The Affinities (22 page)

Nor could he have gone to my brother Aaron. Aaron resented the way the family had changed since Dad's second marriage. He was polite to Mama Laura—Aaron was too fond of being the old man's firstborn and favorite son to put that status at risk. But he was only barely cordial to Geddy, and only when he thought he was being watched. When he figured the rest of us were out of earshot he could reduce Geddy to tears with a few choice words.

“Okay,” I said, “ask.”

“Can I sit on the bed?”

“Is that the question?”

He was impervious to irony. “No.”

“Okay, sit. If you're dry.”

He blushed. “I'm dry.”

“Okay then.”

He perched at the foot of the bed. I felt the mattress compress under his weight. “Adam,” he said, “is the world
old
or is it
young
?”

He stared at me intently, waiting for an answer.

“Jesus, Geddy, is
that
what's bugging you?”

“Please don't swear!”

“What's the question even
mean
?”

He frowned even harder and groped for an explanation. “It's like, is everything all used up? Is history almost over? Or is it just getting started?”

Crazy little guy. I had no real idea what he was talking about it, but he wanted an answer so badly I felt obliged to give him one. “Jesus, Geddy—sorry—but how should I know? I guess it's kind of in the middle.”

“In the middle?”

“Not so old it's finished. Not so young it's new.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I guess. I mean, that's how it seems to me.”

He thought it over, and finally he smiled. I didn't think I'd solved the problem for him—whatever his problem was—but I seemed to have made it easier for him to bear. “Thank you, Adam.”

“You're incredibly weird, Geddy.”

I had said those words often but I always said them affectionately, and Geddy's smile widened. “You too,” he said. As always.

“Go to bed now, 'kay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Neither of us would mention the conversation in the morning. Nor would we report to anyone in the family. Geddy probably figured I would forget about it altogether.

But I didn't, and neither did he.

*   *   *

Four years had passed since I had sat with Amanda Mehta and Trevor Holst in an attic room in our tranche house in Toronto, confronting a future we could barely comprehend. Many things had changed since then.

For one, I was wearing an absurdly expensive suit. For another, I was in New York City. For a third, I was doing something I was good at.

But I was not, at the moment, doing it very successfully.

I sat in a midtown restaurant opposite a woman I had met more than once, for professional reasons, since that night in Toronto. The woman's name was Thalia Novak. She was in her forties, skinny, with a narrow face and a halo of tautly curled hair. She wore a green blouse and a necklace of strung glass beads the size of playground marbles. Thalia was a sodality rep for the Eyn Affinity, and I had a feeling she was about to deliver some bad news.

But we shared dinner first, like civilized people. I supposed it was even possible she might change her mind as we talked, if the decision in question had not already been taken at some higher level of the Eyn hierarchy. I was acting as a Tau negotiator, fully empowered to make a deal on behalf of the North American sodalities, and Thalia was my opposite number.

The restaurant was fairly new. By the look of it and the faint smell of sawdust and plaster, it had opened or been remodeled within the last few weeks. The prices were high and the customer count was low—we very nearly had the place to ourselves. I guessed most folks were home, checking screens to find out whether Pakistan and India had graduated from conventional warfare to the thermonuclear variety. The food was good, maybe because the chef wasn't juggling a lot of orders. Thalia had ordered salmon and I had ordered paella, both on Tau's tab. The Eyns were a small Affinity with no financial superstructure and very little collective wealth, and it didn't hurt to remind her of that.

I let her talk through dinner. The stereotype was that Eyns loved to talk and that they were a little goofy. I liked Thalia—we had negotiated complex inter-sodality covenants on a couple of other occasions, most notably when Eyn and Tau organized opposition to an insurance-reform act that threatened Affinity-based pension funds—but she wouldn't have overturned anyone's preconceptions about her Affinity. She told me she had just started a course in “tantric flexing,” an exercise routine with some kind of spiritual component. She said it made her feel more centered. I wondered if it made her feel better about backing out of her Affinity's commitment to Tau.

I raised the question over dessert, in the bluntest possible way. “If you sign this agreement with Het, you know you'll be out of the Bourse.”

She raised her napkin to her mouth and then folded it over the remains of her raspberry zabaglione. “I do understand that. Obviously, it's an important concern for us.”

Four years ago Damian Levay had opened up TauBourse to investors representing other Affinities. To date, we had created rock-solid pension funds for twelve of the extant Affinities. The Eyns could certainly pull out their money and invest it elsewhere. But TauBourse had outperformed benchmark Wall Street funds for all our members, and by a wide margin, in part because we invested preferentially in Tau-operated enterprises. Leaving TauBourse would have an immediate financial downside for Thalia's Eyns.

But she was still talking. “We see potential legal issues with the Bourse, though, Adam. We're not sure it's a stable, sustainable business model.”

“It's perfectly stable, unless the Griggs-Haskell bill passes.”

“Which looks increasingly likely, however.”

“More than just likely, if you throw the support of Eyn behind it.”

“We're not a political Affinity. You know that.”

“But Het is. And if you back them up—”

“If we back them up, and if Griggs-Haskell passes, and if the president signs the bill, we'll be better off if our money
isn't
tied up in TauBourse. That's the bottom line.”

“Did Garrison tell you that?”

“I can't talk about what I discussed with Vince Garrison.”

Vince,
not
Vincent.
She was already on familiar terms with the Het negotiator. That was when I realized she was trying to let me down easy. Which meant Eyn had already secured an accord with Het.

“I'm sorry, Adam,” she said. “I like you personally. You've been more than fair to me and to the Affinity I represent. I do appreciate that. But you have to understand, it's an existential issue for us. Even if the Griggs-Haskell bill doesn't make it out of the Senate, some kind of legislation is inevitable. Sure, I'd prefer the kind of legislation Tau would write. And I know the Hets are jockeying for king-Affinity status. But it was only three weeks ago that the Russians blamed Tau for its role in the attempted coup—”

“It was a revolution, not a coup. And Tau's role has been exaggerated. We don't really have a huge footprint in the Russian Federation.”

“No, and it won't be getting any bigger, will it?”

“United Russia is running an authoritarian regime. Are we supposed to collaborate with it?”

“Het did.”

“Het kissed Valenkov's ass. Repeatedly. Until he gave them everything they wanted.”

“What Het did was eminently practical. Call it realpolitik if you like—it carved out a space for the Affinities in a closed society.”

“Except for Tau.”

“Well, yes.”

“What does that tell you?”

“It tells me the writing is on the wall. Do you know the story from the Old Testament? It's where the saying comes from. King Belshazzar stole the sacred vessels from Solomon's Temple and used them to praise false gods. A disembodied hand wrote on the wall:
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
It meant Belshazzar's days were numbered. He was killed by Persian soldiers the same night. Moral of the story, there's nothing to be gained from signing up with the wrong god, even for a short-term benefit. Gods are jealous, and gods remember. And right now, Tau is the wrong god.”

She stood up. I stood up. She gave me her hand. “The world's moving on, Adam. Tau can't stand still. Compromise or be left behind. That would be my advice to you.”

“I guess Eyn's famous concern for social justice only goes so far.”

“Don't make this worse. You're alone in a world of trouble, and you know it.” She turned away, then turned back. “Thank you for dinner. It was very good.”

*   *   *

I called Trevor from the sidewalk outside the restaurant. This early on a Thursday evening midtown should have been crowded, but the street was mostly empty. “How was dinner?” he asked.

“The restaurant was lucky to have us. The city feels like a ghost town.”

“Otherwise?”

“No joy,” I said. “So it looks like Plan B.”

Which meant we were heading for Schuyler, New York. My old hometown. To do something that would tear my family apart.

 

CHAPTER 13

We got on the road in the morning. Trev took first turn at the wheel. It was a warm day in late May, pretty enough to make our troubles seem distant. Once we left the city the road wound through farmland and fallow fields where faded exit signs announced the names of equally faded small towns, and Trev cracked his window and let in a breeze that smelled of alfalfa and manure, and sunlight swayed across the dashboard as the road curved west and north.

Somewhere behind us was a second vehicle, a van, with six of Trev's security guys in it. They were keeping a protective eye on us. So were various Taus along the route, locals alerted to watch out for suspicious or unusual vehicles. We didn't really expect trouble. But we took precautions: there had been trouble in the past. In February a delegation of English Taus from a Manchester tranche had been run off the road and killed as their bus passed through the Lake District—no charges were laid, but we had reason to suspect the work of a Het undercover team. A month later one of our sodality leaders had been found dead in his hotel room in Chicago. Again, no actionable evidence, but the victim had been about to finalize an agreement that would have allied us with the Res Affinity and disadvantaged Het. And we had known for years that Het was capable of extreme action. The scar Amanda Mehta still carried was evidence of that.

It was possible but not likely that a Het team might follow us to Schuyler. I had good personal reasons to visit the town. Sure, there would be a sitting congressman in Schuyler at the same time. Yes, that congressman would soon be casting a potentially decisive vote on the Griggs-Haskell bill. And yes, I would be meeting that congressman face-to-face.

But none of that was surprising, given that the congressman was my brother.

*   *   *

On the road to Schuyler I took one call and made another.

The call I took was from Damian Levay, from the Laguna Beach property he shared with Amanda. I docked the phone to the dashboard port and tilted it toward me. Damian frowned out of the tiny screen, and beyond him I could just make out the suggestion of a balcony railing and the blue sweep of the Pacific in early-morning sunlight. I told him we were on our way to Schuyler. He said, “I just want to make sure you're okay with this.”

“If Jenny's okay with it, I'm okay with it.”

“That's good. But things are never really simple, though, are they? When it comes to family.”

He said the word
family
with a faintly disparaging emphasis. Non-Tau family, he meant. Biological family. Family as tether.

“It's not a one-way deal. She helps us, we help her.”

“If we succeed, you probably won't be going back to Schuyler for any more family reunions.”

Meaning I would probably never speak to my brother or my father again, after this weekend. But it wasn't as if we spoke much now. It wasn't as if I stood to lose much in the way of happy familial intimacy. Tranche or family: I wasn't the first Tau to face the choice.

And Damian knew that. There was something else on his mind. It wasn't about my family, it was about me. Damian was a sodality leader now, and he had assigned me diplomatic duties because he believed I had a knack for dealing with non-Taus, a little extra dollop of empathy or something: supposedly, the trait showed up in my Affinity-test numbers. But that could cut two ways. A little sympathy for those outside the tribe was a useful thing, as long as it didn't generate dangerous mixed loyalties.

But I understood what I was getting into, and I reassured him of that. Going back to Schuyler wasn't “going home.” I had just one real home, the home I retreated to whenever possible, a house in Toronto (Lisa's house, since Loretta's death last year), where there was a room set aside for me, folks who genuinely loved me, no simmering rivalries, no hidden sexual violence … “I just hope what we do this weekend makes a difference.”

“It will,” Damian said. Then he looked away from the screen and looked back. “Somebody wants to say hi.”

Amanda.

The last few years hadn't much changed her. The same hair, shiny as the wings of a perfect black bird; same flawless skin, the color of coffee with cream; same sharp, observant gaze. Time had left subtle marks, ghosts of expressions that had lingered long enough to set, a hardness of purpose where there had been a playful openness, resolve where there had been uncertainty. But the smile she gave me was eternal. “Hi, Adam,” she said.

We hadn't talked much since her marriage to Damian. Not out of any awkwardness, just lack of opportunity. She had moved to California with Damian; I had stayed in Toronto. She was a sodality leader, I was just a functionary. She had made it clear, as had Damian, that although the marriage solemnized a real commitment, it didn't mean she and I were finished. But we saw each other far less often than we once had. And to be honest, I was a little uncomfortable about sleeping with a married woman. Not because the relationship was immoral but because it was brutally asymmetrical.