He had finished his salad and was waiting on the main course when the door opened, letting in a cold gust of wind. He glanced up and met the professor’s inquisitive gaze.
“Lieutenant Serrano—what a pleasant surprise. May I sit with you?”
Barin had been in the mood to brood alone, but the professor was an older man, distinguished. “Of course,” he said.
“I wanted to apologize,” the professor said. “I should not have embarrassed you with Ensign Pardalt that way. It’s my instinct for mischief.”
“That’s all right,” Barin said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” the professor said. “You were only trying to protect one of your people from danger—albeit an imaginary danger.”
“Get you something?” That was the waitress, an older woman with gray hair. She handed the professor a menu.
“Ah yes.” He ordered quickly. When the waitress left again, he cocked his head at Barin. “Something’s troubling you, young man. Have you fallen for the fair Margiu instead of your own illustrious Esmay Suiza?”
“No, it’s not that.” Barin pushed the saltshaker back and forth. “She’s got a ship now, Esmay. She’s back in. And she should be.”
“Mmm?” The professor busied himself with his napkin, folding it into a precise triangle before putting it in his lap.
“You’re married, professor, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The professor’s face softened. “Kata. Wonderful woman . . . I’ll tell you what, young Serrano, they get better as they get older. Softer. Mellower. When she was young, she was like a green peach, but now . . .” He smacked his lips. Barin found it a little disgusting. Esmay was not a peach at all. And yet . . . this was maybe the only married man he could talk to.
“We only had those few days,” Barin said. “And I don’t even know where she is . . .”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following this.” The professor leaned back against the rock. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
Barin started instead with Esmay’s disgrace as a result of the quarrel with Brun Meager, and worked his way to the family reunion, and their hasty clandestine marriage.
“You just ran off to a magistrate? How . . . charming.”
“We just couldn’t stand it,” Barin said. “What with the mutiny and my family and everything—we wanted to have some kind of link—”
“And then things hit the fan—”
“Not really. We made the ship by a hair, the captain chewed us out a bit but not much, and—it was so wonderful, those days.”
“Those nights, I suspect you mean, unless you were on third shift,” the professor said dryly.
“Well . . . yes. Both, really. Working together, at least part of the time, and then—”
“You found you could get along with half the sleep you thought you needed. Yes. Youth is wonderful that way. So what happened?”
“Esmay got new orders; she was to leave and tranfer at Sector V to another ship, and then on across to her final assignment. The next thing I knew, she wasn’t in the Fleet database. She’d been separated, and I didn’t know where she was.” Barin chewed his lip, remembering how frantic he had felt. Had she felt the same way?
“Did you think she’d gone back to Altiplano?”
“I didn’t know. And I was on a warship, a cruiser; I had no chance to start looking. I kept thinking . . . worrying . . . and then we were in combat and then—”
“I heard,” the professor said. The waitress reappeared, with a loaf of fresh warm bread and a bowl of butter. The professor pulled off a hunk and started eating. Around a mouthful of bread, he said, “They were determined to save your life, because you’d saved the ship, is what I heard.”
“All I did was stand still,” Barin said.
“Yes, well, sometimes standing still is the right thing to do. But you’re waffling, young man. Get to the point.”
Barin found himself blurting it out, more than he’d meant to say, and finished with, “And she’s older, and she’s got a ship, and I’ll always be behind . . .”
The professor stopped, folded his hands on the table and said, “It’s not a race.”
“Sir?”
“It’s not a race. Marriage. There is no ‘behind’ or ‘ahead.’ You’re not in competition; you’re a partnership.” He cocked his head. “Do you love this woman?”
“Esmay? Of course—”
“Not ‘of course’ . . . I mean really love her, heart and soul and body?”
“Yes . . . I do.”
“But right now you’re jealous, aren’t you? You think she’s the famous one, the hero twice over, the captain of a fine ship—because if she’s the captain, it will be a fine ship. You don’t want to be a bauble on her necklace, a trophy husband.”
Barin felt himself flushing. “It’s not jealousy, exactly.”
“Yes, it is—exactly. Barin, I’m going to talk to you as if you were one of my sons or grandsons. It’s probably going to upset you, too, just as it upsets them. Now it’s obvious to me that you’re a fine young officer, a proper Serrano. But your whole life has been Fleet, and one particular segment of Fleet. Here you’re a prince; you’ve inherited a name and all that goes with it. That’s fine, so far as it goes. But your wife’s not just Fleet; your wife’s a Landbride—or she was—and she’s got connections that go far beyond Fleet.”
“I know that,” Barin said.
“Yes, intellectually, you do. Emotionally—you haven’t begun to cope with it yet. I will bet that when you first met her, you thought you were doing her a favor.”
Barin felt his face going hot again. “I admired her,” he said, a little too firmly.
“Yes, but you knew more about Fleet, I daresay, and you were glad to show your expertise.”
“I suppose,” Barin said, and reached for the bread himself. “She did ask me things.”
“Yes. And you generously instructed her. And that’s fine, so far as it goes. Tell me how much you’ve learned about Altiplano.”
“Er . . . not much.” It occurred to Barin that he hadn’t even considered learning more about Altiplano.
“Tell me—what about those women the news media called your NewTex wives? What does your Esmay think of them?”
“Oh, them . . . they’re not a problem anymore.” He hadn’t thought of them in months, since his pay was no longer being garnished for their support. The professor’s eyebrows went up, and he explained. “Someone Brun Meager knows found them a home on a colony world someplace . . .”
“Someone . . . someplace . . . ? That’s not very specific. Do you feel any responsibility for them, these women who left their native world because they trusted your word?”
Put like that, it sounded as if he were an irresponsible selfish wretch. “I hadn’t really thought about it, not since they left. They seemed happy enough to go there.”
“Umm. Out of Fleet, out of mind? Only the standards here in Fleet are real to you? I suppose that’s why you’re so worried about being always junior to her.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Barin said. He didn’t want to think of it like that, and he was relieved when the waitress returned with their food. He dug into his food and hoped the professor would forget what they’d been talking about. But the professor, halfway through his steak, returned to the topic.
“If you worry about her rank, Barin, you’ll make yourself miserable—and her, too. You can’t grow by cutting her down. This is what I meant by your needing a wider base. If you see everything through the narrow filter of Fleet, date-of-commission and all that, then you can only regret being born later. But if you see that both of you can grow in all dimensions . . . then what will it matter? What kind of person cares, in twenty years, if you were commissioned a year or two after her? Who’s wearing which insignia?”