After a bit of research, this is what I came up with.
1. Identical to the Arduino 1.5.7 Beta setup, "extern int _end" is a variable that the laungague provides to identify the end of the .BSS section. .BSS is also below STACK and HEAP sections. All good here.
2. The Galileo does not permit any other I2C bus speeds than 100K or 400K. So anyone creating a soft-I2C, make sure to bench your responsiveness. A small MCU will have difficulties being able to process clock and data interrupts fast enough. I changed my project to get speeds of 100K. Now we are good.
Thanks JPMontero.