Martian Valkyrie

of us on the surface to stay with the Norwegians. I relinquished my diminished command to Boris Yakov on Leonov and watched the ticklish tether and departure operations from the surface. This was my penance for my pride.

Three of my men lifted on the Amundsen with Ingrid while I and another lifted with Per on the Fram. We passed Phobos on the way out—the inner Martian moon would have to wait.

We tethered together without incident after trans-Earth insertion in an operation that turned out to be surprisingly simple. Per went outside and hooked the ships together while they were nosed up to each other. Each ship then translated to its own right while the line played out, and when the cable was mostly out, did a small burn at right angles to the tether to induce the rotation. Any swinging motions were damped with attitude control thrusters.

Despite six men and one woman, there were no struggles between people on the return mission. Its commander and her understanding first mate saw to that. The Norwegians had a little battery-powered tether runner that gripped the line like a set of tram wheels and pulled you from one ship to another. Ingrid made the trip once a week. We all had frequent times alone with her—and it was not necessarily for sex. People are made to come in pairs, I think, and there are times when it is comforting to be with a woman even if you do nothing but look at the stars, not even talk.

One night three weeks out from Mars, we found ourselves in the dome alone. Per and Mustaffa were asleep below. We sat side by side on one of the acceleration couches, touching comfortably—and uncomfortably. I was fighting a war with myself inside, and losing, again.

“Could you care for me, really?” I asked, meaning could you be the wife of a man who would protect you, who would not let you sleep with others, who would lead you instead of follow? “I think, at times, that I would undo everything to have you, and accept what fate that would bring.”

To take another man’s wife? To steal in the bed a share of the glory I could not win among the stars? No man with self-respect would do that, but events had stripped me to my essential needs. I could summon little sympathy for Per either; he seemed far too careless with his property.

Ingrid touched my lips with her fingers. “It could not be the same with you as with Per. He gives me the space I need and, in my way, I am unbreakably loyal to him. I enjoy doing things for people I care for, but not for life. I cannot be owned by anyone, and I think you want to own me.”

Wanting what I cannot have is a way of life for me. It does not stop me from trying. I looked up at the Amundsen, far overhead on the other end of the tether. “Does it have a telescope?” I asked.

“Of course it does,” she answered, “do you think they watch us now?” She smiled and waved at the distant ship. “Should we put on a show?”

I shook my head. “Ingrid, God forgive me, I want to love you, but to prove it you ask me to abandon my culture, my concepts of right and wrong that lie more deeply in my soul than any other. I am ashamed of myself.”

“I am not ashamed of what I do not think is wrong.” She smiled and added, “But I would not embarrass you. We can always turn out the lights, Enrico, so no one can see through the reflection.”

I stared at her. “You knew.”

“I know many things—like how to win a race to Mars, and how to run a happy ship.”

“The maneuvers, the surprise separation. That wasn’t Halvorsen’s doing?”

“Was Halvorsen on this ship? Was it Halvorsen who had a personal stake in being first—oh, he had point to make, but, nei, it was not a point that required his being first. If anything he is somewhat upset with me.” Her laugh was a throaty burble of delight. “No, that dear old man did not beat you to Mars. I did. I wanted to be first because I am a woman and I wanted to do something no one would ever forget, or put in second place. So I did it.”

The look of complete shock on my face must have troubled even her. Good men had died—but did they die because of what she did, or because of what I did in response? And if she had not responded and it had happened anyway—I and five more would be dead.

“You must get used to this, I think.” She caressed my chest and murmured, “It is not so hard to understand, is it? That no one owns me, that I, too, pursue my own goals and my own happiness?”

But it was hard. My mind was elsewhere, so lost in the maze of contingency that the only way out was to step out of the maze entirely through a greater dimension—that of providcnce. What happened, happened. It was not my fate to be first in anything—on Mars, or in the heart of the woman I must love, and hate, more than any other. Finally I took solace in how far from being last in all these things I was.

“I should die for this,” I said before my lips met hers for what I vowed would be the last time. “Or you. I am not sure who.”

I did not gain the reward of death during the aerocapture maneuver when the Amundsen reached Earth, and I had to endure the purgatory of weeks and months of impoliteness from the insatiable vampires of the media. I fled to southernmost Argentina. Per and Ingrid went to Mars twice more, and settled there in 2043.

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.