Free Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois Page B

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