Once a Hero

by Elizabeth Moon

  "Never mind," Esmay said. "They're not paying any attention to us." She examined the cliff closely. The indentations the climbers were using for their feet and hands were molded fiber-ceram, attached to the cliff face with metal clamps. "It looks like fun."

  "It is, though I'm not very good at it." Barin peered upward. "But one of my bunkies is an enthusiast, and he's dragged me along a few times. That's how I know when they're usually done."

  "Come on up . . ." someone yelled from far above.

  Esmay fitted her hand into one of the holds. "I don't think so—I don't have any gear, and besides . . . we had a conversation going."

  "A conversation or an argument?" Barin asked, then flushed again. "Sorry, sir."

  "No offense taken," Esmay said. Around the base of the fake cliff, decorative rocklike forms had been placed to mark off the climbing area from the garden beds. She found a comfortable niche and sat down. "I'm not letting you off, though. If you can explain the protocols of apologies in Fleet, I'll be forever grateful."

  "Well, as I said, what you called an insult is not that important . . . I mean, unless you really wanted my friendship, and that's personal. Is it on your world?"

  On her world, duels would have been fought, and honor would have been satisfied, for the apologies Fleet never bothered with. Would he think her people barbaric, because they cared? "It's different," Esmay said, thinking how to say it without implying what she really felt about their manners. "We do tend to apologize easily for things . . ."

  He nodded. "So that's why Com—some people think of you as tentative."

  Esmay ignored the slip, though she wondered which commander. "They do?"

  "Yes . . . at least that's what I've heard some people say. You apologize for things we—sorry, most of the Fleet families—wouldn't, things we just take for granted. So it seems as if you're not sure of what you're doing."

  Esmay blinked, thinking back down her years in Fleet, from the prep school on. She had made a lot of mistakes; she had expected to. She had been guided by the family rules: tell the truth, admit your mistakes, don't make the same mistakes twice, apologize promptly and fully for your errors. How could they think that was weakness and uncertainty? It was willingness to learn, willingness to be guided.

  "I see," she said slowly, though she still didn't understand. "So . . . when you make a mistake you don't apologize?"

  "Not unless it's pretty massive—oh, you say you're sorry, if you step on someone's foot, but you don't make a procedure out of it. Most mistakes—you own up, of course, and take the responsibility, but the apology is understood."

  It was not understood, Esmay was sure, nearly as well as an apology properly delivered in plain speech. However, if they chose to be rude about it, she couldn't change that. "Is it offensive?" she asked, intent on mapping the edges of Fleet courtesy.

  "Oh no, not offensive. A little bothersome, if someone's always doing it—it makes seniors a bit nervous, because they don't know how sincere it is."

  Esmay felt her brows rising. "You have insincere apologies?"

  "Of course," he said. Then he took another look at her face. "You don't," he said. Not a question.

  "No." Esmay took a long breath. She felt as if she'd ridden out into a dry riverbed and sunk hock-deep in quicksand. She went on, quickly, keeping her voice as unemotional as possible. "In our—on our world, an apology is always part of taking responsibility for errors. It accompanies action taken to redress the wrong and ensure that the error is not repeated." That was almost a quote from the Conventions. "An insincere apology is like any other lie." Serious, she meant, and her mouth tingled at the memory of the hot peppers that had impressed her with the importance of telling the truth, no matter how unpleasant. She had not suspected her father of an insincere apology . . . just one far too late and insufficient.

  "Fascinating," he said; by his tone he meant it the right way, real interest and not idle curiosity about the barbarians. "It must be very different, if you didn't know—I mean—"

  "I understand what you mean," said Esmay. "It's—a new idea for me, that apologies could get me into trouble."

  "Not trouble exactly, but the wrong idea about you."

  "Yes. I take your point. Thank you for the information."

  "You don't have to thank—" Again that bright-eyed look. "But you do, don't you? Thanking goes with apologizing . . . your world must be terribly formal."

  "Not to me," Esmay said. It wasn't formality, it was caring about how others felt, caring how your actions affected them. Formality was Founders' Day dinners, or the awards ceremonies, not one of the twins coming in to apologize for having broken her old blue mug.

  "Do we—I mean, do the others born into Fleet—seem rude to you?"

  Should she answer that? She couldn't lie, and he had been unexpectedly honest with her. "Sometimes," Esmay said. She forced herself to smile. "I expect that I sometimes seem rude to you—or them."

  "Not rude," he said. "Very polite—extremely polite, even formal. Everyone says how nice you are—so nice they couldn't figure out how you could do what you did."

  Esmay shivered. Did they really think rudeness went with strength, with the killing way, that someone who said please and thank you and I'm sorry couldn't fight or command in battle? A grim satisfaction flowered briefly: if the Altiplano militia ever came offplanet, Fleet wouldn't know what hit them. Pride is a blossom of ashes. The old saying rang in her ears. Bitter in the mouth, sharp to the nose, stinging to the eyes, and blown away on the first wind from the mountains. Plant no pride, lest you harvest shame. She almost shook her head to free it from that old voice.

  "I'm not sure myself how I did what I did—besides making a great number of unnecessary mistakes."

  "Mistakes! You stopped a Benignity invasion—"

  "Not by myself."

  "Well, no, you weren't out there on your white horse galloping across the stars alone." He sounded as sarcastic as he looked.

  This time Esmay took the offensive. "Why do you people use that image so much? The white horse thing, I mean. Yes, we use horses on Altiplano, but where did you get the idea that they're all white?"

  "Oh, that's not about you," he said. "Nor Altiplano. It's from the Tale of the White Knights, who all rode white horses and spent their time doing great deeds. Didn't you have that in your libraries?"

  "Not that I know of," Esmay said. "Our folk tales ran to Brother Ass and the Cactus Patch. Or the Starfolk and the Swimmers of Dawn. The only heroes on horses we know about were the Shining Horde."

  He blinked. "You really do come from another culture. I thought everybody had grown up with the White Knights, and I never heard of the Swimmers of Dawn, or Brother Ass. The Shining Horde—that wasn't an ancestor of the Bloodhorde, was it?"

  "No." That thought sickened her. "They're just legends; supposedly they were people with strange powers, who could glow in the dark." She glared at the twinkle in his eye. "Without getting too close to atomics," she said firmly.

  The climbers, now near the base of the wall, ended that conversation. Esmay went over to see what equipment they used—much like that she'd used at home—and was offered more help than she wanted if only she'd join the climbing club. They would teach her; she could start on the easy end.

  "I've scrambled around some boulders," she said.

  "Well, you should come join us," one of the climbers said. "We can always use new members and soon you'll be right up there—" he pointed. "It's like nothing else, and this is the only ship I know with a real Wall." He was so clearly entwined in his hobby that Esmay felt no embarrassment; he would have welcomed anyone willing to climb off the flat deck. "Come on—just go up a little, and let me see how you move. Pleeease?"

  Esmay laughed, and started up the wall. She had never done as much climbing as her male cousins, but she had learned how to reach and shift her center of gravity without swinging away from the slope. She made it up a meter or so before losing her grip and slithering back down.
/>   "Good start," the tall climber said. "You'll have to come again . . . I'm Trey Sannin, by the way. If you need climbing gear, there's some in our club lockers."

  "Thanks," Esmay said. "I might do that. When's your meeting time?" Sannin told her, then led the other climbers away. "And thank you," she said to Barin. "I'm sorry I misjudged you, and you'll just have to put up with my apology—at least this time."

  "Gladly," he said. He had an engaging grin, she noticed, and she felt an impulse to trust him even more than she had already.

  That night she slept free of nightmares, and dreamed of climbing the cliffs of home with a dark-haired boy who was not quite Barin Serrano.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Over the next few decads, Esmay found herself chatting with Barin Serrano even away from the mess hall. They had gone climbing once, with the club, and after a couple of hours of sweating on the Wall, she could not be shy with any of the climbers, let alone Barin. Then they had found themselves in the same corner during one of the officer socials, simply because Ensign Zintner had cornered a tray of the best cookies and they'd spotted her doing it.

  Esmay did not let herself notice that the nightmares were not as intense on the evenings she spent with Barin and his friends. Instead, she concentrated on what he could show her about the unofficial customs of Fleet. Gradually, she thought of him less and less as "that nice Serrano boy" and more and more as the kind of friend she had not known she wanted.

  In his company, she found herself making other friends. Zintner, whose lifelong background in heavy engineering made her the ideal person to ask for references when Pitak had handed Esmay a problem she couldn't solve. Lieutenant Forrester, who came to the climbing club meetings about half the time, and whose sunny attitude brightened any gathering. She began to realize that not all the people who approached her were interested only in her notoriety.

  Once she began to enjoy herself more, she started worrying that she was being too social, neglecting her studies. "I still don't know what I should to help Major Pitak," she said to Barin one shipnight. She felt guilty about going to the gym to play wallball when she could have been studying. Pitak seemed pleased with her progress, but if a ship needed repair right now, what could she actually do?

  "You're too hard on yourself," Barin said. "And I know what I'm talking about. Serranos have a reputation for being hard on themselves and each other . . . you're off the scale."

  "It's necessary," she said. When had she first discovered that if she had high enough standards, no one else's criticism mattered?

  "Not that far," he said. "You're locking down a lot of what you could be, could do, with that kind of control."

  She shied away from that. "What I could do, is study."

  He punched her arm lightly. "We need you; Alana's not feeling up to a game, and that leaves us short."

  "All right." She wanted to cooperate, and it bothered her. Why was she reacting like this, when she was immune to the tall, handsome Forrester, who had already asked her what Barin probably never would? She didn't want complications; she wanted simple friendship. That was pleasure enough.

  The wallball game turned into a wild melee because most of the players agreed to play a variable-G game. Esmay argued, but was outvoted. "It's more fun," Zintner said, setting the AI control of the variable-G court for random changes. "You'll see."

  "Out of black eyes," said Alana, who was refereeing this match. "I won't play VG games, and neither should you, Esmay."

  "Be a sport," someone on the other team called. Esmay shrugged, and put on the required helmet and eyeguard.

  An hour later, bruised and sweaty, she and the others staggered out to find that they had plenty of spectators.

  "Chickens," Zintner said to those watching through the high windows of the court.

  "It's easier on you shorties," said the tallest player on the other team. "If all the blood rushes to your head, it doesn't have time to go as fast."

  Esmay said nothing; her stomach was still arguing about which way was up, and she was glad she had eaten little for lunch. She refused an invitation to take a cooling swim with the team, and instead showered and changed. By then she was hungry. Outside the showers, she found Barin nursing a swollen elbow.

  "You're going to have that checked, aren't you, Ensign?" she said. They had discovered a mutual distaste for medical interventions, and now teased each other about it.

  "It's not broken, Lieutenant," he said. "I believe surgery won't be necessary."

  "Good—then perhaps you'll join me for a snack?"

  "I think I could just about manage to get my hand to my mouth," he said, grinning. "It was Lieutenant Forrester's fault, anyway. He went for my shot, and got his knee in the way of my elbow."

  Esmay tried to work that out—in a variable-G game, a lunge could turn into an unplanned dive and end in a floating rebound—and gave up.

  As they ate, she brought up her past experience with his family for the first time. "I served on the same ship as Heris Serrano, back when I was an ensign. She was a good officer—I was in awe of her. When she got in that trouble, I was so angry . . . and I didn't know what I could do to help, if anything. Nothing, as it turned out."

  "I met her just one time," he said. "My grandmother had told me about her—not everything, of course, only what was legal. She sent me with a message; she wanted to use only family as couriers. We weren't sure which of us would find her, and I was the lucky one." From the tone, Esmay wasn't sure he thought it was lucky.

  "Didn't you like her?"

  "Like her!" That, too, had a tone she couldn't read. Then, less explosively, "It's not a matter of liking. It's—I'm used to Serranos; I'm one myself. We tend to have this effect on people. We're always being accused of being arrogant, even when we aren't. But she was . . . more like Grandmother than any of the others." He smiled, then. "She bought me dinner. She was in a white rage when I first showed up, and then she bought me dinner, a really expensive one, and—well, everyone knows what she did at Xavier."

  "But you ended up friends with her?"

  "I doubt it." Now he looked down at his plate. "I doubt she's friends with any Serrano now, though I hear she's speaking to her parents again."

  "She wasn't?"

  "No. It's all kind of tangled . . . according to Grandmother she thought they would help her when Lepescu threatened her—and they didn't—and then she resigned. That's when Grandmother told everyone to leave her alone."

  "But I thought she was just on covert ops then."

  "That too, but I don't know when—or what was going on. Grandmother says it's none of my business and to keep my nose out of it and my mouth shut."

  Esmay could imagine that, and wondered that he broke the prohibition even this much. She had prohibitions of her own that she had no intention of breaking, just because she'd found a new friend.

  "I met her, of course, after Xavier, but only briefly," Esmay said. In the dark times before the trial, when she had been sure she'd be thrown out of Fleet, the memory of the respect in those dark eyes had steadied her. She would like to have deserved that look more often. "There were legal reasons for keeping us apart, they said." Then she turned the topic to something less dangerous.

  A few days later, Barin asked her about Altiplano, and she found herself describing the rolling grassy plains, the mountain scarps, her family's estancia, the old stone-built city, even the stained glass she had liked so much as a child.

  "Who's your Seat in Council?" Barin asked.

  "Nobody. We have no direct representation."

  "Why?"

  "The Founder died. The Family we served. Supposedly, half the militia died along with the Family. There are those who say otherwise, that the reason no one from Altiplano has a Seat in Council is that it was a mutiny."

  "What does your grandmother say?"

  "My grandmother?" Why should he think her grandmother's words had any weight . . . oh, of course, because his grandmother was Admiral Serrano. "Papa Stefan sa
ys it's a ridiculous lie, and Altiplano should have a Seat or maybe four." At his look, she found herself explaining. "On Altiplano, we're not like Fleet . . . even if we're military. Men and women don't usually do the same things . . . not as life work, that is. Most of the military, and all the senior commanders, are men. Women run the estancias, and most of the government agencies that aren't directly concerned with the military."

  "That's odd," Barin said. "Why?"

  She hated to think about it, let alone talk about it. "It's all old stuff," she said dismissively. "And anyway, that's just Altiplano."

  "Is that why you left? Your father was a—a sector commander, you said?—and you couldn't be in the military?"

  Now she was sweating; she could feel the prickle on the back of her neck. "Not exactly. Look—I don't want to talk about it."

  He spread his hands. "Fine—I never asked, you never got upset, we can just talk about my relatives again if that's all right."

  She nodded, stabbing her fork into food she barely saw, and he began a story about his cousin Esser, who had been consistently nasty during long vacations. She didn't know if it was true; she knew it didn't matter. He was being polite; she was the occasion for more politeness, and that in itself was humiliating.

  That night the nightmares recurred, as bad as the worst she'd had. She woke gasping from the battle for Despite only to find herself in the body of that terrified child, helpless to beat off her assailant . . . and from that relived the worst of the time in hospital. Dream after dream, all fire and smoke and pain, and voices telling her nothing was wrong even as she burned and writhed in pain. Finally she quit trying to sleep, and turned the light on in her compartment. This had to stop. She had to stop it. She had to get sane, somehow.

  The obvious move presented itself, and she batted it away. She had enough bad marks on her record, with the Board of Inquiry and the court-martial and then that ridiculous award from Altiplano . . . let her get a psych note in her record and she'd never get what she wanted.