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 interest in what I had to say to my former girlfriend, nonetheless I didn’t want others to read my mail.
So I opted for a slower means of communication. I hand-wrote my letter on pages ripped from my logbook, sealed them in an envelope, and addressed it to Jordan’s home. A friend of mine who was heading back to Coyote aboard another ship offered to carry my letter for me. An old-fashioned way of doing things, sure, but at least I’d be a little more assured of privacy.
In that letter, I let Jordan know where I was and what I was doing, then went on to apologize for the things I’d said to her. I told her that I missed her very much, and that I wanted to see her again. I also attached a recent picture of me standing watch on the Pride’s bridge, the galaxy-trotting spacer and all that. After adding the ship’s hyperlink suffix—no sense in her going through the same rigmarole if she didn’t want to—I gave the letter to my buddy. And then I went about my business, and tried not to be too anxious about when I’d get a reply.
None came.
A couple of weeks later, the Pride returned to Coyote to drop off cargo and take on another load of weed and books. Just before we left for Rho Coronae Borealis again, Captain Harker informed me that the regular cargomaster had successfully delivered her baby and that she would soon be coming back to work. After this trip, I’d have to find another ship. So I sent a second letter to Jordan in which I informed her of my change of plans before reiterating everything I’d written in my first letter.
I waited. Still, no response.
At Talus qua’spah, I happened to run into an old acquaintance, another guy who’d gone through training at the same time as I did. His ship was the Texas Rose, a long-range merchanteer that didn’t come and go between just two planets, but instead traveled among the Talus worlds on year-long voyages, carrying freight from one planet to another. My friend had done two of these circuits, and he’d seen enough of the galaxy; the time had come for him to go home.
I spent the night getting drunk and having a long talk with my heart. The following morning, still nursing a hangover, I went to see Captain Harker and asked permission to leave the Pride and take a job that had just opened up on the Rose. Ted was willing to do this, and so was the Rose’s captain, and so my friend and I swapped billets; he returned to Coyote aboard the Pride, while I…