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 creche 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.”
