2312 (4 page)

Toad Man was very slow on his feet. He stood right next to the paintings, for a long time, sometimes with his nose only a
centimeter from the paint. Tintoretto’s
Paradise
was twenty meters wide and ten tall—the notes said it was the largest painting ever painted on canvas—and very crowded with figures. Wahram moved all the way back to 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.

T
erminator rolls around Mercury just like its sunwalkers, moving at the speed of the planet’s rotation, gliding over twenty gigantic elevated tracks, which together hold aloft and push west a town quite a bit bigger than Venice. The twenty tracks run around Mercury like a narrow wedding band, keeping near the forty-fifth latitude south, but with wide detours to south and north to avoid the worst of the planet’s long escarpments. The city moves at an average of five kilometers an hour. The sleeves on the underside of the city are fitted over the track at a tolerance so fine that the thermal expansion of the tracks’ austenite stainless steel is always pushing the city west, onto the narrower tracks still in the shade. A little bit of resistance to this movement creates a great deal of the city’s electricity.

From the top of the Dawn Wall, which is a silvery cliff forming the eastern edge of the city, one can see the whole town stretching out to the west, green under its clear dome. The city illuminates the dark landscape around it like a passing lamp; the illumination is very noticeable except at those times when high cliffs west of the city reflect horizontal sunlight into town. Even these mere pinpricks of the dawn more than equal the artificial lights inside the dome. During these cliffblinks nothing has a shadow; space turns strange. Then the mirrors are passed; that light fades. These shifts in illumination are a significant part of the sensation of movement one has in Terminator, for the glide
over the tracks is very smooth. Changes in light, slight tilts in pitch, these make it seem as if the town were a ship, sailing over a black ocean with waves so large that when in their troughs, the ship drops into the night, then on high points crests back into day.

The city sliding at its stately pace completes a revolution every 177 days. Round after round, nothing changing but the land itself; and the land only changes because the sunwalkers include landscape artists, who are out there polishing mirror cliffs, carving petroglyphs, erecting cairns and dolmens and inuksuit, and arranging blocks and lines of metal to expose to the melt of day. Thus Terminator’s citizens continuously glide and walk over their world, remaking it day by day into something more expressive of their thoughts. All cities, and all their citizens, move in just such a way.

T
he next day Swan returned to Mqaret’s lab. Again he was in his office staring at nothing. Suddenly Swan realized it was a relief to have something to be angry at.

Mqaret roused himself. “How was your trip out with Wahram?”

“He’s slow, he’s rude, he’s autistic. He’s boring.”

Mqaret smiled a little. “Actually it sounds like you found him interesting.”

“Please.”

“Well, I can assure you Alex found him interesting. She spoke of him pretty often. A few times she made it clear they were involved in things she thought were very important.”

This gave Swan pause, as it was meant to. “Gran, can I have another look around her study?”

“Of course.”

S
wan went down the hall to Alex’s room at the end, entered, and closed the door. She went to the one window and looked out at the city, all roof tiles and greenery from this vantage point.

She wandered around the study, looking at things. Mqaret had not yet changed anything. She wondered if he would, and if so, when. All Alex’s things, scattered as always. Her absence was a kind of presence, and again grief stabbed through Swan’s middle and she had to sit down.

After a while she stood and began a more methodical
examination. If Alex had left something for her, where would she have put it? Swan could not guess. Alex had wanted always to keep her business offline, out of the cloud, unrecorded, live only, in real time only. But if she had done anything like this, she would have to have figured out some kind of method. Knowing her, it might be a purloined-letter type of thing: a paper note, for instance, right there on her desktop.

So Swan hunted through small stacks of paper on her desk, still thinking it over. If she had had information she wanted Swan to pass along, without Swan necessarily knowing what it was… if there were a lot of data… possibly it would be more than a paper note. And possibly she would want only Swan to find it.

She began to wander the room, talking to herself, and looking closely at things. The room’s control AI would know the room was occupied by only a single person and, with voice and retina, could certainly be set to identify the person.

There was a little toilet room attached to the study, with a sink and mirror, so now she went into it. “I’m here, Alex,” Swan said sadly. “I’m here if you want me.”

She looked into the wall mirror, then into a little oval mirror on a stand next to the sink. Sad Swan’s bloodshot eyes.

A jewelry box next to the oval mirror fell open; Swan jumped back into the wall, then collected herself. She looked in the box. Jewelry tray; take it out; and under it were three small white paper envelopes. All had written on one side
In Case of My Death
; on the other sides they were marked
For Mqaret
,
For Swan
, and
For Wang on Io
.

Hands trembling, Swan took the one marked for her and tore it open. Two little data tabs fell out. One of them was murmuring, “Swan, Swan, Swan.” Swan put it to her ear, her teeth clenched, tears starting to her eyes.

“My dear Swan, I am sorry you are hearing this,” Alex’s voice said. It was just like hearing a ghost, and Swan clutched her hands over her chest.

The little voice went on: “Very sorry, in fact, because if you’re hearing this, it means I’m gone. My room AI has heard about my death, and it knows to open this box if you come in here alone. It’s the best plan I could think of. Sorry to intrude on you like this, but it’s important. This is kind of an insurance policy, because I’ve got some things going on that need to continue even if I die, and I don’t want to tell anyone else here about them. And really at our age you can go any time, so I’m setting this up. If you’re hearing this, I need your help. Please take the envelope for Wang out to Io and give it to him in person. Wang and I and a few others are working on a couple of very important projects together, and we’ve been trying to keep completely offline with them, which is very difficult to do when we live so far apart. You can help me hugely by taking him his envelope. But please keep the matter entirely to yourself. Also, if you would let your Pauline read the other chip in your envelope and then destroy the chip, that would serve as a secure backup. They both are one-reads. I hate to do even this much. But I know you don’t usually link Pauline to other qubes, and if you would keep it that way, it would be better for our plan. Wang will explain more to you, as will Wahram from Titan. Good-bye, my Swan. I love you.”