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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’sdome 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
    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 glideover 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