If I did not find those words shocking, maybe it was because I had unconsciously anticipated them. “But I live here,” I said.
“No, not any longer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
I had no compelling argument to make. I stood in the entrance hall, neither defiant nor penitent, as Lisa explained what would happen. I would arrange to have my possessions removed from my room. I could return once more, for that purpose. Today, I could take away anything I cared to carry. Otherwise, the tranche house was closed to me.
The afternoon had become unreal, as vague and unfocused as a dream. I went up the stairs to my room, which had become a dream of a room, all memory, no substance, all past, no present. The double bed, the desk, the shelf of books. The window, its bottom sash held open by an empty wine bottle. The lace curtains Lisa had installed years ago, before my time. The sound of the maple tree turning its branches in the fitful breeze, a sound that had lulled me to sleep on hot summer nights.
Most of what I owned was in this room. None of it felt like it belonged to me.
She was waiting when I came back downstairs, empty-handed. Her blank expression made me a little angry. “I’m still a Tau,” I said. “Despite all this. That doesn’t change.”
“But it does,” she said, and something that resembled sympathy finally came into her eyes. “It has. Poor Adam. This is our fault as much as yours. You were never curious about your numbers, were you? Meir Klein’s arithmetic was always a little beyond you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Drift,” she said mournfully. “Just—drift. It’s what made you useful to us, these last few months. You were always good at talking to outsiders. You could see the world the way they did. You had that knack. Almost a sort of double vision, yes? Tau and non-Tau. The reason for that is simple. You’ve been on the edge for many years—a Tau by the skin of a decimal point, so to speak. But at your last requalification, you simply failed. No, Adam, you are not a Tau. Not any longer.”
I could not speak.
“Poor Adam,” she said again. “But you see, it’s not entirely your fault that you betrayed us. We should have anticipated it.”
“You knew this about me? And you said nothing?”
“Damian and Amanda knew. I was told. No one else. Trevor didn’t know, not until after you did what you did in Schuyler. We would have told you as soon as your sister-in-law’s video was released, of course. Until then … we thought it was better to postpone the revelation.”
“Because I was useful.”
“Bluntly, yes. We’re not proud of that. It was always a gamble. But we did it for the sake of the Affinity, Adam. You would have done the same, once, in our place.”
“Once. But not anymore.”
“No, not anymore. Because you used us, too, didn’t you? Lied to us so you could rescue your stepbrother. We failed to anticipate that. But we don’t blame you—it was the drift that made it possible.”
Because there was no way to process what she had told me, I tried to pretend she hadn’t said it. I told her I would arrange to have my things moved out as soon as I had a place to put them. Then I said good-bye, for the last time. Walked out the front door, for the last time. Passed under the maple tree with its papery rain of samaras, for the last time. I felt as if even my grief and anger had been stolen from me. I wasn’t entitled to them: I wasn’t a Tau. I was, in effect, no longer anything at all.
Jenny’s video was released to the Internet a few days later, along with an affidavit from Aaron’s most recent ex-girlfriend, who turned out to be a skinny forty-year-old with unconvincing red hair and a taste for leopard-skin-patterned clothing accessories. Maybe her testimony wasn’t as convincing as Damian had hoped—in the end Aaron was forced to resign his congressional seat, but serial denials kept him in office until after the vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill.
Which passed. Worse, it passed with a suite of draconian but bipartisan amendments that Het had lobbied hard to suppress. The law applied only to the American sodality, but it was a model for subsequent legislation in Canada and Europe and, ultimately, around the world.
In other words, it was the beginning of the end of the brief age of the Affinities. I told myself I didn’t care. But I continued to carry my Tau identity with me like a second skin, a name I could no longer call myself, a raft of memories too essential to be extinguished, though they became, with time, a collation of orphaned moments. A lighted window on a winter night, footsteps on a hidden stairway, the sound of distant voices.
EPILOGUE
The Sound of Voices
The arc of history is long, but our algorithms bend toward justice.
The invitation arrived as a text message. A handful of names, the address of a downtown café, a date and time.
The first six months after I left the tranche house had been the most difficult. I was alone and unemployed, though I had a savings account with a balance big enough to keep me in groceries and pay the rent on a one-bedroom basement apartment in a seedy but not actually dangerous part of town. My savings would have been exhausted by the end of winter, but for a stroke of luck: I ran into a woman I had known slightly when I was a student at Sheridan College. She had recently quit a lucrative advertising job to open her own start-up agency, and she needed a graphic artist with professional skills who would work at an entry-level salary. I was honest: I told her I was years out of date on digital graphics platforms, but I was a fast learner and salary wouldn’t be a problem. It was the last clause that sealed the deal, I suspect. But it was work and it was honest and it filled my otherwise empty days.
I didn’t talk to my family again until my father died. It was Mama Laura who called with the news. “I cannot say he didn’t suffer, but the hospital was generous about painkillers, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Aaron came to see him at the last. Aaron’s drinking pretty heavily these days, I’m sorry to say. But he was sober for his father’s sake.”
A funeral and memorial service had been arranged. My father’s business acquaintances would all be there, including the leading lights of the Onenia County Republican Committee. I would not be turned away, she said, if I chose to attend. But it might be awkward, under the circumstances.
“Did he ask about me at all, before he died?”
It was a stupid question, and I should have known better than to ask.
“Adam … no. But I’m sure he thought of you.”
I didn’t attend the funeral.
Geddy and Rebecca were in India at the time, doing volunteer work for an NGO, helping to assemble modular housing for the legions of Mumbai’s poor made homeless by the Short War. They came back shortly before the funeral, and I began to hear from them every week or two. Their calls became absurdly important to me.
Rebecca talked a great deal about New Socionome. She wasn’t evangelical about it, but her enthusiasm would have been hard to conceal, and she wasn’t interested in concealing it. She blogged on the subject, and I read some of her posts. I liked her idealism, except when it grated on me. She called from Boston one winter evening when I was home from a day’s work, facing unwashed laundry and maybe an hour of pointless television before bed. She was eager to tell me about some fresh iteration of a New Socionome algorithm, the words spilling out of her until I said, more cruelly than I had intended, “Does it matter? I mean, Jesus, what does it change? Eight billion people on the planet, weather disasters, war—what does it matter than somebody invented a new way to make friends?”