The Serrano Connection (57 page)

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.