“Without InterAlia each Affinity must become self-governing, and some particular Affinity will have to assume the role of primus inter pares—first among equals.”
“You think Tau can do that?”
“Already you’ve done more for yourselves than any other Affinity. You’ve generated sturdy, complex systems of mutual support. You’ve created institutions like TauBourse. Your members have made statistically unprecedented gains in productivity and net wealth, and these benefits have been distributed more or less equitably across the membership. Tau is a template for what the Affinities can become—what they must become, if they’re to survive the approaching crisis.”
It was Amanda who spoke up: “But what exactly are we supposed to do?”
“Master your own Affinity, and you become a model for the others. I can help you do that. Beyond that, you’ll have to make your own choices about how to proceed.”
* * *
I went on sketching as Klein talked, almost as a nervous reflex. Amanda was no longer posing, and that made her a more interesting subject.
The first crude outline had emphasized the contrast of her thoughtful eyes and her veiled smile, like a dappling of cloud and sun. There was a playfulness in her that was both deeply attractive and deeply Tau: the playfulness that comes of liberation from convention and misunderstanding. We had never been exclusive lovers, and although we inevitably cycled back to each other we had spent plenty of time in other beds. It was one of the small miracles Tau made possible. Our tranche wasn’t utopia, there had been episodes of jealousy among members, and I wasn’t a complete stranger to that emotion myself—but as Taus we knew how to comfort and distract one another when we needed comfort and distraction. I was only trivially (and, I told myself, temporarily) disappointed that Amanda and Damian had become lovers.
And I wasn’t surprised. My relationship with Amanda was all art and eros, but Damian engaged an aspect of herself she seldom showed me: her deep political commitment to Tau. For Amanda, Tau wasn’t only an identity, it was a cause. She had fled her birth family with all its dour immigrant aspirations to respectability, but her sense of duty was only repressed, not really rejected. She had reassigned it to her Affinity.
And Damian shared that intensity of purpose. She was drawn to him as if to a flame, and it was undeniable that he burned pretty brightly. He was one of the circle of motivated and scary-smart Taus who had turned Tau into a financial powerhouse, lifted Taus out of poverty, and bootstrapped Tau businesses across the continent. He was a sodality rep now, which meant he associated with like-minded Taus from every part of the world. He didn’t have a rank or title—we weren’t like Hets, who loved formal hierarchies—but he had become one of the handful of North American Taus who could speak on behalf of us all. When Damian began to devote himself to working full-time for Tau he had recruited assistants from his own and local tranches, and Amanda had leapt at the opportunity to work alongside him. And so had I, though my motives may not have been quite so pure.
So my sketch of Amanda against the window became a sketch of Amanda paying rapt attention to Damian and Meir Klein. I had to take some of the light out of her face and deepen the shadows, which made it a better drawing but a less satisfying one. She looked past the border of the page uneasily, almost as if the clouds had moved indoors. Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.
* * *
In the end Klein gave us a memory key containing a few megabytes of data, which Damian accepted with due gravity.
Then Klein took a call from his lawyers. Apparently InterAlia had accused him of a breach of confidentiality regarding some remarks he had made at a conference in Shanghai last year. Klein’s legal team was coming up to the house for a conference, so we were promptly and formally dismissed. He would be in touch again soon, he said.
He said good-bye to us at the driveway. He shook my hand and Amanda’s and beamed at us benevolently, but I was startled by how small he suddenly seemed, surrounded by servants but without real family or friends.
I gave my drawing to Amanda as we were driving away. She looked at it and smiled abstractedly and put it in her lap.
* * *
An ambulance arrived at the scene along with a couple of Traffic Services vehicles. We told our story, Rachel Ragland told hers. The EMS guys insisted on taking Damian in for observation, over his protests. As they slid him into the ambulance on a wholly unnecessary stretcher, Amanda offered to ride along to the hospital in Kelowna.
“No, stay with the car,” Damian said. “Stay with Adam.” Klein’s data was safe in her purse.
So we shared an umbrella as we waited for the tow truck. Amanda had already put in a call to someone from a tranche in Kelowna who would meet us at the garage. She was leaning into my arm when she spotted my drawing: it had blown out of the car onto the verge of the road. She kneeled over it and tried to peel the sodden paper from the tarmac, uselessly. It tore in her hand. She looked at me guiltily. “It’s ruined! I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It wasn’t very good.”
CHAPTER 7
The week-long Pan-Affinity conference drew to a close, but Damian asked me and Amanda to stay in the city and help him organize the analysis of Klein’s data. We divided the work into two parts: Amanda’s job was to round up Taus who were qualified to make sense of the mathematics, while my job was to assemble a team who could look at ways to turn the Affinity test protocols into a hardware/software application that could be detached from InterAlia’s corporate control.
For the last few days of the conference we worked out of our rooms at the Hilton. Damian had come back from the hospital with a diagnosis of a minor concussion and a Technicolor bruise on his forehead, but he insisted on keeping his remaining commitments: a couple of roundtable discussions plus a series of private meetings with representatives of the American sodality. One of his roundtables concerned the problem of forming and stabilizing tranches in countries where the Affinities were prohibited by law (including China and most nominally Islamic nations), but where clandestine testing was already being performed—a question that mirrored the larger one nobody wanted to ask: What would happen if InterAlia went belly-up?
On Sunday night the week-long event officially ended and the delegates dispersed, as did the demonstrators who had been making a nuisance of themselves outside the convention center. The picketers represented a variety of groups including evangelicals and right-wingers, but the faction most heavily represented was NOTA (None of the Above), a kind of social club for people who had been rejected by the Affinities or disapproved of them on principle. In the United States, NOTA had already launched a series of class-action suits against InterAlia for what it was calling “category discrimination.”
After the convention the Hilton began to seem both eerily empty and absurdly expensive. We relocated to a cheaper hotel while we set up an office in a three-story commercial building owned by a local Tau—rent-free, because parts of the building were under renovation, which meant we learned to live with the sound of hammering and the squeal of power saws.
We had been there less than a week when I got a call from Rachel Ragland. Something had happened, she was worried, and she wanted to talk to me about it.
* * *
Leaving a Tau-specific environment in which you’ve been immersed for days is like coming up from a deep-water dive: best done in stages, if you want to avoid the bends. But I didn’t have that luxury when I went to meet Rachel.
I had told Amanda about the call, and she had summoned Damian, who rolled his eyes. “She wants money, of course. She’ll probably threaten to go to the police.”
“I asked her about that. Pretty bluntly. She says she already told the police I was driving and that she hadn’t been hurt, and that was the end of it. Or would have been. Except yesterday two guys showed up at her door.”