Two routes to Mars

Victor’s route began in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, in a middle-class household where talent was welcomed and effort was expected. Long before he commanded officers, he led teammates. He was a championship-winning high-school quarterback and an all-star-caliber baseball player, gifted enough to be drafted into the major leagues.

For a young athlete, it was the sort of opportunity that reorganizes a family’s expectations. Victor chose a different future. At seventeen, he joined the Navy.

“I wanted to play,” he says of baseball. “Of course I did. But every time I thought about what I wanted to do with my life, I came back to the service.”

He retains an athlete’s habits: preparation before performance, attention to the person beside him, and a dislike of excuses that former teammates would probably recognize. He also retains an athlete’s pleasure in competition. Eva reports that casual family games have occasionally required a reminder about the meaning of casual.

Her own upbringing was far removed from suburban playing fields. As the daughter of Stephen Aurelius, chief executive of Phoenix Arms Corporation, she grew up with a close view of decisions whose consequences extended across worlds. The family name brought opportunity. Her father expected her to understand what people depended on that opportunity to accomplish.

After graduating at the top of her class, Eva entered the Confederate Naval Academy on Mars. There, in 2748, she met Victor Black.

“He was very sure of himself,” she recalls.

“She keeps saying ‘was,’” he observes.

Eva smiles. “I was getting to that.”

They became inseparable. What drew them together, they say, was the discovery that their very different backgrounds had produced similar expectations: do the work, keep your word, and take seriously the people relying on you. Victor found someone who could challenge him without making a contest of everything. Eva found someone whose confidence came with the willingness to work.

Both were offered naval commissions. Only Victor accepted. As Stephen Aurelius became ill, Eva chose to take a senior position at Phoenix Arms, bringing her Academy training to the enterprise her father had led.

It was a substantial responsibility to assume early in a career. Eva speaks of the decision without regret. There was work that needed her, and she believed she was prepared to do it.

“I had learned a great deal about being responsible for people,” she says. “I was still going to have to put it into practice.”

They married in June 2751. Their careers would take different forms, but the commitment underneath them was shared.

The work of being there

At Phoenix Arms, Eva has built a reputation for preparation and exacting judgment. She is interested in the figures beneath a reassuring summary: the delivery that has slipped, the assumption that needs checking, the person who has identified a problem early enough to solve it. She expects an answer she can use.

“Eva will ask the question everyone else was hoping wouldn’t come up,” Victor says. “Then she’ll stay until there’s an answer.”

That competence has made her a figure young women follow closely. She is powerful without appearing remote, assured without treating attention as an entitlement. Her authority is evident in the seriousness with which she approaches work. So is her pleasure in a life extending beyond it.

The couple’s son, Cameron, was born in 2754. His arrival brought new demands to two already demanding careers. The twins, Arisa and Kira, followed in 2772, returning school calendars, bedtime negotiations, and small discoveries to a household that had watched its first child grow toward independence.

Eva resists the suggestion that there is a secret to making it all look manageable.

“There are days when it isn’t,” she says. “You arrange things. Something changes. You arrange them again.”

The family has help, as families with responsibilities on this scale must. Eva is equally clear about the responsibilities she keeps herself. She knows what the girls are working on at school, notices when one is quieter than usual, and wants to hear an account of their day before offering solutions to it. A child’s concern does not become smaller because an adult’s schedule is large.

Victor describes his wife’s attention with particular admiration. She remembers the unfinished conversation. She follows up on the worry that seemed minor the evening before. The girls know that when their mother promises to look at something, she will.

He shares the work. When he is home, he makes himself available to be enlisted in it. The twins have little interest in the distinction between a father who commands the armed forces and a father who has promised to help them finish something. Victor appears to find that distinction increasingly unimportant himself.

“They know when you’re listening,” he says. “You don’t get credit just for being in the room.”

There is pride, too, in Cameron’s decision to serve in the Confederate Special Forces. His parents speak warmly of his determination and carefully about the work itself. Operational particulars remain outside the conversation. What matters to them is that their son has chosen a demanding path and accepted its obligations.

“You spend years teaching a child to stand on his own feet,” Eva says. “Then you have to let him.”

Victor nods. For a moment, the admiral is simply a father listening to another parent say something he knows is true.

A future people can picture

It is perhaps inevitable that a family so closely associated with Confederate achievement should attract speculation about the presidency. Victor is frequently spoken of as a favorite to seek the office when his military career concludes. Admirers point to his command experience, personal discipline, and ability to make formidable responsibilities seem comprehensible.

He offers no campaign announcement.

“I have a job,” he says. “The people serving under me deserve my attention while I’m doing it.”

Eva is no more inclined to discuss a future address. She knows that public speculation is part of their lives. She also knows that a marriage cannot be organized around every possibility strangers find appealing.

“We’ll discuss our next chapter when we get to it,” she says. “We’ve always discussed those things together.”

The answer reveals much about why the idea has such appeal. Voters contemplating Victor in civilian leadership can already picture the partnership around him: Eva’s judgment and independence, a son in service, daughters growing up with an understanding of duty. The family offers a sense of continuity without seeming fixed in the past.

Their backgrounds reinforce the promise. A boy from an Atlanta suburb and a daughter of one of the Confederation’s great industrial houses met at a naval academy and recognized something in each other. Their marriage has joined different experiences without erasing either. The republic has room for both their stories, and citizens see in their success a reason to believe it has room for their own.

As the interview ends, Arisa returns to collect her father. There is still work to do on the assignment, and he has apparently been given a deadline. Victor looks toward Eva, who declines to negotiate on his behalf.

“You said you would help,” she reminds him.

“I did.”

He sets the briefing pad aside.

For all the offices the Blacks hold, and all the offices others imagine they might one day hold, this is the promise that seems to explain them best: someone is counting on them, and they intend to be there.

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