there was an enormous crash, casting everyone up onto the ceiling, after which they flailed awkwardly down and thumped to the floor. They had struck the shell of ice capping the ocean, Galileo presumed, and it seemed the vessel might have cracked and everyone would soon drown. Then Galileo felt shoved toward the floor, indicating a new acceleration, as when rocked back on a bolting horse. The vessel itself now creaked and squealed, while the eerie shriek was muffled. The chamber was still bathed in flickers of blue fire. Ganymede, propped on both arms before the biggest table of screens and instruments, conferred in sharp tones with crew members holding on beside him. It seemed they were still trying to steer the thing.

      Up they tumbled, turning and spinning this way and that, pitching and yawing but always moving up.

      Ganymede said loudly, ‘Are the Europans ahead of us?’

      ‘There’s no sign of them.’ Pauline’s voice was small under the muffled shriek.

      The shriek shot up the scale in a rising glissando, until it was no longer audible; but immediately a violent earache and headache assaulted Galileo. He shouted up at Ganymede, ‘Won’t we emerge too quickly, if we don’t slow down?’

      Ganymede glanced at him, started tapping again on one of the desks.

      Then the black on the screens turned blue, an indigo that lightened abruptly, and they shot up in a violent turquoise acceleration. Galileo’s head banged the floor of the vessel and he thrust