The Affinities (34 page)

Or maybe that was something she had already learned. She was as solicitous of Geddy as he was of her, and I began to recognize their relationship for the small miracle it was. In her presence Geddy was calm, relaxed, engaged. There were moments when they almost seemed to forget I was in the car with them, to forget what they had so recently endured, and their talk grew soft and murmuring, confident as the sunlight that glittered from the pavement of I-90 East.

We reached their tiny Allston Village apartment after dark. I made repeated but futile attempts to reach Damian or Amanda or Trevor by phone, and I thought about calling the tranche house in Toronto, but in the end I didn't: I was afraid of what Lisa might say. I was still awake well past midnight, sitting in the kitchen reading the news and watching moonlight inch across the linoleum counter, when Geddy joined me, in shorts and a white t-shirt with a wry, sleepy smile. He said he'd heard me moving around. I apologized for keeping him up. “It's okay,” he said. “I'm a light sleeper.”

He poured himself a glass of milk and sat at the table with me. The window was open, and a sudden breeze lifted the curtain and made him shiver. “You're going home tomorrow,” he said.

“If I have a home to go to.”

He nodded. “I want to thank you for what you did for me.”

I shrugged.

“Seriously. I mean, you risked a lot. And now nobody will talk to you.”

“Seems like. But I'm a Tau, Geddy. Sooner or later, they'll understand why I did what I did back in Schuyler. And they'll forgive me.”

He blinked twice and said, “Is it really something you need to be
forgiven
for?”

*   *   *

We sat a while longer. He finished his milk and belched spectacularly. “I ought to go back to bed,” he said. “It's late.”

But something, maybe nothing more than the cool spring air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance, had put me in a philosophical mood. “So what do you think,” I asked him, “is the world
old
or is it
young
?”

He looked startled. Then he smiled. “You remember!”

“Long time ago, huh?”

“Long time,” he agreed. “
Long
time.”

“So what's the verdict, kiddo? Just between us grownups. Is the world old or young?”

He took the question seriously. “Well, Rebecca helped me figure that out. It's about how it
seems
, right? How the world
seems
to people. Back in the dark ages the world must have seemed really old, like it was all, you know, Roman ruins and fallen empires. Like nothing big or good could ever happen again. Like you could stare at some crumbling aqueduct in the French countryside and wonder how it ever came to be built. But then there was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and suddenly there were whole new ways of answering questions, and it made people feel like, no, they were at the
beginning
of something, a whole new world being born. Right?”

“I guess.”

“And when you and I were kids, I guess what worried me was, it was like people thought everything was over—religion was empty, science was useless, progress was phony: if you thought about the future it was like, you know, global warming and overpopulation and wars over food and water. Like the world was old, finished, used up.”

I said, “Those things are worth worrying about.”

“Sure, of course. But no one could
do
anything about them. No single person could make a difference or ever hope to, nobody with money wanted to risk it, nobody with real power cared to exercise it. It seemed like it was just … too late.”

“Isn't it?”

“That's what I learned from Rebecca. And New Socionome. When Meir Klein discovered social teleodynamics? That was a whole new way of looking at things. Like the Affinities—”

“To be honest,” I said, “I'm not sure that's working out the way Klein hoped.”

“No, but it was only the
beginning
. The Affinities proved how powerful social algorithms could be. But the Affinities were, like, the Model T of socionomic structures. We're building better ones! Evolutionary algorithms to enhance non-zero-sum exchanges of all kinds! A way to
address
the big problems!” He was starting to shout, the way he used to, years ago, when he talked about his enthusiasm-
du-jour
; but he caught himself and gave me a sheepish grin. “I don't want to wake Rebecca. But it's
young
, Adam. That's the point. The world's young! We're at the beginning of something, and it's big, and it's scary, but in the end it might be—” He flung his arms wide, as if to embrace the whole spring night.
“Beautiful!”

*   *   *

The next day I managed to secure a seat on a flight to Toronto. The woman who settled into the seat next to me asked whether I was beginning a trip or going home. “Going home,” I said, because it was the easiest answer.

And arguably true. Or not. Depending on how you defined “home.” After I cleared customs I took a cab to a downtown hotel and checked in for the night. My home address, of course, was the tranche house in Rosedale—it was where I lived when I wasn't on the road—but I wasn't sure I would be welcome there. So I spent another night alone, listening to the sound of the hotel elevators pushing air up and down their concrete shafts.

And in the morning I screwed my courage to the sticking point and called the house. When Lisa answered, I said, “It's me. I'm back in town.”

A silence.

“Adam,” she said.

“Yeah. I wanted—” But what
did
I want? To pretend nothing had changed? Not possible. “Wanted to let you know I'll be there soon.”

“You're coming to the house?”

“Well, yeah. Of course.”

Which produced a more protracted silence. Then, “What time will you be here?”

“I don't know. In an hour, say?”

“I suppose that would be all right. An hour.”

“Lisa,” I began. But she had hung up.

*   *   *

They say you never forget your first tranche house. In my case I had never really left it.

It looked as welcoming as ever, drowsing in the gentle heat of a spring afternoon. The lawn had been recently cut, the hedges trimmed. The big maple in the front yard was already putting out seed pods—years ago, Amanda had told me they were called
samaras
—and they fluttered around me as the wind shook the branches. Every step I took, I had taken a thousand or ten thousand times before. Along the paved walk, up the stairs to the porch. Fumbling in my pocket for the key. Needlessly, because the door opened before I reached it.

“Come in,” Lisa said from the cool darkness inside.

I stepped into the smell of baked bread, of wood polish, of the fresh flowers she had cut for the dining room table. Any other day, any other homecoming, Lisa would have taken me into her frail arms. Today she did not. She stood well back, cautiously, as if I had become radioactive. The house was quiet. Unusually quiet, even for a weekday afternoon. As if there had been some communal act of avoidance, a collective absence, perhaps orchestrated by Tau telepathy. “You can't stay, of course,” she said.

If I did not find those words shocking, maybe it was because I had unconsciously anticipated them. “But I live here,” I said.

“No, not any longer,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

*   *   *

I had no compelling argument to make. I stood in the entrance hall, neither defiant nor penitent, as Lisa explained what would happen. I would arrange to have my possessions removed from my room. I could return once more, for that purpose. Today, I could take away anything I cared to carry. Otherwise, the tranche house was closed to me.

The afternoon had become unreal, as vague and unfocused as a dream. I went up the stairs to my room, which had become a dream of a room, all memory, no substance, all past, no present. The double bed, the desk, the shelf of books. The window, its bottom sash held open by an empty wine bottle. The lace curtains Lisa had installed years ago, before my time. The sound of the maple tree turning its branches in the fitful breeze, a sound that had lulled me to sleep on hot summer nights.

Most of what I owned was in this room. None of it felt like it belonged to me.

*   *   *

She was waiting when I came back downstairs, empty-handed. Her blank expression made me a little angry. “I'm still a Tau,” I said. “Despite all this. That doesn't change.”

“But it does,” she said, and something that resembled sympathy finally came into her eyes. “It has. Poor Adam. This is our fault as much as yours. You were never curious about your numbers, were you? Meir Klein's arithmetic was always a little beyond you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Drift,” she said mournfully. “Just—drift. It's what made you useful to us, these last few months. You were always good at talking to outsiders. You could see the world the way they did. You had that knack. Almost a sort of double vision, yes? Tau and non-Tau. The reason for that is simple. You've been on the edge for many years—a Tau by the skin of a decimal point, so to speak. But at your last requalification, you simply failed. No, Adam, you are not a Tau. Not any longer.”

I could not speak.

“Poor Adam,” she said again. “But you see, it's not entirely your fault that you betrayed us. We should have anticipated it.”

“You
knew
this about me? And you said nothing?”

“Damian and Amanda knew. I was told. No one else. Trevor didn't know, not until after you did what you did in Schuyler. We would have told you as soon as your sister-in-law's video was released, of course. Until then … we thought it was better to postpone the revelation.”

“Because I was useful.”

“Bluntly, yes. We're not proud of that. It was always a gamble. But we did it for the sake of the Affinity, Adam. You would have done the same, once, in our place.”

“Once. But not anymore.”

“No, not anymore. Because you used
us
, too, didn't you? Lied to us so you could rescue your stepbrother. We failed to anticipate that. But we don't blame you—it was the drift that made it possible.”

Because there was no way to process what she had told me, I tried to pretend she hadn't said it. I told her I would arrange to have my things moved out as soon as I had a place to put them. Then I said good-bye, for the last time. Walked out the front door, for the last time. Passed under the maple tree with its papery rain of samaras, for the last time. I felt as if even my grief and anger had been stolen from me. I wasn't entitled to them: I wasn't a Tau. I was, in effect, no longer anything at all.

*   *   *

Jenny's video was released to the Internet a few days later, along with an affidavit from Aaron's most recent ex-girlfriend, who turned out to be a skinny forty-year-old with unconvincing red hair and a taste for leopard-skin-patterned clothing accessories. Maybe her testimony wasn't as convincing as Damian had hoped—in the end Aaron was forced to resign his congressional seat, but serial denials kept him in office until after the vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill.

Which passed. Worse, it passed with a suite of draconian but bipartisan amendments that Het had lobbied hard to suppress. The law applied only to the American sodality, but it was a model for subsequent legislation in Canada and Europe and, ultimately, around the world.

In other words, it was the beginning of the end of the brief age of the Affinities. I told myself I didn't care. But I continued to carry my Tau identity with me like a second skin, a name I could no longer call myself, a raft of memories too essential to be extinguished, though they became, with time, a collation of orphaned moments. A lighted window on a winter night, footsteps on a hidden stairway, the sound of distant voices.

 

EPILOGUE

The Sound of Voices

The arc of history is long, but our algorithms bend toward justice.

—REBECCA DRABINSKY

 

The invitation arrived as a text message. A handful of names, the address of a downtown caf
é
, a date and time.

*   *   *

The first six months after I left the tranche house had been the most difficult. I was alone and unemployed, though I had a savings account with a balance big enough to keep me in groceries and pay the rent on a one-bedroom basement apartment in a seedy but not actually dangerous part of town. My savings would have been exhausted by the end of winter, but for a stroke of luck: I ran into a woman I had known slightly when I was a student at Sheridan College. She had recently quit a lucrative advertising job to open her own start-up agency, and she needed a graphic artist with professional skills who would work at an entry-level salary. I was honest: I told her I was years out of date on digital graphics platforms, but I was a fast learner and salary wouldn't be a problem. It was the last clause that sealed the deal, I suspect. But it was work and it was honest and it filled my otherwise empty days.

I didn't talk to my family again until my father died. It was Mama Laura who called with the news. “I cannot say he didn't suffer, but the hospital was generous about painkillers, so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. Aaron came to see him at the last. Aaron's drinking pretty heavily these days, I'm sorry to say. But he was sober for his father's sake.”

A funeral and memorial service had been arranged. My father's business acquaintances would all be there, including the leading lights of the Onenia County Republican Committee. I would not be turned away, she said, if I chose to attend. But it might be awkward, under the circumstances.

“Did he ask about me at all, before he died?”