Helen’s daughter believes that her mother has not adequately dealt with the death of her husband, and further believes that the reason for this has to do with Helen’s unresolved feelings about the death of Helen’s father. Helen does not know exactly what Meeps means when she says this, does not know exactly what sort of statement or act on her part would indicate resolution, and suspects that what her daughter wants is to manifest in Helen an emotional life closer to her daughter’s own dizzyingly intense ability to feel many things at once.
Boone continues the tour. More than a few of the images in Prime Space’s lobby of dreams seemed to be drawn from science fiction rather than actual space exploration milestones. For Helen, the initial flame had been a book. Men on the Moon. But it wasn’t Neil or Buzz that had interested her, or even the moon itself. She had been attracted to the mission’s most unsung hero: Michael Collins, alone in Columbia, drifting around the moon in exquisite solitary splendor while Buzz and Neil had gone about the terrestrial work of putting down a plaque, erecting a flag, and gathering rocks. Every two hours Michael Collins had gone out of radio contact for forty-eight minutes when the moon stood between himself and Earth, and during those minutes he was the most alone person in the history of people. Helen still liked to think about that. That had always been her dream: space, not a location within it, just space.
But she had made, as they all had, public statements of support for every Prime Space success in the MarsNOW timeline announced fifteen years ago. As one of Helen’s astronaut colleagues had put it, “You never know. At least it’s not another fucking rover.” One by one, Prime had been knocking down every serious obstacle, eliminating every “show-stopper.” Even the notoriously cautious Office of Planetary Protection had cleared Prime’s proposed landing site as being acceptable for human presence. And the last achievement—Red Dawn, Prime Space’s Earth Return Vehicle—was currently on Mars making its own propellant from Martian resources, a ride back to Earth for the first humans who could make it there.
Prime Space had been good for all of them, keeping the dream of human space exploration alive during NASA’s Congressional de-pantsing and subsequent morale depletion. Everyone assumed that Prime was working toward developing an independent astronaut corps.
Helen told herself that she would consider any offer carefully. This conversation might have nothing to do with MarsNOW. Prime might want her to advise on its astronaut program. They might want her expertise on inflatable graphene habitats. They might want her as a figurehead, a photograph, a status symbol. It is these scenarios Helen thinks of, because she needs to avoid any awareness of hoping to be rescued.
Rescued! It is an embarrassing word for Helen, and nearly as foreign to her as irrelevant. As a child she had imagined workarounds for stories where maidens needed rescue, had never understood why Rapunzel, for instance, didn’t engineer her own escape. If Rapunzel’s hair was capable of sustaining a man on the ascent, then surely she could have cut herself free from her hair with utensils or sewing implements or broken-off bedroom furniture and then used it to rappel herself down from the tower. Helen had even drawn up several viable contingency options for Rapunzel, should things not go as planned.
Rescued was the wrong word, surely.
Except she cannot escape this feeling of containment, of hindrance, and this is not a rational feeling, since the tower she has been shut in is only all of Earth. It is not anyone’s fault, or responsibility, that the best of her exists in space, that she knows she’s at the height of her powers, that if she doesn’t go back up, then she has run out of road before she has run out of breath.
And how many years left on Earth for her? Consigned to a lesser version of herself on a planet that had also seen better days. Cast out from heaven into a melting Eden.
This is an inappropriate moment to have this realization, and so Helen tries to stave it off by doubling down on PIG.
They’ve now made a circuit of the lobby. Helen has a dim sense of people waiting outside the curved walls, people waiting to come in, or get out. For the thing—something—to happen.
But Boone has not exhausted the meaningfulness of the Playtex poster. He draws Helen’s attention to it once again. “To me this represents the spirit of our enterprise,” he says. “A commercial company finding a way to do something in a way that a government program could not. Although it’s also a reminder of how far we’ve come. Nobody can tell women anymore that this”—Boone nods at the prancing figure—“is all women can be. Or should be.”
“Oh, true,” says Helen, as if she hadn’t considered this. Men stayed enthusiastic about feminism if they believed it was their idea. And honestly, she hadn’t identified the woman in the advertisement as belonging to something connected with herself, or as a subject for indignation, historical or otherwise. You couldn’t get fussed about these things, or you’d find yourself out of the sandbox, complaining.
“This is Prime Space.” Boone taps the glass of the poster. “We’re not a government bureaucracy, and this gives us the freedom and lack of prejudice to accept the best ideas from wherever they come from. The world is not going to be changed in a Congressional committee. The best you can hope for is lowest common denominator consensus. We don’t have to ask permission from the taxpayers. We are the taxpayers. We are the job creators. And our missions have nothing to do with politics. They have to do with opportunities, with ideas, with manifesting dreams. Which do you think is the better route: trying to get everyone to agree that your dream is valid and important, hoping to inspire their support, or simply going ahead and doing what you love and saying, ‘Hey, who’s with me?’”