Entirely True

Avolier Girane paused at the gate to the DeGrace house, straightening his tie and smoothing a palm over his hair. Of course it was impossible to imagine Lorraine DeGrace, or Lorraine Roth as she is now, living anywhere other than the DeGrace's ancient house on the broad terraces above the river, but the restrictions on private vehicles in the old part of town did mean that guests were forced into a closer encounter with the public transport system than a councillor like Girane was used to.

Satisfied that he was at least presentable, Girane made his way up the path between the manicured shrubs. The door opened as he approached, and he recognised one of Lorraine's sons, the polite one, Michel or Marc I think, doing duty as a doorman, offering to take Girane's coat with a smile that made his resemblance to his father all the more marked.

And there was the father himself,  topping up another guest's glass with a wink and a laugh, Lorraine DeGrace's folly they used to say, until Jorion Roth, spacer, became Jorion Roth, capsuleer.

"Bon soir, Avol, you're well?" Jorion draped an arm around Girane's shoulders and drew him further into the room. "I'm glad you could make it tonight, I'd hate to get sent back upstairs without a chance to see you. Pesellian's well? He's not here tonight?"

Jorion's smile was, as always, infectiously warm. Pesellian always said it never reached the man's blue eyes, but Pese's always been jealous of every man better looking than he is, which is why he refused to come tonight and left me to make his excuses. Girane paused, vaguely aware that though the thought was entirely true, it didn't quite feel like the entire truth, and then realised Jorion was waiting for a reply. "I couldn't drag him away from the lab, I'm afraid."

"Ah, scientists, eh? My eldest, Cia, she's the same." Jorian gestured toward the back of the room, where a plump girl was moving among the guests with a tray of canapés. "Lorraine had to drag her down here by the ear, or close to it. She's been accepted to the Ecole de Physique, you know, we couldn't be more proud, but a girl her age needs more in her life than the books, non?"

Girane nodded agreement and took a glass from a tray offered to him by a younger girl, one with a far stronger resemblance to Lorraine. And there was Lorraine DeGrace Roth herself, her eyes and smile as bright as the gemstones around her neck, pausing to kiss her husband's cheek before extending one slender hand to Girane.

"Avol," she said fondly. "Such a pleasure.  Is that darling man of yours brewing up some sort of elixir of eternal youth in his laboratory? Because I swear you look younger every time I see you.  Therese has gotten you a drink?  And - Cia, don't stand there dreaming while Avol is hungry."

With a murmured apology, the older Roth daughter held out her tray, wearing an echo of her mother's bright smile. "M'ser Girane, how nice to see you again."

Girane contemplated the potential damage to his waistline in each pasty-wrapped parcel on her tray, but Lorraine's cook was famous in society circles, and rightly so, and he couldn't resist. The girl smiled again, and began to turn, and Girane hastily cast about for a topic of conversation that would delay her and the tray she carried.  "Jorion said you're studying to be a physicist?"

"Oui, M'ser," she said, politely but a little distantly. "Perhaps less useful than Dr Aurelim's work on tuber yields, but it interests me."

"Oh, you know Pese's latest?" Girane discreetly took another pastry.

"Great potential, perhaps not here but in places with more marginal conditions," Cia said, almost the exact words from Pese's Science Merit Citation, and entirely true, although with no mention of the military applications, not the entire truth. The girl gave him another bright, Lorraine-DeGrace-smile, and said,  "You must be very proud of him, M'ser. Please, do try the ones on the left. They're cheese, quite delicious."

"Oh, well, if you insist." She was right: they were quite delicious. He said so, and Cia's smile broadened, genuine warmth in her eyes for the first time, as if she'd been somewhere else until them and briefly stepped inside herself. Fortune, she's almost pretty, Girane thought with surprise, and then, "Did you make them?"

Cia nodded, flushing a little, and lowered her voice to say confidingly, "The secret is the - "


A loud curse behind her made them both turn. Doetre Tumame, past and most say future mayor, was hopping on one foot, swearing, the crumpled child's model of a sharp-edged space ship on the floor an eloquent explanation.

"You stupid cow!" a shrill voice declared. The owner of the voice, a small girl with startlingly ginger hair, glared up at Tumame. "You ruined it! Why don't you look where you're going, you - "

"Camille," Lorraine DeGrace said, and cast a laughing glance around the room. Children, the glance said, inviting complicity from all the parents there,  what can you do?

""Well, she should!" the girl said furiously. "That took me and Cia ages and - "

"Then you should have taken better care of it, cherie," Lorraine said. "Now pick it up and take it to your room."

"Not until she says sorry!"

Lorraine lost her smile. "Camille! That is not an appropriate tone to use. If you are looking to be -"

Whatever Lorraine thought Camille was looking to be was lost as the tray Cia had been holding hit the floor with a crash. She stared down at it and then looked up with a bright smile. "Fortune," she said. "I'm so sorry, everyone, I really am a butterfingers."


"Oh, Cia," Lorraine said with a disappointed sigh.

The girl flushed a dull red and bent to gather up the spilled food, murmuring apologies.

Jorian put a hand on his wife's shoulder and said genially, "Well, I think Cia has announced it's time to move into the dining room, everyone.  Mayor Tumame, let me offer you my arm, I trust Camille's Drake hasn't caused permanent injury? They are quite a sturdy little ship, we pilots call them flying bricks for a reason."

The tension in the room lifted as the guests followed Jorian and Tumame towards the dining room.  As the staff set out a first course of delicate white fish and lemon butter, even the former mayor forgot her injury.

Girane would not even have remembered Jorion and Lorraine's youngest and least well-behaved child, except, leaving the house full of excellent food and better wine, he heard a child's voice from the shadows beneath the hedge at the front of the property.

"I don't care, Cia! I am running away and you can't stop me!"

The eldest daughter's voice sounded somehow softer and warmer in the darkness. "But I will be lonely when you've gone, cherie. And sad, without you."

"You're going away anyway, to college!" Camille said sullenly.

I am eavesdropping, Girane thought, with a faint, guilty thrill. Still, it's always useful to know what one can about a family like the DeGraces.  As a councillor, it's almost my duty to.

As  a justification, it had the benefit of being entirely true.  Girane stepped further into the shadows as Cia said gravely, "Only a little way away. And I have to, to get a good job so I can get a house of my own."

"Of your own?" Camille asked. "With just, like, you?"

"Mmm. There might be room for one more, cherie. If you wanted."

"We could be running away together!" the child said excitedly.

A faint rustle of clothing. "We could. If you weren't running away now, that is."

"Oh." A small foot scuffed gravel.  "Maybe I could wait, for you. If you didn't take very long."

There was a smile in Cia's voice as she said, "I promise I'll be as quick as I can, how about that?"

"Okay. I guess I can wait, if you're quick. Ow, don't squeeze, Cia!"


The girl laughed quietly. "I can't help it, you're too squeezable.  Hey, since you're not running away, do you want to help me fix your ship?"

"It's too smashed," Camille said sadly. "That stupid lady has big feet! She should watch where they go!"

"Yes, she should," Cia agreed. "But I bet it isn't too smashed. I bet we could fix it, with maybe some replacement bits."

Camille sighed. "Then it won't be the same, with new bits."

"No, it'll be like a real spaceship. They get fixed all the time, you know," Cia said. "And new parts get put on them when they're too broken."

"Really?" Camille asked.

"Uh-huh.  So your ship will be even more real, if it's been fixed up after a collision."

Camille said hotly, "Mama should have made the stupid lady 'pologise, not me, Cia! That wasn't fair! It was on the table and everything, she knocked it down with her big fat backside, I saw!"

Girane had to stifle a laugh, thinking Tumame is rather broad in the beam, as Cia said quietly, "Well, maybe Mama didn't see."


"She should have been on my side anyway! She's my mama!"

"Mama can't help being Mama, Cami. Don't be mean about her. And I'm on your side, hmm? How about that?"

"Okay. Cia?"

"Yes, cherie?"

"Can we go and fix my ship now?"

Girane stepped back out of sight hastily as feet scuffed and bodies moved in the shadows. "If you've finished running away."

"I have," Camille said, as the two sisters joined hands and started back to the house.

Then as they passed the shadows where Girane stood, she added thoughtfully, "Well.  For now, anyway."

Perhaps it was that carefully considered qualification that stuck like a grass seed on Dry Day to Avolier Girane's memory.  Certainly, when he heard that Jorion Roth had fallen victim to some sort of cloning accident, he wondered first, not about the man's beautiful now-widow but about the eldest and the youngest of his children.  When the Roth family left Debreth, suddenly and completely between one day and the next,  Girane found himself thinking For now without quite knowing why he did.

And when, some time after that, Ciarente Roth called upon the town council to explain that sometimes Air Traffic Control regulations were made to be broken, Mayor Avolier Girane surprised his fellow councillors almost as much as he surprised himself when he found himself agreeing with her.

She was a DeGrace, he explained to them later, even if this pilot fellow she wanted them to recognise as a hero was Caldari. There had always been DeGraces in Debreth, even back before the first of the nine bridges had been built.  Humouring her, especially now she was a capsuleer pilot and richer than Fortune's right hand, was an entirely prudent thing to do. 

Eventually he won their agreement.  Fines were cancelled, a statue commissioned, a public holiday gazetted.


After all, what he had said was entirely true.

And in the end, Girane thought to himself, standing on First Bridge on the first Debreth annual holiday to celebrate capsuleer pilots, watching Ciarente Roth watch Captain Night make a gracious speech thanking Debreth for the honour, in the end ...

No-one knows the entire truth, in the end, except perhaps Fortune.

Who keeps her own counsel. 

Even, he thought, joining in the general applause, even  from capsuleers.

Love and Crime

"Charlie, you're a fool." Capitaine Elienne Desorlay hunched her shoulders against the draft whistling out of the ventilation duct, gaze steady on the door at the end of the alley.  "This exchange program - that no-one's ever heard of before - just happened to pull your name out of the hat right when your capsuleer conceived more than a fancy to have you closer to home?"

Lieutenant Charles Etay, his thick coat more than a match for the breeze, more podder bribes, shrugged. "A job is a job all the same."

"A job that's a podder's grace and favour, for you to lose as soon as you lose her fancy?" Eli snorted, fumbling in her pocket for her cigarettes. "That's not a job, farm-boy. That's a polite way of offering to turn you into her putain.."

That got her no more reaction than a faint smile. "Such a way with words, you have," Etay said, leaning forward to cup his hands around her lighter as the draft made the flame flicker and dim.

"Oh, and how's it going to be, then, you tell me, when she tires of your pretty face?" Eli drew on the cigarette and when it lit, puffed smoke in Etay's face.  "When you tell her no when she wants to hear yes? When you think yours when she's thinking hers?"

Etay took a step back and turned to watch the door again. "There's a job there. There'll be one here, if I need it." He shrugged a little."Do you think this asshole's going to show?"

"He'll show," Eli said with flat certainty.

"He's got to know we'll be watching his girl," Etay said.  "The smart thing would be to -"

Eli flicked ash downwind. "You're forgetting something."

"I am?"

"One, he's a criminal. And crime makes you stupid," Eli said, holding up her thumb.

"Well, that explains a great deal," Etay said mildly.

"And two," Eli said, raising her forefinger to make the shape of a gun, "He's in love. And love, farmboy ..." She aimed at him. "Love makes you dumber than dumb."

Etay glanced sideways at her, long lashes half lowered over his limpid gaze, the breeze ruffling his hair into artless disarray, leaning against the wall as if he belongs on the cover of a holo, not that he knows it, which is almost more annoying, Fortune fuck him. "I recall you saying something along those lines once or twice before."

"A pretty girl crooks her finger, and a silly boy goes running. And then discovers he can't go wandering off again so easily."

Etay laughed soundlessly. "You think Cia plans to keep me chained up and captive?" he asked.  "To father the rest of her children?'

"Stranger things have fucking happened, farmboy, most of them in podder's hangars."

Etay took a step sideways as a passer-by obscured his view of the door. "She's not like that, Eli."

"Oh, not like that, not like that, says the man so head-over-heels in love with her he can't see her any more clearly than he can the shadow behind the sun." Eli burnt the cigarette down to filter on a single ferocious inhalation and dropped it.  "Fortune fuck me, and Robert just finished repainting the bathroom."

"Painting the ... " Etay stopped, eyes steady on the end of the alley. Not a stupid boy, no, Eli thought. Just a foolish one. "Eli ..."

"Someone has to keep an eye on you, farmboy. Someone with a clear head."  

The corner of Etay's mouth that Eli could see twitched upwards. "And you're volunteering?"

"Partners, remember?" She took a wide step around him as a face familiar from the squadroom holoboard showed at the end of the alley. "So you tell your pretty podder mama-to-be that this exchange program needs to have room for your senior partner. Flutter your eyelashes at her, or something."

"Eli ..."

She jerked her chin towards their target. "You going to argue with me or you going to make this arrest?"

Etay's head turned, his eyes narrowing, and he reached for the PRD on his belt. Cop trumps love-sick fool, Eli thought to herself.

For now, anyway.

For now.