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Global Shear (Asia) has won a ten-year contract to govern a poor district in south India, replacing the failed bureaucracy. Their charge: to lift 16 million people out of poverty. Their incentive: a percentage of the new wealth they'll help to create. Michael Fielding, the new project manager, finds a battered street waif on his doorstep and takes her in, which lands him in hot water with his boss, his housekeeper and the local fundies.

Cody Graham is a founder of Green Stomp, a bioremediation firm with a new microbe that eats perchloroethylene ("perc") dry-cleaning fluid, a common pollutant. Cody's a scholarship kid, up from an industrial slum in California. She's smart, successful -- and lonely.

This is a profoundly hopeful near-future story -- that technology can improve poor peoples' lives, and enrich the rich helpers' lives in the process. Nagata writes with assurance and grace, touching on wealth & poverty, women & men, love, charity, religion and how we'll live a few years from now -- all without being preachy or dull. One of the year's best (and the price is right). Not to be missed.

For some reason, scifi.com splits their stories into many files -- 10 of them for "Goddesses" -- which makes downloading their stories a bit of a pain. But worth it in this case.

Pete Tillman has been reading SF for better than 40 years now. He reviews SF -- and other books -- for Usenet, "Under the Covers", Infinity-Plus, Dark Planet, and SF Site. He's a mineral exploration geologist based in Arizona. More of his reviews are posted at www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman .