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“A Death In Vesunna”
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the story waa also called “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” - the novel is an expansion
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The Last Favor"
“Good Provider” by Marion Gross
“Islands in the Stream”
Oh, I’ve read Turtledove and I also recall a couple of those stories mentioned. I’ll bet if I search his name I’ll find the book.
Was there a story about a Byzantine guard who as a child had been captured and now worked for the Empire? His birth name was Temujin, huh, and he was inspired to go conquering for Christianity.
I remember that story fondly (though I had forgotten title and author.)
As to the fruit – do you have a farmers’ market in your area with local producers? If so try there. (And try Local Harvest, to find the market.)
Some places called farmers’ markets have only shipping quality fruit brought in from elsewhere; and some vendors who grow their own may be also shipping wholesale and bringing the same to market. But your chances are a lot better.
Thank you! You’re a scholar and a gentleperson! 
And yeah, we have good local produce but I think it’s just an artifact of too much CO2, lots of vegetative growth going on but fruiting, not so much. I didn’t get any cherries from any of my three varieties this year or last, including the pie cherry tree that was fully grown when I bought the place over twenty years ago and has been pretty reliable, especially as a pollinator. Even the Rainier cherries from local orchards were flat tasting and pretty sour. Flowers aren’t blooming much either, usually heliotropes go nuts in this one sunny planter but this year they’re barely hanging on, sweet peas haven’t bloomed at all, gladiolas don’t appear to have any flower spikes starting although the plants are quite lush and even the salvia is anemic. Sigh. Nothing seems right this year, and with the mild summer we’ve been having I’d have expected riotous garden action but not so much. Fewer bees too, in spite of all I do to encourage them.
Another one, a bit vague.
Story in a universe where there is faster than light travel (some kind of hyperdrive or so), but where normal humans can’t pilot the ships, it messes with their minds or so. The pilots are modified humans (I think some genetic predisposition combined with a sort of modification). The main character is a pilot, and I believe he finds out about a plot between the other pilots against normal humans. I also vaguely recall some kind of relationship with a normal woman before he became a pilot?
Sounds like the famous classic SF story “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
Yes, that’s it! The author doesn’t sound familiar, but the title does and the plot matches what I remember.
Cool!
My memory’s not good enough for the more obscure ones, but that’s one of the all time greats and included in a lot of story collections.
Beat me to it!
You realize we all attempt to beat you, right? I got one before you a few years ago, and I’m still bragging about it at cocktail parties.
Aw… Thanks
I think I’ve gotten some before him, and if I could just get invited to a cocktail party I’d have something to brag about.
It probably is “Scanners Live in Vain” (and why that’s a classic, I have no clue, because it was just terrible), but the description is also consistent, or close to it, with “Aztecs”. “Aztecs” doesn’t have a plot against the normals, just a doomed love affair, but on the other hand, “Scanners” doesn’t have FTL (supposedly, normal humans aren’t even able to survive going into space at all).
Something to work on in 2024 - a very specialized kind of cocktail party
I just read it. Normal humans can’t survive in space conscious because it’ll drive them so crazy they’ll die, sorta like Stephen King’s jaunt but with a spaceship rather than instant teleportation. But normal humans are living on various planets. Ships must be crewed by people stripped of all senses except sight. Until the end of the story, that is, when someone figures out using oysters (IIRC) on the inside hull of spaceships shields the passengers. 
The voluntarily de-sensed pilots have their senses restored and are kept on as the guild of spaceship pilots, which I felt to be a bit over-convenient.
This sounds a lot like the premise of Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre, except in that novel, it’s the pilots’ hearts which must be replaced by artificial hearts so that they may remain awake during superluminal transit without going insane and/or dying. (I can’t remember the exact consequences that were supposed to happen to unmodified humans)
That’s the same author as “Aztecs”, the story I mentioned. I hadn’t realized there were other works in that series. The problem was that hyperspace or whatever they called it was a weird sort of timelessness, and so any ability to perceive the passage of time resulted in insanity. A person’s heartbeat provides enough of a rhythm to be a problem, so they have to be replaced by continual-run pumps. Pilots jokingly refer to themselves as “Aztecs”, because they get their hearts cut out.
In the short story, a young woman has gone through pilot training, and is just about to have the surgery, when she falls in love with a man (who’s involved in some other way I don’t remember with spaceflight, but he would be one of the ones who’d be unconscious for the journey). He’s so smitten with her that he tries to sign up to be a pilot, too, but he’s rejected, because his innate sense of time is just too strong (it’s mentioned several times prior that he knows what time it is, without consulting his watch). And the lifestyles of a pilot and a non-pilot are just too alien to each other for a romance between them to work.
Passengers needing to be asleep during the FTL jumps also features in Timothy Zahn’s “Cascade Point” and at least one sequel that I’m forgetting the title of. In that 'verse, being awake didn’t cause death nor total insanity, but was just very unsettling. The pilots who stayed awake just had to learn to deal with the psychological effects of seeing into alternate realities in which they had died, or simply had a much better life.