Furthest Author:Suzette Haden Elgin This is Coyote Jones 2 of 5. — Coyote Jones, agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, had been sent to a planet so unimaginably distant from the rest of the Federation that it bore the descriptive name Furthest. His mission: to find out why the total body of data about Furthest showed the world's inhabitants to be absolutely average down ... more »to the last decimal place. That data had to be false.
Jones was permitted to live on the planet, but the natives were so wary of him that he could uncover nothing -- until he chanced into a personal crisis faced by his young Furthest assistant. The boy's sister had been sentenced to Erasure, and he wanted Coyote Jones to take the fugitive girl in and hide her.
Against his judgment, Jones agreed, and thereby became a criminal on a world he didn't understand. But suddenly the answers began to come, and he found that this planet named Furthest held more strangeness than he could ever have imagined...« less