Once a Hero

Chapter Twenty-One

All very well to say that, but what good was time for sleep if she couldn’t sleep? Esmay acquired an intimate knowledge of every flaw in the surface of bulkhead and overhead, every object in her quarters. When she shut her eyes, she felt wider awake than before, heart racing. At meals, she dutifully forced down one mouthful after another, mimicking whoever sat fourth down on the left, taking a bite when he or she did. No one seemed to notice. She felt suspended in a hollow sphere; nothing seemed quite within reach.

To her surprise and relief, no one seemed to expect her to do more than routine work, even though the ship was shorthanded. Pitak handed her endless lists of inventory to check, progress notes on Wraith’s repair to enter into the database. She was vaguely aware that this was routine clerical work, more suited to a pivot or corporal, but she felt no rancor. The simple tasks engaged her fully, kept her busy. Whatever burst of energy had sent her across the ship, into the enemy’s craft, into battle, had vanished. Someone else could figure out how to get Koskiusko back to Familias space, back to the rest of the Fleet deployment. Someone else could worry about Wraith’s repairs, about internal damage, even about casualties. She couldn’t quite manage to care.

In the next session, Esmay found herself defending her family again. “They didn’t understand,” she said.

“You had the nightmares. You screamed so much, you said, that they banished you to a distant part of the house—”

“It wasn’t banishment—”

“For a child to sleep alone that far from anyone else? I call that banishment. And you had changed in ways that most adults would recognize as a response to stress. Hadn’t you?”

Seb Coron had said she loved to ride, until after that. She had been outgoing, ebullient, eager, adventurous . . . but all children grew out of the easy joy of early childhood. She tried to say that to Annie, who insisted on reflecting it back to her in other interpretations. “Whenever a child’s behavior changes suddenly, there’s a reason. Gradual change is not so diagnostic—exposure to new experiences can mean new enthusiasms replace the old. But sudden change means something, and a child’s family is supposed to notice, and look for the cause. In your case, of course, they already had a cause they knew about.”

“But it wasn’t connected . . . they said I’d just gotten lazy. . . .”

“Children don’t ‘just get lazy.’ That’s an adult’s quick label for some behavior they don’t like. You had liked riding before . . . then you quit, and forgot you’d ever enjoyed it. And you think that’s not related to a sexual assault?”

“I . . . suppose it could be.” Her whole body twitched, like a horse’s skin trying to flick off a biting fly.

“Do you remember whether the assault was in a building or outside?”

“All the buildings were destroyed . . . at least partly. I’d found a corner . . . taller than I was, but only a little . . . there was . . . was straw, and I’d crawled into it . . .”

“What did it smell like?”

Her breath caught again . . . a whiff of that smell, not the smoke but the other smell, blew across her mind. “Barn,” she said, so softly she could barely hear herself. “It was a barn. It smelled like home. . . .”

“That’s probably why you were in it, your nose leading you to something that didn’t scare you silly. So there, in a place you had thought safe—remember, smells go straight in to the emotional center of the brain—you were assaulted in the most terrifying way by someone whose uniform you had previously associated with safety. Is it any wonder you hated cleaning stalls later?”

Astonishment all over again. “I wasn’t just lazy,” she said, half-believing it. “Or being a sissy about the horses moving around. . . .”

“No—your accurate memory told you that barns weren’t really safe, that bad things could happen if you were trapped in a corner. Your brain was working fine, Esmay, trying to keep you safe.”

Even as her ears heard, her mind denied. “But I should have been able to—”

“Whoa.” Annie held up her hand. “In the first place, you could no more change the new insight your experience gave you than a low-level computer can change the program you feed into it. The part of your brain that’s concerned with survival is a very low-level computer; it doesn’t care about anything but connecting sensory input to danger and food. If you’d had proper treatment early on, with neuroactive drugs, the worst of the damage could have been prevented . . . but there would always have been a trace of it. That’s what life is, after all: that’s why mindwipes are illegal.”

“You mean I’m stuck with it forever?” If she was going to be stuck with it, why go through therapy?

“Not exactly. The kind of work you’re doing now, thinking through it bit by bit, will lessen the effect. There are still drugs we can give, to stabilize your insights and put a sort of shield between your present awareness and the ingrained connections while the new connections become stronger.”

“What about the nightmares?”

“Those should diminish, possibly disappear forever, though you might get a recurrence in another period of extraordinary stress. Other patterns of thought which have impeded your development—as a person and as an officer—will change with continued practice.”

“I don’t like the idea of drugs,” Esmay said.

“Good. People who like the idea of drugs have usually medicated themselves with things that don’t work and leave neurons flapping in the breeze. You don’t have to like your medicine, you just have to trust me to know when you need it.”

“Can’t I do it without?”

“Possibly. Slower, and with more difficulty, and not as certainly. What do you think the drugs will do, turn you into one of those people in horror cubes, who drags around in an asylum in ratty slippers?”

As that was the image that had come to mind, Esmay could think of nothing to say. Her head dipped in a weak nod.

“When you’re ready for drugs, Esmay, I’ll tell you exactly what to expect. Right now, let’s get back to the other connections between what happened and the things you quit doing, quit enjoying.”

She had quit enjoying horses; that still shocked her more than the nightmares. She had not even remembered enjoying them; the image Seb Coron gave her, of a child hardly ever off her pony, felt alien. How could she have been that child, and become this woman? Yet if she believed him about the rape, she had to believe him about the pony. It would mean nothing to Fleet, she was sure, but in her own family that by itself had made her different, inferior.

Could it really be just a matter of smells, of her olfactory system going its own stubborn way, associating the smell of barns and horses with all the terror and pain of that day? It seemed too simple. Why couldn’t her nose have associated all the pleasure she’d had, if that pleasure had been real?

Her nose chose that moment to comment on the smell of dinner, which she had been forking into her mouth without thinking about it. She hadn’t noticed anything for days, but now a smell got through, and she realized that her mouth was full of ganash stew. She hated ganash stew, but she couldn’t spit it out. She gulped, managed that mouthful, and took a long swallow of water. “Come play ball, Lieutenant?” someone asked. Who was that? Her mind thrashed around, not finding a name for the pleasant-faced young woman. Barin would have known. Barin . . . had not been around for awhile. Therapy, she reminded herself. He probably felt like she did, in no mood for games.

She needed an excuse. “No thanks,” she said, putting the words together like parts of an intricate model, keeping careful control of tone and volume and pitch changes. “I need to work out—maybe another day.”

From there to the gym, uncrowded in the aftermath of the battles. Everyone’s schedule was upset, not just hers; she scolded herself for being absentminded and climbed on one of the treadmills. When she glanced aside, her gaze caught on the mechanism of the virtual horse. She had not been on one in her entire Fleet career; she had never considered using one. If she didn’t enjoy riding real horses, why bother with a simulator?

It wouldn’t smell like a real one. The thought insinuated itself, and her mind threw up a picture of Luci on the brown mare, two graceful young animals enjoying movement. Pain stabbed her—had she been, could she have been, like Luci? Could she have had that grace?

Never, never . . . she lunged forward on the treadmill, driving with her legs, and almost fell. The safety rail felt cold against her palms. She forced herself to slow down, to move steadily. The past was past; it would not change because she learned more, or wanted it to.

“Evening, Lieutenant.” A jig, moving past her to the horse. He mounted clumsily, and Esmay could tell by the machine’s movement that he had set it for basic mode, a slow trot in a straight line. Even so, he was off-rhythm, posting just behind the beat.

She could do better. Even now, she could do better, and she knew it.

She had no reason to do better. This life had no need for expertise in riding. She reminded herself of the smell, the dirt, the misery . . . her mind threw up images of speed and beauty and grace. Of Luci . . . and almost, tickling at the edge of awareness, of herself.

On the wall of Annie’s room—she thought of it that way, though she had no reason to think it was really Annie’s room—a flatscreen displayed a vague, misty landscape in soft greens and golds. Nothing like Altiplano, where the mountains stood out crisply against the sky, but it was a planet; she felt grounded by even that little.

“In your culture,” Annie began, “part of the global definition of woman or girl is someone to be protected. You were a girl, and you were not protected.”

I wasn’t worthy of protection ran through her mind. She curled into the afghan, not quite shivering, and focussed on its texture, its warmth. Someone had crocheted it by hand; she spotted a flaw in the pattern.

“A child’s reasoning is different,” Annie said. “You were not protected, so your child’s mind—protecting your father, as children do, and the more strongly because your mother had just died—your child’s mind decided that either you were not really a girl, or you were not a good girl, and in either case you did not deserve protection. My guess would be that your mind, for reasons of its own, chose the ‘not really a girl’ branch.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Esmay, who had been remembering the many times someone had told her she was a bad girl.

“Because of your behavior as an adolescent and adult. The ones who think they’re bad girls act like bad girls—whatever that means for their culture of origin. For you, I suppose it would have been having affairs with anything that had a Y chromosome. You’ve been conspicuously good—at least, that’s what your fitness reports say—but you haven’t formed any lasting relationships with either sex. Also, you’ve chosen a career at odds with your culture’s definition of women, as if you were a son rather than a daughter.”

“But that’s just Altiplano . . .”

“Yes, but that’s where you were raised; that’s what formed your deepest attitudes towards the basics of human behavior. Do you fit in, as a woman, in your society?”

“Well . . . no.”

“Are you far enough from their norm to make them uneasy?”

“Yes . . .”

“At least you haven’t taken the whole-bore approach: some people in your situation chose to reverse both parts of the definition and define themselves as ‘bad, not-girls.’ ”

“Does that mean I’m . . . not really a woman now?”

“Heavens, no. By the standards of Fleet, and most of the rest of Familias, your interests and behaviors are well within the definition. Celibacy’s unusual, but not rare. Besides, you haven’t considered it a problem until now, have you?”

Esmay shook her head.

“Then I don’t see why we should worry about it. The rest of it—the nightmares, the flashbacks from combat, the inability to concentrate and so on—are matters for treatment. If, when the things that bother you are resolved, you find something else to worry about, we can deal with it then.”

That made sense.

“My guess—and it’s only a guess, not an expert opinion—is that when you’ve got the rest of this straightened out, you’ll find it easy to decide whether you want a partner, and if you do, you’ll find one.”

Session after session, in that quiet cozy room with its soft textures, its warm colors . . . she had quit dreading them, though she wished they weren’t necessary. It still seemed slightly indecent to spend so much time talking about herself and her family, especially when Annie refused to excuse her family for their mistakes.

“That’s not my job,” Annie said. “It may, in the end, be your job to forgive them—for your own healing—but it’s not your job or mine to excuse them, to pretend they didn’t do what they did do. We’re dealing in reality here, and the reality is that they made what happened to you worse. Their response left you feeling less competent and more helpless.”

“But I was helpless,” Esmay said. She had the afghan over her knees, but not her shoulders; she had begun to recognize, by its position, how much stress she was feeling.

“Yes, and no,” Annie said. “In one way, any child that age is helpless against an adult—they lack the physical strength to defend themselves without help. But physical helplessness and the sensation of helplessness are not quite the same thing.”

“I’m confused,” Esmay said; she had finally learned to say so. “If you’re helpless, you feel helpless.”

Annie looked at the wall display, this time a still life of fruit in a bowl. “Let me try again. The sensation of helplessness implies that something could have been done—that you should be doing something. You don’t feel helpless if you don’t feel some responsibility.”

“I never thought of that,” Esmay said. She felt around inside herself, prodding the idea . . . was it true?

“Well . . . did you feel helpless in a rainstorm?”

“No . . .”

“You might be frightened, in some situations—perhaps severe weather—but not helpless. The opposed feelings of helplessness and confidence/competence develop through childhood as children begin to attempt interventions. Until you have the idea that something is doable, you don’t worry about not doing it.” A long pause. “When adults impose responsibility on a child for events the child could not control, the child is helpless to refuse it . . . or the guilt that follows.”

“And . . . that’s what they did,” Esmay said.

“Yes.”

“So when I got angry, when I found out—”

“A reasonable reaction.” She had said this before; this time Esmay could hear it.

“I’m still angry with them,” Esmay said, challenging.

“Of course,” Annie said.

“But you said I’d get over it.”

“In years, not days. Give yourself time . . . you have a lot to be angry about.”

With that permission, it began to seem a limited anger. “I suppose there are worse things . . .”

“We’re not talking about other peoples’ problems here: we’re talking about yours. You were not protected, and when you were hurt they lied to you. As a result, you had a lot of bad years, and missed a lot of normal growing experiences.”

“I could have—”

Annie laughed. “Esmay, I can guarantee one thing about your child self before this happened.”

“What?”

“You had iron will. The universe is lucky that your family did get a sense of responsibility into you, because if you’d chosen the ‘bad’ branch, you’d have been a criminal beyond compare.”

She had to laugh at that. She even agreed to take the neuroactives Annie said she was ready for.

“So, how’s it going with the psych stuff?” Barin asked. It was the first time since his release from sickbay that they’d had a chance to talk. They had come to the Wall, but no one was climbing. Just as well; Esmay didn’t feel like climbing anyway. When she looked at the Wall, she saw the outside of the ship, the vast surfaces that always seemed to be just over vertical.

“I hate it,” Esmay said. She hadn’t told Barin about the trek across the Koskiusko’s surface in FTL flight; even this topic was better. The weird effects of unshielded FTL travel did not bear thinking about. “It wasn’t too bad when I started, just talking to Annie. It actually helped, I think. But then she insisted I go to that group thing.”

“I hate that too.” Barin wrinkled his nose. “It wastes time . . . some of them just ramble on and on, never getting anywhere.”

Esmay nodded. “I thought it would be scary and painful, but half the time I’m just bored. . . .”

“Sam says that’s why therapy happens in special times and places . . . because listening to someone talk about themselves for hours is boring, unless you’re trained to do something in response.”

“Sam’s your psychnanny?”

“Yes. I wish you were in my group. I’m still having trouble talking about it to them; they want to make a big thing about the physical damage, the broken bones and all. That’s not what was worst. . . .” His voice faded away, but she felt he wanted to talk to her.

“What was worst, then?”

“Not being who I’m supposed to be,” he said softly, looking away. “Not being able to do anything . . . I didn’t manage to put a scratch on them, slow them down, anything. . . .”

Esmay nodded. “I have trouble forgiving myself, too. Even though I know, in my mind, that it wasn’t possible, it still feels as if it was my weakness—mental weakness—that didn’t stop them.”

“My group keeps telling me there was nothing I could do, but it feels different to me. Sam says I haven’t heard it from the right person yet.”

“From your family?” Esmay asked, greatly daring.

“He means me. He thinks I think too much about the family, in quotes. I’m supposed to make my own standards, he says, and judge myself that way. He never had a grandmother like mine.”

“Or a grandfather like mine,” Esmay said. “But I see his point. Would it help if your grandmother told you you’d done as much as you could?”

Barin sighed. “Not really. I thought about that, and I know what I’d think if she did. Poor Barin, have to cheer him up, give him a boost. I don’t want to be ‘Poor Barin.’ I want to be who I was. Before.”

“That won’t work,” Esmay said, out of long experience. “That’s the one thing that won’t work. You can’t be who you were; you can only become someone else, that you can live with.”

“Is that all we can hope for, Es? Just . . . acceptable?” He glowered at the deck a moment, then looked up, with more of the Serrano showing than Esmay had seen for awhile. “I’m not happy with that. If I have to change, fine: I’ll change. But I want to be someone I can respect, and like—not just someone I can live with.”

“You Serranos have high standards,” Esmay said.

“Well . . . there’s this Suiza around who keeps setting me an example.”

Examples. She didn’t want to be the one setting examples; she hadn’t been able to live up to any. New insight pounced on that, turned it inside out, put it in the imaginary sun to air. As a child, she had copied the people she loved and admired; she had tried to be what they wanted, as much as she understood it. Where she had failed was not only not her fault—it wasn’t, in the larger context of the Fleet and Familias Regnant, even failure.

Fleet seemed to think she had set an acceptable example. Now that the Koskiusko was back with its companions, she heard rumors of the reactions in high places. Her head cleared, little by little, from the initial murk of therapy . . . she saw that Pitak and Seveche were not just tolerating her weak need for therapy; they wanted her to take the time she needed. The ensigns and jigs at her table at mess treated her with the exact flavor of respectful attention which a lifetime’s experience of the military told her meant genuine affection.

They liked her. They liked her, they respected her, and not her fame or her background, which they didn’t know anyway. She was the only Suiza—the only Altiplanan—any of them had ever met, and they liked her. With reason, Annie said when she confessed her embarrassment, her confusion. Slowly she came to believe it, each day’s experience layering a thin glaze of belief over the self-doubts.

From time to time she looked at the virtual horse in the gym, wondering. She had not told Annie that it had begun to haunt her. This was something she had to work out for herself. Automatically now her mind picked that thought up and played with it. Denial? No—but this was something she wanted to work out for herself. A choice she would make, when she was free to make it.

“I could get attached to the old girl,” Esmay said, peering out the observation ports to the patterns of lights on T-1 and T-5. “She’s an amazing ship.” She and Barin had found a quiet corner of the crafts activity compartment; the climbing club was busy on the Wall, and Barin had confessed he felt no more eagerness for climbing than she did. She thought he looked a lot better; she knew she felt better . . . she had had no nightmares for the past twenty days and was beginning to hope they were gone forever.

“You’re going to transfer to Maintenance Command?” Barin looked up from the model he was putting together, the skeleton of some exotic beast. She could not read his expression, but she saw tension in the muscles of his face.

“It’s tempting . . . there’s a lot more to learn here . . .”

“Fine for a sponge,” Barin said, in a tone that suggested what he thought of sponges.

“Fretting, are we?” Esmay asked, wrinkling her nose at him. “Eager to get back to the real Fleet?”

He flushed, then smiled. “Therapy’s going well, even the group part. It may even—in the very long run—turn out to be something worthwhile.”

“Look out all admirals . . . someone’s after your job?”

“Not quite. By the time I get to that age, there may be no slots for new admirals anyway. That’s another reason to get back into my own track as soon as possible.” He cleared his throat. “How’s your stuff going?”

“Stuff? I’m not shy about it, Barin. The sessions have helped. I still wish I knew how much of the change was me, and how much was in those medications, but . . . they say it doesn’t matter.”

“So what are you going to do? Back into technical track, into scan?”

“I’m transferring,” Esmay said. “If they approve, which I hope they will. So far they’re being encouraging.” She still found it hard to believe how encouraging. Gruff Pitak had practically leaped over the desk, and she had undeniably grinned.

“Transfer to what, you annoying woman?”

Esmay ducked her head, then faced him squarely. “Command track. I think it’s time a few dirtborn outsiders held command.”

“Yes!” His grin lit the compartment. “Please . . . when you get your first legal command . . . wangle me a place in your crew.”

“Wangle?” She pretended to glare at him, but her face wouldn’t stay straight. “You Serranos can wangle all you want, but Suizas expect to earn command.” He made a face and sighed dramatically. “Gods help us all—we let the Suizas off Altiplano.”

“Let?” Esmay reached out and tickled him. Startled, he dropped the model onto the desk.

“You touched me!”

“I’m an idiot,” Esmay said, feeling herself blush.

“No . . . you’re human. Overwhelmed by my charm.”

Esmay laughed. “You wish!”

“Yes, I do,” he said with a sudden change of expression. Slowly, he reached out and touched her cheek. “I do wish an alliance with this Suiza of Altiplano. Not just because Suiza has pulled Serrano out of trouble twice now, but because . . . I do like you. Admire you. And most desperately wish you’d like me enough to welcome me into your life.” A pause she knew was calculated. “And into your bed.”

Her pulse raced. She wasn’t ready for this, she hadn’t let herself think about it since Pitak’s lecture during the crisis. Her body informed her that she was lying, that she had thought of very little else whenever she had the chance. “Uh . . .”

“Though not if the prospect disgusts you, of course. Only if . . . I never thought you’d touch me, aside from whacking me firmly with your elbow or knee in a wallball game.” He was joking now, flushing a little himself, and Esmay felt moved to perform a rescue.

“I’m shy,” she said. “Inexperienced to the point of total ignorance, barring what I saw on the farm as a girl, which I hope is a long way from anything you were thinking of, as it involved biting and kicking and hobbles.”

Barin choked back a laugh. “Esmay!”

“Inexperienced, I said. Not, you will notice, unwilling.”

In the long silence that followed, watching the shifting expressions play over his face, feeling the first feather-touch of his fingers on her face, on her hair, Esmay laid the last fiery ghost to rest.

Awards ceremonies all had the same structure; she wondered if all recipients felt a little silly, so far removed from the mood in which they’d done whatever it was that got them honored. Why the discrepancy? Why had the Starmount stricken her to silent awe when she saw it on someone else’s uniform, while she had felt first nothing much, and then a sort of shamed confusion, when she wore it herself? As Admiral Foxworth spoke briefly to each recipient, she found she could believe that the others deserved their medals—that those awards were real. It was hers that felt . . . wrong.

The sessions of therapy rose up like a mirror in her mind. From a vague shape against darkness her own face came clear, as real as any other. She was real . . . she had done what she had done, and its worth lay not in anything they said about it. What bothered her . . . she struggled with it, fought to bring it out where she could see. Why was it right for others, but wrong for her? You don’t deserve it, said part of her mind. She knew the answer to that now, knew the roots of that belief and could pull up those roots no matter how often the wrinkled seed sprouted. But what else? If . . . if she became that person who could be honored, who could be recognized in public as honorable, then . . . then what? Then someone might . . . look up to her as she had looked up to that young man. Might expect her to be what the award made her seem, what they judged she was ready for.

She almost grinned, making that connection.

She could remember, down the years, from before the trouble, an instructor telling some hapless student: “Don’t tell me I overmounted you: shut up and ride.” And then he’d looked at her, the little Esmay knee-high to the tall horses, watching from the ringside, and said, “This one’ll show you.” He had tossed her up to another horse—the first time she’d been on a horse and not a pony. She’d been more excited than scared, too young to know she couldn’t do what she was told to do—and not knowing, she’d stayed aboard. It had felt like flying, so high above the ground, so fast. She could almost feel that grin stretching her face. “Like that,” the instructor had said, lifting her down. And then he’d leaned close to her. “Keep that up, little one.”

She wasn’t riding ponies any more. She was out in the world, on the big horses, taking the big fences—and she would just have to live up to her reputation as the horses and fences grew bigger. . . .

“Lieutenant Esmay Suiza.” She stood, came forward as directed, and listened as Admiral Foxworth read the citation. She waited for him to pick up the ribbon his aide held on a tray, but instead he raised one bushy gray eyebrow. “You know, Lieutenant, I’ve seen the summary of the Board of Inquiry.” Esmay waited, and when the silence lengthened wondered if she was supposed to answer that. Finally he went on. “The final paragraph specifically notes that you are not to be in command of any combat vessel until such time as you have demonstrated competence in relevant training exercises. Yet I find that your citation says you took command of the vessel Antberd’s Axe which subsequently engaged enemy vessels in a hostile encounter. Your commander praises your initiative, when I would think he should condemn your blatant disregard of the findings of that Board of Inquiry.” He looked at her, his face now blank of all expression. “Do you have anything to say, Lieutenant?”

All the things she wanted to say, and must not, tangled in her mouth. What was right? What was safe? What was . . . true? Finally she said, “Well, sir, my recollection is that the Board said I should not command any R.S.S. combat vessels until further training . . . it didn’t say anything about Bloodhorde ships.”

A long moment of utter silence, during which Esmay had ample time to regret her boldness and consider the power of angry admirals. Maybe she had overmounted herself, maybe the fence was too high. Then a slow grin creased his face and he looked past her to the rest of the assembly. “And she can think on her feet,” he said. The crowd roared; Esmay felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. The admiral picked up the decoration and pinned it on. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Suiza.”

On the far side of the fence, the ground was still there; she would survive this time, and she would keep riding forward. Coming back to her seat, she caught Barin’s eye; he was sparkling all over with delight in her, and she indulged herself with a moment’s fantasy . . . Suiza and Serrano. Yes. Oh, my, yes.