Year's Best SF 11, page 12
“Saskia,” Joe said with extreme distaste.
I really wouldn’t have recognized his older daughter. Saskia used to be a lovely girl. This creature was the kind of horror story that belonged on the front page of a tabloid.
“Whatcha starin’ at?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I promised quickly.
“I need money,” she told her father.
“Get a job.”
Her face screwed up in rage. I really believed she was going to hit him. I could see Heloise behind her on the verge of tears, arms curling protectively around the kitten.
“You know what I’ll do to get it if you don’t,” Saskia said.
“Fine,” Joe snapped. “We no longer care.”
She made an obscene gesture and hurried back through the mansion. For a moment I thought Joe was going to run after her. I’d never seen him so angry. Instead he turned to his wife, who was frozen in her chair, shaking slightly. “Are you all right?” he asked tenderly.
She nodded bravely, her eyes slowly refocusing.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Joe said bitterly. “We didn’t spoil her, we were very careful about that. Then about a year ago she started hanging out with the wrong sort: we’ve been living in a nightmare ever since. She’s quit school; she’s got a drug habit, she steals from us constantly, I can’t remember how many times she’s been arrested for joyriding and shoplifting.”
“I’m sorry. Kids, huh!”
“Teenagers,” he said wretchedly. “Fiona needed two Prozac gland implants to cope.”
I smiled over at Heloise, who had started playing with the kitten again. “At least you’ve got her.”
“Yes.” Joe seemed to make some kind of decision. “Before you leave, I’d like you to perform the cellular stasis-regeneration procedure for me.”
“I don’t understand. I explained before, it’s simply the first stage of verifying the overwrite sequence we developed.”
His attitude changed. “Nevertheless, you will do it again. Without my help you will be going back to prison for a long time.”
“It’s of no use to adults,” I said helplessly. “You won’t become young, or even maintain your current age.”
“It’s not for me,” he said.
“Then who…” I followed his gaze to Heloise. “Oh.”
“She’s perfect just the way she is,” he said quietly. “And that, Doctor, is the way she’s going to stay.”
City of Reason
MATTHEW JARPE
Matthew Jarpe (home.comcast.net/~m.jarpe/) lives in Quincy, Massachusetts, with his wife and son. “I currently work (as a biochemist) at a company in Cambridge, Massachusets, called Biogen Idec. I characterize interactions between molecules,” he says on his website, and “I like to cook, build things, and brew beer.” Jarpe has published six SF stories to date in six years, five in Asimov’s and one in Fantasy & Science Fiction. In the 1990s he was part of Hal Clement’s SF writing circle.
“City of Reason” was published in Asimov’s. It’s an exciting space opera with action, complex intrigue, a nuclear weapon, mind control, a post-human teenage girl, and much more. Out on the edge of the solar system, a man who is supposed to find out information about space ships for an agency that sells the information finds a ship containing two teenagers and a nuclear weapon, on their way to destroy a city.
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 flipped on the horn and spoke 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 there was 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. Okay, 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 50 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 on board 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 MacTaggart. 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 twenty-three 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 that 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 your 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 Coordinators’ fees. But at least most of the homesteaders acted like they were still part of the human race, if only 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 the 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.”
“Like I said before, it ain’t my business to get mixed up in all this.”
I pulled myself back to the airlock 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 one hundred fifty-two days together so far, and had another twenty-three 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 eighteen 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 heebie-jeebies.
