On Venus the backlash against the plot to spin up the planet caused a long and bitter civil war, largely invisible to the rest of the system, fought with knives and depressurization, and only resolved in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century with a general referendum of the entire population, which decisively chose to renew the bombardment of the equator and initiate the spectacularly destructive creation of a hundred-hour Venusian day

the so-called invisible revolutions on Earth led to the recreation of its landscapes both physical and political, all of which followed the Reanimation. In that same period the integration of qube and human existence was another invisible revolution, a struggle vexing the minds of every engineer, philosopher, and qube who ever attacked the problem

on Mars it became clear that a small working group within the official government had been infiltrated and influenced by a cadre of qubed simulacra, who were summarily kidnapped and sent into exile, after which a profound reconsideration of their governance brought them closer to their democratic system as described, and reentry in the Mondragon Accord followed

with majorities on Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Triton, and even Luna declaring the intention to fully terraform their worlds, all volatiles and nitrogen in particular became much more expensive; inflation struck the entire system at once; and by the end of the twenty-fourth century the Saturn League had amassed a titanic fortune

all the invisible events make the history of that time hard to write. And all the events continued to occur against the most intense resistance of time, material, and human recalcitrance—human fear, in fact, seizing with a desperate grip various imagined props out of the past that were somehow felt to hold the world together. Because of this, there is still and always the risk of utter failure and mad gibbering extinction. There is no alternative to continuing to struggle

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.