Mqaret heaved another sigh. “Well, I don’t know. She didn’t leave me anything either, as far as I know. I mean, it would be like Alex to tuck something away without telling us. But nothing has popped up. So I just don’t know.”
Swan said, “So there wasn’t anything unusual in the autopsy?”
“No!” Mqaret said, but he was thinking it over. “A cerebral aneurysm, probably congenital, burst and caused an intraparenchymal hemorrhage. It happens.”
Swan said, “If someone had done something to—to cause a hemorrhage… would you necessarily be able to tell?”
Mqaret stared at her, frowning.
Then they heard another tap at the lab’s outer door. They looked at each other, sharing a little frisson. Mqaret shrugged; he had not been expecting anyone.
“Come in!” he called again.
The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos—toad, newt, frog—even the very words were ugly. Briefly it occurred to Swan that onomatopoeia might be more common than people recognized, their languages echoing the world like birdsong. Swan had a bit of lark in her brain. Toad.Once she had seen a toad in an amazonia, sitting at the edge of a pond, its warty wet skin all bronze and gold. She had liked the look of it.
“Ah,” Mqaret said. “Wahram. Welcome to our lab. Swan, this is Fitz Wahram, from Titan. He was one of Alex’s closest associates, and really one of her favorite people.”
Swan, somewhat surprised that Alex could have such a person in her life without Swan ever hearing of it, frowned at the man.
Wahram dipped his head in a kind of autistic bow. He put his hand over his heart. “I am so sorry,” he said. A froggy croak. “Alex meant a great deal to me, and to a lot of us. I loved her, and in our work together she was the crucial figure, the leader. I don’t know how we will get along without her. When I think of how I feel, I can scarcely grasp how you must feel.”
“Thank you,” Mqaret said. So strange the words people said at these moments. Swan could not speak any of them.
A person Alex had liked. Swan tapped the skin behind her right ear, activating her qube, which she had turned off as a punishment. Now Pauline would fill her in on things, all by way of a quiet voice in Swan’s right ear. Swan was very irritated with Pauline these days, but suddenly she wanted information.
Mqaret said, “So what will happen to the conference?”
“There is complete agreement to postpone it and reschedule. No one has the heart for it now. We will disperse and reconvene later, probably on Vesta.”
Ah yes: without Alex, Mercury would no longer be a meeting place. Mqaret nodded at this, unsurprised. “So you will return to Saturn.”
“Yes. But before I go, I am curious to know whether Alex left anything for me. Any information or data, in any form.”
Mqaret and Swan shared a look. “No,” they both said at once. Mqaret gestured. “We were just asked that by Inspector Genette.”
“Ah.” The toad person regarded them with a pop-eyed stare. Then one of Mqaret’s assistants came into the room and asked for his help. Mqaret excused himself, and then Swan was alone with their visitor and his questions.
Very big, this toad person: big shoulders, big chest, big belly. Short legs. People were strange. Now he shook his head and said in a deep gravelly voice—a beautiful voice, she had to admit—froggy, yes, but relaxed, deep, thick with timbre, something like a bassoon or a bass saxophone—“So sorry to bother you at a time like this. I wish we could have met under different circumstances. I am an admirer of your landscape installations. When I heard that you were related to Alex, I asked her if it might be possible to meet you. I wanted to say how much I like your piece at Rilke Crater. It’s really very beautiful.”
Swan was taken aback by this. At Rilke she had erected a circle of Göbekli T-stones, which looked very contemporary even though they were based on something over ten thousand years old. “Thank you,” she said. A cultured toad, it seemed. “Tell me, why did you think Alex might have left a message for you?”
“We were working together on a couple of things,” he said evasively, his fixed gaze shifting away. He didn’t want to discuss it, she saw. And yet he had come to ask about it. “And, well, she always spoke so highly of you. It was clear you two were close. So… she didn’t like to put things in the cloud or in any digital form—really, to keep records of our activities in any media at all. She preferred word of mouth.”
“I know,” Swan said, feeling a stab. She could hear Alex say it: We have to talk! It’s a face world! With her intense blue eyes, her laugh. All gone.
The big man saw the change in her and extended a hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said again.
“I know,” Swan said. Then: “Thank you.”
She sat down in one of Mqaret’s chairs and tried to think about something else.
After a while the big man said in a gentle rumble, “What will you do now?”
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
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.