Name of a short story from Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

Question

It was about a space sailor who would travel back and forth on 6 month trips that resulted in 11 years passing between each trip. He was assigned to a "primitive" planet to build a portal to allow instantaneous travel to it from the empire, so that it could be assimilated. He falls in love with a woman on the planet and learns years later that she is leading a revolution on the planet by those who do not want the empire to come, and eventually he sabotages the gate being constructed.

I read it 10 or 15 years ago? It was in an Asimov's Science Fiction that I found in an apartment that I rented.

Answer 1

This is the "Remembering Siri" story from Dan Simmons' Hyperion cycle. It was previously asked about and answered here: Story set on ocean planet, featuring floating islands

You seem to be looking for the short story version, which, per ISFDB, was published in the December 1983 issue of Asimov's magazine, and also independently collected in Simmons' anthology Prayers to Broken Stones. Many will recognize it from its inclusion in Hyperion. Per Wikipedia:

Simmons used it as the seed for Hyperion (in which it appears nearly verbatim)

Here's the relevant quote from the story about the protagonist's sabotage of the portal:

"So it is with great pleasure that I close this circuit, and welcome you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the community of the Hegemony of Man."

The thin thread of the ceremonial com-laser pulses to the zenith. There is a spattering of applause and the band begins playing. I squint skyward just in time to see a new star being born. Part of me knows to the microsecond what has just occurred.

For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional. For a few microseconds time and space had ceased to be obstacles. Then the massive tidal pull of the artificial singularity triggered the thermite charge I had placed on the outer containment sphere. That tiny explosion had not been visible but a second later the expanding Schwarzchild radius is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand tons of fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several thousand kilometers of space around it. And that is visible -- magnificently visible -- as a miniature nova flares whitely in the clear blue sky.