The Undersea

There is an ocean that never sees the sun.

It has no shore, this silent sea. No river feeds it, no rain falls on it.

Its waters are black, and not just because they roil sluggishly in endless night. Black and cold and as thick and salty as blood.

Every child on every world knows this ocean, feels it lapping beneath their bed in the deepest hours of the night. Every adult remembers it, feels its water in the cold sweat that beads their skin when they start awake from dreams too unbearable to recall.

Nightmares crawl out of that ocean. Fears slink into it. No light can illuminate it.

Older than time, it will drown the strongest swimmer and freeze the fiercest heart.

Speak its name and its waters will fill your mouth and throat and chest until you drown.

The Undersea, they call it in the city of nine bridges, the city that knows as well or better than any other that the tides of the blood need the greater tides of the ocean.  The Undersea, that never ebbs or flows, deeper than death, darker than grief.

It has been a long time since anyone believed the Undersea to be anything more than a picture on the wall of a church, more than a tale that children use to scare each other.

Even so, it has never been quite forgotten.

You can hear the echo of its waters beneath the voices of the children as they sing their skipping rhymes on the bridges of Debreth. Once, twice, thrice lost, count, count, count the cost, still water, black water, see it take the river's daughter.  


Beneath their feet the river rushes on, tumbling as fast through the city as the blood through their veins.  

They laugh in the sunshine, secure in the knowledge that they are in the river and the river is in them, and all rivers flow to the sea.

But no river flows to the Undersea.

Its waters, black and cold and salty as tears, have no shore.

It is the only ocean that never sees the sun.

Fish Or Swords: The Podder's Tale.

I am as young as the River, rushing from spring to sea in a short half-handful of days.

I am as young as the River, but I have died many times.

They say we leave the River when the pod splits open and our bodies die - and we do not.

But we are in the River and the River is in us.

And you cannot leave the River, no matter what the parieurs say.

The burner stabs and sears and I am a coin falling through air, through water, though fire.

Fortune's coin, landing one side up or the other, fish or swords.

We come from the River, and go back to it.

Dip a bucket from the spring, from the flood, from the delta, and see the difference. Tip them back and try to find them.

I am not who I was. One day, I will not be who I am.

But for now, I skip across the surface, a fish that leaps and dives, now with and now against the current.

I am who I was. I will be who I am.

I will always be of the River.

However the coin falls.

Fish or swords.

Either Way

It's not a baby.

Nerila's a doctor, for Fortune's forsaken sake, not some sentimental fool getting teary-eyed at the idea of teeny-tiny toes and fingers. The bundle of rapidly-dividing cells inside her bears as much resemblance to an infant as a circuitry diagram does to the finished machine. It's a plan, a blueprint, a diagram for what will be built out of the iron stripped from her blood and the calcium sucked from her bones.

No more.

No less.

Not even that, soon, when Pilot finally stops asking for one more day, Nerila, just one more.

When she finally gives up and realizes she's wasting her time.

Not a baby, not a chance, either, no matter what Pilot or that interfering bitch of a friend she has say.

Not something that belongs in her life.

Either way.

Apples and Oranges

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay looked at the screen of her terminal in bemusement. What by the face of Fortune is the University of Caille sending us copies of their cloning contracts for? "Farmboy, those files from Eletta you asked for are - " She turned in her seat and forgot what she was about to say. She gave her partner an incredulous look.  "Is that ... an apple?" she asked.

Lieutenant Charles Etay gave her his sweetest choirboy smile.  "Yep."

Elienne leaned forward to get a closer look, the tiny silver knife in Etay's hand catching the light as he scraped the rich red skin from the fair-to-Fortune, real-life, actual apple that he held. "Where did you get it?"

"My mother has an orchard."  The skin came off in one long, curling strip, and Etay set it carefully on the desk.

"An orchard? Like, with lots of apples?"  Elienne poked at the long curlicue of ridiculous red with one finger, then surreptitiously licked that finger in case some taste of real, grown-on-a-tree apple had managed to stick to it. Nope.  


"Yeah, with lots of apples," Etay said, his quiet, slightly hoarse voice matter-of-fact, as if everybody had a childhood with lots of apples in it. "But mostly for sale. We only got to eat them for special occasions." He nodded towards the apple-skin lying on the desk. "You can dry that, you know. It keeps its scent."

"Uh-huh." Elienne watched him slice the apple in half, then quarters, then eighths. "And your mother sends you apples from her orchard, here?"

"One. Every year," he said. "For my birthday."

"It's your birthday?"

"It is," he said, with the tiny twitch of the corner of his mouth that Elienne had learned to recognize as his real smile, "my birthday."

She could smell the tart tang of the apple now as Etay cut out the seeds from the side of each slice. Her mouth watered. Normally, if she'd been eating, she'd have offered him half. Normally, if he had something that looked good, she'd ask Are you going to eat all of that?  It was the rules, everybody knew that.

But the rules applied where it was turn and turn about. Anyone could get a peshorky from the stall outside SCIDHQ, anyone could walk the extra block to the cafe that made shrip-and-chocolate coffees.

That apple, that was something else.

Elienne swallowed hard, and tore her eyes away from the actual, not re-fabricated cellulose proteins, ripened-under-a-sky, apple.   "Happy birthday," she said, a little bit thickly with her saliva glands working overtime at the tantalizing scent in her near proximity, and turned away.

"Thank you," Etay said.

Elienne concentrated on the files on her screen. Clone activations, Eletta system, 24/5 last year, for ... why?

"Eli?" Etay said.

"Mmm?" She turned back to see him holding out one white crescent toward her, white but already browning at the edges like she'd read real apples do once they're cut.

Her hand wanted to reach out and snatch it and stuff it in her mouth before he could change his mind.  The impulse was so strong that for a second Elienne thought she'd actually do it, grab the piece of fruit from Etay's fingers and hunch over it. Maybe growling.

Somewhere within her, she found the reserves of decency and discipline to say "No, Charlie. It's your birthday apple."

Etay gave her another of his choirboy smiles, as sweet and as bland as a painted cherub. "Don't you have a birthday?"  When she didn't answer he held the little white sliver out further. "Go on, Eli. You'll like it, I promise."

An offer made once is manners. An offer made twice is genuine. That was the rules, too.

Elienne took the fragile morsel from him. She made herself wait, looking at it, smelling it, feeling the slight give in the crispiness of it, the sticky juice on her fingers, wanting to be able to remember this moment in years to come.

Maybe tell my grandkids, if Jules ever gets around to giving me any.


Once upon a time, Granmamare had a real apple, one that was grown on a tree, and everything!


It tasted sweet, yes, and not sweet, at the same time.  A flavor she could recognize as apple from the packets with that word on the label, but as much like that sickly-sweet taste as the giant ball of flaming gas outside the station was like the pale yellow globes set into the ceiling of the station.

Elienne closed her eyes and held the piece of fruit in her mouth until it was nothing more than mush, and then, reluctantly, swallowed.

Etay was watching her. "Good?" he asked.

She nodded wordlessly. Good.

Etay ate a piece of the apple himself, thoughtfully, showing, Elienne thought, proper respect for it even if he had grown up surrounded by trees full of them. "It's a shame you can't grow them in pots," he said. "Oranges, now, orange trees don't mind a pot."

"No?"

He shook his head. "No. Never get very big, of course, so there's not much fruit. I get two a year, if I'm lucky."

Elienne  gaped at him. "You have an orange tree?"

Etay gave her another beatific smile. "More of an orange shrub, really."

Apples, oranges ... man probably grows shrip in his window box, too. "There's a lot more than meets the eye to you, Charlie," Elienne said.

Etay's gaze flicked to her, easy good humor gone, eyes very level and face very still. After a pause, a pause that went three seconds too long, he smiled. "Could say the same for all of us, I guess."  He picked up another sliver of fruit and offered it to her.  "Our job's'd be boring if not, hey?"

Elienne reached out and took the slice of apple. "Nothing wrong with boring, farmboy."

"Mmm," Etay said. He picked up the long curl of apple skin from his desk and slowly wound it around one finger. Against his white skin, the deep red looked like a wound. Elienne watched as he twisted and untwisted it, the edges fraying slightly with the movement.

"What?" she asked at last, her tone unreasonably sharp.

He let the apple skin slide loose from his fingers and coil itself on the desk again, and looked up to meet her eyes.  "Nothing wrong with boring, Eli."

"That's right."

"Except boring doesn't have apples, now, does it?"

There was no reason for the hair on the back of Elienne's neck to raise at that, no reason at all.

But it did.

The Queen Of The Stadium

They're shouting for her.

Two syllables, echoing around the stadium, picked up and tossed from voice to voice until there's just one huge roar, the crowd a single giant animal with a hundred thousand voices and two hundred thousand stamping feet.

Ga-er! Ga-er! Ga-er!


They're shouting for her, all those Holders and navy officers and rich commoners. Shouting for the slave child of slaves, worth less than a good breeding steer in the ordinary scheme of things.

But she is not ordinary.

Ga-er! Ga-er! Ga-er!

 She is Gaer Anansi, who scored three times in the match against Dam-Torsad's best team.  Gaer Anansi, who made the over-hand throw from half-way down the stadium that was widely agreed to be the play of the decade. Gaer Anansi, whose boots are said to be blessed since her kicks never, ever miss.

Slave child of slaves, in the stadium she is a queen.

Ga-er! Ga-er! Ga-er!


The noise builds and rolls and just as it is about to peak and fall back in on itself in a murmur of disappointment, Gaer strides forward.  She looks neither right nor left, not a flicker of her eyes or a lift of her hand to acknowledge the crowd, screaming wordlessly now. The tattoos on her face and the number branded on her bare back mark her as the left flanker for Euathrace, but she knows no-one there needs either to recognize her.  Children playing pick-up games in parks imitate her walk, the easy stroll that explodes into a blur of speed when the siren sounds.  Teenage girls - and boys, for that matter - copy the way she holds her head. Last spring there was a public scandal when two well-brought-up daughters from good families turned up to school wearing her tight-braided Brutor hairstyle.

Amarr daughters imitating a slave?

She is Gaer Anansi.

Normal rules do not apply.

At the center of the field, she stops, and for the first time acknowledges the presence of her audience, raises one hand. Quiet. The game is about to begin.

They obey her, and the noise dies away into a breathless silence.  They obey her, the slave child of slaves.

The ball rises in the air.

The whistle blows.

And then she is neither slave nor queen, nor Gaer Anansi either, but movement and light and the angle of the ball, for a period of time that is both infinite and far, far too short.

The whistle blows and she stands panting, sweat rolling down her sides and trickling into her eyes. Her palms sting from the burn of the ball, her shoulder aches from a half-remembered collision.

Ga-er! Ga-er! Ga-er!


The scoreboard says she won.

She always wins.

She is the queen of the stadium, still.

Gaer gives the crowd one long look, all those open mouths, shouting her name, gaping wide to swallow as much of her beauty and her skill and her grace as they can.

As she turns towards the exit the cheering crowd is almost loud enough to drown out the jingle of the collar around her neck.