The Affinities (28 page)

I asked without thinking, “And Geddy slept through it?”

“I guess so. We're in separate rooms, remember?”

Of course they were: Mama Laura's Protestantism wouldn't countenance an unmarried couple cohabiting under her roof. Rebecca headed for the kitchen, and I heard the refrigerator door open and close. She came back into the living room with a glass of milk in her hand. “I put the rest of the carton in the freezer, where it's still a little cold. But if this blackout goes on much longer you'll have to start throwing away perishables. Mind if I sit?”

I did mind, because as long as she was in the room my attention would be divided between her and the street. But I couldn't say that. I shrugged, and she sank into the big easy chair that used to be reserved for my father. “I guess you couldn't sleep either.”

“I'm a light sleeper at the best of times.”

“Uh-huh.” She sipped her milk.

Outside, a car drove past. It didn't stop. I watched until its taillights vanished around the nearest corner. “I apologize about the candles.”

“I'm not religious, and I'm not sentimental about yahrzeit candles. Though I still light one on Yom HaShoah, like everyone else in my family.”

“Big family?”

“It seems like it, when we get together for the holidays.”

“Have you introduced Geddy to them?”

She sipped her milk and wiped her lip with her wrist. “My Gentile boyfriend? Of course I have. They love him. There's no problem, except with a couple of Orthodox cousins whose opinions no one takes seriously. An awkward moment now and then, no big deal.”

“As awkward as all this?”

“Well, maybe not
quite.
But Geddy told me what to expect, especially concerning his dad. So no shocks there. And I know how it is with families.”

I nodded and looked back at the window.

“Conventional families, I mean,” she said. “Your friend Trevor is cute, by the way. I like the way you are with him. There's obviously some real love there.”

Her gaydar had surely blipped when Trevor came within range, and I wondered if she was making an unwarranted assumption about my relationship with him. But if so, so what. “Real love” was a fair call.

“Being in an Affinity must be like that. That's what I think. I mean all these wonderful, complex relationships just spilling out of the air practically—a million possibilities, a million flavors of potential happiness. You were an early adopter, right? It must have been great back then.”

“It's great now. Anyway, I thought you disapproved.”

“No, I totally get it! I mean I
do
disapprove, in a way, but I don't disapprove of what an Affinity gives you.”

“So what do you disapprove of?”

“The fact that it's
in an Affinity.
The fact that there's a wall around it. All due credit to Meir Klein—he knew utopia isn't one-size-fits-all. You could put a hundred people together and they could live better, fuller, freer, happier, more collaborative lives—but only the
right
hundred people, not a hundred random people off the street. So once you know what to measure and how to crunch the numbers,
voil
à
: the twenty-two Affinities. Twenty-two gardens, with twenty-two walls around them. No disputing it's nice inside, for anyone who can
get
inside. But think about what that means for all the people not included. Suddenly you've segregated them from the best cooperators. Which puts outsiders in a walled garden too, but it's not really a
garden
, 'cause all the competent gardeners buggered off and the trees don't bear much fruit. And a walled garden that
isn't
a garden looks like something different. It looks like a prison.”

“Colorful metaphor, but—”

“And that's not the only problem. You've created twenty-two groups—twenty-
three
, if you count those of us left out—with competing interests. The Affinities are all about cooperation
within
the group, not
between
groups. So, hey, look, a new world order, twenty-three brand new para-ethnicities and meta-nations, and what prevents them from going to war with each other? Nothing. Apparently.”

“We've done good in the world, Rebecca. TauBourse, for instance. It benefited a lot of people who weren't Taus, directly and indirectly. As for war, we had people in high places in India and even a few in Pakistan, trying to prevent all the trouble.”

“And how's that going?”

I shrugged and looked back at the window. A pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street, approaching. The vehicle behind them was big, but it was too dark to make out more than a boxy shape. It drove past without slowing or stopping. Then the street was empty again.

“I don't think you're down here because you can't sleep,” Rebecca said. “I think you're down here standing guard.”

“What makes you say that?”

“In addition to the way you can't keep your eyes off an empty street?”

“What would I be standing guard against?”

“Het, I'm guessing.”

“And why would you think that?”

“Because your sister-in-law talks to Geddy, and Geddy talks to me. I know what Jenny's situation is. I know how Aaron treated her, and I know what she means to do about it. I also know you're helping her—Tau is helping her—and I know why. You think her video will discredit Aaron and maybe force him to step down before the vote on Griggs-Haskell. Win-win, right? Except for Het.”

I looked at her with fresh respect and a degree of wariness. Maybe Geddy had trusted her enough to confide in her. But I wasn't Geddy, and I wasn't sure I trusted Geddy's judgment.

“Assuming any of this is true,” I said, “what's
your
interest?”

“Personally, you mean? Or from the point of view of New Socionome?”

“Either.”

“New Socionome isn't an Affinity. There's no
us
and
them
. No single point of view. No consensus. It has no interests to advance, except to facilitate non-zero-sum collaboration. So the only opinion I can offer is my own. I think the Affinities are doomed whether Griggs-Haskell passes or not. Because they have a toxic dynamic. The sooner they fail, the better. I think Jenny needs to get away from Aaron, and I think she's brave to want to out him as an abuser. Short-term, I approve of what you're doing to help her. Even though it's messy. I assume you've thought about what it's going to do to this family?”

At length. I told her so. “But I believe it's worth it.”

“For Jenny, you mean. And to do the right thing.”

“For Tau,” I said. “And to do the right thing.”

*   *   *

Rebecca asked me one more question before she carried a yahrzeit candle back upstairs with her: “Do you really think there might be Het people out there who want to hurt us?”

I wondered whether it was wise to answer her question. I didn't want to confirm her suspicions or reveal more than she already knew. “Look at it from Het's point of view,” I said. “They've kept a close eye on Aaron and they probably know at least a little about his troubled marriage. If they don't know about the video, they may at least suspect Jenny of being a loose cannon. They also know the most direct connection between Jenny and Tau is through me. So any occasion that brings me into contact with Jenny is going to interest them.”

“Interest isn't the same as a threat.”

“Suppose they figured out what Jenny intends to do. How do they respond? They can't take control of the video—it's already been copied to remote servers, and they would have to assume Tau already has access to it. The only real leverage they can exercise is over Jenny herself, by making the price of releasing the video too high to bear.”

“How would they do that?”

“The usual tools are threats and intimidation.”

“What kind of threats and intimidation?”

“No way to predict. Plus there's the communication shutdown. Hets are strongly hierarchical, which means the people they sent to Schuyler might be unwilling to act without authorization. Or maybe they have contingency orders—there's no way of knowing.”

“You have any evidence they actually have hostile intentions?”

Solid evidence: a bunch of Tau security guys in the local hospital. But that was news Rebecca didn't need to hear. “Better to assume the worst.”

“So your plan is to sit by the window and worry?”

“Until we can get Jenny out of town.”

“I see. Okay.”

“I'm glad you approve.”

She gave me another of her conflicted smiles, one part sincere, one part cynical. “I'm not sure I do. But I guess I understand.”

*   *   *

Trevor came down to relieve me in the chill hours of the morning, looming out of the darkness like a candlelit Goliath. “Hey, Trev,” I said. “Quiet so far.”

“Hope it stays that way,” he said, small-voiced and careful not to wake anyone, settling into the chair I had just left.

So I went to bed and got a useful few hours of sleep. When I opened my eyes it was morning, the house beginning to warm up in a bath of late-May sunlight. Downstairs, Mama Laura fixed breakfast for those of us who were awake (Rebecca was still sleeping). The electric stove wasn't working, but she had fired up the gas grill in the backyard and used it to scramble eggs in an iron pan, standing in the dewy grass in her bedroom slippers with a goosedown jacket over her nightdress. She delivered the eggs to the table with a satisfied flourish: triumph over adversity. Plus coffee, boiled in a pan over the grill.

Trev ate heartily even as my father sat in sulky silence, glaring at the gigantic Maori who had somehow invaded his home. Geddy had been keeping an ear on the radio in the living room, and he brought us up to date on the latest news: phone and data services had been partially restored to parts of the west coast but were operating sporadically and unreliably. New York City and Washington, DC, also had intermittent telecom coverage, but the rest of the country, and most of Europe, and all of the Indian subcontinent, were still down. A few unconfirmed reports hinted that Mumbai was burning. All this information was being relayed through private broadcasters running on self-generated power, whispers passed from one ear to the next.

As soon as possible, I took Trevor and Jenny aside—once again, Jenny's tobacco habit gave us an excuse to segregate ourselves in the backyard. I said we should leave for Buffalo as soon as possible. Trev was clearly uneasy about undertaking the trip without an escort, but he didn't want to alarm Jenny by raising the possibility of a Het attack. Jenny herself was fine with leaving this afternoon. “I'll pack,” she said, “and we can leave as soon as Geddy gets back.”

I said, “Geddy left?” Trev, simultaneously: “Back from where?”

“My mom's. I need to know how she's doing. She really does need to move out of that house and into a care facility, sooner rather than later. I can arrange that through Tau, though, right? Even when I'm in Canada living under an assumed name?”

I managed to nod.

“So Geddy offered to go check on her. She's always been nice to Geddy, even at her worst.”

“When did he leave?”

“Just now. Said he'd be about an hour.”

But an hour passed. Then two. And Geddy didn't come back.

 

CHAPTER 19

I borrowed the keys to Mama Laura's Hyundai while Trev stood guard at the house. My plan was to check in at the Symanski house and see whether Geddy had been there. I was also prepared to check the local hospital and police station, and Trevor had supplied me with the names and addresses of some local Taus in case I needed help.

The car was well maintained but very old: it had always been hard to convince Mama Laura to trade in a vehicle that was “still perfectly good,” and she had never felt comfortable at the wheel of my father's Cadillac. Which was actually helpful, because the car's radio was an analog relic, which meant it brought in the local station, itself an analog relic. The announcer's voice periodically gnarled into incomprehensibility, but the gist of the news came through. Such as it was.

And it seemed almost preternaturally strange, these rumors of apocalypse whispered against the morning calm of Schuyler, lawns just days shy of needing their first mowing of the season, a few cars on the road, a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, nobody hurrying, as if the blackout had created not panic but a sort of unpremeditated vacation. The most sinister thing I saw on the way to the Symanski house was a Great Dane lifting its leg over a maniacally grinning garden gnome.

It was clear that something dreadful had happened in Mumbai and elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, though it wasn't at all clear who was benefiting by it. Our own continent-wide blackout was an echo of that conflict, a reminder that we weren't exempt from it. Before I left the house we had had a brief visit from our neighbor on the left, Toby Sanderval, who owned the Olive Garden franchise off the highway; he advised us to keep the doors and windows shut “so the fallout don't get in.” Which terrified Mama Laura, until Rebecca and I assured her that any fallout from a nuclear exchange in India—had there been one—would have to travel across the equator and through nearly a dozen time zones before it presented any danger to the good citizens of Schuyler, New York.

But it was not all bad news that crackled through the car speakers. Municipal power had been restored to parts of Washington, DC. A presidential statement calling for calm and patience had been released to all extant media. There was even a report of intermittent cell phone service in New York State, though not locally—I tried.

As I drove, I kept my eyes open. I had biked and driven from my house to Jenny's house so often that the route was familiar, even all these years later. I looked for Geddy's car, an eye-poppingly yellow Nissan Elysium; I saws no sign of it, and it wasn't in the driveway of the Symanski house when I pulled up.