But life on the road had not agreed with Geddy. He had left The Humbuckers after a gig in Syracuse and bought a bus ticket to Alexandria. Two days ago he had shown up on Aaron’s doorstep with an unhappy expression and a duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Shockingly, he had pawned his Mauriat tenor sax, an instrument he had scrimped to buy and which he had insisted on holding in every recent photograph of him I had seen. Asked why he left the band and sold his sax, Geddy would only say, “It didn’t make me happy anymore.”
Jenny texted me this information later; here on the Pender Island ferry, all I knew was that Geddy had expressed a completely uncharacteristic desire to talk on the phone. So I waited while Jenny gave him the handset. “Hello?” he said. It was Geddy in two syllables. Timid but somehow courageous, as if he had forced out the word on a cloud of pure bravado.
“Good to hear your voice,” I said.
“Where are you? It sounds loud.”
“I’m on a ferry in Georgia Strait. That’s the engines you hear.”
“You’re on a boat?”
“Yeah, a boat.”
“Do you still live in Toronto?”
“I do, but I’ll be out west for a few weeks more.”
“Okay.” He was silent a few moments more, and I had learned to respect Geddy’s silences. Eventually he said, “I wish I could visit you.”
“That’s not possible right now, but maybe in a few months. What are you doing at Aaron and Jenny’s place?”
“They agreed to let me stay a while. I don’t really have anywhere to go. I didn’t want to go back to Schuyler.”
He didn’t want to go back to Schuyler because my father would have humiliated him for his failure. Neither of us needed to say this aloud. “Are you okay there?”
“Aaron says I can’t stay forever.” Now he just sounded tired. “I don’t know what to do, Adam.”
“The band didn’t work out, huh?”
“There was a girl. I really liked her. She needed money. So I had to sell my saxophone. She took the money, but…”
“I understand.”
“People are pretty fucking mean sometimes.”
His brief career in the music business had made Geddy more casual about what he would once have called “swear words.” Worse than that was the bitterness in his voice. It was entirely self-directed. Geddy would never despise the woman who had taken his money. Instead, he would despise himself for his own gullibility. And learn nothing from the experience. I suspected Geddy would go on trading luck for love for as long as it took him to give up on love. “If you need a little money to get you through, Geddy, no problem. I can send it care of Aaron and Jenny.”
“No,” he said quickly. “Thanks, Adam. No, I just wanted to hear your voice. It was always…” I imagined him blushing. “You were always pretty good to me.”
Which for some reason made me feel even worse. “Okay, but listen. We’ll get together, I promise. Soon as I clear up some business out here. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good.”
“In the meantime, let Aaron and Jenny pamper you for a while.”
“I can’t really do that. I mean, they’ll let me stay for a few weeks. But I don’t think Aaron is really happy having me here. It’s kind of…” He lowered his voice. “I don’t like this house. It’s big and it’s pretty, but I would hate to live here.” He added, a barely audible whisper, “Jenny has a black eye.”
“A what? What did you say? A black eye?”
“Yes.”
“What, like somebody punched her?”
A maddening pause. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Geddy, what do you mean?”
“Here she is. Here she is!”
“Geddy?”
Jenny came on. “We should keep this short. Aaron will be home any minute.”
“Are you all right?”
“What? Yes, of course I am. Why? What did Geddy say?”
“Nothing.” Or too much. “But he seems a little forlorn.”
“Look … I’ll text you about it, okay?”
“Of course.”
“Great. Well. Thank you for calling back, Adam. That was nice. I know you’re busy.”
“Never too busy to talk to my sister-in-law.”
“Great,” she said. “Good-bye.”
* * *
Damian had rented what the owner (a local Tau) called a “chalet” on a rural lot near the ocean on Pender Island. In reality it was a four-bedroom log-walled home with double-glazed windows and a kitchen big enough to feed and accommodate a dozen people.
We were slightly less than a dozen: me, Amanda, Damian, a tech guy from each of our two research teams, plus Gordo MacDonald and four of his security people. Gordo immediately scoped out the house and its surrounding territory and posted his subordinates where they could cover all approaches. “We’ll be inconspicuous,” he said. “We’ll feed ourselves and sleep in shifts. You probably won’t notice us. But if you do need us, all you have to do is holler.”
Which was reassuring, though it was unlikely that anyone had followed us here. The house felt safe. Even better, with the rain falling and the daylight beginning to fade and a fire crackling in the hearth, it felt cozy.
The feeling lasted until Damian told us what he had deduced from Meir Klein’s data.
* * *
It was obvious we hadn’t come here for a standard meeting, but Damian wanted to start with a progress report, so that’s what we gave him. My team leader and I summarized the problems we’d run into trying to design a portable Affinity-testing system. With suitable sensors, virtually any handheld digital device could record the results and run the algorithms. But another part of the traditional Affinity screening was a DNA test. Adding a portable nanopore sequencer to the kit would triple the cost to the end user and make the process needlessly complex, so we were looking at workarounds: a simpler filter that would detect only the relevant bases, or a two-part qualification process that would include a blood sample submitted to a registered lab. Amanda’s team leader said it might be possible to eliminate the DNA test altogether, since it mainly functioned as a kind of pre-screening, picking up a few gene sequences that were incompatible with any Affinity. Adding another layer of neurotesting might achieve the same effect.
All well and good, and we chewed it over for an hour or so, but this wasn’t the main event. That began when Damian stood up, clearing his throat and looking uncharacteristically awkward. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you, and I’m really pleased with the progress we’re making. But we all know this is happening in a larger context. The overarching goal is to cut loose the Affinities from InterAlia, to let each Affinity govern itself according to its own interests. Meir Klein foresaw that possibility and wanted to encourage it. But he foresaw a few other things, too, maybe not so nice. I brought along Dr. Navarro to explain this.”
Ruben Navarro was the oldest Tau on the team: he was seventy-one and had held a chair in analytical sociology at the University of Montreal for more than twenty years. Amanda and I had shared lunch with him a couple of times. Navarro was old enough that he had met Klein at academic conferences before Klein’s work was locked up by InterAlia; they had published in the same professional journals. He sat in a chair by the window, his halo of white hair framed by the rain-silvered glass, and he spoke without getting up.
“Physicists have said that what they would ultimately like to discover is ‘a theory of everything.’ For the science of neurosocial teleodynamics, the equivalent goal would be ‘a theory of everyone.’ We’re not quite there yet. Social teleodynamics is a technique for modeling human psychology and human social interactions with unprecedented accuracy. It’s not a crystal ball. But like any science, it does make certain predictions. We can extrapolate from current events. We can run models based on our assumptions and see where they take us. As I like to say, the result is less reliable than a weather forecast but more reliable than divination.”