the clear inner wall to look at this one for a while, then took his more usual position nuzzling it. “Interesting how he has angels’ wings as being black,” he murmured, breaking his silence at last. “It looks good. And look here, see how the white lines in this one angel’s black wings actually form letters. C H E R, see? Then the rest of the word is hidden in a fold. That’s what I wanted to check. I wonder what that was about.”
“Some kind of code?”
He didn’t reply. Swan wondered if this was his usual response to art. He ambled on to the next painting. Possibly he was humming to himself. He was not interested in her response to these paintings, even though he knew she was an artist. She wandered on her own, looking at the portraits. The big crowd scenes were too much for her, like epic movies all jammed into a single frame. The subjects of the portraits, on the other hand, looked at her with expressions she recognized immediately. “I am always me, I am always new, I am always me”-for eight centuries they had been saying it. Nothing but women and men. One woman had her left nipple exposed, just under the curve of a necklace; in most periods that would have been transgressive, she seemed to recall. Almost all the women were very small-breasted and big-waisted. Well-fed, under-exercised; didn’t nurse their own babies; not working people. The bodies of nobles. Beginning of speciation. Tintoretto’s Leda looked quite fond of the swan ravishing her, in fact was protecting the swan from an intruder. Swan had once or twice been swan to a Leda, not violently of course-at least not physical violence-and she recalled some of the Ledas had liked it. Others not.
She returned to Wahram, who was again inspecting Paradise, this time from as far away as he could get, thus at a slant. To Swan it still seemed a mess. “It’s very crowded,” she said. “The figures are in too symmetrical a pattern, and God and Christ look like doges. Indeed the whole thing looks like a Venetian senate meeting. Maybe that was Tintoretto’s idea of paradise.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“You don’t agree. You like it.”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and walked a few meters away from her.
He didn’t want to talk about it. Swan went off to look at more Venetians. For her art was something to make, first and foremost, and after that something to talk about. Ineffable aesthetic responses, communing with a work- these struck her as too precious. One of the portraits glowered, another tried to suppress a little ironic smile; they agreed with her. She was out here with a stick of a toad. Mqaret had said Alex revered this man, but now she doubted it could be true. Who was he? What was he?
A low recorded announcement informed them it was time for the tram to take them back to Terminator, which would soon be catching up to their longitude-as would the sun. “Oh no!” Wahram exclaimed faintly as he heard the announcement. “We’ve only just started!”
“There are over three hundred paintings here,” Swan pointed out. “One visit will never do. You’ll have to come back.”
“I hope,” he said. “These are really magnificent. I can see why they called him Il Furioso. He must have worked every day.”
“I think that’s right. He had a place in Venice that he rarely left. A closed shop. His assistants were mostly his children.” Swan had just read this on one of the notes.
“Interesting.” He sighed and followed her to the tram.
On the ride back to the city, they passed a group of sunwalkers, and Swan pointed them out. Her guest roused himself from his reverie and looked.
“So they have to keep moving,” he said. “How do they rest, eat, sleep?”
“We eat on our feet, and sleep in carts pulled by companions,” Swan said. “We take turns at that, and on it goes.”
He gave her a look. “So you have an inexorable spur to action. I can see the appeal.”
She almost laughed. “Do you need such a spur?”
“I think everyone does. Don’t you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But you join these ferals,” he said.
“That’s just to do it. To see the land and the sun. I check out things I made, or do a little crack mining. I don’t need to find reasons to stay busy.”
This was exactly backward, she realized, and shut her mouth.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “Most people do.”
“Do you think?”
“Yes.” He gestured at the sunwalkers, whom they were rapidly leaving behind. “What happens if you run into an obstruction that keeps you from continuing westward?”
“You have to avoid those. In some places they’ve built little ramps that go up cliffs, or trail systems that get through chaotic terrain quickly. There are routes established. Some people stick to certain routes, some do them all. Others like to try new terrain. It’s pretty common to do a complete circumnavigation.”
“Have you done that?”
“Yes, but it’s too long for me. I usually go out for a week or two.”
“I see.”
It was pretty clear he didn’t.
“We were made to do this, you know,” she said suddenly. “Our bodies are nomads. Humans and hyenas are the two predators that chase their prey down by wearing it out.”
“I like walking,” he allowed.
“So what about you? What do you do to occupy your time?”
“I think,” he said promptly.
“And that’s enough for you?”
He glanced at her. “There’s a lot to think about.”
“But what do you do?”
“I suppose I read. Travel. Listen to music. Look at the visual arts.” He thought some more. “I work on the Titan project, that’s very interesting, I find.”
“And the Saturnian league, more generally, Mqaret tells me. System diplomacy.”
“Yes, well, my name came up in the lottery and I had to do my time, but it’s almost over now, and then I plan to return to Titan and get back to my waldo.”
“So… what were you and Alex working on?”
His pop eyes took on a look of alarm. “Well, some of it she wouldn’t want me to talk about. But she spoke of you often, and now that she’s gone, I just wondered if she might have left you a message. Or even arranged things such that you might be able to step in a bit in her absence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you designed many of the terraria out there, and now they form the bulk of the Mondragon Accord. They would listen to you, perhaps, knowing you were one of Alex’s closest confidantes. So… possibly you could go out with me and meet some people.”
“What, to Saturn?”
“To Jupiter, actually.”
“I don’t want to do that. My life is here, my work. I traveled the system enough when I was young.”
He nodded unhappily. “And… you are quite certain Alex didn’t leave anything for you? Something to give to me, in case something happened to her?”
“Yes, I’m sure! There’s nothing! She didn’t do things like that.”
He shook his head. They sat in silence as the tram slid over the dark face of Mercury. To the north some hilltops were just sparking white with the rising sunlight. Then the top of Terminator’s dome appeared over the horizon, like the shell of a transparent egg. As it cleared the horizon, the city looked like a snow globe, or a ship in a bottle-an ocean liner on a black sea, caught in a bubble of green light. “Tintoretto would have liked your city,” Wahram said. “It looks like a kind of Venice.”
“No it doesn’t,” Swan said crossly, thinking hard.
TERMINATOR
