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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.”

W hen 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.