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The canvases ranged in size from miniatures to gigantic wall-fillers. The palette of Renaissance Italy fleshed out crowded scenes from the Bible: the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, Paradise, and so on. Mixed in was a bit of classical mythology-including a portrait of Mercury himself, with stylish gold shoes covering his feet, the shoes sporting slots through which Mercury’s wings emerged. There were also many portraits of individual sixteenth-century Venetians, vivid to the point of breaking into speech. Most of the paintings were the originals, moved here for safekeeping; the rest were copies so perfect that it would take a chemical analysis to tell them from the originals. As with many of Mercury’s single-artist museums, the hope was to gather all the original paintings here and locate only copies on Earth, to take on the intense assault of that most volatile environment-oxidation, corrosion, rust, fire, theft, vandalism, smog, acid, daylight… Here, in contrast, everything was controlled, benign-safer. Or so it was said by Mercurial curators. The Terrans were not always so sure.

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.