Contact across the Solar System

Triumphant Return

Cristina's deals with the SSC were a great help in importing SSC technology to the United States, deals that he made on her trip to Venus.

Some years later, Kalna and Ilmuth visited Harvard and MIT, announcing their visit as a homecoming trip. The two decided to do a nod to the region's heritage, with Kalna wearing a colonial dress with an apron and a bonnet, and Ilmuth wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a straw hat. Both women nevertheless let their hair flow loose, and Ilmuth's pants fit her hips. "This was way before our time here," Kalna conceded, "and I wanted to do it to honor some of the earliest residents in the colonies that became the United States."

Ilmuth described her costume as a tribute to all the SSC women who posed as men in past centuries. "That was what was necessary to get a lot of freedom in past centuries. But over the last century, women started having more freedom, and our female residents could go as women, residents like ourselves."

Someone asked about costumes that they had trouble with.
Kalna responded with "Upper-class women's clothes from a few centuries ago. They were often so tight and constricting."
Ilmuth said "I tried one of them on, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't breathe. I'm not going to go through all that just for a costume tribute. So that's why Kalna and I mostly wore commoner clothing. A lot easier to wear and move in and put on. I did wear some upper-class clothing a few times, but I let it be loose. Between authenticity and breathing, I chose breathing."
She continued. "Some of us have a theory that it was an effort to keep women subordinate, by turning our love of pretty clothes against us."

Ilmuth ended up discussing the Tunguska disaster, with the usual Titanic comparisons. Someone proposed another maritime disaster as a comparison, the Costa Concordia. Its captain was remarkably reckless and careless, and the ship ran aground in shallow waters. But nearly everybody survived, and the ship was eventually refloated and towed to a scrapyard.

The two also accepted honorary degrees, in honor of their covert studies at those universities several decades earlier.