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Epilogue

Descending to Mars on its Pavonis space elevator, you look down through the clear floor at the red planet rising to meet you. The three prince volcanoes topping the Tharsis bulge bulk in a line, like mounds built by a mound-building tribe of red people. Off to the west Olympus Mons rears like a round continent all its own, its encircling ten-kilometer cliff from this vantage no more than a beveled line around its foot. All the rest of the planet is cut into enormous red polygons by the many green lines crisscrossing the planet—the famous canals, incised into the landscape in the first days of terraforming. They used orbiting Birch solettas that focused sunlight like a magnifying glass on the land, creating temperatures so high that the rock both vaporized and melted. Quite a bit of Mars had to be thus burned to get all the air and heat they wanted; so to distribute that burn they had decided to use the Lowell maps of the late nineteenth century as inspiration, and platted the burn accordingly. Having gone that far, they also adopted the old nomenclature for these canals, a witches’ brew of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Egyptian, and other ancient languages, so that you now descend to places with names like Nodus Gordii, Phaethontis, Icaria, Tractus Albus, Nilokeras, Phoenicis Lacus. The greened strips crossing the red land are about hundred kilometers wide, and are only threaded by their actual canals. The strips sometimes run in pairs across the red desert. They meet at vaguely hexagonal angles, and the nodes are lush oases, with elegant cities clustered around complexes of waterways and locks, ponds and fountains. Thus a nineteenth-century fantasy forms the basis for the actual landscape currently existing. Some call it bad taste. But they were in a hurry, back in the beginning, and this is what they had to show for it.

North of Olympus Mons the wedding party walked out of the doors of a train station into the open air, just as if they had been on Earth. It was early in the morning, cool and breezy. The sky was a Maxfield Parrish blue; the trees scattered about in small groves were enormous sequoia, eucalyptus, valley oak. The canal ran across the plain below the hill they were on, one side of it lined with cypress trees. Between its levees the canal’s water looked as if it stood a little higher than the land around it. In many places the levee tops were broad high boulevards, green and crowded with buildings and people. Lower on the sides of the levees it could sometimes be seen that they were composed of endless mounds of black glass.

Along the top of one levee they rode a tram, headed for Olympus Mons. Wide streets angled out into the green fields that flitted by below them. These grassy boulevards were flanked by blocky buildings that were often faced with ceramic murals and had an Art Deco look. They passed white plazas under palm trees and remarked to each other the lush beauty, also the uniformity of style, with its hexagonal suggestion of a hive mind. A green and pleasant land. They trammed from oasis to oasis, in a regular flashing of light and shadow created by the long rows of cypress trees by the tracks. Gardens in the desert. The hyperterran look combined with the Mercury-light gravity created a dreamscape feel. Mercury would never look like this. Nowhere else could look like this.

Inspector Genette, standing on the chair by the window and looking out intently at the passing scene, said, “I lived there once,” gesturing down at one swiftly passing town square. “I think it was in that building right there.”

Their tram stopped in a train station in Hougeria, where they were going to transfer to a maglev train to ascend the northeast side of Olympus Mons. While they waited for their train, they took a walk out of the station and around the city center. All the canals were iced over here, and people were out ice-skating, hands behind their backs. It was sunny but chill.

Swan complained about the trip up the great volcano: “What’s the point of coming to Mars if we go right up out of the atmosphere and have to stay in a tent again? Up there we could be anywhere.”

This was regarded by her companions as a rhetorical question, as they were all quite sure she remembered they were attending the epithalamion. Wahram shaded his eyes and looked south, up the side of the great volcano. They were at the only part of the circumference of Olympus Mons that was not guarded by an immense escarpment, a circular cliff ten kilometers high that was remarkably uniform all the way around the mountain; but here a flood of lava late in the volcano’s active life had poured down and over the escarpment—had fallen in a ten-kilometer firefall, which Wahram was now attempting to imagine—ten thousand meters of free fall, cooling on the way no doubt, from red to orange to black, while the spill at the bottom piled up on itself and rose higher and higher, until the cliff was entirely erased under lava, after which the molten rock continued to flow northeast, leaving in the end a broad and gentle ramp extending all the way from the upper slopes of the volcano down to the plain. Thus the land under them now, its fiery past.

“After this we can tour the lowlands,” Wahram said. “Honeymoon at the beach, so to speak.”

“Good. I want to go swimming in the Hellas Sea.”

“Me too.”

When the time came, they got in one of the pressurized cars of their maglev train, along with many other wedding parties, and the train headed up the ramp toward the summit. It was a long lift, and took them through a Martian-red sunset, and then a night of parties and troubled sleep. At dawn they woke to find the train entering the station on the southeast slope of the volcano’s broad summit. Here on the apron of little Crater Zp a big clear tent covered the planet’s traditional festival space. They had arrived on the first morning of the epithalamion.

From the inside, the tenting could scarcely be seen; it was much less visible than Terminator’s dome, and it seemed as if they stood in the open air, which was warm and aromatic. A black roof of starry space stood overhead, turning blue only just over the horizon; the atmosphere was almost entirely below them. They had to be inside a tent, and knowing that, one could just make it out here and there, prisming against the border of blue-and-black sky. Olympus Mons was so big that the distant horizon to the east and south was still part of the mountain; they could not see the Tharsis volcanoes over the horizon to the east, nor any of the planet below the encircling escarpment. All the land they could see was as bare and red as it had been in the beginning, with only the blue rind of air over the horizon to reveal what they had done to this world.

All the tented land of the festival space was on a mild tilt, and had been terraced, therefore, to make flat surfaces. The result looked like certain terraced hillsides in Asia: a few hundred bands of level land ran down the slope, the terrace walls between them curving like contour intervals on a map. Three broad low-angled staircases cut up through these terrace walls, and some of their wedding party remarked at how this reminded them a bit of the Great Staircase in Terminator; but these staircases extended for four or five kilometers each and spanned a vertical reach of perhaps three hundred meters—it was hard to judge, given the vastness of the volcano outside the tent.

The epithalamion was the wedding day for Mars and for visitors from all over the system. Now the festival space was busy with movement, and loud with voices, as a few hundred couples moved up and down the staircases with their groups, finding the terraces reserved for them. The three staircases were heaped with flowers for the day. One could not avoid stepping on flowers, and their bright colors stained the big quartzite flagstones covering the risers.

Wahram and Swan and their group came to their terrace, number 312. When Swan saw that their friends had decorated the terrace in flowers so as to make it look somewhat as if Terminator’s Great Staircase were running through the seashell architecture of Iapetus, she smiled and gave Wahram a hug. They stood together smiling as their party of friends applauded them. Wahram was dressed in Saturnian black and resembled a dreadful Roman emperor or, yes, a giant amphibian. Mr. Toad was indeed beginning his wild ride. Swan was in a red dress that made it look as if she stood in a rose of fire. She would not let go of Wahram’s hand as they ascended littler stairs onto the dais where they were going to conduct their ceremony.

Music was playing all over the festival grounds, and they could hear very distinctly a gamelan from the terrace below, but the overlapping musics were part of the epithalamion experience, and their own ceremony was to be accompanied by the galloping finale of Brahms’s Second Symphony—Wahram’s choice, but Swan had approved. She kept looking up at him as Inspector Genette tapped at Passepartout’s screen to call up the poem they had asked him to read. Wahram seemed to be mostly looking out at the view. It was still morning, and the sunlight slanted in at them in almost Mercurial splendor. It was a huge planet. All the couples above and below them were performing their particular nuptials. The space was so big, the music so various, that each ceremony took place in a little bubble world of its own; but the sight and sound of all of them together was very much part of each one.

In their particular space, Saturn and Mercury were well represented. Mqaret was there, also Wang, and Kiran, and some of Swan’s farm team. Zasha too. Wahram’s crèche was represented by Dana and Joyce, and the Satyr of Pan. They all stood in a disorganized mass around the dais, but the two populations could be easily distinguished, the Saturnians in their black and gray and blue, the Mercurials in their reds and golds. There was also a group of Genette’s old Martian friends, many of them smalls. Apparently all the smalls at the festival were to congregate later to sing small favorites like “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant” and “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”

Everyone on the terrace was looking pleased. They were eyeing each other and smiling: Our friends are doing something crazy, their looks said, something crazy and beautiful, isn’t it great? Love—some kind of leap of the imagination. Inexplicable. It was going to be quite a party.

Inspector Genette, standing on a lectern to be almost at eye level with the two of them, raised their clasped hands together and said, “You two, Swan and Wahram, have decided to marry and become life partners, for as long as you both shall live. Wahram, do you affirm this?”

“I do so affirm.”

“Swan, do you affirm this?”

“Yes.”

“Do it, then. Live it, and everyone here, help them to live it. I now recite some lines from Emily Dickinson that describe very well the symbiogenesis they intend to enact:

Brain of his brain—

Blood of his blood—

Two lives—one being—now—

All life—to know each other—

Whom we can never learn—

Just finding out—what puzzled us—

Without the lexicon!”

The inspector smiled at this thought, raised a hand. “By the authority vested in me by you and by the Mondragon Accord, and even by Mars, I declare that Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram by mutual agreement are now married.”

Genette hopped off the lectern. Swan and Wahram faced each other; briefly they kissed. Then they turned and faced the group below them, and their friends applauded. The Brahms surged to its dizzy end, trombones blaring. Swan took a gold ring held up by the inspector, who made a lovely ring bearer, and pulled up Wahram’s left hand. She saw he was squinting down the slope of Olympus, the look on his face pensive, almost melancholy. She squeezed his hand and he looked at her. “Well,” he said with the tiniest of smiles, “I guess now we get to walk the second half of the tunnel.”

“No!” she cried, and thumped him on the chest, then jammed the ring over the knuckle of his ring finger. “This is for life.”