The Affinities (20 page)

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.”