I have not been into space again— no one has asked for me, and I have not tried. I will not tempt Providence again. Linda and I settled on a rancho near Rio Gallegos. It is a cold, bitter land but suitable for cattle, horses, and grandchildren.
Over the years, with agonizing slowness, this sleazy badgering of the press has dribbled down to the point that I almost miss it, as one might miss the pain of an aching joint that becomes so familiar as to be part of one’s personality. The fact of my being part of that first group to go to Mars has assumed more importance and the circumstances less and less.
And, in the bottom of a desk drawer among things my late wife never saw, I keep an old picture of Ingrid, clipped from one of those magazines whose photographers had caught Ingrid on the Riviera so many years ago. In shame, I look at it and remember. I look at it and wonder, is she our future? There are many like her in space these days, and some who see a biological aspect to these things point out that the mindset best for managing a spacecraft is very close to that of keeping a home.
I dare think now that my male-oriented values, my ideas of a paternal God, my beliefs of what men and women should be, may not fit out there as well as hers. Such beliefs may be of no more lasting consequence than those of the people who built the pyramids or crossed the Bering Strait. Save for these past few primitive centuries, Ingrid Karinsdatter’s way of loving and living may be what most of eternity thinks of as typically human. Still, the pyramids are there. I salute their builders.
Looking back, the wonder may be not that a big, complicated, political, hierarchal UN/ISA mission was beaten to Mars by a woman, but that there was one at all.
Forgive me; but when I look on Ingrid, I still long for something. But it is not a body or a moment of illicit joy that time can never return that I covet as I contemplate the possibilities of eternity. No, it is not her that I covet. Not her so much as her freedom.
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Martian Valkyrie Page 5