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.