City of Reason

By Matthew Jarpe
Originally published January 2005 by Asimov's Science Fiction. Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Jarpe.



Homesteaders made for easy pickings. For one thing they were hell and gone outside the orbit of Neptune, the last crumb of civilization before the big dark. For another, they all had philosophies. You didn’t up and leave mainstream humanity unless you had some ideas that just wouldn’t work inside someone else’s system. And so the homesteaders moved out and set up on trans-Neptunian objects, balls of dirty ice, and made a go at Utopia. I’ve never heard of a philosophy that didn’t cripple a society from defending itself properly. So most of the homesteads were weak.

Easy pickings, but slim. Their equipment wasn’t the best. They didn’t have loads of energy or raw materials, or biodiversity or any of the stuff that makes a pirate happy to have risked his life to get. In fact, the Kuiper belt had gotten a reputation as a kind of pirate’s farm system. You honed your skills out where the sun was dim, and when you had the moves and the weapons, you drifted down into the gravity well and you went major league.

So what was I doing out among the snowballs? Well, that’s the thing. I’m not a pirate anymore. I’ve gone legit. Nowadays when I reduce a manned spacecraft to a blob of alloy with a crispy center, I’m on the side of the angels. I’m a Damager, license right there on my forward bulkhead next to the picture of my sainted mother.

I get my information from the eye in the sky. The Coordinator Group maintains three space stations in solar polar orbits that are perpendicular to the ecliptic. Between those SoPo stations and the spy bots salt and peppered around the system, those bastards see everything. Needless to say the rise of the Coordinator Group was what persuaded me and others like me to go legit. Best play for the winning team.

So there I am cooling my heels and everything else besides out past the orbit of Neptune when I get a blip on my radar. Something is out there, and it isn’t supposed to be, and the Coordinators don’t know about it, and that’s the first time that’s happened to me.

It’s too late for me to go all stealthy. I’ve had my radar and transponder shouting out for all to hear, so I’ve already given up my shit. I figured I might as well play Damager, so I flip on the horn and speak in Belligerent Asshole voice.

“This is the licensed Damager One in the Hand addressing the unidentified object at 183.24.46 incline -16 out 67 heading 004.58.07. Please reactivate transponder and identify.” At the same time I sent a burst of machine code that would give the same message, minus the belligerent tone, to the automated systems of the ship.

And how did I know it was a ship and not some piece of rock wandering off its accustomed orbit? After all, the only thing I had to go on was a little radar blip. It could be anything. Well, call it a gut feeling if you want to. A few minutes of data gathering and my ship’s targeting computer confirmed my suspicions. The thing was hollow and rotating and about thirty thousand klicks back it had shed a wisp of chemical rocket exhaust during a course-correcting burn.

So I was right. Hell, I ought to be. I’ve survived out here longer than most people have been alive, and most of that time was spent hunting ships. I can smell a can of meat across a thousand kilometers of void. But no answer from the unidentified vessel. Nobody ignores a Damager. I laid in a course and burned hard for the cheeky bastard. I overtook easily in just a few hours. He didn’t even try to run. That’s when I got my first look at the ship.

Ship. I’m being charitable. It was made of rock and ice and only a miracle gave it enough balance to burn the engines without wobble. This thing wouldn’t last ten minutes inside the orbit of Mars. Sol would cook off the ice and leave nothing holding it together. It was no wonder the Coordinators hadn’t pegged it. It looked like just another fucking rock. “In case you haven’t got any sensors, my friend, I’ll tell you that I’ve matched vectors two thousand meters from your ... well, I guess we’ll call it a vessel. Now, I already told you I’m a Damager, but just in case you’ve been living under a rock, or inside one, for a long time I’ll tell you what that means. That means I’ve got a weapon trained on you that will take your whole outfit down to plasma in just a couple of seconds. OK, you’re probably asking yourself about now what you have to do to avoid the fate I’ve just described. You can tell me who you are for starters, and we’ll go from there.”

I gave it a few minutes with my message repeating on all frequencies in a couple dozen common languages and I got my reply. “Uh, don’t shoot, mister. I’m Jesse Marslarsen. I’m out of the High Fantastic Empire of Trans-emotional Excellence.”

I looked that one up. Sixty-three people in a cave hollowed out of an ice ball about two hundred million clicks from here. Pretty god damned Fantastic. “Good job, Jesse. I’m about fifty percent less likely to kill you now that you’ve started talking. What’s the name and registration number of your vehicle there?”

“I don’t ... have one. It’s homemade.”

“I kind of figured. So you never registered this thing with the Coordinator Group?”

“We can’t afford the fee,” the voice said. “We don’t produce anything to trade, you know.”?

“I’ve got that information on my screen, yeah. Only it’s dangerous to be out here without the Coordinators knowing what you’re about. Guy like me is likely to shoot first and explain the situation to the oversight board later. They usually don’t care much. Tell you what, Jesse Marslarsen. Let’s give your ship a name. I’m going to call it JAFR.”

“What is that, a random code?”

“No,” I said. I was about to tell him what it stood for, then I thought better of it. “Yes, that’s what it is.” Jesse didn’t sound like he had much of a sense of humor there. “Now we’re going to do pretty much what the Coordinators do when they register a flight. I’m going to ask what your business is, where you’re going and why, and then I’m going to find out what you’ve got on board. The whole purpose is so we can let the people at your destination know that you’re no danger and they’re safe to let you dock. If they’re willing to pay for that information, of course.”

“Well, I guess there isn’t much I can do to stop you,” Jesse said. “I’m willing to tell you the whole story and let you onboard to inspect, but you’re not going to give any assurances to the people I’m on my way to see.”

“Why is that, Jesse?”

“Because I’m going to kill them.”

The probes I brought with me to the JAFR confirmed what Jesse had told me. He was transporting a rather hefty thermonuclear device buried in the rock and ice that was his ship. He had no other ordnance, no weapons of any kind. Just one honking great bomb, a standard ion drive, and a rather meager life support bubble. I was rather impressed that they had gone to the trouble to outfit this crummy little ship with a lifeboat and a distress radio. Perhaps a futile gesture in this sparsely populated region, but you had to give them points for thinking ahead. The rest of the ship was barely adequate. It would have been cramped space for one human, but there were two people in there. Two young people.

I entered the ship through a short tunnel that led to an airlock. They let me in without protest or threat, but I kept my battle armor on anyway. Not just to be safe, but because talking to the blank metal faceplate and the array of sensors made people nervous. I like the answers I get from nervous people.

Jesse Marslarsen was just a kid, good dark-haired thin-faced Martian stock. The High Fantastic Empire was working on emotions, according to their published manifesto. They were using some genetic modifications and some hardware implants to ... I don’t know, conquer emotions or get in touch with them or something like that. Like most of these homesteader manifestos, it wasn’t the clearest thing to read. They had reported no success to the rest of the solar system, but best of luck to them anyway. The battle armor trick was working on Jesse. I had thought he was high-strung talking to him on the radio, but in person he seemed ready to snap.

His companion was not of the High Fantastic Empire but from a neighboring colony. She was a darling little thing of sixteen Earth years, strawberry blond hair and green eyes, scattering of freckles across her nose. But looks were, as is so often the case in this day and age, deceiving. That cute little American cheerleader’s body was just a walking feeder culture for sophont silk.

I’d seen people boost their brainpower with thread lots of times. I’ll bet there isn’t anyone on Luna who doesn’t have a bit of silk in the old gray matter. It was a popular implant, not one of the ones I was using, but it had its adherents. It was nice to see that even this trend had been taken to its extreme out in the homesteads. I don’t believe that there was anything left, mentally, of the young woman who had been called Shaunasie MacTaggert. When I spoke to her, found out who she was and where she was from, it was clear to me that I was talking to the silk.

She was from an enclave that called itself A Better Way. They didn’t have much on file, and the name certainly didn’t give me much to go on. If their whole philosophy was an unhealthy indulgence in mental enhancements that made them dangerous enough. But what interested me right then was not why her colony had created such a loathsome creature but why they had put it on this ship with this kid and this bomb.

“Jesse, Shaunasie, thanks for inviting me in here. I like it when people make my job easier. I’ll be sure to remember that in my report. Now, do you mind telling me what you’re up to? Looks like your trajectory is taking you to someplace called the City of Reason in about 23 days. What’s your beef with these guys?”

“We’re making a retaliatory strike against them,” Jesse said “They’ve repeatedly attacked us over the past two years.”

“They’ve attacked both your home colonies?”

“No, they’ve only attacked the High Fantastic Empire so far, but everyone else in this region is at risk. A Better Way is just orbiting by beneath us, and they’ve been advising us, first on how to deal with the attacks, and now they’re helping us to bring the fight to them. Shaunasie is here to do the strategic analysis of the base we’re taking out, make sure the bomb is planted in the right place to do maximum damage. The High Fantastic Empire doesn’t have any expertise in the arts of war.”

“And A Better Way does?”

“Some of their people had done military service before coming out here.”

“But not Shaunasie, certainly?”

“She’s been trained by people with experience,” Jesse said, glancing at the girl across the habitat bubble. “She can handle the job.”

I turned to Shaunasie. “Is this a suicide mission?” At the same time I asked the question in standard Chinglish I aimed a communication laser at the teardrop lens on her left cheek. I sent out some priority override codes to see what her implants would give up to a licensed Damager. Turned out nothing. She was locked to me. As a Damager. But I already told you that I haven’t been a Damager forever. Before joining up with the Coordinator Group I was a criminal. That can come in handy, like it did now.

“Not necessarily,” Shaunasie said. “We’re prepared, if it comes to that.” She glanced at Jessie and he looked back at her with admiration and pride.

“So you’re willing to throw your life away just to help your neighbors?”

“I’m not throwing my life away. It’s true, this isn’t our fight. We’ll be orbiting out of here in another ten years or so. But we can’t let naked aggression like this go unanswered. Our council of elders was willing to risk my life to help these people.” I had to hand it to the software that was running her. She was pretty good. I began to wonder whether her comrade in arms had any idea that she was a posthuman. My guess was no.

“Look, guys,” I told them, “I have to tell you, it isn’t my job to get mixed up in local politics. All I’m here to do is gather the information so the Coordinator Group can put it on the market. If the City of Reason wants to pay our fee, they will find out everything that I know about you. You’ve been most helpful and for that I am grateful, but, and I’m being brutally honest here, if they buy what we’re selling, the City of Reason is going to blow you’re ship into something that makes smithereens look chunky.”

“They’re not going to buy your information.”

The young woman was probably right. The City of Reason was weird even by homesteader standards. They had never published a manifesto, had never registered themselves to receive immigrants, and had never once paid any sort of fee to the Coordinators. Now, true, nobody ever read the manifestos, nobody ever emigrated to the homesteads once they were set up, and when you didn’t have trade you usually couldn’t make the Coordinator’s fees. But at least most of the homesteaders acted like they were still part of the human race, if a distant cousin twice removed. The City of Reason had left Titan, grabbed a ball of dirty ice at the edge of the system, and had kept to themselves ever since.

“What exactly did the City of Reason do to make you want to drop a bomb on them?” I asked Jesse.

“They sent us Trojan horse data packets that shut down our physical plant. We almost died.”

“Uh-huh. And how do you know these data packets came from City of Reason?”

“Our friends helped us trace the source,” Jesse said, nodding at Shaunasie.

I shook my head inside the helmet. You’d think these crazies could get along with one another, being united against the rest of us, but it never seems to work out that way.

Shaunasie tossed her short hair in a perfect imitation of a defiant gesture. “These people have a right to defend themselves.” < p>“Like I said before, it ain’t my business to get mixed up in all this.”

I pulled myself back to the air lock that would get me outside the cramped living quarters. I toyed briefly with the idea of telling Jesse what Shaunasie really was. They had spent 152 days together so far, and had another 23 to go before they completed their mission. Assuming they managed to drop their bomb and get away alive, they would have a hell of a long trip back even using the fastest transfer orbit.

Jesse was about 18 Earth years old. Even if the High Fantastic Empire had some kind of sexual hang-up, which I’m pretty sure they didn’t, he would have to be crawling the walls trying to figure out a way to get at that tight little body of hers. Trans-emotional excellence notwithstanding. If he knew she was just software running on organic fibrils interspersed throughout her nervous system he might lose interest. It would turn the rest of the trip from exquisite torture to something more like the heeby jeebies.

In the end I decided against it. I was 18 once. I know what I would have said if some old fart told me to stop wasting my time with my current love interest. I waved goodbye with a gloved hand and left through the airlock.

As I took the sled back to my ship I was doing a bit of data mining on the info I had teased out of the little tease on the JAFR. Nothing I had downloaded would be admissible in most courts, seeing as how I had stolen it. But the Coordinator Group was not a court. They didn’t care where their information came from. They were simply brokers. They found things out, they sold that information, they stayed in business and they helped the vastly complex process of interplanetary trade happen. Nobody got hurt.

They ordinarily wouldn’t pay much for the inside scoop on a homestead, but I had a feeling that A Better Way were up to something the rest of the solar system would find distasteful at best, dangerous at worst. Human enhancement was a touchy issue. Nobody was ready to come out against any form of improvement, whether it was genetic manipulation of the unborn or hardware or organic implants in adults. The practice was just too pervasive. But all the same, everyone wanted to know what everyone else was up to. How smart, how fast, and how much of the wild type human mind was still intact? I didn’t know whether the interest was self-defense or keeping up with the competition. Maybe a bit of both.

The data dump I got from Miss MacTaggart gave me a good idea what A Better Way was up to. They had a few thousand members, pretty thriving community for the Kuiper Belt. The elders were well augmented with hardware implants. Younger generations had some bold genetic modifications, all mental. They had a few dozen brain-jacked kids still learning how to direct link with the three artificial intelligences that ran the physical plant.

They were growing their own sophont silk. In the quantities they were using the stuff I wasn’t surprised. Millions of Outer System Currency Units couldn’t buy the crop of thread that went into each baby. Yeah, that’s right, they were threading the babies. As if drilling them for brain-jacks wasn’t enough.

So, it was a creepy setup. So, they were doing nasty things to children. I know that’s all bad stuff, I’m no moral cripple. But I also knew that it wasn’t moral outrage that would attract the high bidders. No, what they wanted to know was: what were the capabilities of this colony? What edge did their enhanced mental powers give them? And what did they plan to do with that power?

I left it to the Coordinator Group to figure that all out. They had the background on the colony’s founders, and the data on what sort of mind you could expect to result from extreme abuse of sophont silk. I sent off my data with my usual contract to Coordinator HQ on Mercury. My job here was done.


Here’s the thing about orbits. When you leave someone behind, you still share the same orbit around the Sun until you do a burn. To save fuel you coast in a bit or out a bit and speed up or slow down and you gradually drift apart. The whole setup is hell on dramatic exits. You’re still looking at the people you walked out on for days afterwards.

I still had the ugly lump that was JAFR on my radar map when the call came in from my ombudsman in the Coordinator Group. No two-way conversations out here, of course. I was 15 light hours away from the headquarters on Mercury. But then again, no conversation with Seymour Gladstone was two way, even when he was in the same room. <

“Nice report, cowboy,” he said without preamble. “Where do you find these people? I mean, a little sophont silk here and there is all well and good, but eeeeewww. Anyway, we had our top analyst dig through your data dump and all the other dirt we’ve got on these Better Way people. Turns out they come from Titan, just like those poor schmucks out at City of Reason. But wait, it gets better.

“City of Reason was founded by a mathematician named Right Finegold. Chair of the Institute for Introspection in the Graduate School of Abstract Sciences in the College of Higher Thought of Titan University.” He said this last in a sing song voice while reading off a data pad. He tossed the pad on his desk and leaned into the camera for a conspirational whisper that was completely unnecessary and very like Seymour. “There was a Scandal. It had all the ingredients of a classic: sex, money and cognitive enhancements. Finegold’s Institute was collaborating with the Experimental Cognition Department, writing the software that would run on enhanced human minds, and things went wrong.”

I paused the playback, made myself a sandwich, and got comfortable for the rest of the message. Should have done that when I first saw Seymour’s face on the screen.

“Experimental Cognition planted a spy, a cute little girl type, to steal some mind templates. She seduced a grad student, then an assistant professor, and apparently Finegold himself. She extracted a lot of free code before she was finally caught and linked back to Ex Cog.

“Well, you know how Titan politics are. Turns out, Ex Cog had a bigger budget and more pull with the Deans, so Finegold gets the ouster. He packs up a few loyalists and he goes Homesteader. They’ve got a pretty good outfit judging by their startup package. I’d give them a good ten more years before they come crawling back or die out.

“So meanwhile back on Titan, the legislature starts to get antsy about all this posthuman business, and a lot of what Ex Cog does becomes illegal. Eventually even Titan U can’t protect them from the angry villagers with the pitchforks and, well, we know where this all ends up, right? In the Kuiper Belt on a snowball called A Better Way. <

“Let me tell you about this so-called Better Way. You dug up some of the obvious stuff, but they’ve also got work going on in nanotech, uploading human minds into computers, all sorts of ways of getting to the posthuman future. It all sounds rather flaky to me.

“So, anyway, these two colonies started out nowhere near each other out in the frozen hinterland but twenty years go by and orbits are eccentric and rings turn inside of rings and now they’re practically neighbors. Coincidence? Ah, maybe. Or maybe an elaborate plot of revenge.

“Actually, the whole revenge thing is my idea. The analyst, an AI of course, didn’t have the imagination to come up with that. AI’s just don’t have that sense of drama. Anyhow, the AI thinks that A Better Way is setting up a conflict between The High Fantastic Empire and the City of Reason for some nefarious purpose.

“Here’s why I’m telling you all this. We’ve got a customer who’s willing to pay you to stop those two kids from destroying the City of Reason. Eighty thousand oscus, of which we take our usual 20% finder’s fee. Shouldn’t be too hard a job, considering they’re not armed. “There, you have your mission. Good luck, mazel tov, bon voyage, and all that. Oh, and be careful. What did I forget? I can’t think of anything. We’re downloading our analysis for you to study, standard cripto of the day. Any questions, feel free.”

The analysis from the Coordinator Group AI confirmed my suspicion that the High Fantastic Empire was being set up. But to what end? Surely A Better Way wasn’t trying to avoid legal ramifications of genocide. This was the Kuiper Belt. There was no law out here. There were only people like me, the Damagers, and we didn’t retaliate or punish evil doers. Our only purpose among the homesteads was to prevent the rise of new pirates before they began to plague paying customers in the inner system. As I scanned more of the data less and less of it fit. The High Fantastic Empire was apparently completely uninvolved in this dispute. They were Martians and as such they hated authority. They were a weak colony, small and underdeveloped, experimenting on their minds not to produce superhumans but just to understand themselves a little better. I was sure that the Trojan horse attacks had come not from the City of Reason but from A Better Way.

I didn’t like the setup for a lot of reasons. Jesse Marslarsen was getting screwed, that much was certain, and I kind of liked him. The High Fantastic Empire was probably getting screwed as well, although it was their own fault for believing the charlatans of A Better Way. And most of all the City of Reason was getting screwed. They were just trying to mind their own damned business and hadn’t done anything to anybody.

So it was up to me to put this tangled mess back to rights, champion of justice that I am. I laid in an intercept course for the JAFR and fired up the engines.


As soon as I saw the lifeboat separate from the JAFR my first impulse was to cook it. I had the microwave laser powered up and targeted before the tactical computer had the situation analyzed.

It wasn’t the bomb. The mass was all wrong, and it had no obvious guidance system. There had to be someone inside it, and I wanted to figure out who it was before I pulled the trigger.

We were just three hundred kilometers from the City of Reason. Both ships were decelerating fast, so there was more than enough time for me to get a ‘bot onto the JAFR and disarm the bomb before it could be deployed, but the lifeboat changed things. I wanted that lifeboat back with the JAFR so I could deal with all of the variables in one place.

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