Damian had the future of the entire Tau Affinity—maybe the future of all the Affinities—in his pocket (literally!), and he’d had a couple of drinks with Meir Klein, which could complicate matters if the cops assayed his blood alcohol. “Okay,” I said. “But I was driving, not you.”
She thought about it a moment and nodded. Amanda had a couple of DUIs on her record from her pre-Tau days. I had a clean record, I hadn’t been drinking, and of the three of us my work was the least critical. “Fine,” she said. “And maybe you should go talk to that woman we almost hit.”
So I walked back to the yellow Toyota. The woman was sitting inside, the door open. She watched as I approached, her skinny arms crossed and her lips pressed tight. The child was in back, a pair of solemn eyes under a drooping orange rain hat. The girl was dressed for the weather, but the mom, if she was the girl’s mom, wore a brown woolen sweater that looked like the hide of a sodden Airedale. I asked if everyone was all right.
She eyed me coolly. “More or less,” she said. “Felt the breeze when you went past. But no damage done.”
“That’s great.”
“I called CAA before you came around the bend. I think my transmission’s fucked up. That’s why we stopped. Been here twenty minutes. You got somebody hurt back there? I already dialed 911.”
“No, we’re okay.”
“You sure? You keep rubbing your shoulder.”
“Sprained it, maybe.” I looked down at her feet. “But you’re bleeding.”
She followed my eyes. Then she hiked up one leg of her jeans, revealing a bloody gash along her calf. “Jesus, I didn’t even feel it. I mean when you went past it felt like the car maybe just brushed my leg, but I guess something caught it…”
Probably the rear bumper. It had lost a lug where it met the wheel well, and the edge stuck out from the frame. “You need to put pressure on that,” I said.
She rummaged in her purse for a pack of Kleenex. I watched her face while she dabbed at the blood. I wanted to judge her sincerity, though it was impossible to read the motives of a non-Tau the way I could read a Tau. Of course, the woman could have been a Tau herself … but my intuition said not.
The injury to her leg wasn’t anywhere near serious, but it might be grounds for an insurance claim if she sensed an opportunity to exact a settlement. “Don’t worry,” she said, apparently reading me more acutely than I was reading her, “it wasn’t your fault. Though you guys took the curve at a pretty good clip.”
“My name’s Adam Fisk.”
“I’m Rachel. Rachel Ragland. In the back, that’s Suze.”
“Hi, Suze.”
Suze was maybe six or seven years old, as blond as her mother was dark. She ducked away from the window, shy but smiling.
Rachel said, “Is your driver really okay?”
I looked back to where Amanda was tending Damian. “Just a bump. But I was the one driving.”
“No you weren’t.”
“Yeah, actually, I was.”
“Uh-huh. So is that what I’m supposed to tell the cops—that you were the one driving?”
“Well, yeah. Because I was.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Okay then,” she said. “That’s what we’ll tell them.”
Damian’s nose had bled prodigiously—he looked like he was wearing a rust-colored goatee—but he was sitting up by the time I got back to the car. “The EMS guys will probably take me in for observation if they think I have a concussion—”
“They will, and you might.”
“—and I don’t want this stuck in some hospital locker.” He gave Amanda the thumb drive containing Meir Klein’s data, and she tucked it into her purse.
Amanda turned to me. “So what’s the deal with the other vehicle?”
I told her about Rachel Ragland.
“You think she’ll be a problem?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“You think she has an Affinity?”
Sometimes you can tell. Some people liked to advertise their affiliation, and InterAlia had licensed the rights to market lapel pins, tattoos, t-shirts. Rachel displayed none of those obvious signs, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t a Tau, either tested or potential, but beyond that I couldn’t say.
“Worse luck for us,” Amanda said.
“Not necessarily. She seems reasonable. She has a daughter.”
“Proves nothing.”
Amanda distrusted outsiders. And maybe that was wise, given what Meir Klein had told us. Given the future we were facing.
Klein, of course, was the man who invented the Affinities.
More than a decade ago he had traded a successful academic career in neuroscience and teleodynamics for a contract with InterAlia Inc. At the time InterAlia had been a struggling commercial data-mining business with offices in Camden, New Jersey, using evolutionary algorithms to focus marketing strategies and reclaim “untapped commercial margins” for its corporate clients. Three years after hiring Klein, InterAlia opened its first Affinity-testing centers in Los Angeles, Seattle, Taos, and Manhattan.
The business had taken off slowly, but by the time I took my test the Affinities had become a significant component of InterAlia’s revenue stream; a year after that, Meir Klein’s division dwarfed everything else in InterAlia’s portfolio. And Klein, whose deal with InterAlia had included a generous block of shares in the company’s stock, had become quietly wealthy.
But a little more than a year ago Klein had severed all connections with InterAlia and dropped out of sight. No public explanation was forthcoming, but the Wall Street Journal reported that he had signed a heavily lawyered nondisclosure agreement and promised his former employers to conduct no further research on the human socionome that would compete with their interests. Most of us assumed he had simply retired. Which made it a big surprise when Damian received a hand-delivered invitation to a meeting, signed by Meir Klein himself.
We had been attending the annual All-Affinities North American Potlatch, held this year in Vancouver: more than fifty thousand delegates from tranches across the continent crammed into the city’s convention center and nearby hotels. The note delivered to Damian’s hotel room had been arch and cryptic—It is urgently important that we meet to discuss the future of Tau—but it was on Klein’s letterhead, it included a phone number, and after a quick call Damian was convinced it really was Klein who had sent it.
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.