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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.”
Many thanks for the help from:
Charles Beck, Hadas Blinder and the Clarion 2011 selection committee, Michael Blumlein, William Burling, Bob Crais, John Cumbers, Paul di Fillipo, Ron Drummond, James Haughton, Charles R. Ill, Louis Neal Irwin, Fredric Jameson, Kimon Keramidas, Stephanie Langhoff, Darlene Lim, Chris McKay, Andrew Matthews, Beth Meacham, Pamela Mellon, Michael Montague, Lisa Nowell, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, David Robinson, Tim Robinson, Pamela Ronald, Carter Scholz, Mark Schwartz, Michael Sims, Sean Stewart, Carol Stoker, Sharon Strauss, Slawek Tulaczyk, Ralph Vicinanza, and Donald Wesling.
A special thanks to Tim Holman.
Thanks also for the art of Marina Abramovi
,
Andy Goldsworthy,
and John Dos Passos.
THREE CALIFORNIAS
The Wild Shore
The Gold Coast
Pacific Edge
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars
The Martians
Antarctica
The Years of Rice and Salt
Forty Signs of Rain
Fifty Degrees Below
Sixty Days and Counting
Galileo’s Dream
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EIDGENÖSSISCHE TECHNISCHE HOCHSCHULE MOBILE
SWAN AND PAULINE AND WAHRAM AND GENETTE
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Kim Stanley Robinson
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ISBN 978-0-316-19280-4