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If Meir Klein wanted to talk to a prominent Tau, it was reasonable that he would have chosen Damian. The Affinities had no official hierarchy, and under the rules laid down by InterAlia all tranches were created equal; the national sodalities existed solely to organize social events and maintain centralized websites and mailing lists. Like every other Affinity, Tau had no president, no board of directors, and no governing body apart from the policy wonks at InterAlia itself. But the Affinities were all about cooperation and organization. And more than any other Tau on the continent, Damian had been a tireless organizer. He had come into the Affinity as a successful business-affairs lawyer, and he had soon begun setting up financial plans for other Taus: pensions, investment portfolios, trusts. His reputation gradually spread from our tranche to the Toronto Tau network and from there to the entire national sodality, and before long he had hired a small army of accountants and financial experts (all Taus) to handle the huge volume of work. Out of that had emerged TauBourse, the first publicly-traded Affinity-based corporate entity. It was also the first Affinity-based business to face a legal challenge from InterAlia, which had become alarmed at the prospect of others deriving profits, even indirectly, from an institution to which InterAlia owned intellectual property rights.

The litigation was still ongoing. Damian viewed it as a bid by InterAlia for closer control of the Affinities, a prospect that had always worried him, and a few months ago he had started a much less well-publicized project: an effort to systematically debrief Taus about their membership tests, with the goal of reverse-engineering the process. Basically, he wanted to crack the neural and analytical code that identified Taus. Which was an explicit trespass on InterAlia’s intellectual property, which is why we kept it quiet. But given how much we all meant to each other, it was inconceivable that we could leave these tools locked behind a wall of corporate law. The test protocols were the keys to our identity. They were how we had discovered ourselves as a proto-ethnicity. Unless we controlled them, how could we know they wouldn’t be altered or mismanaged?

Klein hadn’t said what he wanted to talk about, but Damian guessed it had something to do with the Tau codes. What was unclear was whether Klein wanted to scold us, warn us, threaten us, or help us.

Some of each, as it turned out.

*   *   *

The address Klein had given us was a three-story mansion dressed up as a rustic cabin. It was big enough to sleep busloads, but as far as I could tell it was occupied only by Klein and his staff. It was impossible to know how many employees Klein had, but a best guess was “many”—there was the guy who met our car (who looked like an ex-Marine crammed into khakis and a flannel shirt), the guy staking out the entrance hall (likewise), and the woman who offered us canapés on a silver tray after escorting us to a room with a glass wall overlooking the pristine shores of Lake Sanina. No doubt there were others unseen.

A few minutes after we settled onto the sofa, Klein shuffled into the room. Klein was in his late sixties, and what was intimidating about him was his intellect and his reputation, not his physical presence. He wore a white shirt open at the collar and blue jeans cinched over his hips with an expensive leather belt. His head was shaved, his face weathered and finely wrinkled. He made no objection to my presence or Amanda’s—knowing Tau dynamics as well as he did, he had probably expected Damian to show up with company—but he more or less ignored us once we’d been introduced.

There was no superfluous chitchat. He settled into a chair and looked at Damian solemnly. He said, “I undertook my life’s work more than thirty years ago. At the time we had only begun to apply computer modeling to the discipline of cognitive and social teleodynamics. I cannot tell you how exciting it was, to stand on the verge of a vast new range of human knowledge…”

And so on. It was as if he had mistaken Damian for a biographer. But he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. When Klein paused to sip water from a bottle, Damian said, “Your invitation—that is, I have to wonder—”

Klein cocked his head. “You’re asking me to hurry up and get to the point?”

“Sir, it’s a privilege to be here. I just want to make sure I’m not missing the point.”

“And I want to make sure you understand it. All right. We can circle back to the details. The crux of the matter is this.”

He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and blew his nose into it, long and loudly. I thought of the way Amanda looked when she tried to suppress a laugh. I was careful not to look at her now, because I was almost certain she had that expression on her face.

Klein examined the handkerchief, folded it, and tucked it back in his pocket. “My latest models suggest we’re at the opening of an unprecedented revolution in human social dynamics. The revolution is technologically driven, and the Affinities are in the vanguard of it. We traditionally conduct the Affinity tests with mainframe computers and complex analytical algorithms, but today you can build the majority of those functions onto a single microprocessor. Throw in a half dozen sensors and a video device and you can run the application on any tablet computer or smartphone. InterAlia knows this, and it terrifies them. Affinity testing for pennies on the dollar! It would completely democratize the process. It would also put InterAlia out of business.”

“The process should be democratized,” Damian said. “But as long as InterAlia owns the protocols—”

“InterAlia owns proprietary rights to the algorithms and the methodology, but that’s merely a legal barrier. You remember what people used to say? Information wants to be free. As soon as the test parameters and sorting algorithms are publically available, InterAlia’s legal standing becomes almost irrelevant. Bluntly, their copyrights and so forth won’t be worth shit.”

His faint accent made the word sound like “zhit.”

“You think that might happen?”

Klein seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, I guarantee it will happen! Because, you see, I mean to make it happen!”

And having delivered this declaration, he invited us to dinner.

*   *   *

At the table Klein became more obviously human. The food was impeccably presented, delivered by poised and professional servants, but Klein ate like someone who lived alone. His chief utensils were fork and fingers, and by the end of the salad course there was an oil-drenched endive clinging to his shirt collar. As he ate he reminisced about his youth, hanging out on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, “back when a secular Jew in Israel was a relatively uncomplicated thing to be.” He elicited a few stories from Damian in return. I had rarely heard Damian talk about his pre-Tau life, but he offered some tales from his days at the University of Toronto. What was really going on, of course, was that the two men were sizing each other up.

Amanda was brave enough to ask Klein whether he had ever applied his own test to himself—did he have an Affinity of his own?

He smiled at the question. “No.”

“You were never curious?”

“Often curious, but I was afraid the knowledge would create a bias. I wanted to remain objective. And at some point it began to seem like a potential conflict of interest, to whatever extent I was capable of influencing InterAlia’s policies. Now, of course, it’s far too late.”

“Too late to test yourself? Why? There’s no age limit, is there?”

“Because I have cancer,” Klein said flatly. “And it’s not the kind that can be cured. Multiple metastases. If I were to join a tranche, Miss Mehta, I would only make a hospice of it. And I don’t want to do that.”

We sat out an awkward silence. Amanda said, “I’m sorry—”