Council of the Talus, to which the hjadd belonged, determined that Earth no longer posed a threat to other starfaring races. And if the Federation didn’t like it, the hjadd could always withdraw their ambassadors, shut down their embassy on New Florida, and leave Coyote once and for all, slamming the door into hyperspace behind them. They’d reconstructed the starbridge, sure . . . but they also knew how to disable it so that no ships could pass through it without their permission.
To be sure, quite a few people objected to being cut off from Earth. Yet a surprisingly large majority supported the hjadd’s decision. Ever since the unexpected arrival of the first Western Hemisphere Union starship, four years after the Alabama party set foot on Coyote, and the military occupation that followed, Earth had been little but trouble for the colonies. The refugee crisis had been only the latest example of how the folks back home were using and abusing the new world, with little but a supply of trade goods to show for it. But if the Talus was willing to make up for this shortfall with a new source of vital materials . . . well, why bother with Earth at all?
So Coyote had become the latest partner in a galactic network of commerce and cultural exchange, with vessels constantly coming and going through the starbridge, bound for distant worlds whose very existence had been unknown until only a few years ago. And those ships needed crews. The fleet already had plenty of captains and first officers and navigators and engineers; those guys had come with their vessels, and their jobs essentially remained unchanged. But someone had to load cargo, repair hull plates, scrub decks, cook meals, clean toilets, and otherwise perform all the menial tasks to go with running a starship . . . and that’s how guys like me earned our paychecks.
After I passed through a four-week boot camp and earned my union card, I became a Payload Specialist Third Class, which is a polite way of saying that I was a cargo rat. My first billet was aboard the Lady Amelia, a jovian-class freighter that made regular runs out to a planet in the HD 114386 system, locally known as . . . well, I’m not going to try to it spell the name of the place; you couldn’t pronounce it anyway. The inhabitants called themselves the arsashi, and they had a use for the mountain briar our loggers cut in the highlands of Great Dakota. So I spent a couple of days loading lumber aboard a pair of payload containers, and once the containers were lifted into orbit and attached to the Lady Amelia, off we went to the Puppis constellation.
I didn’t see much of the arsashi homeworld. A small planet the color of ear-wax in orbit around a white dwarf, its atmosphere had too much ammonia and too little nitrogen for it to be habitable by humans—which is, indeed, the case for most worlds of the Talus. Yet the natives were friendly enough for a race of eight-foot tall, bug-eyed yeti; once my fellow rats and I unloaded five tons of wood, the arsashi did their best to make Amelia’s crew as comfortable as possible, even putting us up for the night in a small dome suitable for humans. Their food was indigestible, but at least we had a nice view of a nearby shield volcano. Which, so far as I could tell, was the only thing on their planet worth seeing.
I stayed aboard Amelia for the next six months, Coyote time, long enough to make five more trips to HD 114386. By then, I’d ended my probation period and had been promoted to Payload Specialist Second Class. I was tired of the arsashi and their dismal little wad of a planet, so after that last run, I gave up my billet to another spacer and went in search of a new job.
This time, I lucked out: the next available post for a cargo rat was aboard the Pride of Cucamonga, the freighter that made history by undertaking the first trade expedition to Rho Coronae Borealis. Word had it that, if you were fortunate enough to crew aboard the Pride, then you could get a job anywhere in the fleet. As things turned out, the Pride’s cargomaster was about to take maternity leave, and Captain Harker—himself a near-legendary figure—needed someone to fill her position. I was barely qualified for the job, but the letter of recommendation that the Lady Amelia’s captain had written on my behalf went far to ease his reluctance. So I managed to get one of the choice jobs in the merchant marine.
Cargo for the Pride of Cucamonga was cannabis sativa, but that wasn’t the only thing we brought with us. The Talus races opened trade with Coyote for our raw materials, yet it wasn’t long before we learned that they were willing to pay better for something else entirely. Not our technology; with the exception of seawater desalinization, for which the sorenta gave us negative-mass drive, anything humans had invented, the aliens had long since perfected.
To our surprise, what they liked the most about us was our culture.
The nord enjoyed our music. They didn’t think much of Mozart or Bach, and thought jazz was boring, but they liked bluegrass and were absolutely wild about traditional Indian music; apparently both the banjo and the sitar sounded much like their own instruments, only different. The sorenta were fascinated by our art, the more abstract the better, and didn’t mind very much if what we brought them were copies of Pollock, Kandinksy, or Mondrian. The kua’tah were interested in nature films; Coyote’s surface gravity and atmospheric density meant that they’d never set foot on our world, but they loved seeing vids of the plants and animals we’d found there.
As for the hjadd . . . the hjadd were intrigued by our literature. They’d learned how to translate most of our major languages long before humans actually made contact with them—a long story that I shouldn’t need to repeat—so they read everything we brought them, from Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley to 20th century potboilers to The Chronicles of Prince Rupurt. So not only was the Pride of Cucamonga carrying five thousand pounds of cannabis to Rho Coronae Borealis, but also a comp loaded with novels, stories, and poems by authors as diverse as Jane Austen, John D. MacDonald, Edward E. Smith, and Dr. Seuss . . . all as another payment for the sophisticated microassemblers that had enabled us to transform log-cabin colonies like Liberty and New Boston into cities the likes of which had never been seen on Earth. Our nanotech was primitive compared to theirs . . . but then again, there’s nothing else in the universe quite like Green Eggs and Ham.[4]
We never actually landed on Hjarr, of course. No non-hjadd ever had, with the sole exception of the chaaz’braan, the Great Teacher of the Sa’Tong. Instead, the Pride once again docked at Talus qua’spah, the immense space colony in orbit above Hjarr that served as one of the major rendezvous points for the Talus races. This was the first time I’d visited the House of the Talus, the place from which I’d embark on a journey that would eventually bring me to Hex.
But before then, I’d send a letter home.
• • • After I left Jordan, I told myself that she was just another girl with whom I’d had a brief affair, and that I’d miss her no more than any other woman I’ve slept with. She was gone. No regrets.
As time went by, though, I gradually discovered that I was wrong. I did miss Jordan, and I did regret the things I’d said to her. It wasn’t as if I was lacking female companionship. I’d had a brief fling with Lady Amelia’s com officer, and on those occasions when another merchant marine vessel was docked at Talus qua’spah, I could always count on a one-night stand with another Federation spacer. But these dalliances were nothing more than sexual exercise, and more than once I woke up in a bunk with a woman whose name I barely knew, to find myself thinking, if only for a moment, that it was Jordan who was curled up beside me.
Yet when I tried to get in touch with her, those times when I was back on Coyote between flights, I discovered that she’d taken measures to cut me out of her life. Her pad number had been changed, and when I tried calling her house, her folks would immediately disconnect, leaving me talking to a dead phone. Mutual friends informed me that she was still in Leeport and hadn’t yet taken up with anyone else; on the other hand, she never mentioned my name, or seemed to miss me in any way.
Nonetheless, I wanted her back. And so, during my third trip to Talus qua’spah, I wrote her a letter.
In order to send mail across the galaxy, one relies on hyperspace communication links; once a message was encrypted and addressed to its recipient, it’s sent to a network of transceivers maintained by the Talus, which in turn relays the letter to its intended destination. Unfortunately, that means that it’s theoretically possible for the message to be intercepted, decrypted, and read anywhere along the line. One has to be able to translate the written language of an alien race in order to do that, of course, and while I doubted that anyone would have much
