Federations

The impact was rough, but we lived through it. And a hell of a lot more after that too. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find another data cache and learn how things ended for us. But first, you need to look through those files on the Humpty culture. Ask yourself: Is this who you really are? Ask yourself, and don’t be surprised at the answer. Never stop looking.

THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN ALLEN STEELE

Two-time Hugo Award winner Allen Steele is the author of the novels Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Chronospace, Spindrift, and many others. Over the last several years, he’s been focusing on writing and expanding his Coyote milieu, of which this story is a part. The most recent novel in the Coyoteverse, Coyote Horizon, came out in March, and will be followed by Coyote Destiny.

Steele is also a prolific writer of short fiction, with four published collections, and a new one— The Last Science Fiction Writer —on the way. His stories have appeared in the magazines Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Science Fiction Age, and in numerous anthologies.

“The Other Side of Jordan” is a simple tale of love lost and found, played out upon a galactic scale, with aliens and cosmic megastructures aplenty, not to mention a nice-sized helping of that good old sense of wonder.

Jordan and I broke up on the docks of Leeport, about as lovely a place as you can have for the end of an affair. It was a warm summer evening in Hamaliel, with sailboats on the water and Bear—the local name for Ursae Majoris 47-B—hovering above the West Channel. We’d gone down to the waterfront to have dinner at a small bistro that specialized in grilled brownhead fresh from the fishing net, but even before the waiter brought us the menu the inevitable arguments had begun. There had been a lot of those lately, most of them about issues too trivial to remember but too important to ignore, and even though we settled the matter, nonetheless the quarrel caused us to lose our appetites. So we skipped dinner and instead ordered a bottle of waterfruit wine, and by the time we’d worked our way through the bottle, she and I decided that it was time to call it quits.

By then, it had become apparent that we weren’t in love. Mutual infatuation, yes. We had the strong passions that are both the blessing and the curse of the young, and Jordan and I never failed to have a good time in bed. Yet desire was not enough to keep us together; when it came right down to it, we were very different people. She’d been born and raised on Coyote, a third-generation descendant of original colonists; I was an émigré from Earth, one the gringos who’d managed to escape the meltdown of the Western Hemisphere Union before the hyperspace bridge to the old world was destroyed. She came from money; I’d been a working man all my life. She was a patron of the arts; my idea of a good time was a jug of bearshine and a hoot-and-holler band down at the tavern. She was quiet and reserved; I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, even when it was in my best interests to do so.

But most important—and this was what really brought things to a head—she was content to live out the rest of her life on Coyote. Indeed, Jordan’s ambitions extended no farther than inheriting her family’s hemp plantation—where we’d met in the first place, much to her parents’ disapproval, since I was little more than a hired hand—while having a platoon of children. I was only too willing to help her practice the art of making babies, but the thought of everything to follow made my heart freeze. After five years on Coyote—fifteen by Earth reckoning, long enough for me to have allegedly became an adult—I wanted to move on. Now that the starbridge had been rebuilt and the Coyote Federation had been tentatively accepted as a member of the Talus^[1] , humankind was moving out into the galaxy. There were worlds out there that no human had ever seen before, along with dozens of races whom we’d just met. This was my calling, or at least so I thought, and the last thing I wanted to do was settle down to a dull life of being husband and father.