David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Sure, sure!" He raised his hand, waving his pencil at her admonishingly. "Stop criticizing and ask your question."

"I said I'd prefer not to talk about the meeting, but there was one really weird thing, and I'm not sure what to do about it."

"What do you mean, 'weird'?"

"As we were leaving, Westman asked me if Mr. Van Dort had ever mentioned someone named Suzanne Bannister."

"He did what?" Paulo frowned with the expression of someone who knew he didn't have all the information required to understand something. "Why would he do that?"

"I don't know." She turned her eyes away, gazing back out the armorplast at the storm system. "He said I reminded him of someone, then asked me if Mr. Van Dort had ever mentioned her. And I don't think the last name's exactly a coincidence," she added.

"Bannister? I guess not!"

He sat there for several seconds, frowning at her profile.

"You're worried that he had some kind of ulterior motive for telling you, aren't you?" he asked finally, and she gave an irritated little shrug.

"No, not really… most of the time. But I can't be sure. And even if he doesn't, I've got a strong feeling it might be painful to Mr. Van Dort if I brought it up.

"Well," Paulo said, "it seems to me you've got three options. First, you can keep your mouth shut and never bring the question up. Second, you can ask Van Dort who this Suzanne Bannister was. Or, third, if you really think Westman might've had some sort of ulterior motive, you could report it to the Skipper and see what he thinks you should do about it."

"I'd already pretty much come up with those same options on my own. If you were me, which one would you choose?"

"Without being there and actually hearing what he said to you, I'm not prepared to say," he said thoughtfully. "If you're reasonably certain this isn't simply a case of Westman looking for some way to upset Van Dort or create some kind of suspicion between him and the Skipper-or between him and you, for that matter-then maybe you should just go ahead and ask him. If you're seriously afraid it is a way to make trouble, you should probably tell the Skipper without letting Van Dort know anything about it. Let the Skipper decide the best way to handle it." He shrugged. "Bottom line, Helen, I don't think anyone else can make that decision for you."

"No," she agreed, yet even as she did, she realized just talking to Paulo about it had helped her decide what to do.

"Yes, Helen? What can I do for you?

Bernardus Van Dort laid aside the old-fashioned stylus with which he'd been scribbling longhand notes when the cabin hatch chime sound. He tipped back his chair, smiled, and indicated the small couch on the other side of the cabin he'd been assigned.

Helen settled down and looked at him, wondering one last time if she was doing the right thing. But she'd made her mind up, and she inhaled unobtrusively.

"I hope I'm not out of line, Sir," she said. "But someone suggested that I reminded him of someone called Suzanne Bannister."

For just an instant, Van Dort's face froze. All expression vanished, and for that moment, Helen felt as if she were looking at an old-fashioned marble statue. Then he smiled again, but this time the smile was crooked and contained no humor at all.

"Was it Westman? Or Trevor?" His voice was as calm and courteous as ever, yet wrapped around a tension, almost a wariness, she'd never heard from him before.

"It was Mr. Westman," she said steadily, meeting his gaze without flinching, and he nodded.

"I thought it probably was. Trevor and I haven't mentioned Suzanne to one another in over twenty years."

"Sir, if it's none of my business, just tell me so. But when Mr. Westman mentioned her-I don't know. It was as if he really, really wanted me to know and, I think, to ask you about her. And as if his reasons didn't have anything at all to do with the annexation or why we're here."

"You're wrong about that, Helen," Van Dort looked away at last. He gazed intently at a perfectly bare patch of bulkhead. "It has quite a lot to do with why we're here-why I'm here, at any rate-even if only indirectly."

He was silent for a long time, still gazing at the bulkhead. The blindness in his eyes made Helen regret that she'd begun the entire conversation, but he hadn't bitten her head off or told her to go away. He simply sat there, and she couldn't just leave him wherever he'd wandered to.

"Who was she, Sir?" she asked quietly.

"My wife," he said, very, very softly.

Helen stiffened, her eyes opening wide. She'd never heard that Van Dort had been married. Then again, she thought, she hadn't actually heard anything about his personal life.

Van Dort's eyes finally released the bulkhead and returned to her face. He studied her features, then nodded slowly.

"I see why he told you to ask. You look so much like her. You could be her again, or at least her daughter. That's why I almost refused Captain Terekhov's offer to assign you as my aide. It was too much like how I met her, in many ways."

"Would… would you care to talk about it, Sir?"

"No." He smiled again, wryly. "But that doesn't mean I shouldn't explain it to you, anyway. I probably should've explained it to Baroness Medusa before she asked me to come here, for that matter. I suppose it comes under the heading of 'potential conflicts of interest.'"

She said nothing, only looked at him, and he faced her fully.

"How old do you think I am, Helen?"

"I'm not sure, Sir," she said slowly. "You're obviously first-gen prolong, if you'll pardon my saying so. I guess… sixty T-years?"

"I'm well past eighty," he said. Her eyebrows arched, and he chuckled humorlessly. "I may well have been the first person in the Talbott Cluster to receive prolong. My father was merchant-owner of two freighters when I was born. My mother and I lived aboard, with him, until I was almost sixteen and he sent me off to Old Earth to college. He had a freight concession from one of the Solly shipping lines, and he made regular runs deeper into the League. Prolong wasn't available here, but he took me along on those trips into the Old League and had the therapies started when I was about fourteen.

"You're what-third-generation, I suppose?" He looked the question at her, and she nodded. "Your father?"

"Second- generation."

"Well, I imagine there are enough first-gen recipients in the Star Kingdom for you to realize that first-generation prolong's effects aren't very evident until you're well into your biological thirties." She nodded again, and he grimaced. "Given the fact that prolong wasn't generally available here, the handful of us who'd gotten it the way I did tended not to mention it. It creates a certain resentment when your contemporaries discover you're going to live three or even four times as long as they are. So the fact that I'd received the prolong therapies wasn't general knowledge, and most people simply assumed I naturally looked younger than my age.

"Then I met Suzanne."

He fell silent again, gazing into the past, and this time there was a deep, bittersweet joy in his smile. A joy compounded equally of happiness and pain, Helen thought without knowing why she was so certain.

"I was the skipper of one of my father's ships at the time. I was probably, oh, thirty-three or thirty-four, and Dad had almost a dozen ships by then. By Verge standards, we were indecently wealthy, but Dad already had his eye on Frontier Security. He knew they were coming, and he was afraid of what it would mean for all of us, but especially for Mom and me. He died of a heart attack-he was only fifty-six-the same year I met Suzanne, before he could think of any way to protect us. But it was his concern that started me in the direction of the Trade Union and led directly to where we all are now.