“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.”