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.