Free Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois

been tested?”
    “On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys, though.”
    He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat. “Can it be . . . caught? I mean, it’s a virus, can it go from one person to another?”
    “Through skin-to-skin contact.”
    “I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their children?”
    “Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it. If mothers want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it deliberately.” She shrugged. “Whatever the case, my guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as they’re green healthy babies.” She looked down at the little vials in their secure coffins of foam. “We can infect tens of thousands of people with this amount,” she said. “And we can make more very easily.”
    If mothers want to infect their children . . . Terzian closed the lid of the plastic case and snapped the locks. “You’re out of your mind,” he said.
    Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking as if she’d anticipated his objections and was humoring him. “How so?”
    “Where do I start?” Terzian zipped up the bag, then tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see her defensive reflexes leap in response. “You’re planning on unleashing an untested transgenic virus on Africa—on Africa of all places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy history with pandemics. And it’s a virus that’s cooked up by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-country with a murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much confidence that this is going to be anything but a disaster.”
    Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she were wishing there were a cigarette between them. “I can put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal study worked. Adrian had a family of bright green rhesus in his lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah, liquidated.”
    “So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull the plug?”
    “Money.” Her lips twisted in anger. “Starving people can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so they’d have to practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of endless bad publicity, which is exactly what outlaw biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There are millions of people who go ballistic at the very thought of a genetically engineered vegetable —you can imagine how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenic bell pepper would freak at the thought of infecting people with an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They closed the project down.”
    Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. “But Adrian had been in the camps himself, you see. A displaced person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he couldn’t stand the thought that there was a way to end hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that nothing was being done with it. And so . . .” Her hands outlined the case inside the Nike bag. “He called me. He took some vacation time and booked himself into the Henri IV on the Place Dauphine. And I guess he must have been careless, because . . .”
    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