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Swan shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll go out on the surface again. That’s my place to… to pull myself together.”

“Will you show it to me?”

“What?” Swan said.

“I would be very grateful if you were to take me out there. Maybe show me one of your installations. Or, if you don’t mind-I noticed that the city is approaching Tintoretto Crater. My shuttle doesn’t leave for a few days, and I would love to see the museum there. I have some questions that can’t be resolved on Earth.”

“Questions about Tintoretto?”

“Yes.”

“Well…” Swan hesitated, unsure what to say.

“It would be a way to pass the time,” the man suggested.

“Yes.” This was presumptuous enough to irritate her, but on the other hand, she had in fact been searching for something to distract her, something to do in the aftermath, and nothing had come to her. “Well, I suppose.”

“Thank you very much.”

Lists (1)

Ibsen and Imhotep; Mahler, Matisse; Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and Holbein, touching rims; Ovid starring the rim of the much larger Pushkin; Goya overlapping Sophocles. Van Gogh touching Cervantes, next to Dickens. Stravinsky and Vyasa. Lysippus. Equiano, a West African slave writer, not located near the equator. Chopin and Wagner right next to each other, equal size. Chekhov and Michelangelo both double craters. Shakespeare and Beethoven, giant basins. Al-J i, Al-Akh al. Aristoxenus, Ashvaghosha. Kurosawa, Lu Hsun, Ma Chih-yuan. Proust and Purcell. Thoreau and Li Po, R m and Shelley, Snorri and Pigalle. Valmiki, Whitman. Brueghel and Ives. Hawthorne and Melville.

It’s said the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union got hilariously drunk one night at their annual meeting, took out a mosaic of the first photos of Mercury, recently received, and used it as a dartboard, calling out to each other the names of famous painters, sculptors, composers, writers-naming the darts, then throwing them at the map.

There is an escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.

SWAN AND WAHRAM

It was not difficult to spot the Titan, standing there by the city’s south lock door at the appointed hour. He was in form spherical, or perhaps cubical. As tall as Swan, and Swan was pretty tall. Black hair in tight curls like sheep’s wool, cut close to his round head.

Swan approached him. “Off we go,” she said gracelessly.

“Thank you again for this.”

Terminator began to glide past the platform that held the Tintoretto tram station. They walked through the lock directly into a waiting tram, along with about a dozen other people.

The tram, when it departed, moved much faster than Terminator did, zipping off west on ordinary tram tracks and soon reaching a couple hundred kilometers an hour.

Swan identified a long low hill on the horizon as the outer wall of Hesiod Crater. Wahram consulted his wristpad: “We slide between Hesiod and Sibelius,” he announced with a little smile. His pop eyes had brown irises, flecked with radial streaks of black and pumpkin. His wristpad meant he probably did not have a qube stuck in his head, and if he did, it would not be a bitch trying to ruin his day. Pauline was murmuring stuff in her ear, and when Wahram got up to look out the other side of the tram, Swan muttered, “Don’t bother me, Pauline. Don’t interrupt me, don’t distract me.”

“Exergasia is one of the weakest of the rhetorical devices,” Pauline opined.

“Be quiet!”

After another hour they had a good lead on Terminator, and the tram glided up to the outer wall of Tintoretto Crater, where the tracks led into a tunnel in the rugged wall of old ejecta. As they exited the tram, it announced they had two hours before it would return to the city. Through the vestibule of the museum, then to a long arcing gallery. The inner curve of the chamber was a single recessed window wall, giving them an excellent view of the crater’s interior. It was a small but steep-walled crater, a handsome circular space under the stars.

But her Saturnian did not appear to be interested in Mercury. He walked facing the outer wall of the gallery, moving slowly from painting to painting. He planted himself in front of them each in turn, stood staring impassively.