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CHAPTER 12

One January night when I was sixteen years old my stepbrother Geddy came into my room, terrified for no apparent reason.

When the sound of his anxious breathing woke me, my first thought was that something was wrong in the house: a fire, a break-in, somebody was sick. A glance at the window showed winter darkness and a lacework of ice and a few snowflakes drifting past the fogged glass, as the clock on my nightstand ticked from 4:10 to 4:11. “Geddy?” I said. “What the fuck?”

“You shouldn’t swear,” he said.

Geddy was a month shy of ten and still very much under the influence of Mama Laura, for whom even “hell” and “damn” were forbidden words. I told him that if he wanted to wake me up in the middle of the night he should brace himself for the possibility of a curse or two. Then I said, “So what’s wrong? Bad dream?”

It was a reasonable guess. Geddy suffered from chronic bad dreams. He was also an occasional bed-wetter, though the flap of his PJs looked dry tonight. He was pretty amorphous in his pajamas: a heavy kid, clumsily proportioned, strands of hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. Mama Laura kept the house swelteringly hot in winter. The furnace was roaring like a chained dragon down in the basement.

“Can I ask you a question?” His voice was plaintive.

“Can’t you ask Mama Laura?”

He hung his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I’d wake up Daddy Fisk.”

Fair enough. My father was pretty touchy. Geddy was still getting used to his hair-trigger temper. Dad had not yet uttered an unkind word to or about his new wife in the six months they had been married, but his attitude toward Laura’s son Geddy was increasingly impatient. If Geddy was reluctant to wake the old man with a question, I couldn’t blame him.

Nor could he have gone to my brother Aaron. Aaron resented the way the family had changed since Dad’s second marriage. He was polite to Mama Laura—Aaron was too fond of being the old man’s firstborn and favorite son to put that status at risk. But he was only barely cordial to Geddy, and only when he thought he was being watched. When he figured the rest of us were out of earshot he could reduce Geddy to tears with a few choice words.

“Okay,” I said, “ask.”

“Can I sit on the bed?”

“Is that the question?”

He was impervious to irony. “No.”

“Okay, sit. If you’re dry.”

He blushed. “I’m dry.”

“Okay then.”

He perched at the foot of the bed. I felt the mattress compress under his weight. “Adam,” he said, “is the world old or is it young?”

He stared at me intently, waiting for an answer.

“Jesus, Geddy, is that what’s bugging you?”

“Please don’t swear!”

“What’s the question even mean?”

He frowned even harder and groped for an explanation. “It’s like, is everything all used up? Is history almost over? Or is it just getting started?”

Crazy little guy. I had no real idea what he was talking about it, but he wanted an answer so badly I felt obliged to give him one. “Jesus, Geddy—sorry—but how should I know? I guess it’s kind of in the middle.”

“In the middle?”

“Not so old it’s finished. Not so young it’s new.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I guess. I mean, that’s how it seems to me.”

He thought it over, and finally he smiled. I didn’t think I’d solved the problem for him—whatever his problem was—but I seemed to have made it easier for him to bear. “Thank you, Adam.”

“You’re incredibly weird, Geddy.”

I had said those words often but I always said them affectionately, and Geddy’s smile widened. “You too,” he said. As always.

“Go to bed now, ’kay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Neither of us would mention the conversation in the morning. Nor would we report to anyone in the family. Geddy probably figured I would forget about it altogether.

But I didn’t, and neither did he.

*   *   *

Four years had passed since I had sat with Amanda Mehta and Trevor Holst in an attic room in our tranche house in Toronto, confronting a future we could barely comprehend. Many things had changed since then.

For one, I was wearing an absurdly expensive suit. For another, I was in New York City. For a third, I was doing something I was good at.

But I was not, at the moment, doing it very successfully.

I sat in a midtown restaurant opposite a woman I had met more than once, for professional reasons, since that night in Toronto. The woman’s name was Thalia Novak. She was in her forties, skinny, with a narrow face and a halo of tautly curled hair. She wore a green blouse and a necklace of strung glass beads the size of playground marbles. Thalia was a sodality rep for the Eyn Affinity, and I had a feeling she was about to deliver some bad news.

But we shared dinner first, like civilized people. I supposed it was even possible she might change her mind as we talked, if the decision in question had not already been taken at some higher level of the Eyn hierarchy. I was acting as a Tau negotiator, fully empowered to make a deal on behalf of the North American sodalities, and Thalia was my opposite number.

The restaurant was fairly new. By the look of it and the faint smell of sawdust and plaster, it had opened or been remodeled within the last few weeks. The prices were high and the customer count was low—we very nearly had the place to ourselves. I guessed most folks were home, checking screens to find out whether Pakistan and India had graduated from conventional warfare to the thermonuclear variety. The food was good, maybe because the chef wasn’t juggling a lot of orders. Thalia had ordered salmon and I had ordered paella, both on Tau’s tab. The Eyns were a small Affinity with no financial superstructure and very little collective wealth, and it didn’t hurt to remind her of that.

I let her talk through dinner. The stereotype was that Eyns loved to talk and that they were a little goofy. I liked Thalia—we had negotiated complex inter-sodality covenants on a couple of other occasions, most notably when Eyn and Tau organized opposition to an insurance-reform act that threatened Affinity-based pension funds—but she wouldn’t have overturned anyone’s preconceptions about her Affinity. She told me she had just started a course in “tantric flexing,” an exercise routine with some kind of spiritual component. She said it made her feel more centered. I wondered if it made her feel better about backing out of her Affinity’s commitment to Tau.

I raised the question over dessert, in the bluntest possible way. “If you sign this agreement with Het, you know you’ll be out of the Bourse.”

She raised her napkin to her mouth and then folded it over the remains of her raspberry zabaglione. “I do understand that. Obviously, it’s an important concern for us.”

Four years ago Damian Levay had opened up TauBourse to investors representing other Affinities. To date, we had created rock-solid pension funds for twelve of the extant Affinities. The Eyns could certainly pull out their money and invest it elsewhere. But TauBourse had outperformed benchmark Wall Street funds for all our members, and by a wide margin, in part because we invested preferentially in Tau-operated enterprises. Leaving TauBourse would have an immediate financial downside for Thalia’s Eyns.

But she was still talking. “We see potential legal issues with the Bourse, though, Adam. We’re not sure it’s a stable, sustainable business model.”

“It’s perfectly stable, unless the Griggs-Haskell bill passes.”

“Which looks increasingly likely, however.”

“More than just likely, if you throw the support of Eyn behind it.”

“We’re not a political Affinity. You know that.”

“But Het is. And if you back them up—”

“If we back them up, and if Griggs-Haskell passes, and if the president signs the bill, we’ll be better off if our money isn’t tied up in TauBourse. That’s the bottom line.”