Rough Rider

"The point might be to help you stop having the dream every night," Woodlawn observed dryly. "You didn't seem to be enjoying it much, so I thought you might like to unload it. Or unload the baggage that's causing it, is what I meant to say. Why not, Joy? You said it, I was there - so there can't be anything you need to hide from me."

"Don't be too sure about that, Woody." Again that twisted, completely unhumorous grin distorted Grant's mouth. She was no beauty, never had been; but in her mid-forties she usually had an air of calm certainty that gave her perfectly average face a comfortable attractiveness whenever she wasn't finding it necessary to stare down an enemy or scare hell out of a difficult crew member.

Woodlawn remembered her as an Academy cadet who was still filled with adolescent uncertainties, as a junior officer who hadn't yet learned that it wasn't necessary for her to take herself far too seriously in order to command respect; and as a youthful executive officer on a ship much smaller, much less technologically advanced than the St. Pete, which would have taken twice as long to make a direct passage from Earth to Zorti and which had been heading into the utterly unknown instead of visiting today's well-established colony there. That young exec had really been pretty whenever she'd smiled, but of course in those days her smile had reached her eyes almost every time she'd worn it.

The mature woman might have been beautiful tonight, if she hadn't long ago forgotten how to smile like that. She laughed at jokes like other human beings, she apparently enjoyed all the normal pleasures - eating, drinking, working hard, making love - but Woodlawn hadn't seen those expressive blue-gray eyes of hers fully include themselves in her smile since they'd taken the old Rough Rider away from Zorti after being the first humans to land on that world, all those years ago now. As far as he knew she hadn't smiled like that even once since she'd left someone behind on Zorti who had been capable of making her light up like a Terran sunrise.

Hell, of course she wasn't going to talk to him about it. She'd allowed herself to be debriefed after her return to Earth nineteen years earlier, she'd talked to the press about all the conventional things that an explorer was expected to discuss and describe - and as soon as some other drama had diverted the media's attention from the discovery of Zorti, she'd plainly been thankful to be allowed to stop talking about it and hadn't willingly done so since. Except maybe to the child that had been born to her eight months after that discovery, the child she had just learned that she was carrying when she'd had no choice but to presume its father dead and to leave his body unrecovered somewhere on the alien world of which he had afterward been immortalized as discoverer.

An appropriate fate, perhaps, for Kirkland Gambol Rogers. How they'd joked about having an uppercrust dandy of a young captain for a ship called Rough Rider! It had seemed so poetically suitable before they'd realized their "discovered" world already had a name, by which its native inhabitants called it, that Rough Rider's officers had humorously suggested it should be dubbed "New Cuba" and that its highest elevation should be named "San Juan Hill."

Those high spirits of theirs had come crashing down soon enough, though. Although Joy Grant had since then risen in rank from lieutenant to full captain, although she'd commanded a succession of increasingly larger and more powerful starships and although the son she'd borne eighteen years earlier had grown into an intelligent and good-looking man of whom she had every right to be proud, it was her old friend John Woodlawn's opinion that she had left much more than a lover down there among the telepathic natives of Zorti. She'd left something behind that had by its absence changed her forever, and although Woodlawn had come to love her more dearly than ever during the months since she'd first allowed him to share her bed he was always aware even when they were closest to each other both physically and emotionally that something essential was absent from their times together. There was some part of her that he was not touching because she wasn't in touch with it herself, or (a cold thought that horrified him whenever he permitted himself to entertain it briefly) because that part of her was gone, not just concealed. Really gone, destroyed, literally and not just figuratively sacrificed on the altar of initial contact with an unknown and in its terribly innocent way absolutely deadly alien species.

"Woody, I'm sorry - this is going to sound awfully unfair - but I need you to go back to your quarters now," Grant said, managing to use her command voice without looking or sounding ridiculous given their current circumstances. Two naked lovers in a bed, and she was giving an order like the Star Guard captain she was and she plainly was expecting to be obeyed. "I know I said you could stay, but now I really have to be alone for awhile."

"All right." Woodlawn wasn't sure whether he was agreeing because he wanted to give her what she needed, or whether he was a chief medical officer obeying his captain; and it didn't matter, because he'd long since given up worrying about it when the lines between official and private relationship became blurred. Such things were inevitable when men and women served together in confined spaces over months, sometimes years, out of contact with others of their own kind except their shipmates. The old "nonfraternization regulations" had been sent to the junk pile decades earlier, and as long as mature adults used discretion there was no need to be afraid of discovery because no one really gave a damn what anyone else did in privacy. Not even when "anyone else" was the ship's captain, and when her relationship was with one of her own senior officers.