The Affinities

Chapter 6

This happened seven years later, in southern British Columbia, on a two-lane road connecting a resort town called Perry’s Point to the Okanagan Highway. Three of us in a borrowed car, heading for Vancouver. Damian Levay was driving. Amanda sat up front, next to him. I sat in back, watching pine boughs whip past the rain-fogged windows.

Wet blacktop, a winding road, steep grades. Amanda had twice asked Damian to slow down, but he had eased off the accelerator only marginally. He was carrying several gigs of contraband data in his shirt pocket, and he knew there were people who would have liked to relieve him of it. So we came around a curve in fading daylight at an unwise speed, and when the headlights picked out a yellow Toyota parked on the verge Damian swerved to avoid it. It was a fraction of a second later that he saw the woman and the child crossing in front of us.

The rear of the car flailed as he braked, and although he avoided hitting either of them he risked sliding into a skid that would sweep them both down a steep embankment. So he stepped off the brake and twisted the wheel, which sent us hurtling into the forested slope to the left of the road. I caught a freeze-frame glimpse of the woman’s face, inches from the window as we passed: big eyes, pale skin, a cascade of dark, wet hair. Damian braked again and managed to bleed off a little momentum before the car sideswiped a lodgepole pine hard enough to pop the airbags.

The next thing I was aware of was the smell of hot fabric and talcum powder. My face throbbed and my right shoulder felt as if I had tackled a concrete block. I opened my eyes and looked for Amanda.

She was up front, startled but not hurt. She looked to her left and said, “Damian?”

Damian was splayed over the steering wheel. He raised his head when she called his name. There was blood around his nose and mouth. “M’okay,” he said.

Amanda leaned in and switched off the engine. Her door was jammed against the trunk of the tree we had hit. She looked back at me. “Adam, help me get him out.”

I managed to climb out of the car into the drenching rain. I opened the driver’s door, hooked Damian’s left arm over my shoulder, and lifted him out. He found his feet but had to brace himself against the hood. He put his hand to his head and said, “Dizzy.”

Amanda scooted out after him, and since the car seemed in no danger of bursting into flame—the only obvious damage was a trashed side panel—we helped Damian lie down across the backseat.

“He wasn’t driving,” Amanda said tersely.

“What?”

“Listen. We’ll have highway cops here pretty soon. If Damian gets caught up in any kind of litigation, it’ll make us vulnerable. So I’ll clean him up, and when the police or EMS get here I’ll say I was at the wheel. You back me up, okay?”

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.

The litigation was still ongoing. Damian viewed it as a bid by InterAlia for closer control of the Affinities, a prospect that had always worried him, and a few months ago he had started a much less well-publicized project: an effort to systematically debrief Taus about their membership tests, with the goal of reverse-engineering the process. Basically, he wanted to crack the neural and analytical code that identified Taus. Which was an explicit trespass on InterAlia’s intellectual property, which is why we kept it quiet. But given how much we all meant to each other, it was inconceivable that we could leave these tools locked behind a wall of corporate law. The test protocols were the keys to our identity. They were how we had discovered ourselves as a proto-ethnicity. Unless we controlled them, how could we know they wouldn’t be altered or mismanaged?

Klein hadn’t said what he wanted to talk about, but Damian guessed it had something to do with the Tau codes. What was unclear was whether Klein wanted to scold us, warn us, threaten us, or help us.

Some of each, as it turned out.

The address Klein had given us was a three-story mansion dressed up as a rustic cabin. It was big enough to sleep busloads, but as far as I could tell it was occupied only by Klein and his staff. It was impossible to know how many employees Klein had, but a best guess was “many”—there was the guy who met our car (who looked like an ex-Marine crammed into khakis and a flannel shirt), the guy staking out the entrance hall (likewise), and the woman who offered us canapés on a silver tray after escorting us to a room with a glass wall overlooking the pristine shores of Lake Sanina. No doubt there were others unseen.

A few minutes after we settled onto the sofa, Klein shuffled into the room. Klein was in his late sixties, and what was intimidating about him was his intellect and his reputation, not his physical presence. He wore a white shirt open at the collar and blue jeans cinched over his hips with an expensive leather belt. His head was shaved, his face weathered and finely wrinkled. He made no objection to my presence or Amanda’s—knowing Tau dynamics as well as he did, he had probably expected Damian to show up with company—but he more or less ignored us once we’d been introduced.

There was no superfluous chitchat. He settled into a chair and looked at Damian solemnly. He said, “I undertook my life’s work more than thirty years ago. At the time we had only begun to apply computer modeling to the discipline of cognitive and social teleodynamics. I cannot tell you how exciting it was, to stand on the verge of a vast new range of human knowledge…”

And so on. It was as if he had mistaken Damian for a biographer. But he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. When Klein paused to sip water from a bottle, Damian said, “Your invitation—that is, I have to wonder—”

Klein cocked his head. “You’re asking me to hurry up and get to the point?”

“Sir, it’s a privilege to be here. I just want to make sure I’m not missing the point.”

“And I want to make sure you understand it. All right. We can circle back to the details. The crux of the matter is this.”

He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and blew his nose into it, long and loudly. I thought of the way Amanda looked when she tried to suppress a laugh. I was careful not to look at her now, because I was almost certain she had that expression on her face.

Klein examined the handkerchief, folded it, and tucked it back in his pocket. “My latest models suggest we’re at the opening of an unprecedented revolution in human social dynamics. The revolution is technologically driven, and the Affinities are in the vanguard of it. We traditionally conduct the Affinity tests with mainframe computers and complex analytical algorithms, but today you can build the majority of those functions onto a single microprocessor. Throw in a half dozen sensors and a video device and you can run the application on any tablet computer or smartphone. InterAlia knows this, and it terrifies them. Affinity testing for pennies on the dollar! It would completely democratize the process. It would also put InterAlia out of business.”

“The process should be democratized,” Damian said. “But as long as InterAlia owns the protocols—”

“InterAlia owns proprietary rights to the algorithms and the methodology, but that’s merely a legal barrier. You remember what people used to say? Information wants to be free. As soon as the test parameters and sorting algorithms are publically available, InterAlia’s legal standing becomes almost irrelevant. Bluntly, their copyrights and so forth won’t be worth shit.”

His faint accent made the word sound like “zhit.”

“You think that might happen?”

Klein seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, I guarantee it will happen! Because, you see, I mean to make it happen!”

And having delivered this declaration, he invited us to dinner.

At the table Klein became more obviously human. The food was impeccably presented, delivered by poised and professional servants, but Klein ate like someone who lived alone. His chief utensils were fork and fingers, and by the end of the salad course there was an oil-drenched endive clinging to his shirt collar. As he ate he reminisced about his youth, hanging out on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, “back when a secular Jew in Israel was a relatively uncomplicated thing to be.” He elicited a few stories from Damian in return. I had rarely heard Damian talk about his pre-Tau life, but he offered some tales from his days at the University of Toronto. What was really going on, of course, was that the two men were sizing each other up.

Amanda was brave enough to ask Klein whether he had ever applied his own test to himself—did he have an Affinity of his own?

He smiled at the question. “No.”

“You were never curious?”

“Often curious, but I was afraid the knowledge would create a bias. I wanted to remain objective. And at some point it began to seem like a potential conflict of interest, to whatever extent I was capable of influencing InterAlia’s policies. Now, of course, it’s far too late.”

“Too late to test yourself? Why? There’s no age limit, is there?”

“Because I have cancer,” Klein said flatly. “And it’s not the kind that can be cured. Multiple metastases. If I were to join a tranche, Miss Mehta, I would only make a hospice of it. And I don’t want to do that.”

We sat out an awkward silence. Amanda said, “I’m sorry—”

“Please don’t insult me by apologizing.”

“And … I can only speak for my own Affinity, but any Tau tranche would welcome you, any time and under any circumstances. We aren’t squeamish about helping each other. Even under extreme circumstances. In fact we’re pretty good at it.”

“Of course I know that,” Klein said softly. “Thank you, but it’s not what I want.”

A servant took away our plates and came back with four cut-glass bowls, each containing a perfectly formed globe of lemon sorbet with a finger cookie standing in it like the mast of a sailing ship. We stared at them.

Damian tried to steer the conversation back to business. “You must know that if you release the Affinity protocols, there are going to be unpredictable consequences.”

“On the contrary, the consequences are far from unpredictable. I have predicted them. But we can talk about it in the morning. I’m tired. You brought what you need for an overnight visit? Then please spend the rest of the evening any way you like. Whatever you need, ask the staff. When you’re ready, they’ll show you your rooms.”

That night one of Klein’s assistants escorted us to our bedrooms, three rooms side by side along a spacious corridor. But we only needed two.

I slept alone. Amanda, as had been her custom lately, slept with Damian.

In the morning the three of us rendezvoused in Klein’s large kitchen. He had left instructions for the staff to fix us anything we wanted for breakfast, or we could raid the refrigerator and do our own cooking if we preferred. So we improvised eggs and toast and coffee, after which Damian went for a walk down by the lake. From the big window of the main room Amanda and I caught glimpses of him by the boathouse along the dock, watching the sky in case it started to rain.

Amanda sat where the window framed her. One of the servants told us Klein would be available in an hour or so, and was there anything she could do for us in the meantime?

I asked her to bring me paper and a pencil. “Plain paper, not lined.”

“Making notes?” Amanda asked.

“Sketching.”

The assistant came back with paper and a selection of sharpened pencils and a clipboard.

“Sketching what?”

“You, if it’s okay.”

She smiled. “It’s been a while since you did that.”

I mumbled something about the light, which really was striking: the clinical fluorescence of the house lights versus the brooding gray clouds behind the window. But yes, it had been a while. The pleasure in this case was in capturing the contrast between Amanda and the turmoil of cloud that framed her, doing it without color, just gray tones. I think she liked the attention, but her eyes kept straying to the window. To Damian where he stood on the dock, waiting and thinking.

The fact was, we both loved Damian. But only Amanda was fucking him.

“Will you show it to me when you’re done?”

I said I would. But not until it was done. Grammy Fisk had always laughed at how jealously I guarded my work: the wary look, the cupped hand blocking the paper as she passed. She didn’t understand that I couldn’t share a drawing until I had finished it. Until then, it was mine and only mine.

Meir Klein joined Damian down at the dock. We saw them talking as they followed the path back to the house, Damian lagging to accommodate Klein’s careful, plodding steps. They came in through a nearby door, and Damian steered Klein into the room where we sat—I think he wanted to make sure Amanda and I heard at least some of what he said.

Puzzlingly, it sounded like a lecture on entomology. Klein was talking about “eusociality,” the ability of some insect species to act cooperatively. Hive insects like bees and ants were the classic example. By comparison, human beings seem like pretty feeble cooperators: we compete with each other, occasionally kill each other when scant resources are at stake. But that’s only part of the story. In fact we collaborate even more effectively than insects (who conduct their own wars and mortal combats), and our genius for collaboration has made us uniquely successful as a species. Insect hierarchies are rigid and formal; human hierarchies are fluid and an individual can participate in more than one. The more flexible and layered these multiplex hierarchies, the more successful a human culture tends to be. Cooperation everywhere, built so deeply into our nature that it’s almost invisible: all we see are the deplorable exceptions, crime and corruption and oppression.

Literacy, the printing press, high-speed travel, and instantaneous communication: all these technologies had expanded and enhanced the human genius for cooperation, Klein said. “And now we confront a technology that directly addresses human eusociality.”

The Affinities, I assumed he meant. But he meant much more than that.

“The Affinities were the first application to emerge from the science of social teleodynamics. But recent modeling suggests that the Affinities are only one of many possible forms of enhanced human collaboration—that there exists an entire untapped phase space of potential social networks.”

Klein paused for breath, and Damian took the opportunity to ask, “Is that a bad thing?”

“Not intrinsically, but there are two potential problems. One fundamental, one practical.

“The fundamental problem is that cooperation is a blade with two edges. Sometimes we collaborate in order to give our own group an advantage over others. Think of it as predatory collaboration. Predatory collaboration can also be technologically enhanced, which means short-term gain for some but a net loss of collaborative efficiency. It can also lead to a kind of arms race, in which predatory collaboration becomes a requisite for any group’s survival. In that case, the results can be bloody.

“The practical problem is that we’re opening the door to a cascade, a torrent, a tsunami of cultural and economic and political change. No one is prepared for this! Existing institutions could fail massively. Wholly novel loyalties and systems of loyalty may arise. And without constraints, we could be looking at a state of perpetual war between competing sodalities.”

Tranche warfare, I thought, but the joke didn’t seem funny.

“Worse,” Klein said, “this comes at a critical juncture in human history. You know the problems we face, from climate change to economic inequality to world hunger. Problems that are easy to name but almost impossible to address, because they require a kind of global collaborative response our species hasn’t yet mastered. InterAlia sold the Affinities as a commercial product, a way of making friends, like a dating service or a social club. But they were always more than that. Designedly so. Because they concentrate human collaborative potential, they are a potential avenue to the kind of work that might redeem this battered planet. But they can only become that if they remain structurally sound, within the framework I created for InterAlia.”

“If you publish your research,” Damian said, “aren’t you tearing down that framework?”

“On the contrary, I hope to preserve it.” Klein had begun to pace, as if some kind of crackling energy had percolated through his frail body. “The crisis is already inevitable. The corporate model of the Affinities is failing. I was the first to do this work, but other social dynamicists are following a similar path. Much more would already have been published if not for InterAlia’s attempts to suppress it. So, listen: my plan is this. I mean to release my own key research within the next six months. From what I’ve seen in journals and on the Internet, much of the knowledge will by that time already be an open secret. InterAlia believes it can contain the leaks that have already occurred, but InterAlia is mistaken. Either way, I want you to have the best available data in advance of its release. By you, of course I mean the Tau Affinity.”

Damian blinked. I suspected he was having a hard time processing all this. I knew I was. “Why Tau?”

“Without InterAlia each Affinity must become self-governing, and some particular Affinity will have to assume the role of primus inter pares—first among equals.”

“You think Tau can do that?”

“Already you’ve done more for yourselves than any other Affinity. You’ve generated sturdy, complex systems of mutual support. You’ve created institutions like TauBourse. Your members have made statistically unprecedented gains in productivity and net wealth, and these benefits have been distributed more or less equitably across the membership. Tau is a template for what the Affinities can become—what they must become, if they’re to survive the approaching crisis.”

It was Amanda who spoke up: “But what exactly are we supposed to do?”

“Master your own Affinity, and you become a model for the others. I can help you do that. Beyond that, you’ll have to make your own choices about how to proceed.”

I went on sketching as Klein talked, almost as a nervous reflex. Amanda was no longer posing, and that made her a more interesting subject.

The first crude outline had emphasized the contrast of her thoughtful eyes and her veiled smile, like a dappling of cloud and sun. There was a playfulness in her that was both deeply attractive and deeply Tau: the playfulness that comes of liberation from convention and misunderstanding. We had never been exclusive lovers, and although we inevitably cycled back to each other we had spent plenty of time in other beds. It was one of the small miracles Tau made possible. Our tranche wasn’t utopia, there had been episodes of jealousy among members, and I wasn’t a complete stranger to that emotion myself—but as Taus we knew how to comfort and distract one another when we needed comfort and distraction. I was only trivially (and, I told myself, temporarily) disappointed that Amanda and Damian had become lovers.

And I wasn’t surprised. My relationship with Amanda was all art and eros, but Damian engaged an aspect of herself she seldom showed me: her deep political commitment to Tau. For Amanda, Tau wasn’t only an identity, it was a cause. She had fled her birth family with all its dour immigrant aspirations to respectability, but her sense of duty was only repressed, not really rejected. She had reassigned it to her Affinity.

And Damian shared that intensity of purpose. She was drawn to him as if to a flame, and it was undeniable that he burned pretty brightly. He was one of the circle of motivated and scary-smart Taus who had turned Tau into a financial powerhouse, lifted Taus out of poverty, and bootstrapped Tau businesses across the continent. He was a sodality rep now, which meant he associated with like-minded Taus from every part of the world. He didn’t have a rank or title—we weren’t like Hets, who loved formal hierarchies—but he had become one of the handful of North American Taus who could speak on behalf of us all. When Damian began to devote himself to working full-time for Tau he had recruited assistants from his own and local tranches, and Amanda had leapt at the opportunity to work alongside him. And so had I, though my motives may not have been quite so pure.

So my sketch of Amanda against the window became a sketch of Amanda paying rapt attention to Damian and Meir Klein. I had to take some of the light out of her face and deepen the shadows, which made it a better drawing but a less satisfying one. She looked past the border of the page uneasily, almost as if the clouds had moved indoors. Suddenly I wanted the earlier version back, but there was no retrieving it. When I blurred the lines to soften them it was as if she began to disappear.

In the end Klein gave us a memory key containing a few megabytes of data, which Damian accepted with due gravity.

Then Klein took a call from his lawyers. Apparently InterAlia had accused him of a breach of confidentiality regarding some remarks he had made at a conference in Shanghai last year. Klein’s legal team was coming up to the house for a conference, so we were promptly and formally dismissed. He would be in touch again soon, he said.

He said good-bye to us at the driveway. He shook my hand and Amanda’s and beamed at us benevolently, but I was startled by how small he suddenly seemed, surrounded by servants but without real family or friends.

I gave my drawing to Amanda as we were driving away. She looked at it and smiled abstractedly and put it in her lap.

An ambulance arrived at the scene along with a couple of Traffic Services vehicles. We told our story, Rachel Ragland told hers. The EMS guys insisted on taking Damian in for observation, over his protests. As they slid him into the ambulance on a wholly unnecessary stretcher, Amanda offered to ride along to the hospital in Kelowna.

“No, stay with the car,” Damian said. “Stay with Adam.” Klein’s data was safe in her purse.

So we shared an umbrella as we waited for the tow truck. Amanda had already put in a call to someone from a tranche in Kelowna who would meet us at the garage. She was leaning into my arm when she spotted my drawing: it had blown out of the car onto the verge of the road. She kneeled over it and tried to peel the sodden paper from the tarmac, uselessly. It tore in her hand. She looked at me guiltily. “It’s ruined! I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It wasn’t very good.”

Chapter 7

The week-long Pan-Affinity conference drew to a close, but Damian asked me and Amanda to stay in the city and help him organize the analysis of Klein’s data. We divided the work into two parts: Amanda’s job was to round up Taus who were qualified to make sense of the mathematics, while my job was to assemble a team who could look at ways to turn the Affinity test protocols into a hardware/software application that could be detached from InterAlia’s corporate control.

For the last few days of the conference we worked out of our rooms at the Hilton. Damian had come back from the hospital with a diagnosis of a minor concussion and a Technicolor bruise on his forehead, but he insisted on keeping his remaining commitments: a couple of roundtable discussions plus a series of private meetings with representatives of the American sodality. One of his roundtables concerned the problem of forming and stabilizing tranches in countries where the Affinities were prohibited by law (including China and most nominally Islamic nations), but where clandestine testing was already being performed—a question that mirrored the larger one nobody wanted to ask: What would happen if InterAlia went belly-up?

On Sunday night the week-long event officially ended and the delegates dispersed, as did the demonstrators who had been making a nuisance of themselves outside the convention center. The picketers represented a variety of groups including evangelicals and right-wingers, but the faction most heavily represented was NOTA (None of the Above), a kind of social club for people who had been rejected by the Affinities or disapproved of them on principle. In the United States, NOTA had already launched a series of class-action suits against InterAlia for what it was calling “category discrimination.”

After the convention the Hilton began to seem both eerily empty and absurdly expensive. We relocated to a cheaper hotel while we set up an office in a three-story commercial building owned by a local Tau—rent-free, because parts of the building were under renovation, which meant we learned to live with the sound of hammering and the squeal of power saws.

We had been there less than a week when I got a call from Rachel Ragland. Something had happened, she was worried, and she wanted to talk to me about it.

Leaving a Tau-specific environment in which you’ve been immersed for days is like coming up from a deep-water dive: best done in stages, if you want to avoid the bends. But I didn’t have that luxury when I went to meet Rachel.

I had told Amanda about the call, and she had summoned Damian, who rolled his eyes. “She wants money, of course. She’ll probably threaten to go to the police.”

“I asked her about that. Pretty bluntly. She says she already told the police I was driving and that she hadn’t been hurt, and that was the end of it. Or would have been. Except yesterday two guys showed up at her door.”

“What do you mean—cops?”

“They said they were insurance investigators. They wanted to hear about the accident. She says she stuck to her story.”

“But?”

“But the ID they showed her looked dodgy, and she thinks there was something off about them.”

“Something off?”

“I think she meant they seemed threatening. They scared her. And since she lied to them on my behalf, she feels like I owe her an explanation.”

“Which is the one thing you can’t give her.”

“I agreed to meet her for lunch.”

Amanda said, “You couldn’t just tell her to fuck off? Because Damian’s right, it’s probably some kind of shakedown. She’ll ask for money, bet on it.”

“I didn’t tell her to fuck off.” For some reason I thought of Rachel’s daughter Suze, owl-eyed and rain-drenched in the backseat of her car. “But if she asks for money, I will.”

So I drove to the restaurant Rachel had suggested, a chain steakhouse in a Burnaby strip mall, and a bored waiter steered me to her table. Which was good, because I might not have recognized her. Her hair, which had looked black in the rain, was actually a deep coppery red. It framed her round face, brown eyes, small nose, and a pursed mouth that showed her upper front teeth when she smiled. “Adam Fisk,” she said.

“Just Adam.”

“And I’m Rachel.”

“I remember. Where’s Suze?”

“In school, but thank you for asking. I hope I didn’t drag you away from anything important?”

I had been more or less confined to a room with six other Taus—IT types and electronics engineers—for days now. But I couldn’t complain. “Just work,” I said.

“Mm. Well, I work three days a week at the food bank on Hastings Street. But today’s not one of those days.”

So we stared at our menus and discussed the comparative virtues of the salad plate and the club sandwich and wondered what else we ought to say. After we ordered I said, “You had some people come visit you?”

“Yeah. Like I said, two guys with IDs I didn’t trust. Kind of pretending to be nice—at least at first—but you could tell they were only pretending.”

“What did they look like?”

She shrugged. “Hard to describe. White guys in suits. Short hair. Maybe Russian or Eastern European–looking, if that means anything. Something about the cheekbones. But no accent, so I don’t know. One was a little chunky, the other was taller and looked like he worked out.”

“And they asked about your accident?”

“They seemed to know the details already, which is why I thought they were legitimate. I told them about the transmission. Actually the car’s still in the garage. Until I can bail it out. Expensive repairs.” I wondered if this was the point at which she would ask for money. “I got suspicious when they kept asking about what they called ‘the other vehicle.’ Your car.”

“What about it?”

“Well, they asked who was driving. Wanted a description.”

“And you told them—?”

“I said I there were three people in the car, two guys and a woman, and the younger guy was driving. Same as I told the cops. But these guys kept asking the same questions over and over. Was I hurt? No. Was I sure? Yes. Was I frightened? No. And so on. Like they thought I was being uncooperative. Which admittedly I kind of was. They weren’t very good at hiding their pissed-offness.” The waiter put down glasses of ice water and Rachel took a long gulp. “So I asked them to leave.”

“Which they did?”

“More or less peacefully. They didn’t make any threats. But I still felt threatened. So I called you.” Her expression hardened. “Since I stuck to the story about you driving, I feel like you owe me something.”

“Owe you what exactly?” I refrained from saying, How much?

“Well, for starters, an explanation! Who were those guys? What did they want? Am I in some kind of danger? I mean, I’ve got Suze to worry about. For that matter, who are you?”

“To be honest, I don’t know how much of that I can answer. I have no idea who those guys were.”

“Okay. I guess I believe that. But you don’t seem real surprised by any of this.”

And suddenly I wasn’t sure what to say. I was coming out of a long Tau immersion. Had she been a Tau, I would have just explained. But she wasn’t. I could neither trust her nor be sure she would understand anything I told her. Still, it was true she had done me a favor, and not just me; she had helped protect Damian, and by implication our entire Affinity. I said, “I’m a Tau—”

She rolled her eyes. “And I’m a Pisces. So what?”

“All the people in the car were Taus.”

“You’re saying this is some kind of Affinity thing? I knew the convention was in town, but—”

“My friend is involved in a legal wrangle with a major corporation. Their lawyers probably have investigators in the field looking for something they can use as leverage. Now, I’m not saying that’s who came to your house. I honestly don’t know who came to your house.”

“But it’s a possibility?”

“It’s a possibility. Did they ask anything that struck you as particularly odd?”

“They asked if I knew where you were coming from, the day of the accident.”

We had been coming from Meir Klein’s country house. InterAlia knew where Klein lived. Maybe someone had connected the dots.

We talked through lunch. Rachel asked a few questions about the Affinities, I asked a few questions about Rachel. She was fairly voluble now that she had relaxed, and I liked the way she stroked the air with her right hand as she talked, index finger and middle finger pressed together as if she were holding an invisible cigarette. The waiter cleared our dessert dishes. We ordered coffee. Another twenty minutes and we were still talking. And enjoying it.

So I went home with her. Though I knew it was probably a bad idea.

Affinity members tend to be endogamous: they’re more likely to form sexual relationships within their Affinity than outside of it. When it comes to long-term commitments, that’s true of all the Affinities. But some Affinities—Delts and Kafs, most notoriously—have a penchant for short-term liaisons outside the group. Taus fall somewhere in the middle of that range. Trevor Holst, for instance, hadn’t lived with anyone but another Tau since he joined our tranche, but he treated the annual convention as an all-you-can-eat sexual buffet, pun not entirely unintended. Wherever some Kaf was organizing a hotel-room orgy, there you would find Trev.

I told myself I wasn’t like that. Since I joined my tranche my single long-term partner had been Amanda, and all my dalliances had been Taus. If for no other reason than that it made life easier. No mixed signals, fewer hurt feelings.

But Rachel had attracted my attention, suddenly and deeply and in a way I didn’t entirely understand. And by the time we left the restaurant, both of us knew it. She had come by bus, and I asked her if she wanted a ride home. She said she did.

I wasn’t sure what was beginning, only that I was willing to let it begin.

“So you have somebody?” she asked. “Back in Tau-land?”

She had invited me into her basement apartment in New Westminster. Rachel was a single mother on a shoestring income and had furnished the place accordingly. Cotton throw rugs over scuffed linoleum, a thrift-shop sofa, three overflowing laundry baskets occupying the space between a video panel and a bookcase stocked with secondhand paperback bestsellers. The tablet computer on the coffee table was a couple of years out of date and there was a burn mark on the plastic frame.

She caught me looking. “Okay, it’s a mess.”

“No, it’s fine.” I liked the personal touches she had added—the paisley silk scarf draped over a lampshade, a magazine photo of the Great Barrier Reef tacked to the wall. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom for Suze, Rachel’s bedroom.

“So answer the question. Are you seeing anybody?”

“Yes. Or—it’s complicated. Sort of yes.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want me to explain that?”

“Actually, no. But thank you for offering. My last steady guy was Suze’s dad. He took a job as a rigger on an Alberta oil pipeline about the time I got pregnant. He was kind of absentminded, though. Forgot to leave a forwarding address. How long have you been a Tau?”

“Seven years.”

“Doesn’t it get boring, hanging around with people who’re just like you?”

“That’s not how it works. Have you been tested?”

She laughed. “Fuck no!”

“Why not?”

“I doubt there’s a group that would have me.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged off the question and scooted closer. “So what are you here for, Adam Fisk?”

“I guess I want to get to know you.”

“Oh? I thought maybe you wanted to fuck me.”

My mouth went dry. “Well … that, too.”

“Then maybe you should do it.”

She leaned in to kiss me. It wasn’t a tentative kiss. I liked the way she tasted. I moved to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. She unbuckled my belt, unzipped me, knelt down.

I was seconds away from an orgasm when she stood up, took my hand, led me to her bedroom, pushed me onto the bed. She tugged off her blouse and stepped out of her jeans. Nothing under them but a pair of cotton dollar-store briefs, which I yanked down. She straddled me, and we locked into an urgent rhythm, Rachel moving to some music I couldn’t hear, eyes wide open—her eyes were my entire field of vision, her hair a curtain that sealed us from the world. When it was impossible to do anything else, we came hastily and greedily and simultaneously.

After we caught our breath she said, “How long has it been?”

“What do you mean?”

“Since you did it with somebody who isn’t a Tau.”

“Honestly? A few years.”

“Who was it? I mean the last one who wasn’t in your Affinity.”

Jenny Symanski. “Just a girl I knew.”

“Like me.” She kissed me again. “Now I’m a girl you know.”

She got up, left the room, came back with a joint and a lighter. I liked the way she moved, unselfconsciously naked, fluid, her body more wave than particle. The bed creaked when she climbed back in. We shared the joint: some generic weed Amanda would have turned up her nose at, but it did the trick. We settled into a measured second round.

The next thing I noticed was the fading light from the bedroom window. Because this was a basement apartment the window was high in the wall but low to the street. Sunset turned the curtains scarlet. We listened to the sound of footsteps passing on the sidewalk outside. Strangers coming home from work. Shadows of unfamiliar lives. The murmur of voices. “Might rain tonight,” Rachel said sleepily.

“I wish I could stay, but—”

“I know. It’s okay. I have to go get Suze.” Suze was at her grandmother’s, where she often went after school.

“Need a drive?”

“Easier to bus it, but thank you for asking.” She cleared her throat. “So … is this just a happy afternoon, or can I call you?”

She meant it casually but I heard a hitch of tension in her voice.

“Of course you can call me. More likely I’ll call you first.”

“That’s a nice thing to say. Are all Taus as nice as you?”

“In their way. Uh, maybe not quite as nice.”

I used the bathroom before I left. There was a row of brown prescription bottles on the shelf over the toilet. I resisted the temptation to read the labels, and I congratulated myself for respecting her privacy. Or maybe I just didn’t want to know what was wrong with her.

I stopped by the building where we worked to pick up some papers and to see if there was anyone I could recruit for dinner company. I ran into Amanda, who was hurrying down the hallway. She noticed me, stopped, did a double take, and drew an instant conclusion about where I’d been and what I’d done. I couldn’t help it: I blushed.

“Well,” she said. “Well.”

“I, uh—”

“Uh yeah. So I guess she didn’t ask for money, huh? Or did she?”

“That’s not fair. And no, she didn’t. Where are you rushing off to?”

“Meeting. With Damian. You’re invited.”

We joined him in one of the building’s newly renovated conference rooms, nothing inside but a trestle table, a dozen folding chairs, and a faint haze of plaster dust. Just the three of us. If Damian had any thoughts about what might have happened between Rachel and me, he didn’t bother to share them. He had bigger issues.

Meir Klein was dead.

Klein had died in his big house in the Okanagan Valley. “Staff found him,” Damian said, “when he didn’t get up this morning.”

“His cancer,” Amanda whispered.

“Actually, no. According the police, he died of a ligature injury.”

In other words he had been strangled. Or had strangled himself: maybe an autoerotic strangulation gone wrong, unlikely as that sounded given Klein’s fragile physical condition. The evidence was ambiguous, the coroner was performing an autopsy, but until the report was finalized, the police were betting on foul play.

Amanda knocked on the door of my hotel room a few minutes after midnight, and it didn’t take Tau telepathy to figure out what she wanted. She pressed herself hard against me. “Now fuck me,” she whispered, “like you fucked your tether.”

I didn’t like the word “tether.” It was what some Taus called the lovers they took outside of the Affinity. It was a term of contempt, like shiksa or shegetz. As in, Don’t let that tether of yours drag you down. But this was Amanda. It was not in my power to refuse her. Which is to say, I didn’t want to refuse her. And she knew it. “Let me shower first,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Now. While the smell of her is still on you.”

Chapter 8

Amanda and I met Damian at the office the next morning, an hour before the research teams arrived, early enough that the light of dawn through the east-facing windows made the motes of plaster dust in the air sparkle like diamonds. Amanda slumped in the nearest chair, her eyes still bruised with sleep. Damian stood at the head of the table, looking grim. “I’ve been talking to some contacts in the Vancouver Police Force,” he said. “The RCMP is investigating Klein’s death, not the cops, but I managed to learn a few things. Almost certainly homicide. A couple of hard drives are missing from Klein’s office. So we can assume that whoever killed him knew he was in possession of valuable data.”

“InterAlia’s data,” Amanda said.

“You’re picturing some goon ransacking the place and murdering Klein on orders from corporate headquarters. And maybe that’s a reasonable assumption, but unless someone was unforgivably clumsy there won’t be any evidence linking the murder to InterAlia. What we have to ask ourselves is, if InterAlia is behind this, what’s their next move? Especially if the drives they stole contain anything that would connect Klein to us.”

I said, “Somebody wants to keep Klein’s data from going public, they have money to spend on hired thieves, and they’re apparently willing to kill for what they want. If they suspect Klein passed us the data, we’re the next logical target.”

“Maybe. But only as long they figure they have something to gain by intimidating us.”

“So if they’re going to act,” Amanda said, “they have to act soon.”

“Right. So we need to be able to protect ourselves. We have two teams here, twenty people in the building during daylight hours if you include the three of us, and any or all of us could be targeted. How do we afford protection to twenty people, either here or when they’re moving freely around the city?”

“Warn them, obviously,” I said. “House them in one place, even the ones who live here in the city. And we need help. People who know how to do real-world security.”

Damian nodded. “I’ll get on T-Net this morning and set it up.”

T-Net was the hidden webspace where sodality reps interacted with each other. A tech guy had once tried to tell me how it worked. All I remembered was that the explanation involved words like “serial/parallel encryption” and “onion routing.” Basically, it was a space where sodality-level Taus could exchange information with minimal risk of surveillance. Through T-net, Damian could put out the word that he needed volunteers with security and military experience who lived in the area or could get to Vancouver on short notice.

“Okay,” I said. “But are we the only ones at risk?”

“What do you mean?”

Amanda said, “He’s thinking of the guys who questioned his new tether, Rachel Ragland.”

“I doubt she’s in any danger,” Damian said. “They’ve talked to her already, they didn’t learn anything.”

“Depends on whether they know I’ve been seeing her.”

“Well, that’s easily fixed,” Amanda said. “Stop seeing her.”

Damian said, “The guys who came to see her, did she describe them?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Do you think you could get a better description from her?”

“I don’t know. I could try. Why? Do you think they’re the same people who went after Klein?”

“Could be. It would help if we could give our security guys some faces to look out for.”

“You mean, like a sketch?”

“Yeah,” Damian said. “Like a sketch.”

I said I would get on it.

The first of our new security team showed up that afternoon, a local guy named Gordo MacDonald. Gordo was ex-military, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, chest like a rain barrel, abs so defined you could count them through his t-shirt. Shaved head and one glittering gold earring. I would have flinched when we shook hands, but the look passed between us. The Tau look: a wry curvature of the mouth, something indefinable about the eyes, but it was as if all the threat went out of his face. He gave me a sheepish grin, and I gave him one back. “Hey, bro,” he said.

I wasn’t a hey bro kind of guy, but I said, “Hey.”

Gordo told Damian he wanted to start by walking through the building, get to know the layout, “make sure the bad guys don’t have a place to hide.”

Amanda touched my arm after Damian and Gordo left the room. “I wanted to say, I wasn’t just being bitchy this morning. About Rachel Ragland, I mean. It’s none of my business whether you keep on seeing her. It’s just, I can’t help thinking, a single mom on social assistance, she’s bound to need more than you can give her. A couple of months of great sex and then you’re gone—is that good for her? Does she need that?”

“I told her what the situation is.”

“You told her, but did she hear you? You’ve been living in Tau-land. It’s different out there. People lie. Not just to each other but to themselves. People get hurt.”

“I know that. And I don’t intend to hurt her.”

“It may not matter what you intend. You’re treating her like a Tau, and she’s not.”

And that was true. But I needed to see her at least once more. If only to make a forensic sketch.

So when Rachel suggested we get together Saturday afternoon, I said sure. She had a whole day planned, she said. We could drive to Stanley Park with Suze. Walk the seawall. Drop off Suze at her grandmother’s, then have the evening to ourselves. Go out for dinner and drinks, maybe. If I was free?

I said I was free.

When I pulled up to the low-rise building in New Westminster, Rachel came out of the lobby with a big backpack over her shoulder and Suze clinging to her left hand. Rachel was wearing shorts and a yellow blouse and a Canucks cap to keep the sun out of her eyes. Suze was decked out in a summer dress and pink plastic Barbie sunglasses.

“Remember me?” I said to Suze when she climbed in the backseat.

“No!”

“From the forest,” Rachel prompted her. “When our car broke down.”

I told her my name was Adam. Suze gave me a solemn look, then said she was pleased to meet me.

The car’s sound system had been playing the news from a US netcast, but the announcer’s voice was so solemn and the news so ominous (the India-Pakistan conflict had heated up again) that I turned it off as soon as we pulled into traffic. Suze immediately began to sing the chorus (and only the chorus) of a song from an old kids’ movie: “Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you! Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you!”

“It’s ‘chitty,’” Rachel told her. “Not ‘chiddy.’”

“CHIDDY chiddy BANG bang! I LOVE YOU!”

“Have it your own way. A little quieter, though, okay?”

Suze grudgingly moderated her chiddies. An hour later we were at the seawall, watching cargo ships glide like iron ballerinas across the water of English Bay. The water was too cold for swimming, but Suze seemed more interested in digging in the sand and chasing gulls. Rachel and I settled into a patch of packed sand in the shade of a sea-bleached drift log. She opened her backpack and took out a selection of plastic-wrapped Wonder Bread sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade. I reached into my own pack and produced a sketchbook and a pencil. She said, “What’s that? You draw?”

“Now and then.”

“Is that what you do for a living?”

“No. I thought about it once, but you go where life takes you. I’m more of a management consultant these days.”

She gave one of her quick, full-throated laughs. “That sounds like a money-for-bullshit job. No offense.”

“None taken. Those two men who visited you, you think you could describe them to me?”

“What, so you can draw them?”

I nodded.

“Are they so dangerous you need to know what they look like? No, don’t answer that. Are you, like, a police sketch artist or something?”

“To be honest, I’ve never tried to draw a face from a description. I’d like to try. But we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, I think we do have to. Since you brought your pencil and paper and all. Afterward, maybe you can draw a picture of me?”

“I’d like to. Once we get this out of the way.”

She shrugged. “What do I do?”

“Start by picking one of the two men. Don’t think about what he looked like, just think about something he did. Like, smile or not smile. Blink. Pick his teeth.”

She squinted her eyes. “The taller guy. His head…”

“What about it?”

“He kept cocking it to the left, like a dog hearing a whistle. Head shaped like a rectangle. Like a loaf of bread with eyes and a mouth.”

I made some tentative lines, more to encourage her than to accomplish anything. “Hair?”

“Bald as a bottle cap. I don’t think he shaved it bald, I think it was just bald bald. Narrow eyes, close together. His mouth, when he tried to smile, you could see his clenched teeth. White teeth. He’s got a good dental-care plan, whoever he is.”

“What do you mean, when he tried to smile?”

“He smiled like he was faking it. He had one of those mouths that opens like a puppet’s jaw, like on a real crude hinge. Wide. Kind of bracketed, the lines at the side of it, not a curvy smile, kind of inorganic, like a robot smile.”

It turned out I wasn’t especially good at translating any of this to paper, but before too long I had scribbled and erased my way to something Rachel called, “Cartoony, but I guess I’d recognize him from that. Sure.”

The second guy—shorter, rounder, pig-eyed—took less time. I had just finished when Suze came bounding up, demanding to see what I’d done. I showed her. Her eyes went wide. “Who are they?”

“Nobody in particular,” I said.

“Draw me!”

“I think your mother wants to go first.”

“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “Go ahead and make a picture of her. I need to stretch my legs.”

She went off to find a public washroom and smoke a joint. Drawing Suze was fun, though she kept jumping up to see how the picture was coming along. It was pretty good for a rough sketch, I thought. I captured her sandy knees poking out from the hem of her dress, her cautious eyes and wary smile. When it was done I gave it to her. She inspected it critically. “Can I color it?”

“If you like. It’s all yours.”

She nodded, tucked the drawing into her mother’s backpack, and rose to return to the holes she had been making in the beach (because they filled up with seawater, she said, and there were tiny shells in them, along with cigarette butts and bits of charcoal from the nearby barbecue pit). Then she seemed to remember something. She turned back and said, “Thank you for making a picture of me.”

“You’re very welcome.”

When Rachel came back she posed on the drift log, riding it sidesaddle. I produced a quick sketch but a good one; good enough that I was almost reluctant to hand it over to her. She said, “Well, this is bullshit, Adam. I mean, it’s great. But you prettied me up.”

What I had done was pay attention to the way doubt and mischief took turns with the curve of her lips. “Or maybe you’re just pretty.”

“More bullshit.” But she grinned. “Time flies. We should collect Suze and take her to my mom’s. She’ll be wanting dinner soon.”

A few hours in the parking lot had left the car sun-warmed and smelling of sand and ozone. Suze insisted on holding the picture I had drawn of her, and she sang chiddy chiddy bang bang to the hum of the wheels on corduroy blacktop as we crossed the Lions Gate Bridge.

Rachel’s mother struck me as a wearier, more cynical version of Rachel. She had suffered a minor stroke a couple of years back and lived in a public housing complex with two Corgis and a budgerigar named Saint Francis. She didn’t say much—the stroke had left her slightly aphasic—but she surveyed me with unmistakable suspicion, and I did my best to appear small and harmless. “TV dinners?” Suze asked. Her grandmother nodded. “Yay,” Suze said.

Rachel kissed her mom and promised to pick up Suze by noon tomorrow. Then we were on our own. Rachel wanted to have dinner at a New West bar she liked. It was a working-class bar that smelled of stale hops and was dim as a dungeon, but the tables were reasonably clean and the staff called Rachel by name. We ordered steaks from the grill, and I asked for a beer. “Usual?” the waitress asked Rachel, and she nodded. “Usual” turned out to be a rum-and-Coke. She went through a couple of them while we waited for the food, then ordered another. She eyed the beer I was nursing and said, “You drink like you’re afraid of it.”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Yeah, I heard that. About Taus. Big potheads, but not heavy drinkers.”

Sociologists had been taking long, interested looks at the Affinities for years now. The studies were generally accurate, but the public’s misunderstanding of them had generated all kinds of stereotypes. “That’s true,” I said. “Statistically. But in the real world all it means is that the numbers are a little skewed. We have our share of drinkers. A couple of months ago, in my tranche, we helped a guy get into rehab for his alcohol habit.”

“Ah, rehab. Where rich people go, because prison’s so darned uncomfortable.”

The bigger Affinities ran their own rehab and therapy services. It had nothing to do with being rich, but it had a lot to do with being treated by people whose Affinity you shared. Nobody can help a Tau like another Tau. “It’s not always about the money. What else do you know about us?”

“There’s a lot of LGBT people, I’ve heard.”

“A few percentage points over the general population.”

“And you all sleep together.”

“Not true.”

“Maybe not as much as Eyns or Delts. I know a woman who joined the Delts. More like her vagina joined the Delts. We used to be pretty friendly, but she started to ignore me once she found a bunch of fuck friends to play with.”

The steaks arrived from the kitchen, and they were big and unpretentious and reasonably tender. Rachel continued drinking at a steady pace. I did not, which seemed to make her unhappy. I was a bush league drinker; I didn’t like being drunk, I didn’t drink gracefully. So I ordered serial rounds of chips and salsa to keep the waitress happy while some local band began to set up on the tiny stage across the room. The bass player struck an open E that rattled the cutlery.

“You’re going back to Toronto in a few weeks,” Rachel said.

I had told her that the first time we had lunch. “Right.”

“So I guess that means we’re just, we’re … not anything, really. The famous two slips. I mean ships. I keep thinking, I’ll never know him better than I do right now.”

“It is what it is,” I said. “I like you, Rachel. I don’t want to mislead you.”

“You like me all right, but I’m not a Tau.”

“I didn’t say that.”

The heat or the alcohol was making her sweat. She ran the back of her hand over her forehead. “You don’t have to. They used to say, ‘All the good ones are gay.’ Or ‘All the good ones are married.’ Well, sometimes the good ones just have an Affinity to go home to.”

“It’s nice you think I’m one of the good ones.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t.”

The band launched into a full-tilt cover of some old Tom Petty tune, and suddenly Rachel and I were shouting to each other as if we were separated by an abyss. I suggested it was time to start for home.

“Hey,” she said, “no! We’re just getting started! It’s fucking early! Or maybe that’s what you had in mind—some early fucking.”

“Come on, Rachel.”

“I want to hear the music! Then we’ll go. You can keep it in your pants until then.”

She began to sing along, loudly and inexactly, to “I Won’t Back Down.” I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the room. A guy at the bar, a tall dude with long pale hair and narrow, angry eyes, had been giving Rachel covert glances for the last hour, and now he was just staring.

Rachel looked where I was looking. She leaned toward me and yelled, “That’s just Carlos!”

“Carlos?”

“Old friend of mine! We had a thing for a while! He gets protective!”

Great, I thought. Carlos. Then I thought: What if the guy staring at us hadn’t been Carlos? What if it had been one of the insurance adjustors from the drawings? It was possible I was endangering her simply by being with her. “Okay, Rachel. Let’s leave Carlos to his business and go home.”

She gave me a contemptuous, drunken smile. “Are you afraid of him?”

“Yeah. I’m terrified.” I took out my wallet and put money on the table. “You coming?”

She pouted but stood up, gripping the back of her chair to steady herself. She let me take her arm.

We passed Carlos on our way to the door. I avoided eye contact, but Rachel gave him a look that was half leer, half sneer. Carlos responded by standing up and blocking my way. He put his face in my face but he shouted to Rachel over the music hammering from the stage: “YOU ALL RIGHT THERE, RACHE?”

Rachel nodded. When it became obvious he hadn’t seen the nod, she said, “YEAH! I’M FINE! LEAVE HIM ALONE, CARLOS!”

“SURE ABOUT THAT?”

He was a messy talker. Some of his spittle missed me, some didn’t.

“YES! DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE!”

Carlos winced. Then he mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He stepped out of our way, but his nail-gun stare followed us all the way to the door.

In the car, windows open, cool night air flowing in, Rachel grew moody and quiet. She didn’t say anything until we reached the block where she lived, when she asked in a small voice, “I fucked up there, didn’t I?”

“Not sure what you mean by that.”

“Our big evening together. Rachel and Adam. What fun, huh?”

“Maybe just not my idea of a good time.”

“I should have known. Taus are potheads, not drinkers. Taus are a little bit prissy, too. So they say on the Internet. I mean—oh, fuck! Now it sounds like I’m calling you names. I’m sorry!” She leaked a tear. “I just wanted us to have fun.”

I helped her to the door of the low-rise building, helped her get the key into the lock. Helped her down the stairs, though she pulled away and insisted on unlocking the door of the basement apartment herself. The night had gotten chilly, but the air inside was overheated and stale. As soon as I had closed the door she leaned into me, pressed herself against my body, grabbed my hips. The smell of Bacardi and sour sweat swarmed off of her.

“Bet I know what you want,” she said.

Bet you don’t, I thought.

I excused myself for the purpose of using the bathroom. The parade line of brown plastic pill bottles caught my attention again. This time I was less scrupulous about inspecting them. Lithium, Depakine, Risperdol, Seroquel. Some of the prescriptions were old and expired, some were fresh.

She was slumped on the sofa when I came out. I said, “Rachel…”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But yeah, I think that’s best.”

“Because I fucked up.”

“No. Listen—”

“Just go.”

“Rachel—”

“Do I embarrass you? Well, you embarrass me! Smug candy-ass Tau boy. Get out! I’m tired of you anyway. You know what’s better than your dick? My finger! My little finger! GO!”

Amanda was waiting in my hotel room when I got back (we shared keys). She said she wanted to see the sketches I had made. I gave them to her. She examined them approvingly. Then she asked me what happened with Rachel. And I tried to explain.

“She was showing you her world,” Amanda said. “Her apartment, her daughter, the ratty bar where she spends her weekends. Even the pill bottles she leaves out where people can see them. She probably wanted to find out whether all that would offend you or whether it would turn you on.”

“It didn’t offend me. I was just worried the wrong people would see us … Why would it turn me on?”

“Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”

“What?”

“Look at you, you’re so tense you’re practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We’ll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”

The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn’t have let her think—”

“Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“That’s what’s important. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

Chapter 9

My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.

When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can’t think of a better use for it.”

“Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They’re complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”

“They’re right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we’ve come across some anomalies in Klein’s data.”

“Anomalies?”

“Some unsettling implications.”

“Such as?”

He looked unhappy. “We’ll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We’ll be out of harm’s way and we’ll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”

It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn’t ready to talk.

The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother’s home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.

I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s fine.”

“Is Aaron around?”

“He’s in DC for the day. A congressional briefing or something.”

The truth was that talking to my family (my tether family) had become a duty, not a pleasure. Lately I had heard more from the house in Schuyler, since my father had entered into negotiations to sell his faltering hardware-store businesses to a national chain. “We’ll be able to retire very comfortably,” Mama Laura had told me, “though I dread what idleness will do to your father.” (Her dread wasn’t entirely hyperbolic: even a long holiday weekend could drive my father into a state of sullen, resentful boredom.)

My brother Aaron was working as an assistant to Mike Menkov, the Republican congressman from the Onenia district, and it seemed like he was making a career of it. He had learned his way around the federal labyrinth and had even drafted a couple of Menkov’s speeches. I knew this because Aaron made a point of mentioning it whenever we talked, and anything he neglected to tell me would be relayed from Schuyler by way of my father. And I always congratulated Aaron when he announced his latest triumph … even though Menkov was a pliant tool of the corporate lobbies and would endorse any noxious idea that seemed likely to boost him up the political ladder. Lately, Aaron himself had been talking about running for office.

But Aaron wasn’t home today, and Jenny had sounded a little uncomfortable telling me so. “Look,” I said, “I can get back to you if this is a bad time. Tell Aaron I returned his call, okay?”

“No, wait. Geddy’s here! That’s why I called earlier. He wants to talk to you. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. What’s Geddy doing in Alexandria?”

“Well, it’s a long story. You know he was playing with a band, right?”

Mama Laura had kept me posted on Geddy’s music career. Some natural talent, plus a little formal instruction and Geddy’s capacity for obsessive repetition, had made him a better-than-average reedman. A little over a year ago Geddy had joined a band called The Humbuckers, currently making a minor reputation for itself across the northeastern states. It was a precarious living—barely a living at all—but since the family had long ago concluded that Geddy was probably unemployable, it seemed like a good thing.

But life on the road had not agreed with Geddy. He had left The Humbuckers after a gig in Syracuse and bought a bus ticket to Alexandria. Two days ago he had shown up on Aaron’s doorstep with an unhappy expression and a duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Shockingly, he had pawned his Mauriat tenor sax, an instrument he had scrimped to buy and which he had insisted on holding in every recent photograph of him I had seen. Asked why he left the band and sold his sax, Geddy would only say, “It didn’t make me happy anymore.”

Jenny texted me this information later; here on the Pender Island ferry, all I knew was that Geddy had expressed a completely uncharacteristic desire to talk on the phone. So I waited while Jenny gave him the handset. “Hello?” he said. It was Geddy in two syllables. Timid but somehow courageous, as if he had forced out the word on a cloud of pure bravado.

“Good to hear your voice,” I said.

“Where are you? It sounds loud.”

“I’m on a ferry in Georgia Strait. That’s the engines you hear.”

“You’re on a boat?”

“Yeah, a boat.”

“Do you still live in Toronto?”

“I do, but I’ll be out west for a few weeks more.”

“Okay.” He was silent a few moments more, and I had learned to respect Geddy’s silences. Eventually he said, “I wish I could visit you.”

“That’s not possible right now, but maybe in a few months. What are you doing at Aaron and Jenny’s place?”

“They agreed to let me stay a while. I don’t really have anywhere to go. I didn’t want to go back to Schuyler.”

He didn’t want to go back to Schuyler because my father would have humiliated him for his failure. Neither of us needed to say this aloud. “Are you okay there?”

“Aaron says I can’t stay forever.” Now he just sounded tired. “I don’t know what to do, Adam.”

“The band didn’t work out, huh?”

“There was a girl. I really liked her. She needed money. So I had to sell my saxophone. She took the money, but…”

“I understand.”

“People are pretty fucking mean sometimes.”

His brief career in the music business had made Geddy more casual about what he would once have called “swear words.” Worse than that was the bitterness in his voice. It was entirely self-directed. Geddy would never despise the woman who had taken his money. Instead, he would despise himself for his own gullibility. And learn nothing from the experience. I suspected Geddy would go on trading luck for love for as long as it took him to give up on love. “If you need a little money to get you through, Geddy, no problem. I can send it care of Aaron and Jenny.”

“No,” he said quickly. “Thanks, Adam. No, I just wanted to hear your voice. It was always…” I imagined him blushing. “You were always pretty good to me.”

Which for some reason made me feel even worse. “Okay, but listen. We’ll get together, I promise. Soon as I clear up some business out here. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good.”

“In the meantime, let Aaron and Jenny pamper you for a while.”

“I can’t really do that. I mean, they’ll let me stay for a few weeks. But I don’t think Aaron is really happy having me here. It’s kind of…” He lowered his voice. “I don’t like this house. It’s big and it’s pretty, but I would hate to live here.” He added, a barely audible whisper, “Jenny has a black eye.”

“A what? What did you say? A black eye?”

“Yes.”

“What, like somebody punched her?”

A maddening pause. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Geddy, what do you mean?”

“Here she is. Here she is!”

“Geddy?”

Jenny came on. “We should keep this short. Aaron will be home any minute.”

“Are you all right?”

“What? Yes, of course I am. Why? What did Geddy say?”

“Nothing.” Or too much. “But he seems a little forlorn.”

“Look … I’ll text you about it, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Great. Well. Thank you for calling back, Adam. That was nice. I know you’re busy.”

“Never too busy to talk to my sister-in-law.”

“Great,” she said. “Good-bye.”

Damian had rented what the owner (a local Tau) called a “chalet” on a rural lot near the ocean on Pender Island. In reality it was a four-bedroom log-walled home with double-glazed windows and a kitchen big enough to feed and accommodate a dozen people.

We were slightly less than a dozen: me, Amanda, Damian, a tech guy from each of our two research teams, plus Gordo MacDonald and four of his security people. Gordo immediately scoped out the house and its surrounding territory and posted his subordinates where they could cover all approaches. “We’ll be inconspicuous,” he said. “We’ll feed ourselves and sleep in shifts. You probably won’t notice us. But if you do need us, all you have to do is holler.”

Which was reassuring, though it was unlikely that anyone had followed us here. The house felt safe. Even better, with the rain falling and the daylight beginning to fade and a fire crackling in the hearth, it felt cozy.

The feeling lasted until Damian told us what he had deduced from Meir Klein’s data.

It was obvious we hadn’t come here for a standard meeting, but Damian wanted to start with a progress report, so that’s what we gave him. My team leader and I summarized the problems we’d run into trying to design a portable Affinity-testing system. With suitable sensors, virtually any handheld digital device could record the results and run the algorithms. But another part of the traditional Affinity screening was a DNA test. Adding a portable nanopore sequencer to the kit would triple the cost to the end user and make the process needlessly complex, so we were looking at workarounds: a simpler filter that would detect only the relevant bases, or a two-part qualification process that would include a blood sample submitted to a registered lab. Amanda’s team leader said it might be possible to eliminate the DNA test altogether, since it mainly functioned as a kind of pre-screening, picking up a few gene sequences that were incompatible with any Affinity. Adding another layer of neurotesting might achieve the same effect.

All well and good, and we chewed it over for an hour or so, but this wasn’t the main event. That began when Damian stood up, clearing his throat and looking uncharacteristically awkward. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you, and I’m really pleased with the progress we’re making. But we all know this is happening in a larger context. The overarching goal is to cut loose the Affinities from InterAlia, to let each Affinity govern itself according to its own interests. Meir Klein foresaw that possibility and wanted to encourage it. But he foresaw a few other things, too, maybe not so nice. I brought along Dr. Navarro to explain this.”

Ruben Navarro was the oldest Tau on the team: he was seventy-one and had held a chair in analytical sociology at the University of Montreal for more than twenty years. Amanda and I had shared lunch with him a couple of times. Navarro was old enough that he had met Klein at academic conferences before Klein’s work was locked up by InterAlia; they had published in the same professional journals. He sat in a chair by the window, his halo of white hair framed by the rain-silvered glass, and he spoke without getting up.

“Physicists have said that what they would ultimately like to discover is ‘a theory of everything.’ For the science of neurosocial teleodynamics, the equivalent goal would be ‘a theory of everyone.’ We’re not quite there yet. Social teleodynamics is a technique for modeling human psychology and human social interactions with unprecedented accuracy. It’s not a crystal ball. But like any science, it does make certain predictions. We can extrapolate from current events. We can run models based on our assumptions and see where they take us. As I like to say, the result is less reliable than a weather forecast but more reliable than divination.”

It was a line that may have had them rolling in the aisles in Navarro’s classes at Montreal, but we just nodded and waited for him to go on. “What is original in Klein’s work,” he said, “is the subtlety and complexity of the modeling. In that respect, he was far in advance of anything I have seen in the peer-reviewed literature. The method by which he derives his models is radical and contentious, but for now we can go with Klein’s claim that it is reliable. So, for instance, we can ask ourselves what Klein’s model predicts for interactions between the various Affinities, if InterAlia ceases to exert comprehensive control. But we have to ask that question in light of a larger one, one posed by Klein himself: How is the general culture changing, and what is the role of the Affinities in that change?” Navarro paused, and a gust of wind rattled the window. “In simple terms, Klein was asking: Is our social structure viable? Is there a future worth looking forward to? Or are we simply fucked?”

Which got a suppressed laugh from Amanda. Navarro acknowledged her reaction with a wry smile.

“Without going into detail, I can say that his research suggests that we are not entirely fucked. But it’s a close thing. The problems confronting us are the obvious ones—climate change, resource competition, population stress, and all the human conflicts arising from those problems. What makes these questions especially difficult is that they cannot be dealt with comprehensively by individual action. We need to act collectively, on a global scale. But we have very limited means of doing that. We are a collaborative species, the most successful such species on the planet, but we collaborate as individuals, for mutual gain, under systems established to promote and protect such collaboration. Our global economic and social behavior is largely unconstrained. Which means that, under certain circumstances, it can run away with us. It can carry us all unwilling into the land of unforeseen consequences. Which is a very dark place indeed. May I have a glass of water, Damian?”

“Something stronger, if you like.”

“No, water is fine.”

Damian rustled up a glass of ice water while we fidgeted. Navarro accepted the glass, took a sip, licked his lips. “Now, all this is elementary social teleodynamics. But here again, Klein does something daring. Because he knows more about the Affinities than anyone else—and because he can model them with unprecedented accuracy—he has factored their influence into his predictions.”

Amanda said, “And that makes a difference?”

“Yes! Quite a startling difference! Klein’s research suggests that the Affinities could become major players in the evolution of a pan-global culture. By which I mean they will increasingly influence politics, policy, and economics. They could in fact come to serve in place of what is so conspicuously absent—a global human conscience.”

“The Affinities can do that?”

“Well, no. Not every Affinity. There was a reason Klein entrusted his data to Taus.”

“What,” Amanda said, “we’re so special?”

“Apparently,” Navarro said, “we are.”

We’re special. It was something we may have suspected but never said aloud. It sounded arrogant and narcissistic.

But did we feel it? Of course we did.

I had felt it when I first walked through the doors of Lisa and Loretta’s house in Toronto. I had felt it when I realized I was in a community of people who loved me, whom I could love freely and confidently in return, and who loved me despite my imperfections as I loved them despite theirs. I had recognized in that house the presence of what was so conspicuously absent in the house where I had grown up: the possibility of being both truly known and genuinely loved.

Which of course made us special. Special to ourselves; special because we were inside the charmed circle, and others were not. But Navarro was suggesting something different. He was suggesting that we might be special to the world at large … that something in the Tau community might help shepherd everyone into a better future.

“The bad news,” Navarro said, “is that the second half of this century could be a very unpleasant time and place for the human species. In the worst case, we could be facing the collapse of infrastructure, political chaos, widespread starvation, perhaps even the beginning of a massive human die-off. But Klein is not universally pessimistic. His models suggest that there is a way through that terribly narrow passage. It’s possible that we can create a better world—more just, equitable, and humane. In fact that may be the only alternative to destruction. And as Taus we are in a unique position to help.” Navarro paused and looked at Damian. “But only if the Tau Affinity is willing to assume that responsibility.”

Damian stood up as Navarro sank back into his chair. “Okay, I think that gets the gist across.” He surveyed the handful of us. I was aware of the rain clamoring at the window, as if God had decided to wash us all into the sea. I was aware that what we said in this shell of warm light on the edge of the cold Pacific might have consequences far beyond our own lives, if Klein’s mathematics were reliable; that a word spoken or unspoken could cascade into history. “Obviously,” Damian said, “this isn’t something we can keep secret, either from the rest of the Tau Affinity or from the world at large. But we do have choices. That’s why I wanted to have this discussion here, away from the city and away from hostile influences. So we’re going to talk about this, and fair warning, we might still be talking about it when the sun comes up tomorrow morning.”

“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.”

“Ah. The parable of the storm.”

“I’m sorry, was it too obvious?”

“Maybe just obvious enough. You are wise, oh ancient of days. Maybe Amanda’s the one who should be jealous.”

Lisa performed a credible blush. “I love you too, dear. Especially now that you’ve stopped pouting. You’ve finished your tiramisu, so I propose a bottle of wine and chairs in the arboretum. We can watch the lightning together. How does that sound?”

It sounded fine.

That had been four years ago. Since then, Damian and Amanda and I had arrived at a modus vivendi. Amanda would not tolerate us competing for her attention, so we didn’t. And as for my feelings about Damian …

“Lord,” he said, hands on the railing of the cedar deck, staring into the moonlit corridors of the forest, “take this cup from my lips. I’m pretty sure Lisa and Laura would make a better decision than any of us.”

He was a Tau and I loved him as a Tau. But he was as imperfect as the rest of us. Left to his own devices, he would never wear anything but sweat pants and t-shirts. He believed he was a good cook; he was mistaken. He had a laugh that sounded as if someone had stepped on the tail of a small dog. He couldn’t assemble Ikea furniture or operate simple appliances without a friendly intervention. Amanda had once said she loved Damian for his confidence, even when it was misplaced, and she loved me for my doubts, even when they were foolish. In a sense, we were the two sides of Amanda’s own personality. Damian worked on behalf of Tau in a way that echoed the work ethic Amanda had inherited from her family: do what needs doing, and do it selflessly, efficiently, and promptly. I was the other side of that equation, impractical and occasionally impulsive, sometimes usefully creative. Amanda’s personal philosophy veered between Aristotle and Epicurus. No wonder she needed two men in her life.

It was also true that these thoughts were easier to entertain now that she was sleeping in my bed again.

Mist from the drenched forest had begun to condense into a ground fog. The high moon dimmed. I was about to stand up when Damian said, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“In the woods. About your nine o’clock.”

I tried to look where he was looking. The trees were still dripping. In the silence I could hear the creak and sway of their branches. I might have glimpsed a moving light in the deep of the woods. But it was gone before I could say a word. “Maybe it’s one of the security guys.”

Damian stepped away from the railing. “We need to ask Gordo,” he said. “And we need to go inside. Right now.”

Chapter 10

I went into our bedroom to wake Amanda.

She was asleep on her back, head turned to one side. She wore her hair longer than she used to, but it was still short, a dark halo against the cotton pillowcase. She sighed when I sat on the bed. I called her name.

She opened her eyes and frowned at me. “Adam? What is it?”

“Sorry, but Gordo wants us all in the main room where he can keep an eye on us. Might be some motion outside the house.”

“Oh.” She sat up and fished her blouse off the floor where she had dropped it. “Something moving around, you mean? Like a deer? A bear?”

“Someone carrying a flashlight.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah. Hand me my jeans.”

In my experience the only thing better than watching Amanda put on her jeans was watching her take them off, but Gordo distracted us by knocking at the door. “Turn off the lights when you come out, okay? I don’t want the whole place lit up like Times Square.”

She finished buttoning up. “I thought we were here to get away from scary strangers.”

“Probably it’s nothing,” I said. “False alarm.”

We found everyone gathered in the main room, looking sleepy and irritable. Gordo had drawn the drapes, and he waited as Amanda and I settled onto the sofa. He had a phone in his hand and a pistol in what looked like a military holster at his hip. Usually it would have been Damian who dominated the gathering, but tonight Damian was just one more endangered Tau. He sat quietly with the rest of us.

Gordo said, “I’ve got three people on the perimeter and they’re watching all the access points. Anybody approaches the house, they’ll see him. That doesn’t mean we’re altogether safe. I’ve got Marcy Britnell on the west side, she says there was what looked like a flashlight in the woods and she’s found fresh footprints tracking past the property on an oblique angle, like somebody was scouting us out. Maybe one set of footprints, maybe more, hard to tell at night on muddy ground. So we’re being careful. I can’t see why anyone would be out there at two in the morning after a rainstorm for innocent purposes, but we can’t rule out a lost hiker or a drunk trying to find his way home. It may seem isolated here but there are plenty of people living closer to the docks, so let’s not draw too many conclusions, okay?”

Good advice—we all nodded sagely—but easier said than done.

Amanda was still sleepy and she snuggled against me. I saw Damian’s eyes linger on us a moment. He didn’t seem jealous but he did look a little frustrated. Or maybe it was just the weight of the responsibilities he had recently shouldered.

It occurred to me to wonder what I might have been doing if Damian hadn’t more or less adopted me a few years ago. Six months after I joined the Rosedale tranche I had been working in Walter Kohler’s ad agency, putting together text and images on an Apple platform and proofreading copy on the side. The job was well paid but was only mildly interesting, and Damian told me I was wasting my time there. “Come work for me. I talked to Walter, and he’s agreeable, if that’s what you want.”

“Work for you doing what?” Back then, Damian’s main business had been his law practice. “I don’t have any legal training.”

He told me he was setting up a Tau-specific pension fund (which would eventually become TauBourse) and devoting some of the profits to pro-bono work on behalf of the Affinities, including petitioning InterAlia for greater transparency in their management of Affinity groups. He had already enlisted all the legal talent he needed, but what he wanted was a cadre of people who understood Tau and who were flexible enough to act in various capacities as needed, from driving cars to conducting research to writing briefs. Gophers, in effect, but we would be described as “consultants.” The drawback was that none of this would exercise my artistic talent.

And I surprised myself by being okay with that. Photoshopping images of puppies for pet food ads was what I had been doing with my artistic talent lately, and the muses weren’t impressed. I liked Damian’s passionate attitude toward the Tau Affinity and I was excited by the idea of playing a role in its evolution. Plus—no small thing—Amanda had already agreed to join his team. The work appealed to her serious side, what Lisa had once described as her desire “to do good ferociously.”

Since then I had driven cars for Tau, written press releases for Tau, arranged catering for Tau, rented hotel rooms for Tau, negotiated property purchases for Tau, even mopped floors (on one memorable occasion) for Tau. Damian was my boss, but we tended not to use that word. He initiated and organized the work, but we performed it collaboratively. Even the menial work contributed something to Tau, which made it bearable, and most days I was working alongside Amanda, which was more than merely bearable. In just a few years that work and those relationships had fused into what I thought of as the heartbeat and the music of my life.

Some days it made me feel invulnerable. I was Adam Fisk of the Tau Affinity, with a host of loyal brothers and sisters—almost seven million of us, according to the most recent census. Take me on and you take on my tribe. But I wasn’t invulnerable, and neither was Tau, and this weekend retreat had made that obvious.

We needed to stay together where Gordo could keep an eye on us, but that didn’t mean we had to stay awake all night. Professor Navarro had the bright idea of moving sheets and blankets into the living room for makeshift beds, which we did, and he promptly curled up on one of them. Navarro wasn’t one of those elderly people who have trouble sleeping: he snored like a drunken longshoreman.

Amanda stretched out on the sofa, and I was about to move to a blanket on the floor when my phone buzzed. Rachel Ragland’s number. A call at this hour probably meant she was drunk, either belligerent and accusatory or wanting to make tearful amends. I considered ignoring the call. The ugly word “tether” echoed in my head. I took the phone to a vacant corner of the room. “Rachel? What is it?”

But it wasn’t Rachel on the other end. It was her daughter.

“Is that Adam?”

“Suze?” I asked.

“Adam from the beach?”

“Yep, it’s me. What are you doing awake at this hour?”

“I still have the picture you drew of me. I colored it.”

“That’s great. Suze, is your mommy around?”

“Yes but not awake.”

“Maybe you should be asleep, too. Does she know you’re using her phone?”

“No,” she said, and for a moment I mistook the tension in her voice for guilt.

“Well, it’s not a good idea to use your mom’s things without her permission.”

“I’m sorry.” Suddenly she sounded near tears.

“Suze … is something wrong?”

“I wanted to ask her, but she won’t wake up!”

“I don’t understand. Are you at home?”

“Yes!”

“Your mom’s in her bedroom?”

“No! She’s on the couch! I’m looking at her right now!”

“What happens if you try to wake her up?”

“Nothing!”

Amanda overheard some of my end of the conversation—she sat up and gave me a concerned look. No one else was paying attention. Gordo sat by the window, his own phone in his hand, talking to one of his security people. Navarro’s snoring had settled into a growling rhythm, like someone trying to start a chainsaw.

“Go to her now,” I told Suze. “See if she wakes up.”

“Okay…”

“Are you with her?”

“Yes.”

“Can she see you?”

“Her eyes are closed.”

“What if you touch her?”

A pause. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to get the blood on me.”

I closed my eyes and said, “Suze, tell me about the blood. Is Mommy hurt?”

“She cuts herself sometimes. Maybe she cut herself too much.”

“Try to wake her up. Say, ‘Mommy, wake up!’ Real loud. Can you do that for me?”

She didn’t just call it out, she screamed it. When she stopped, I said, “What happened?”

“Nothing! Maybe her eyes came open a little bit but they closed up again.”

“Okay,” I said, though okay was far from what I felt. “Okay, Suze, you need to call 911. Do you know how to do that?”

“Yeah but…”

“But what?”

“Mommy said never call 911 if she’s passed out. Because people might come and take me away from her. She said just wait for her to wake up. But there’s more blood this time. Your number was in the phone so I called it instead.”

“That’s good, Suze, that’s smart, but you’re right, this time’s different. Your mommy would want you to call 911. The 911 people know how to help, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

“I’m afraid.” It sounded as if the tears were about to brim over.

“Sure you are, but that’s part of being brave. Even the bravest people get scared. That’s when they ask for help, right?”

“I guess.”

“So I’ll hang up, and then you call 911. Right away, okay? Don’t wait. They’ll stay on the phone with you until everything’s fixed up. After that I’ll call back and check on you. Okay?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t guess, Suze. Just do it.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll hang up now, but I need you to promise to make that call. Do you promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Say it for me.”

“I promise.”

“Good girl.”

I ended the call and looked at the phone in my hand. The phone was shaking. Because my hand was shaking.

Amanda came over and touched my shoulder, and I told her what Suze had said.

She frowned and nodded. “God, that’s awful. It sounds like Rachel’s a cutter.”

“A what?”

“Self-injury. It’s a personality disorder. People cut themselves, burn themselves, things like that. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do real damage. So it probably wasn’t a suicide attempt. You said she had psychiatric drugs in her bathroom?”

Her stash of pharmaceuticals, the kind prescribed for ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, even a couple of antipsychotics. Most of them had been prescribed to Rachel, though I had seen a different name on a couple of the labels—Carlos something-or-other, her barroom buddy.

Amanda’s Tau telepathy was acute enough for her to guess what was going through my mind. “You didn’t take advantage of her, Adam. You didn’t know she was crazy until—”

“Until after I took advantage of her.”

“No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Rash, maybe, but not wrong. That’s the thing about outsiders. They’re unpredictable. Not always bad, but dangerous in all kinds of ways, to themselves and others.”

I opened my phone again and tried Rachel’s number. I was gratified that the line was busy. I hoped it meant Suze was doing what I had told her to do.

Amanda said, “Rachel’s damaged in ways you couldn’t have known about. I just don’t want you to be collateral damage.”

“I’m thinking about Suze. Does she count as collateral damage?” I looked at the others in the room, my tribe, all of us leaning on each other in one way or another. Suze didn’t have a tribe. She barely had a mother.

Amanda took a step back and said, “What I mean is—”

I could guess what she was about to say. My welfare was more important to her than Rachel’s. She didn’t want me to get hurt. Outside Tau, people were unpredictable and relationships could go wrong in countless ways. Misunderstandings were inevitable. And so on.

But she didn’t finish the sentence.

At the time—when the window glass shattered, when the drapes billowed as if an invisible finger had tugged them, when Amanda looked startled and then fell down—we didn’t understand what was happening. Later, we reconstructed it this way:

Gordo MacDonald had put his security detail on alert. Marcy Britnell, a Tau from Cleveland and formerly a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was working the tree line at the western edge of the property, armed with a pistol and equipped with a pair of IR goggles, when she spotted a figure in the forest. The figure appeared to be carrying a long gun, and Marcy quietly called the news in to Gordo while keeping the stranger in view.

Gordo didn’t want Marcy tackling the intruder by herself, so he told her to hold her position while he sent out a couple more of his people. And that’s what Marcy did, until she saw the figure raise his weapon and aim it toward the house. At which point she leveled her pistol and shouted to the gunman to lower his weapon and stand down.

The gunman didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he began to swing it toward the sound of Marcy’s voice. Marcy wasn’t sure how visible she was in the moonlight, but she was taking no chances. She squeezed off a shot.

The gunman twisted to the left, obviously hurt, and reflexively fired a round of his own.

The rifle he carried was a Remington 783, and the bullet he fired went nowhere near Marcy Britnell. Instead it flew toward the house, clipped a pine bough, penetrated the glass of the sliding doors that adjoined the deck, pierced the coarse fabric of the curtains, passed within inches of the phone Gordo was holding to his ear, and struck Amanda just under her left shoulder and inches from the curve of her spine.

I looked away from her at the sound of the bullet cracking the window. I saw the curtain billow and settle back as if a wind had lifted it, and I saw Gordo pause in mid-conversation, mouth open but motionless as he tried to sort out what was happening. When I turned back to Amanda she looked perplexed. Then she fell toward me, eyes open, and I caught her.

In those days we liked to talk about “Tau telepathy.” It wasn’t really telepathy, of course, but we understood each other so deeply, so intuitively, that it often felt that way. What we discovered that night on Pender Island was something even deeper than Tau telepathy. Call it Tau rage.

Amanda tumbled into my arms, struggling to say something that emerged as a choked whisper, and time began to stagger forward in a series of static moments, snapshots taken in a glaring light. Probably everyone else in the room could say the same thing. But we worked in concert despite our confusion. I went to my knees, Amanda’s weight carrying me down. I helped her to lie on her right side. I could see the wound now, a flower of blood on the back of the wrinkled white blouse she was wearing. The wound was bleeding freely but not gushing. Her eyelids fluttered and the pupils of her eyes rolled upward.

I said, “Amanda?”

Hands pulled me away from her, and Gordo MacDonald knelt down in my place. “I’m qualified in emergency first aid,” he said, “and Marcy’s on her way in—Marcy did time in Afghanistan as a field nurse. Let us look after her.”

Before I could answer he had taken a knife from his belt and cut away her blouse. Amanda gasped, a sound like water bubbling over rocks.

The exterior door flew open almost immediately. It was Marcy, breathless, with a plastic case the size of an overnight bag in her hand. A med kit, which she had stashed in the trunk of one of the cars that had come over on the ferry. She looked frazzled and breathless, but she moved straight to where Gordo was tending Amanda. She inspected the wound, checked Amanda’s pulse, called her name and got a weak response. “Hang in there,” Marcy said. She turned to Gordo and added in a low voice, “We need professional help.”

“The shooter?” Gordo asked.

“Nelson’s bringing him in.”

Damian was on the phone to a Tau contact back in Vancouver. He put down the handset and began a brief, intense conversation with Gordo. I couldn’t hear what they said. All my attention was still focused on Amanda.

She was alert enough to murmur something about the pain. Marcy took a syringe from her kit and with practiced efficiency gave her a shot of morphine. Almost immediately, Amanda’s eyes drifted to half-mast. “She’ll be okay, Adam,” Marcy told me over her shoulder. “I mean that.”

“She needs a hospital.”

“Setting it up right now,” Damian said from across the room.

There were a couple of local physicians on Pender and a small regional hospital not far away on Salt Spring Island, but we needed a better and faster option. Late as it was, it took Damian only three calls to find a Tau who ran a helicopter-commute service out of Tsawwassen. A Sikorsky S76 was in the air twenty minutes later, by which time Damian had located a Tau physician near Ladner with access to a fully equipped clinic. The doctor agreed to assess and treat Amanda without reporting a gunshot wound, as long as she didn’t require complex surgery—which Marcy had said she would not.

As that was being arranged one of Gordo’s security guys, the one called Nelson, came up the stairs to the rain-sodden deck with the wounded shooter clinging to him. Damian stopped him at the door: “Not in here—we can’t have his blood all over everything.” The shooter slid down to the hardwood planks.

When we talked about it later, that was what we called him: the shooter. Because we had heard the word on TV and in the movies. But that wasn’t how I thought of him at the time. Not when Amanda was still losing blood. I thought of him instead as the son of a bitch who had tried to destroy everything that made my life worth living.

Marcy and Gordo headed for the deck, and I followed them. The shooter was a skinny dude with one of those long faces you sometimes see on very tall people, as if his features had been stretched vertically. His hair was wet and dangled over his forehead in two black wings. His eyes were anxious but unfocused. Marcy’s bullet had taken him mid-body, below the ribs and to the left. Blood had clotted on his cotton shirt and discolored his jeans from the waist to the left knee. Marcy looked at him and said in a small voice, “Oh, Christ. Gordo—”

“I know,” Gordo said.

The man was dying, and there was nothing Marcy or anyone else could do to save him. That was what I surmised from their silences.

It made me glad.

Hatred is a purifying emotion. Before that night I would have said I hated a few people. But dislike and disdain aren’t hatred. They’re pallid, hollow emotions. Real hatred is a bulldozer. It wants to demolish and destroy. It brooks no opposition.

I looked down at this piece of shit in the form of a human being, and he looked back at me through a haze of pain. Furious or frightened tears leaked from his eyes. I knelt down and put my face close to his face. His pig eyes narrowed. His breath stank of cloves and halitosis, mingled with the coppery smell of all the blood he was spilling. I ordered him to tell me his name.

Gordo, behind me, tried to get my attention. “Adam—”

The shooter wasn’t saying anything, though I had his complete attention. So I put my hands on his throat. I felt the stubble where he had shaved that morning. I felt his Adam’s apple frantically bobbing against my fingers. His lips struggled to form words. I let him take a breath.

“Fuck you,” he whispered.

Gordo pulled me away before I could do any damage. “Adam, we know who he is. We’ve got his wallet. His driver’s license. His credit card. His phone.” He looked at the dying man and I realized that the same hatred I felt was running through Gordo, Damian, Marcy, everyone else in the house. It was one big river. Maybe what they felt was a little less white-hot than what I felt, but it was real, visceral hatred.

“This time tomorrow,” Gordo said, “we’ll know everything about him. Where he lives, who his friends are, who he’s working for. We already know he’s an amateur. Carrying his personal shit on him like that.”

The shooter moved his mouth again, seemed to be trying to say something that wouldn’t come out.

Marcy fetched her medical kit. After a brief, hushed conference with Gordo and Damian, she produced a syringe and filled it from a small brown bottle.

“Hold him steady,” she said. “I don’t want him knocking this out of my hand.”

Gordo leaned across the shooter, pinning his legs and his left arm. I tugged his right arm straight out as Gordo used a pocket knife to slice his shirt sleeve from cuff to shoulder. When Marcy jabbed the needle into the shooter’s bicep, he arched his back in a feeble spasm of resistance. I asked Marcy what she was giving him.

“Painkiller,” she said curtly.

“What, to make him feel better?”

“Enough for that,” she said. “Enough for that and more.”

The shooter thrashed and struggled when he heard her. But not for long.

Chapter 11

Maybe understandably—or maybe not—a couple of days passed before it occurred to me to call Rachel Ragland.

She didn’t answer her phone, and I left an apologetic message and asked her to get in touch. Another day passed. Nothing. I drove to Rachel’s building, parked, and buzzed her apartment from the lobby. Silence. So I called the local hospitals and found her at Vancouver General. She was in “for observation,” and unless I was family, visiting hours were two to six, at Rachel’s discretion.

By my watch that left a window of three hours, and the hospital was only twenty minutes away. It hadn’t rained since the weekend. The weather had slipped into an autumn lull, all soft blue skies and crisp breezes, and it was an easy drive. But I felt as if some transparent part of me had become opaque: I looked at the world through a lens of clouded glass.

It turned out that Rachel was in a ward in the hospital’s psychiatric wing. A locked ward, though that wasn’t as bad as it sounded; all it meant was that patients and visitors needed authorization to pass through the glass-and-mesh doors next to the nurses’ station. I waited twenty minutes for someone to find Rachel, give her my name, and find out if she was willing to see me. At last a nurse (a young guy in powder-blue scrubs) waved me in. I followed him to Rachel’s bed.

She was dressed in slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. There were slippers on her feet, and she was sitting up, an ancient paperback novel in her hand. She gave me a long, searching look. She was clean and reasonably alert but I could tell by a certain slackness around her eyes that she was back on her meds. Before I could speak she said, “They think I’m suicidal. That’s why I’m stuck here. But I was only cutting.” She held out her left arm to show me her bandages, a swatch of cotton and tape that ran from wrist to elbow. “You know about that? People who cut themselves sometimes?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

“Well, I’m one of them.”

“I’m surprised. I never saw—”

“What—scars? This was the first time I did my arm. I used to just cut my legs. Up high, so I could wear shorts and not show anything. But not a bathing suit. Which was okay because I don’t swim. And I was pretty healed up when you saw me without my clothes on. I’d been good. On the mend. But you could have found scars if you’d looked for them.” She put a bookmark in her paperback novel and set it aside. “So why are you here?”

“Suze called me,” I said. “That night.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard all about it. You told her to phone 911.”

“Yeah.”

“Even though she wasn’t supposed to do that.”

“She said so, but—”

“Because I trained her that way. You know why? Fucking social workers, that’s why! There were a couple of incidents back before I got my prescriptions and now I’m on their watch list or whatever. I’m on, like, bad mother probation.”

An orderly passing by with a box of gauze in his hand slowed and cocked his head. Rachel moderated her voice until he was out of sight. “They’re like the NSA in here, always watching. This is where they put people who can’t be trusted.”

“You were unconscious when Suze called. She couldn’t wake you up.”

“I’d been cutting, yeah, and maybe a little too deep, and I was ashamed of myself, so I took a double dose of meds and washed ’em down with orange juice and vodka. Because I really, really wanted to sleep. And hey, it worked. Out like a light, right there on the sofa. Still bleeding a little. I leaked before I clotted. So I guess Suze got scared, which I’m really really sorry about. A miscalculation on my part. But would you take away my kid for that?”

“No…”

“No, but you did. That’s exactly what you did when you told Suze to call 911. Now they’re putting her in temporary foster care. Pending an assessment. They won’t even let me talk to her. They say we can schedule a visit, but not until the doctors decide I’m up to it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears that were perhaps equal parts loss and anger. “They took away my baby!”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I would absolutely fucking love it if this were totally your fault. That would make me feel a little better. But, taking Suze’s call? Being worried about me? I can’t really blame you for that.”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

“What I do blame you for is—” She hesitated and bit her lip as if debating how to proceed.

“Go ahead. Say it.”

“I don’t know exactly how to say it, but … I’m here, and Suze is in foster care, and I can’t help thinking, none of this would have happened if I was a Tau. If I was a Tau, you wouldn`t have called 911, would you? You would have called some other Tau. Or a bunch of other Taus. Some nice little Tau couple would be looking after Suze, and after I got attention from a Tau clinic, and with a whole tranche to make sure I kept on my meds, I’d have her back right away quick. What do you think, Adam? Is that about right?”

I didn’t have to answer. It was absolutely true.

I stayed a few minutes more. A nurse came by with three pills and a paper cup, and Rachel dutifully swallowed the pills and chased them with a gulp of water. She opened her mouth to show the nurse she’d swallowed the meds. I think Rachel wanted me to see this small humiliation. The fate to which I had delivered her.

As I turned to leave she said, “Are you okay? No offense, Adam, but you look like shit.”

“I haven’t slept much.”

“Yeah, well.” Her gaze went a little quavery. “Welcome to the club. Oh, I remembered something. Something I meant to tell you. About the guys who came to visit me? The ones you drew a picture of at the beach?”

It seemed like a long time ago. “What about them?”

“The guy who did most of the talking—you asked about his face, and that’s what I was trying to remember. But he had another, uh, distinguishing feature. Not his face. His hand. There was a mark on it.”

“A mark?”

“A tattoo. A little one. Actually not his hand but just above the wrist? I saw it when his shirt cuff rode up.”

“What did it look like?”

The medication was beginning to kick in. She smiled dreamily. “A window.”

“I’m sorry—a window?”

“A box. A rectangle. A tall box. With a line across it. Like an old-fashioned window, the kind where you lift the lower pane. Know what I mean? Like a letter H, but with three cross lines, top bottom and middle. Does that mean anything?”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

We rolled up our Vancouver operation in November of that year. Which was good, because by then I was desperately homesick. I missed Lisa and Loretta. I missed their big, warm house in Toronto. I wanted to be there when they put up the Christmas tree—usually a huge spruce, decked out with Victorian ball ornaments and spun-glass angels and silver menorahs and any other ecumenical or secular decoration any tranche member felt like attaching to it. I wanted to be home for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Dognzhi, Pancha Ganapati, Shabe Yaldā, Saturnalia, and what-have-you. That was what I wanted.

Damian needed to be back in Toronto for another reason. Toronto was where his law offices were, and the war between Tau and InterAlia was being fought with writs and court appointments. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: InterAlia was in a severely weakened condition, which gave us some leverage. The company’s stock had declined to record lows and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy.

Damian and I went out for an early dinner on our last day in the city. A couple of blocks down Robson there was a restaurant that served good and reasonably affordable schnitzel. The staff had come to recognize us as regulars, and I assumed they also recognized the two Tau security guys who habitually followed us in and kept watch over us from a table of their own. The evening crowd hadn’t arrived yet, and we had enough space and privacy to speak freely.

For years Damian and his law firm had been conducting pitched battles with InterAlia over the autonomy of Tau. The corporation was jealous of its intellectual property, and the last thing they wanted was any kind of legal judgment that might recognize the Affinities as quasi-ethnicities, even invented ones. But what had lately crippled InterAlia were the legal challenges from unaffiliated sources: class action suits, discrimination cases. Most of the Affinities—Tau on the vanguard—had created institutions that served their members exclusively. We had established, for example, a network of Tau rehab clinics, staffed by Taus and catering to Taus with substance-abuse problems. The success rate of our clinics was spectacular, with a recidivism rate half that of standard treatment. But we routinely turned away non-Taus. Did that mean our clinics (or our financial services, another area Damian had pioneered) were discriminatory? InterAlia didn’t officially sanction these Affinity-specific businesses, which meant Tau had been forced to fend off similar legal attacks; in all of these cases our lawyers had attempted to subpoena InterAlia’s sorting protocols; and in every case InterAlia had resisted, which meant costly out-of-court settlements or lengthy legal challenges, several of which were currently wending their way toward Supreme Court decisions.

But that was old news. As of yesterday, Damian told me, InterAlia had folded its cards and pushed away from the table. “Partly because they found out Klein had arranged for their proprietary algorithms to be posted all over the Internet. Between that and the ongoing litigation, the writing was already on the wall.”

“I guess I understand. But then, why go to the trouble of murdering Klein?”

“Simple. They didn’t.”

I blinked. That had been our theory from the day we first heard about Klein’s death: InterAlia was behind it. Who else could it be?

Damian sat a moment, watching customers come and go through the revolving glass door. Our waiter poured fresh rounds of coffee but knew better than to hover. “Remember what Rachel Ragland told you about the tattoo on that guy’s hand?”

The Phoenician letter Het. The guy who interrogated her had belonged to the Het Affinity. Which was disturbing in itself. There was nothing about the Affinities that precluded criminal behavior. All the Affinities were, in effect, low-crime districts, but that was because our collaborative potential made crime less inviting. Within the Affinities jealousy was blunted, greed was marginalized, and basic human needs were usually met. Statistically, Tau was the most law-abiding of all the Affinities, if only by a hair. We liked to think of ourselves as good people, and that was statistically true. But we were free moral agents like everybody else, perfectly capable of committing crimes under the right circumstances. So were the Hets.

“I saw the same kind of tattoo the night Amanda was shot,” Damian said. “On the guy who fired the rifle.”

“What do you mean—it was the same guy?” In which case my career as a forensic sketch artist was over before it had begun. The Pender Island shooter had looked nothing like either of my drawings.

Damian shook his head. “Not the same guy, a similar tattoo. The shooter had it on the back of his neck, just under the collar of his shirt. So we’ve had our experts take a deeper look at Klein’s models of Affinity interactions and how that might play out when the Affinities are autonomous and self-governing. The results are surprising. Some of the smaller Affinities, like Mem and Rosh, eventually wither up and vanish. Some get bigger. Some get big enough and rich enough to exert real political and economic influence.”

“Which is why Klein gave us the information, right? He saw Tau as a potentially powerful influence. A good one.”

“Others might be powerful but maybe not so good. And that raises a huge red flag, especially concerning Het.”

“Does it? I mean, why would the Hets want to kill Klein in the first place? Why would they be stalking our people?”

“It’s not clear that the guy on Pender actually intended to shoot anyone. He was probably there for reconnaissance, carrying the weapon in case he needed to defend himself. He had his wallet in his pocket, and Gordo says that marks him as an amateur. We have his name, we know where he lived, we’ve identified his tranche. We should have better answers soon. But our best guess is that the Hets also acquired Klein’s data, and they read the same auspices in it as we did. Potential conflict, Het versus Tau. It’s possible the Hets wanted to get in the first blow by keeping Klein’s data out of our hands, and when that didn’t work, by interfering with our analysis of it.”

I thought again about the man who shot Amanda. He hadn’t been aiming at her, but he must have been willing to kill any or all of us—that was why he had come armed. Gordo had disposed of the rifle and taken charge of the shooter’s effects. But I hadn’t talked directly to Gordo since the night I had ridden with Amanda on the helicopter to the mainland. I knew the shooter was dead because I had seen Marcy deliver the lethal injection. Damian had been reluctant to say anything more about the incident until our investigation was complete, and for weeks he had discouraged questions. But since the subject had come up, I asked him what happened to the remaining evidence from that night—the shooter’s car, if he had one. The body.

“The shooter left his car parked at Tsawwassen ferry docks, but it’ll be found—if it’s ever found—on a logging road down by the US border.”

“Gordo’s people moved it?”

“Gordo and his people were extremely helpful, everything from finding spent cartridges to sluicing down the back deck. That’s something we’re going to need, by the way—a permanent Tau security force. Taus who have the appropriate skills and can be called on when we need them. Once we stop paying dues to InterAlia we’ll have to allocate revenue to set that up.”

“And the body?”

“Our helicopter pilot came back to pick up the body.”

“And?”

“And…” Damian looked at me, then looked away. “There’s a lot of water in Georgia Strait. It’s easy to lose things in it.”

We booked a flight to Toronto as soon as Amanda’s doctor cleared her to travel.

The plane arrived at Pearson International, and we caught a cab at the beginning of an early snowfall. Bright, small flakes of snow, the kind that dart up at the merest breeze and snake in narrow lines across the roads. “Just a taste of winter,” the cabbie told us. “Just a little taste.”

Damian smiled thinly but didn’t answer. Amanda wasn’t talking much, either. Her left arm was in a sling, to protect the healing musculature of her shoulder. She was somber, as she had been ever since she had woken up in an outpatient clinic in the suburbs of Vancouver. Chastened by what had happened to her, as anyone would be. But not frightened, not traumatized: I felt that, and I loved and admired her for it. No fear, but a new and tangible anger. It was as if, along with the bullet, something sharp and coldly luminous had lodged inside her.

Lisa was waiting on the porch when we arrived at the tranche house. Damian paid the cabbie, then we mounted the wooden risers to the porch and took turns hugging her (though Amanda had to do it cautiously, favoring her injury). Lisa was two years shy of her eightieth birthday, and hugging her was like wrapping my arms around a porcelain figurine. Her white hair smelled of this morning’s shampoo and this afternoon’s loaf of cinnamon bread. “Welcome home,” she said. “Come in, all of you. Loretta’s not too mobile today but she’s waiting in the front room. And I expect you’re cold. Not to mention hungry and thirsty.”

This was home, I thought. This was worth fighting for. Worth dying for, if it came to that.

By the first of December our tech guys had assembled a functioning prototype of a portable Affinity tester, and we put it to work on the tranche as a test of its effectiveness.

The social-theory guys were still trying to work out the long-term implications of the availability of such a device. At the tranche Christmas party Amanda and I tried to explain all this to Trevor Holst, who had flown home after the annual convention and had been out of the loop during the Vancouver crisis. There had been things we couldn’t say to him over the phone, which was awkward because he was close to Amanda, too. But we could talk freely now.

Trev’s hair had a hint of gray that hadn’t been there when I first met him seven years ago, but he was as physically imposing as he had ever been. He had been living alone for six months, since his last lover moved to Phoenix and married a roofing contractor he’d met at a Tau mixer. No hard feelings, “but it’s not easy to get used to. The bed still feels empty when I’m the only one in it.”

He wasn’t asking for sympathy, just catching us up on his situation. His eyes had gone wide as dinner plates when he first saw Amanda’s sling. “It doesn’t hurt,” she reassured him. “At least not anymore.”

The shooter’s bullet had spent much of its momentum by the time it penetrated the windowpane and the drapes of the house on Pender Island. It had struck her high in the back, chipped her shoulder, cracked a rib, and done a fair amount of soft tissue damage. If the wound had been even slightly worse she would have required serious surgical intervention, in a hospital where awkward questions would have been asked. As it was, she would carry the mark for the rest of her life.

And maybe some less visible scars as well. Tonight should have been a happy occasion. Lisa had been in the kitchen all day, and the buffet was overflowing. Loretta’s arthritis had reduced her mobility but she hobbled gamely through the crowd, as quietly amiable as ever. The whole tranche had turned out, plus some old members who had moved out of our catchment area, plus a bunch of friendly Taus from nearby tranches. This was the span of my social universe, people I loved and who loved me, many of whom had passed briefly and pleasantly through my bed and might do so again if the stars were suitably aligned. It was a happy occasion. But Amanda had something serious on her mind, and Trevor and I both sensed it. So, after dinner, as the house filled with the murmur of gentle and happy talk, we headed upstairs.

Had it been summer we might have climbed out on the roof and watched the moon rise over the city. It was too cold for that now, so we went to the attic instead—not really an attic but a dormer room on the third floor, too small to fix up for a tenant and too hot in summer, where Lisa and Loretta had stored a few sticks of old furniture, and where a single-paned window overlooked the backyard and the ravine full of leafless oaks and maples. There were three ancient easy chairs in the room, lined up to face the window. The glass was opaque with frost, and we sat in the eerie luminescence of moonlight through ice as Amanda fetched a pipe from her bag and filled it with finely ground cannabis. When she passed me the pipe I tasted her lipstick on it. I looked at her and smiled, and she smiled, but there was a sadness behind her eyes, and I thought: Just say it. Whatever you need to say, say it.

The Tau Affinity had reached a tipping point, a point of accelerated change, a point beyond which nothing would ever be quite the same. The evidence was everywhere. The retesting we had done, for instance. Our tech guys had presented us with their prototype of a portable Affinity tester: a plastic box with a couple of data ports and with eight cranial sensors dangling from it like the arms of an octopus. It was clunkier than the product we would eventually manufacture, but in full working order. Everyone in our tranche had been retested, and Lisa had announced the results this morning: we were all Taus, tried and true.

“Except one of us,” Trevor confided, taking a long hit from the pipe.

Amanda and I stared at him. The moonlit dormer room was quiet enough that I could hear a train sound its whistle all the way from the Canadian Pacific tracks a mile north. “Who?” Amanda asked.

“A guy who was assigned to the tranche just a couple of weeks ago. He replaced Jody Carmody, who’s moving to Lunenburg, something to do with her job. Tonight would have been his first official meet-up. I ran the test on him myself. He seemed a little nervous at the time, but I didn’t give it much thought. But Lisa told me last night he came up as a ringer. Near enough to pass in the social sense, but definitely outside what they call Tau phase space.” The cluster of characteristics that defined Tauness.

“So how’d he get assigned to a tranche?”

“InterAlia tested him, right? So it’s possible they might have slipped in a ringer. Somebody who could report back to them about Tau politics.”

“You think that’s what this was?”

“I went to see the guy this morning, give him the bad news. He was already gone. His apartment had been cleared out overnight. So yeah, he knew. It wasn’t anybody’s innocent mistake. Somebody sent him to infiltrate us.”

“InterAlia?”

“Possibly. In which case it would have to have been set up before InterAlia went bankrupt. So of course the guy buggered off—he was already redundant.”

Amanda looked thoughtful, the icy light glinting in her eyes. “So if he wasn’t actually a Tau … did Lisa say whether he qualified as anything else?”

“He was pushing several categories. Almost a none-of-the-above result. But he would have qualified as a Het, if only just.”

I thought about all the half-true stereotypes, fodder for countless stand-up comics and video sitcoms. Wealthy, pot-smoking Taus. Indolent, cheerful Zens. Sex-crazed, bisexual Delts. And stern, efficient Hets, with their complex pecking orders and finely graded hierarchies. Their creased trousers and their businesslike expressions.

All of which was bullshit, but bullshit with a kernel of statistical truth. Most of the stereotypes had emerged from journalistic overstatement of the earliest sociological studies of the Affinities. As a Tau I was in fact a few percentage points more likely to be a regular cannabis user than someone from the general population, and our comparative business acumen was a matter of public record. And it was probably also true that Hets were quantifiably more likely to be overcontrolling, know-it-all dicks.

Which, in the world as we had known it, hardly mattered. All the Affinities shared the same goal: to bring together people selected for their mutual compatibility. Hets weren’t all hopeless assholes, or they wouldn’t have been able to leverage their own not-inconsiderable worldly success. (Tau and Het were the top-earning Affinities.) And Het wasn’t a problem for Tau, as long as the Affinities weren’t competing against one another. But that was in the old days, when InterAlia called the shots and made the rules. New rules now.

“It’s the Wild West,” Amanda said. “We need to be a lot more careful. Watch our backs.”

She had talked about this at length with Damian. The general scenario was pretty simple, she said. With the availability of cheap, portable testing, the population of the Affinities was about to explode. And not just in North America and Europe, but in places that had been legally closed to Affinity testing, like Russia and China. And without InterAlia to enforce the rules, non-aligned people were likely to sense their disadvantage and agitate for greater oversight. Whether the Affinities survived would depend on whether we could influence the inevitable legislation. “Because if we don’t,” she said, “we’ll be driven underground, like terrorist cells or something. And given the huge number of people involved? We could be looking at something like civil war.”

“Bullshit,” Trevor said. “Civil war?”

“Of one kind or another. I mean, look at what Tau does for us. TauBourse is like Social Security, and we have a Tau medical network that takes care of us whether we’re insured or not. Now Damian says we need a permanent security force and a fair way of making Affinity rules, so no tranche or sodality feels cheated or left out. That’s an army and a parliament, basically. Those are government functions. And governments tend to be jealous of their power.”

“Sure,” Trevor said, “but even if they pass laws against us, I can’t see Taus taking up arms.”

“Maybe not Tau. Other Affinities might, and that could make life difficult for all of us.”

She didn’t say which other Affinities she had in mind. But the Hets, or some faction among them, had already taken up arms. One Het soldier was dead, his body entrusted to the tidal currents of Georgia Strait, and we had discovered what may have been a Het spy in our midst. If there was a war coming, the first shots had already been fired.

But there was more than that on Amanda’s mind. She needed to tell us something, and it was something we didn’t want to hear, and both Trevor and I had figured that out. Her attention kept drifting to the ice-covered window, as if she saw something unsettling there.

“It’s all going to change,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been talking about with Damian.”

Back when he was young my stepbrother Geddy used to get what he called “the Sunday night feeling.” Neither of us had much liked school. Friday afternoon was great, the whole inchoate weekend in front of you, and Saturday was also fine, twenty-four hours of distilled freedom. Even Sunday morning was okay, as long as Mama Laura didn’t insist on church, and Sunday afternoon flowed as sweetly as an autumn creek. But by sunset you could feel the ominous weight of the week ahead. The homework you hadn’t finished, the book report you hadn’t written.

I had spent seven years in the Tau Affinity, and it had been the longest, happiest weekend of my life. But suddenly I had the Sunday night feeling.

“We’re like the Lost Boys,” she said. “You know? Peter Pan. But it’s time to grow up.”

Even worse.

“We have to take responsibility for ourselves. Lay down a foundation and build some walls. Damian’s already doing that. And he’s not the only one. He’s been conspicuously successful, but there’s somebody like Damian in almost every tranche. Dozens of them in the Canadian sodality and hundreds in the US, just waiting to be organized. Damian’s calling a meet-up in February, in California, to start discussions. He expects to devote the next few years to creating a Tau political structure.”

“Great,” Trevor said, not quite ironically. “What about us?”

“He still needs us,” Amanda said. “Maybe more than ever.” She turned to face Trevor. “We’re going to need people to organize and run a Tau police force. Damian wants you to be one of them.”

Trev didn’t say anything. He was startled, clearly. Flattered, but also freaked out by the idea. Amanda didn’t wait for an answer. She turned to me.

“You have different skills. Good memory, you can follow instructions, you can improvise if you have to, and you know how to interface with people who aren’t Tau.”

That seemed dubious. I thought of Rachel Ragland. My interface with Rachel had not been a raging success. “Which makes me what?”

“A diplomat,” Amanda said.

“You must be joking.”

“Actually I’m not. But you need to talk to Damian. He can explain it better than I can.”

I said, “And how about you? Does he have plans for you yet?”

She looked at the window again. “I’m going to California with him.”

Which was how I found myself, long after the end of the party, sitting at the kitchen table telling my troubles to Lisa.

The rest of the tranche had gone home. Those who lived in the house had retired to their rooms. Loretta was upstairs, asleep. But Lisa had always been a night owl. I think she liked the quiet of the hours before dawn, the house restored to order, the dishes washed. She looked tired but content. I told her about what Amanda had said, and about the choice Amanda had made, and Lisa nodded. “Things change,” she said. “I know, that’s terribly trite. A static existence is impossible, and who would want such a thing? But change comes at a price, doesn’t it? And we all pay in full, sooner or later.”

She was probably thinking of Loretta, whose health had been fragile lately. I had come to Lisa for sympathy, but that began to seem like a dickish move on my part. I said, “I’m sorry if I—”

“Oh, stop. Don’t apologize. There’s no reason we can’t commiserate together.” She sat back in her chair and gazed around the cooling kitchen. “Winter nights like these, I think of what’s changed over the years. Even in our tranche. I think about the people who’ve moved on.”

Plenty of us had, even in the seven short years since I had joined. People took new jobs, went to live in different cities, joined different Tau tranches. And they were always replaced by new faces, new friends. Tau was a river. I said, “That includes some of the people I met the first time I showed up here. Remember Renata Goldstein?”

“Of course. Yes. And her girl, the one with Down syndrome.”

“Tonya.”

“Yes, Tonya. She used to hide out in the basement and watch cartoons.”

“SpongeBob SquarePants. With the sound turned off.”

“That’s right. And you used to sit with her. Until Renata left the tranche, what, four years ago now? Five?”

“Moved out west, didn’t she?”

“Mmm … that’s what she told people. Actually she’s still in town. I ran into her on the subway last February.”

I was surprised. “Really?”

“She quit the tranche and never joined another one.”

“What—did she drift?”

“Drift” was a problem buried in the fine print of Affinity test. The human brain and the human mind were malleable. Affinity scores tended to be robust, but they could change over time; it was possible for someone who was only barely a Tau to drift out of the range of qualification altogether, and InterAlia had always mandated five-year retests. The phenomenon was thankfully rare—in my years with Tau I had heard of only one case of terminal drift in the city, a suburban car wash owner who failed to re-up and was forced to leave his tranche, tears all around—but it was a terrifying concept.

“Perhaps she drifted,” Lisa said. “More likely it was just family conflict. Tethers.” Lisa pronounced the word with audible scorn. “Usually it’s a spouse. In Renata’s case the tether was that girl. The girl was Renata’s tether.”

“Not her tether, Lisa. Her daughter.”

Lisa gave me hard look. “Yes, of course. The tether was her daughter.”

She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up slowly, wincing. “I’m going to bed. You should do the same, Adam. You’ll feel better when you’ve closed your eyes for a while.”

We didn’t know it yet, but it was the beginning of the hard years. The harrowing of the Affinities.