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Jarpe, Matthew - City of Reason




City of Reason
MATTHEW JARPE
From Hartwell, David Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

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 Idee. 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 posthuman 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 transNeptunian 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


file:///E|/mIRC/download/Hartwell,%20David%20-%20Ye...hew%20-%20City%20of%20Reason%20(v1.0)%20[html].html (1 of 18)10-10-2007 17:02:37
 Jarpe, Matthew - City of Reason

saltandpeppered 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