“If it comes up,” Amanda said, nodding at the window and the roaring rain.
Damian smiled. “If it does. Because there is one choice we can’t share and we can’t delegate. According to Klein’s data, the Tau Affinity can help move the world in a better direction. But if we attempt to do that, we also make ourselves vulnerable. The world may not want to be moved, and the world can hurt us. Klein’s models don’t guarantee that we’ll come through this unharmed. They do guarantee that we’ll make enemies. The risk is real.”
“The risk is also real,” Amanda said, “for someone who runs into a burning building to rescue a child. But we do it anyway, don’t we? It’s the better part of being human.”
“But we’re not just assuming personal risks. We’re putting other people at risk as well—other Taus, not to mention people outside our Affinity. If we go ahead with the project of making Affinity testing cheap and universal, it’s going to force new responsibilities on us and it will inevitably put us in harm’s way.”
I said, “What’s the alternative?”
“The alternative is not to do it at all. Lay low and let events take their course.”
“And what does Klein’s model say about that?”
Navarro spoke up: “It says that, if we keep our heads down, the chance of the Tau Affinity surviving as a coherent group is to some degree enhanced. But the likelihood that our current civil society will survive is proportionally decreased. In neither scenario is any particular outcome guaranteed. We’re talking about probabilities here.”
“So that’s the question we need to answer,” Damian said. “If Klein is right, a kind of war is coming. Do we enlist, and maybe do some good? Or do we sit it out and try to survive?”
Amanda said, “We could take it to T-Net.”
“Sooner or later we will. I’ll be talking to all the major sodality reps. But we need to have a plan to show them. There’s no way to dodge the responsibility. Klein chose us for a reason.”
No one spoke. For a long moment there was only the sound of the rain playing cadences on the drumhead of the house.
It rained until after midnight. Come one o’clock, Navarro pled fatigue and most of us went to bed—all of us except the security guys on the night shift. And me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I went to sit on the back deck of the house.
The cedar deck was still dripping and the patio furniture was sodden, but I didn’t care. I threw a bath towel over an Adirondack chair and settled in. The sky had begun to clear. A crescent moon rode over the forest, and the air was cool and smelled of the pine woods and the sea.
I was thinking about Damian when the door creaked and he stepped out to join me.
“Sleep,” he said. “Highly overrated.” He looked into the distance, and the moon cast his shadow, pale as smoke, across the deck. “I keep thinking about home. You know what I mean?”
Lisa and Loretta and their big welcoming house. Yes. “We could use their advice.”
Like most of us in the tranche, I had sought their advice more than once. I was thinking of the time (four years ago now) when Damian and Amanda had first gotten together. The dynamics of jealousy were different in a Tau community, but I was as capable of jealousy as any other human being. I had been avoiding both Amanda and Damian for days—I had even thought about leaving the tranche—and it was Lisa who had called me on it. She had summoned me into the kitchen to sample her tiramisu (“I used Madeira instead of Marsala”), but that was just bait. She sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me a big-eyed stare. “Adam,” she said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were sulking.”
“I don’t know what you mean. The tiramisu is great.”
“And you lie so very badly. But I guess it isn’t easy, knowing Amanda is with another man?”
“I’m dealing with it.”
“But not very well. You know she loves you, yes?”
“She says so.”
“And she means it. You know she means it?”
“I guess so.” That was disingenuous and childish. Of course she loved me. We were Taus. I recognized her love in the worried glances she had lately been giving me. I heard it in her voice when she tried to explain the relationship that had developed between her and Damian. And I resented her for it. It denied me the comfort of an uncomplicated anger.
“Then you need to stop behaving the way you’re behaving. Your relationship to Amanda has a certain nature. You two have always conducted yourself according to that knowledge. Her need for autonomy was built into her love for you. What’s the use of wanting her to be what she is not?”
“No use. I know that. I’m just…”
“Hurt,” Lisa supplied.
Yes, painful as it was to admit it. Hurt, yes. Childishly hurt. Hurt like a five-year-old whose ice cream cone just plopped onto the sidewalk. Hurt by this awareness of myself as a petulant infant. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”
“Of course you don’t want to talk about it.” Lisa reached across the table and put her hand on mine. Her hand was parchment-skinned, all bones and veins. It felt wonderful. “Who would? But here we are. You know, of course, that Damian is also concerned about you.”
That was even more difficult to accept. The thing was, I admired Damian Levay. Which hardly made me unique; everyone admired Damian. He was passionate about the Tau community and its welfare—not just our tranche, but the sodality, the entire Affinity. He was smart, wealthy, generous, and ten years my senior. I could hardly blame Amanda for falling in love with him. I was half in love with him myself.
“It is Amanda’s misfortune,” Lisa said, “that she’s attracted to hopelessly heterosexual men. More than once I have seen conflicts like this resolved by a jovial three-way fuck. But I think in this case that’s not an option.”
Trevor had made the same suggestion more bluntly. (“So get over yourself and go to bed with him. Are you completely blind to his hotness?”) But Lisa was right; it wouldn’t have worked. I wasn’t especially proud of my heterosexuality—in our tranche it sometimes seemed like a kind of selective sexual impotence, for which I deserved sympathy and compassion—but I was stuck with it. Born that way, as the old song has it.
“If you continue to cultivate your own unhappiness,” Lisa said, “you and Amanda will end up as—what? Not enemies. We aren’t that sort of people. But just friends. Do you want that?”
“No,” I said.
“Then you have to start living up to your own expectations. And—oh, do you feel that?”
“What?”
“The wind from the window!” The gingham curtains lofted as she spoke. “Rain on the way. You can smell it.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “I do love that smell. Smells like thunder!” As if on cue, there was a distant rumble. “I’m nearly seventy-five years old, Adam, and I still love a summer storm. Is that wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“I sense a kindred soul. You love a storm, too, don’t you?”
I admitted I did.
“But we’re not rivals, are we? Because there’s storm enough for both of us.”