Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

Her mouth was dry again, but she didn’t think she could drink; her stomach had knotted shut.

“No, thank you.”

“Your first time with psych support?” Esmay nodded; she hated to be that transparent.

“Everyone’s scared beforehand,” the clerk said. “But we haven’t killed anyone yet.” Esmay tried to smile, but she didn’t really think it was funny.

Nubbly toast-brown carpet ran halfway up the bulkheads, here painted cream; a fat-cushioned couch with an afghan draped over one end and a couple of soft chairs made the little compartment look more like a particularly cozy sitting room. It was quiet, and smelled faintly of mint. Esmay, aware that she had stopped in the doorway like a wary colt halfway through a gate, forced herself to go on.

“I’m Annie Merinha,” the woman inside said. She was tall, with a thick braid of light hair going silver at the temples. She wore soft brown pants and a blue shirt with her ID tag clipped to the left sleeve. “We don’t use ranks here . . . so I’ll call you Esmay, unless you have a favorite nickname.”

“Esmay’s fine,” said Esmay through a dry throat.

“Good. You may not know that a request for psych support authorizes whoever works with you to have complete access to your records, including all personal evaluations. If this is a problem, you’ll need to tell me now.”

“It’s not,” Esmay said.

“Good. I called up your medical record earlier, of course, but that was all. There are some other things you need to know about the process before we get started, if you feel you can understand them at this time.”

Esmay dragged her wits back from their hiding places. She had expected to have to tell everything at once . . . this was much duller, if less painful.

“The slang for most of us is psychnannies, as I’m sure you know. That’s reasonably accurate, because most of us are nannies, not medtechs or psychiatric physicians. You’re from Altiplano, where I believe they still call nannies nurses, is that right?”

“Yes,” Esmay said.

“Do you have any cultural problems with being in the care of a psychnanny rather than a physician?”

“No.”

Annie checked off something. “Now: you need to know that although our sessions are confidential, there are limits to this confidentiality. If I have reason to believe that you are a danger to yourself or others, I will report that. This includes participation in certain forms of religious or political activity which could be a danger to your shipmates, and the use of proscribed substances. Although you may choose to attempt concealment of any such activity, I must in conscience warn you that I’m very good at spotting lies, and in any event dishonesty will markedly affect the value of your treatment. Do you want to go on?”

“Yes,” Esmay said. “I don’t do anything like that . . .”

“All right. Now we get to the heart of it. You said you had problems connected both with your experiences on Despite , and with other experiences from before you joined the Service. I would have expected problems existing when you joined to have been dealt with at that time.” She stopped there. It took Esmay a long moment to realize that this was an implied question.

“I . . . didn’t tell anyone.”

“You concealed something you knew was—?”

“I didn’t know . . . at that time . . . what it was.” Only dreams, only dreams, only dreams pounded her pulse.

“Mmm. Can you tell me more about it?”

“I thought—it was only nightmares,” Esmay said.

“There is a question on the intake physical about excessive nightmares,” Annie said, with no particular emphasis.

“Yes . . . and I should have said something, but—I didn’t know for sure they were excessive, and I wanted to get away—to get into the prep school . . .”

“How old were you then?”

“Fourteen. The first year I could apply. They said the application was good, but to wait a year or so, because they’d already filled up, and besides they wanted me to take extra courses. So I did. And then—”

“You did get into the prep school. The dreams?”

“Weren’t as bad, then. I thought I was outgrowing whatever it was.”

“You didn’t know.”

“No . . . they said it was only dreams.”

“And now you know differently?”

“I do.” That sounded as grim as she felt. She met Annie’s eyes. “I found out when I went home. After the court-martial. That it was true, it was all real, and they lied to me!”

Annie sat quietly, waiting for her breath to steady again. Then she said, “What I understand you to say is that something happened when you were a child, before you joined Fleet, and your family lied, told you it had never happened and you only dreamed it. Is that true?”

“Yes!”

Annie sighed. “Mark down another one for the misguided abusive families of the world.”

Esmay looked up. “They’re not abusive, they just—”

“Esmay. Listen. How painful was it to think you were going crazy because you had unreasonable, disgusting, terrifying bad dreams?”

She shivered. “Very.”

“And did you have that pain every day?”

“Yes . . . except when I was too busy to think about it.”

Annie nodded. “If you tormented someone every day, made them miserable every day, scared them every day, made them think they were bad and crazy every day, would you call that abusive?”

“Of course—” She saw the trap, and turned aside like a wild cow swerving to avoid a gate. “But my family wasn’t—they didn’t know—”

“We’ll talk about it. So the first problem you have is these dreams, that turned out not to be dreams, of something bad that happened when you were a child. How old were you when it happened?”

“Almost six,” Esmay said. She braced herself for the next questions, the ones she wasn’t sure she could answer without coming apart.

“Do you still have the same dreams, now that you know what it is?”

“Yes, sometimes . . . and I keep thinking about it. Worrying about it.”

“And your second problem has to do with your experiences aboard Despite ?”

“Yes. The . . . the mutiny . . . I’ve had dreams about that, too. Sometimes they’re mixed up, as if both things were happening at once. . . .”

“I’m not surprised. Although you haven’t told me yet what kind of childhood trauma it was, there are parallels: in both instances you were under someone’s protection, that protection failed, and someone you trusted turned out to be against you.”

Esmay felt particularly stupid that she hadn’t figured this out for herself; it seemed obvious once Annie had said it.

“I presume the mutiny on Despite involved a lot of close-contact fighting aboard?”

“Yes . . .”

“So of course the Bloodhorde intrusion here would rekindle the same feelings—and tie into the earlier trauma as well.”

“I wasn’t quite as scared this time,” Esmay said. “Not at the time, anyway.”

“Luckily for the rest of us. Now—have you ever told anyone about the events in your childhood?”

Esmay felt her shoulders hunching. “My . . . my family already knows.”

“That’s not what I asked. Have you ever told anyone since you grew up?”

“One person . . . Barin Serrano . . . because he was feeling so bad. About having to consult you, and . . . and what happened.”

“Barin Serrano . . . ? Oh. The ensign in sickbay—he’s assigned to someone else. Interesting. You’re friends?”

“Yes.”

“It must have been hard for you to tell him . . . how did he react?”

Esmay shrugged. “I don’t know what a normal reaction is. He was mad at my father.”