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June 2788. Amalie is the last unmarried girl in Jain’s Ford settlement. Life on a frontier farming planet in the twenty-eighth century has a few complications. The imported Earth animals and plants don’t always interact well with the local ecology, and there’s a shortage of doctors and teachers. The biggest problem though is the fact there are always more male than female colonists arriving from other worlds. Single men outnumber single women by ten to one, and girls are expected to marry at seventeen.
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Amalie turned seventeen six months ago, and she’s had nineteen perfectly respectable offers of marriage. Everyone is pressuring her to choose a husband, or possibly two of them. When Amalie’s given an unexpected chance of a totally different future, she’s tempted to take it, but then she gets her twentieth offer of marriage and it’s one she can’t possibly refuse.
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Frontier is the first novella in the Epsilon Sector Novella sequence featuring Amalie. Please note that most of the first two chapters of Frontier have appeared as the story Epsilon Sector 2788 in the EARTH 2788 short story collection. The other eighteen chapters are entirely new.
Chapter One
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On the day after Cella’s wedding, I came close to skipping school for the first time in my life. If I’d done that, stayed home on that crucial afternoon, I’d probably never have been faced with a choice between two different lives.
Even after I’d started walking down the track towards Lone Tree portal, I was tempted to turn round and go back home. Afternoon school shift started at one o’clock, and I was already late. Partly because I’d been babysitting my three youngest brothers and sisters all morning, partly because the water pipe from the spring needed unblocking for the third time this week, and partly because I’d heard the chickens squawking for help and had to go and rescue them from a moon monkey that was peering nosily into the chicken run. Moon monkeys were one of the original native species of Miranda, perfectly harmless herbivores, but our chickens were terrified of their round, glowing faces.
These things were all just excuses, of course. The real reason I’d set off late for school was because I knew exactly what would happen when I got there. In fact, it started before I was anywhere near the school, because Torrin Summerhaze was lying in wait for me at the portal that was shared between the dozen nearest farms.
It would take me an hour to walk to the next nearest portal, so I gritted my teeth and marched up to this one, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Torrin. That didn’t stop him happily jeering at me.
“Old maid! Old maid! Amalie is the old maid!”
I didn’t turn to look at him, just reached out with my right hand to slap him on the back of the head.
“Ow!” he complained. “That hurt.”
“It was meant to hurt.”
I reached out to set the destination for the portal, but hesitated at the last moment. It was one of the economy models, just offering the six most important local destinations: Jain’s Ford Settlement Central, Jain’s Ford School, Mojay’s General Store, the livestock market, the vet, and the medical centre over at Falling Rock Settlement.
If you wanted to go anywhere else, you had to portal to Settlement Central first. That had a proper portal you could use to travel anywhere on the inhabited continent of Miranda, though naturally the portalling charges were a lot higher. The only time I’d been through it was last year, when my parents took all eleven of us to visit Memorial. We’d seen the sea, and the hilltop monument marking where the Military handed Miranda over to the first colonists thirty-one years ago. It was a totally zan day, apart from the twins falling in a rock pool so they stank of seaweed.
Right now, I felt like going to Settlement Central and portalling to Memorial again, or even all the way to Northern Reach. I’d seen images of the great cliffs there on the Miranda Rolling News channel. I could see those cliffs for myself, and have a glorious day of freedom, far away from Jain’s Ford Settlement, Jain’s Ford School, and people like Torrin Summerhaze. The snag was that I’d have to come back and face them all at the end of it. I’d have spent credits I couldn’t afford, and it would change nothing.
I set the destination to the school, and walked through the second the portal established. I stepped out of the portal in the school field, and headed for the nearest of the six grey flexiplas domes, the one that was labelled with a large white number 6 and a lopsided pink hummingbird.
The number 6 was the official school dome label. The pink hummingbird was a legacy of when the boys in the year above us got drunk on their last day at school and found a stray can of paint. Rodrish Jain had climbed onto the dome roof to finish painting the hummingbird’s wings, stopped in the middle to shout and wave at the rest of us, fell off, and was portalled to the medical centre at Falling Rock with a broken arm. There was a rumour that Doc Jumi had fixed Rodrish’s arm, and then locked him in quarantine for twenty-four hours in case his pink spots were a sign of a previously undiscovered Mirandan disease. It was probably true. Doc Jumi had an evil sense of humour.
Torrin came through the portal and chased after me. “Amalie, I could help you solve your problem. Marry me!”
I stopped walking, looked him up and down, shook my head sadly, and gave him the standard frontier planet rejection line. “Come back when you’ve got a farm!”
He sighed, and trailed along after me to dome 6. As we went inside, twenty boys looked at me, stood up, and yelled it in unison. “Old maid! Old maid! Amalie is the old maid!”
Last year, there’d been twenty-one boys and eighteen girls in our class. Here on Miranda, as on most of the planets in Epsilon sector, you could have Twoing contracts at 16 and marry at 17. On Year Day 2788, we’d all turned 17, and seven of the girls instantly proved themselves perfect frontier world women by having Year Day weddings. Admittedly, in Rina’s case, there was a scandal over her last minute change of husband.
Norris was still fuming about that, and you could hardly blame him. He’d been Twoing with Rina for ten months, so when she dumped him in the middle of their wedding and married another man it was a shock for everyone. The fact the other man was Norris’s older brother, made things even worse. Jain’s Ford Settlement was pretty equally divided between those who thought Rina had done the right thing, those who thought she should have stuck with Norris, and those who thought she should have married both of them. I was the exception. I thought it would have been much more sensible for Rina to cancel the wedding, and think things over for a few weeks before she married anyone, but it was her life, not mine.
Over the next three months, nine of the other girls had got married as well, though without any more scandals. My friend, Cella, had held out for a further two months before caving into social pressure and marrying yesterday. Now there were twenty-one boys, seventeen empty desks, and me. I was the class old maid. Worse than that, I was the settlement old maid, because all the girls my age who’d left school at 15 were married as well.
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Frontier, an Earth Girl prequel novella featuring Amalie, is available now in both ebook and paperback editions. You can find full details at https://janetedwards.com/books/frontier/
