“Being in an Affinity must be like that. That’s what I think. I mean all these wonderful, complex relationships just spilling out of the air practically—a million possibilities, a million flavors of potential happiness. You were an early adopter, right? It must have been great back then.”
“It’s great now. Anyway, I thought you disapproved.”
“No, I totally get it! I mean I do disapprove, in a way, but I don’t disapprove of what an Affinity gives you.”
“So what do you disapprove of?”
“The fact that it’s in an Affinity. The fact that there’s a wall around it. All due credit to Meir Klein—he knew utopia isn’t one-size-fits-all. You could put a hundred people together and they could live better, fuller, freer, happier, more collaborative lives—but only the right hundred people, not a hundred random people off the street. So once you know what to measure and how to crunch the numbers, voilà: the twenty-two Affinities. Twenty-two gardens, with twenty-two walls around them. No disputing it’s nice inside, for anyone who can get inside. But think about what that means for all the people not included. Suddenly you’ve segregated them from the best cooperators. Which puts outsiders in a walled garden too, but it’s not really a garden, ’cause all the competent gardeners buggered off and the trees don’t bear much fruit. And a walled garden that isn’t a garden looks like something different. It looks like a prison.”
“Colorful metaphor, but—”
“And that’s not the only problem. You’ve created twenty-two groups—twenty-three, if you count those of us left out—with competing interests. The Affinities are all about cooperation within the group, not between groups. So, hey, look, a new world order, twenty-three brand new para-ethnicities and meta-nations, and what prevents them from going to war with each other? Nothing. Apparently.”
“We’ve done good in the world, Rebecca. TauBourse, for instance. It benefited a lot of people who weren’t Taus, directly and indirectly. As for war, we had people in high places in India and even a few in Pakistan, trying to prevent all the trouble.”
“And how’s that going?”
I shrugged and looked back at the window. A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street, approaching. The vehicle behind them was big, but it was too dark to make out more than a boxy shape. It drove past without slowing or stopping. Then the street was empty again.
“I don’t think you’re down here because you can’t sleep,” Rebecca said. “I think you’re down here standing guard.”
“What makes you say that?”
“In addition to the way you can’t keep your eyes off an empty street?”
“What would I be standing guard against?”
“Het, I’m guessing.”
“And why would you think that?”
“Because your sister-in-law talks to Geddy, and Geddy talks to me. I know what Jenny’s situation is. I know how Aaron treated her, and I know what she means to do about it. I also know you’re helping her—Tau is helping her—and I know why. You think her video will discredit Aaron and maybe force him to step down before the vote on Griggs-Haskell. Win-win, right? Except for Het.”
I looked at her with fresh respect and a degree of wariness. Maybe Geddy had trusted her enough to confide in her. But I wasn’t Geddy, and I wasn’t sure I trusted Geddy’s judgment.
“Assuming any of this is true,” I said, “what’s your interest?”
“Personally, you mean? Or from the point of view of New Socionome?”
“Either.”
“New Socionome isn’t an Affinity. There’s no us and them. No single point of view. No consensus. It has no interests to advance, except to facilitate non-zero-sum collaboration. So the only opinion I can offer is my own. I think the Affinities are doomed whether Griggs-Haskell passes or not. Because they have a toxic dynamic. The sooner they fail, the better. I think Jenny needs to get away from Aaron, and I think she’s brave to want to out him as an abuser. Short-term, I approve of what you’re doing to help her. Even though it’s messy. I assume you’ve thought about what it’s going to do to this family?”
At length. I told her so. “But I believe it’s worth it.”
“For Jenny, you mean. And to do the right thing.”
“For Tau,” I said. “And to do the right thing.”
* * *
Rebecca asked me one more question before she carried a yahrzeit candle back upstairs with her: “Do you really think there might be Het people out there who want to hurt us?”
I wondered whether it was wise to answer her question. I didn’t want to confirm her suspicions or reveal more than she already knew. “Look at it from Het’s point of view,” I said. “They’ve kept a close eye on Aaron and they probably know at least a little about his troubled marriage. If they don’t know about the video, they may at least suspect Jenny of being a loose cannon. They also know the most direct connection between Jenny and Tau is through me. So any occasion that brings me into contact with Jenny is going to interest them.”
“Interest isn’t the same as a threat.”
“Suppose they figured out what Jenny intends to do. How do they respond? They can’t take control of the video—it’s already been copied to remote servers, and they would have to assume Tau already has access to it. The only real leverage they can exercise is over Jenny herself, by making the price of releasing the video too high to bear.”
“How would they do that?”
“The usual tools are threats and intimidation.”
“What kind of threats and intimidation?”
“No way to predict. Plus there’s the communication shutdown. Hets are strongly hierarchical, which means the people they sent to Schuyler might be unwilling to act without authorization. Or maybe they have contingency orders—there’s no way of knowing.”
“You have any evidence they actually have hostile intentions?”
Solid evidence: a bunch of Tau security guys in the local hospital. But that was news Rebecca didn’t need to hear. “Better to assume the worst.”
“So your plan is to sit by the window and worry?”
“Until we can get Jenny out of town.”
“I see. Okay.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
She gave me another of her conflicted smiles, one part sincere, one part cynical. “I’m not sure I do. But I guess I understand.”
* * *
Trevor came down to relieve me in the chill hours of the morning, looming out of the darkness like a candlelit Goliath. “Hey, Trev,” I said. “Quiet so far.”
“Hope it stays that way,” he said, small-voiced and careful not to wake anyone, settling into the chair I had just left.
So I went to bed and got a useful few hours of sleep. When I opened my eyes it was morning, the house beginning to warm up in a bath of late-May sunlight. Downstairs, Mama Laura fixed breakfast for those of us who were awake (Rebecca was still sleeping). The electric stove wasn’t working, but she had fired up the gas grill in the backyard and used it to scramble eggs in an iron pan, standing in the dewy grass in her bedroom slippers with a goosedown jacket over her nightdress. She delivered the eggs to the table with a satisfied flourish: triumph over adversity. Plus coffee, boiled in a pan over the grill.
Trev ate heartily even as my father sat in sulky silence, glaring at the gigantic Maori who had somehow invaded his home. Geddy had been keeping an ear on the radio in the living room, and he brought us up to date on the latest news: phone and data services had been partially restored to parts of the west coast but were operating sporadically and unreliably. New York City and Washington, DC, also had intermittent telecom coverage, but the rest of the country, and most of Europe, and all of the Indian subcontinent, were still down. A few unconfirmed reports hinted that Mumbai was burning. All this information was being relayed through private broadcasters running on self-generated power, whispers passed from one ear to the next.