“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 be
en 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.”