Read Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 for Free Online

ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.
    The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.
    Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?
    The latter, for preference.
    He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.
    His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con—a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for. . . .
    Eventually, the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another cigarette.
    He tapped his wedding ring on the table top, something he did when thinking. “Shouldn’t you contact the local police?” he asked. “You know something about this . . . death.” For some reason he was reluctant to use the word murder . It was as if using the word would make something true, not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some kind of power over him.
    She shook her head. “I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it.”
    “Because of this copyright.”
    Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “That’s right.”
    “It’s not a literary copyright, I take it.”
    She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.
    “Your friend was a biologist.” He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the next question.
    “Is it a weapon?” he asked.
    She wasn’t surprised by the question. “No,” she said. “No, just the opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. “It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly.”

    “Listen,” Stephanie said. “Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is still there—the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be greased—all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more ‘inspectors’ and ‘tax collectors, ’ more ‘customs agents’ and ‘security directorates’ than there ever were under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want.”
    “Trashcanistans,” Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into freedom for the fatherland.
    Stephanie nodded. “And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria.”
    She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.
    The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance