Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (10 page)

Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian, strong in the knowledge that he’d shared quite enough of her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green landscape that was beginning to take on the brilliant colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and whitecapped in the distant east, and nearby were orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves, and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.

“I’m not going to be your bagman,” he said. “I’m not going to contaminate the world with your freaky biotech.”

“Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die,” Stephanie said. “And it will be for nothing.”

“My experience of death,” said Terzian, “is that it’s
always
for nothing.”

She snorted then, angry. “My experience of death,” she mocked, “is that it’s too often for
profit
. I want to make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to crash the market in starvation by
giving away life
.” She gave another snort, amused this time. “It’s the ultimate anti-capitalist gesture.”

Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were just that.

Gestures didn’t change the fundamentals. If some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just use bullets, or deadly genetic technology he bought from outlaw Transnistrian corporations.

The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant came by and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

“You should use my phone to call your wife,” Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her sandwich. “Let her know that your travel plans have changed.”

Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.

“My wife is dead,” Terzian said.

She looked at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Brain cancer,” he said.

Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had first complained of back pain, and there had been an operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There had been a couple of weeks of mad joy and relief, and then it had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain and that it was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.

“Do you have any other family?” Stephanie said.

“My parents are dead, too.” Auto accident, aneurysm. He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and his partner Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each other and left Claire the Victorian house on Esplanade in New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had sold for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and Uncle Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one thousand.

He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot of money, enough to float around Europe for years.

Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.

There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. “I’ve read spy novels,” he said. “And I know that we shouldn’t go to the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go anywhere
near
Nice.”

She considered this, then said, “We’ll get off at Avignon.”

They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying always in un-rated hotels, those that didn’t even rise to a single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in
gîtes ruraux,
farmhouses with rooms for rent. Stephanie spent much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on her cell phone and achieved only sporadic success, a frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she thought they were going to get the papilloma off her hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved in this conspiracy of hers.

They attended some local fêtes, though it was always a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe to appear in a crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats and shades and ended up looking like a cartoon spy. Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets, lost some pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine, and gained a suntan. He made a stab at writing several papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in Internet cafés.

He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if only Claire had been with him.

“What is it you
do,
exactly?” Stephanie asked him once, as he wrote. “I know you teach at university, but . . .”

“I don’t teach anymore,” Terzian said. “I didn’t get my post-doc renewed. The department and I didn’t exactly get along.”

“Why not?”

Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on his display. “I’m too interdisciplinary. There’s a place on the academic spectrum where history and politics and philosophy come together—it’s called ‘political theory’ usually—but I throw in economics and a layman’s understanding of science as well, and it confuses everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in American Studies—nobody in my philosophy or political science department had the nerve to deal with me, and nobody knows what American Studies actually
are,
so I was able to hide out there. And my doctorate is in philosophy, but only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who was willing to chair my committee.

“The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or Hume or whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by adding Maynard Keynes and Leo Szilard. And if you teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to acceptable stories about the past and not toss in ideas about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the noumenon, and of course you court crucifixion from the laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche.”

Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. “So where do you find a job?”

“France?” he ventured, and they laughed. “In France, ‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not necessary to have a degree, it’s just something you do.” He shrugged. “And if that fails, there’s always Burger King.”

She seemed amused. “Sounds like burgers are in your future.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate enough interesting, sexy, highly original papers, I might attract attention and a job, in that order.”

“And have you done that?”

Terzian looked at his display and sighed. “So far, no.”

Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him. “You’re not a conventional person. You don’t think inside the box, as they say.”

“As they say,” Terzian repeated.

“Then you should have no objections to radical solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that don’t cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world.”

“Hah,” Terzian said. “Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an
economist
.”

So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa. Another famine was brewing across the southern part of the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood
and
drought, a startling combination. The Horn of Africa was worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food shipment stuck in Mogadishu and before letting it pass, the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the meantime, people were starving, dying of malnutrition, infection, and dysentery in camps in the dry highlands of Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa was worse than the Somali warlord, at this stage permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.

And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking about.

“What’s
your
solution to this?” she demanded of Terzian. “Or do you have one?”

“Test this stuff, this papilloma,” he said, “show me that it works, and I’m with you. But there are too many plagues in Africa as it is.”

“Confine the papilloma to labs while thousands die? Hand it to governments who can suppress it because of pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You call
that
an answer?” And Stephanie went back to working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for another stalk down country lanes.

Terzian walked toward an old ruined castle that shambled down the slope of a nearby hill. And if Stephanie’s plant-people proved viable? he wondered. All bets were off. A world in which humans could become plants was a world in which none of the old rules applied.

Stephanie had said she wanted to crash the market in starvation. But, Terzian thought, that also meant crashing the market in
food
. If people with no money had all the food they needed, that meant
food itself had no value in the marketplace
. Food would be so cheap that there would be no profit in growing or selling it.

And this was all just
one application
of the technology. Terzian tried to keep up with science: he knew about nanoassemblers. Green people was just the first magic bullet in a long volley of scientific musketry that would change every fundamental rule by which humanity had operated since they’d first stood upright. What happened when
every
basic commodity—food, clothing, shelter, maybe even health—was so cheap that it was free? What then had value?

Even
money
wouldn’t have value then. Money only had value if it could be exchanged for something of equivalent worth.

He paused in his walk and looked ahead at the ruined castle, the castle that had once provided justice and security and government for the district, and he wondered if he was looking at the future of
all
government. Providing an orderly framework in which commodities could be exchanged was the basic function of the state, that and providing a secure currency. If people didn’t need government to furnish that kind of security and if the currency was worthless, the whole future of government itself was in question. Taxes weren’t worth the expense of collecting if the money wasn’t any good, anyway, and without taxes, government couldn’t be paid for.

Terzian paused at the foot of the ruined castle and wondered if he saw the future of the civilized world. Either the castle would be rebuilt by tyrants, or it would fall.

Michelle heard Darton’s bullhorn again the next evening, and she wondered why he was keeping fruit-bat hours. Was it because his calls would travel farther at night?

If he were sleeping in the morning, she thought, that would make it easier. She’d finished analyzing some of her samples, but a principle of science was not to do these things alone: she’d have to travel to Koror to mail her samples to other people, and now she knew to do it in the morning, when Darton would be asleep.

The problem for Michelle was that she was a legend. When the lonely mermaid emerged from the sea and walked to the post office in the little foam booties she wore when walking on pavement, she was noticed. People pointed; children followed her on their boards, people in cars waved. She wondered if she could trust them not to contact Darton as soon as they saw her.

She hoped that Darton wasn’t starting to get the islanders on his side.

Michelle and Darton had met on a field trip in Borneo, their obligatory government service after graduation. The other field workers were older, paying their taxes or working on their second or third or fourth or fifth careers, and Michelle knew on sight that Darton was no older than she, that he, too, was a child among all these elders. They were pulled to each other as if drawn by some violent natural force, cataloguing snails and terrapins by day and spending their nights wrapped in each other in their own shell, their turtleback tent. The ancients with whom they shared their days treated them with amused condescension, but then, that was how they treated everything. Darton and Michelle didn’t care. In their youth they stood against all creation.

When the trip came to an end, they decided to continue their work together, just a hop across the equator in Belau. Paying their taxes ahead of time. They celebrated by getting new bodies, an exciting experience for Michelle, who had been built by strict parents who wouldn’t allow her to have a new body until adulthood, no matter how many of her friends had been transforming from an early age into one newly fashionable shape or another.