The Affinities

“No. Listen—”

  “Just go.”

  “Rachel—”

  “Do I embarrass you? Well, you embarrass me! Smug candy-ass Tau boy. Get out! I’m tired of you anyway. You know what’s better than your dick? My finger! My little finger! GO!”

  * * *

  Amanda was waiting in my hotel room when I got back (we shared keys). She said she wanted to see the sketches I had made. I gave them to her. She examined them approvingly. Then she asked me what happened with Rachel. And I tried to explain.

  “She was showing you her world,” Amanda said. “Her apartment, her daughter, the ratty bar where she spends her weekends. Even the pill bottles she leaves out where people can see them. She probably wanted to find out whether all that would offend you or whether it would turn you on.”

  “It didn’t offend me. I was just worried the wrong people would see us … Why would it turn me on?”

  “Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”

  “What?”

  “Look at you, you’re so tense you’re practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We’ll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”

  The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn’t have let her think—”

  “Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “That’s what’s important. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

  CHAPTER 9

  My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.

  When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can’t think of a better use for it.”

  “Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They’re complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”

  “They’re right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we’ve come across some anomalies in Klein’s data.”

  “Anomalies?”

  “Some unsettling implications.”

  “Such as?”

  He looked unhappy. “We’ll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We’ll be out of harm’s way and we’ll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”

  It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn’t ready to talk.

  * * *

  The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother’s home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.

  I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it’s fine.”

  “Is Aaron around?”

  “He’s in DC for the day. A congressional briefing or something.”

  The truth was that talking to my family (my tether family) had become a duty, not a pleasure. Lately I had heard more from the house in Schuyler, since my father had entered into negotiations to sell his faltering hardware-store businesses to a national chain. “We’ll be able to retire very comfortably,” Mama Laura had told me, “though I dread what idleness will do to your father.” (Her dread wasn’t entirely hyperbolic: even a long holiday weekend could drive my father into a state of sullen, resentful boredom.)

  My brother Aaron was working as an assistant to Mike Menkov, the Republican congressman from the Onenia district, and it seemed like he was making a career of it. He had learned his way around the federal labyrinth and had even drafted a couple of Menkov’s speeches. I knew this because Aaron made a point of mentioning it whenever we talked, and anything he neglected to tell me would be relayed from Schuyler by way of my father. And I always congratulated Aaron when he announced his latest triumph … even though Menkov was a pliant tool of the corporate lobbies and would endorse any noxious idea that seemed likely to boost him up the political ladder. Lately, Aaron himself had been talking about running for office.

  But Aaron wasn’t home today, and Jenny had sounded a little uncomfortable telling me so. “Look,” I said, “I can get back to you if this is a bad time. Tell Aaron I returned his call, okay?”

  “No, wait. Geddy’s here! That’s why I called earlier. He wants to talk to you. Is that okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay. What’s Geddy doing in Alexandria?”

  “Well, it’s a long story. You know he was playing with a band, right?”

  Mama Laura had kept me posted on Geddy’s music career. Some natural talent, plus a little formal instruction and Geddy’s capacity for obsessive repetition, had made him a better-than-average reedman. A little over a year ago Geddy had joined a band called The Humbuckers, currently making a minor reputation for itself across the northeastern states. It was a precarious living—barely a living at all—but since the family had long ago concluded that Geddy was probably unemployable, it seemed like a good thing.

  But life on the road had not agreed with Geddy. He had left The Humbuckers after a gig in Syracuse and bought a bus ticket to Alexandria. Two days ago he had shown up on Aaron’s doorstep with an unhappy expression and a duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Shockingly, he had pawned his Mauriat tenor sax, an instrument he had scrimped to buy and which he had insisted on holding in every recent photograph of him I had seen. Asked why he left the band and sold his sax, Geddy would only say, “It didn’t make me happy anymore.”

  Jenny texted me this information later; here on the Pender Island ferry, all I knew was that Geddy had expressed a completely uncharacteristic desire to talk on the phone. So I waited while Jenny gave him the handset. “Hello?” he said. It was Geddy in two syllables. Timid but somehow courageous, as if he had forced out the word on a cloud of pure bravado.

  “Good to hear your voice,” I said.

  “Where are you? It sounds loud.”

  “I’m on a ferry in Georgia Strait. That’s the engines you hear.”

  “You’re on a boat?”

  “Yeah, a boat.”

  “Do you still live in Toronto?”

  “I do, but I’ll be out west for a few weeks more.”

  “Okay.” He was silent a few moments more, and I had learned to respect Geddy’s silences. Eventually he said, “I wish I could visit you.”

  “That’s not possible right now, but maybe in a few months. What are you doing at Aaron and Jenny’s place?”

  “They agreed to let me stay a while. I don’t really have anywh
ere to go. I didn’t want to go back to Schuyler.”

  He didn’t want to go back to Schuyler because my father would have humiliated him for his failure. Neither of us needed to say this aloud. “Are you okay there?”

  “Aaron says I can’t stay forever.” Now he just sounded tired. “I don’t know what to do, Adam.”

  “The band didn’t work out, huh?”

  “There was a girl. I really liked her. She needed money. So I had to sell my saxophone. She took the money, but…”

  “I understand.”

  “People are pretty fucking mean sometimes.”

  His brief career in the music business had made Geddy more casual about what he would once have called “swear words.” Worse than that was the bitterness in his voice. It was entirely self-directed. Geddy would never despise the woman who had taken his money. Instead, he would despise himself for his own gullibility. And learn nothing from the experience. I suspected Geddy would go on trading luck for love for as long as it took him to give up on love. “If you need a little money to get you through, Geddy, no problem. I can send it care of Aaron and Jenny.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Thanks, Adam. No, I just wanted to hear your voice. It was always…” I imagined him blushing. “You were always pretty good to me.”

  Which for some reason made me feel even worse. “Okay, but listen. We’ll get together, I promise. Soon as I clear up some business out here. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “In the meantime, let Aaron and Jenny pamper you for a while.”

  “I can’t really do that. I mean, they’ll let me stay for a few weeks. But I don’t think Aaron is really happy having me here. It’s kind of…” He lowered his voice. “I don’t like this house. It’s big and it’s pretty, but I would hate to live here.” He added, a barely audible whisper, “Jenny has a black eye.”

  “A what? What did you say? A black eye?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, like somebody punched her?”

  A maddening pause. “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Geddy, what do you mean?”

  “Here she is. Here she is!”

  “Geddy?”

  Jenny came on. “We should keep this short. Aaron will be home any minute.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “What? Yes, of course I am. Why? What did Geddy say?”

  “Nothing.” Or too much. “But he seems a little forlorn.”

  “Look … I’ll text you about it, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great. Well. Thank you for calling back, Adam. That was nice. I know you’re busy.”

  “Never too busy to talk to my sister-in-law.”

  “Great,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  * * *

  Damian had rented what the owner (a local Tau) called a “chalet” on a rural lot near the ocean on Pender Island. In reality it was a four-bedroom log-walled home with double-glazed windows and a kitchen big enough to feed and accommodate a dozen people.

  We were slightly less than a dozen: me, Amanda, Damian, a tech guy from each of our two research teams, plus Gordo MacDonald and four of his security people. Gordo immediately scoped out the house and its surrounding territory and posted his subordinates where they could cover all approaches. “We’ll be inconspicuous,” he said. “We’ll feed ourselves and sleep in shifts. You probably won’t notice us. But if you do need us, all you have to do is holler.”

  Which was reassuring, though it was unlikely that anyone had followed us here. The house felt safe. Even better, with the rain falling and the daylight beginning to fade and a fire crackling in the hearth, it felt cozy.

  The feeling lasted until Damian told us what he had deduced from Meir Klein’s data.

  * * *

  It was obvious we hadn’t come here for a standard meeting, but Damian wanted to start with a progress report, so that’s what we gave him. My team leader and I summarized the problems we’d run into trying to design a portable Affinity-testing system. With suitable sensors, virtually any handheld digital device could record the results and run the algorithms. But another part of the traditional Affinity screening was a DNA test. Adding a portable nanopore sequencer to the kit would triple the cost to the end user and make the process needlessly complex, so we were looking at workarounds: a simpler filter that would detect only the relevant bases, or a two-part qualification process that would include a blood sample submitted to a registered lab. Amanda’s team leader said it might be possible to eliminate the DNA test altogether, since it mainly functioned as a kind of pre-screening, picking up a few gene sequences that were incompatible with any Affinity. Adding another layer of neurotesting might achieve the same effect.

  All well and good, and we chewed it over for an hour or so, but this wasn’t the main event. That began when Damian stood up, clearing his throat and looking uncharacteristically awkward. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you, and I’m really pleased with the progress we’re making. But we all know this is happening in a larger context. The overarching goal is to cut loose the Affinities from InterAlia, to let each Affinity govern itself according to its own interests. Meir Klein foresaw that possibility and wanted to encourage it. But he foresaw a few other things, too, maybe not so nice. I brought along Dr. Navarro to explain this.”

  Ruben Navarro was the oldest Tau on the team: he was seventy-one and had held a chair in analytical sociology at the University of Montreal for more than twenty years. Amanda and I had shared lunch with him a couple of times. Navarro was old enough that he had met Klein at academic conferences before Klein’s work was locked up by InterAlia; they had published in the same professional journals. He sat in a chair by the window, his halo of white hair framed by the rain-silvered glass, and he spoke without getting up.

  “Physicists have said that what they would ultimately like to discover is ‘a theory of everything.’ For the science of neurosocial teleodynamics, the equivalent goal would be ‘a theory of everyone.’ We’re not quite there yet. Social teleodynamics is a technique for modeling human psychology and human social interactions with unprecedented accuracy. It’s not a crystal ball. But like any science, it does make certain predictions. We can extrapolate from current events. We can run models based on our assumptions and see where they take us. As I like to say, the result is less reliable than a weather forecast but more reliable than divination.”

  It was a line that may have had them rolling in the aisles in Navarro’s classes at Montreal, but we just nodded and waited for him to go on. “What is original in Klein’s work,” he said, “is the subtlety and complexity of the modeling. In that respect, he was far in advance of anything I have seen in the peer-reviewed literature. The method by which he derives his models is radical and contentious, but for now we can go with Klein’s claim that it is reliable. So, for instance, we can ask ourselves what Klein’s model predicts for interactions between the various Affinities, if InterAlia ceases to exert comprehensive control. But we have to ask that question in light of a larger one, one posed by Klein himself: How is the general culture changing, and what is the role of the Affinities in that change?” Navarro paused, and a gust of wind rattled the window. “In simple terms, Klein was asking: Is our social structure viable? Is there a future worth looking forward to? Or are we simply fucked?”

  Which got a suppressed laugh from Amanda. Navarro acknowledged her reaction with a wry smile.

  “Without going into detail, I can say that his research suggests that we are not entirely fucked. But it’s a close thing. The problems confronting us are the obvious ones—climate change, resource competition, population stress, and all the human conflicts arising from those problems. What makes these questions especially difficult is that they cannot be dealt with comprehensively by individual action. We need to act collectively, on a global scale. But we have very limited means of doing that. We are a collaborative species, the most successful such species on the planet, but we collaborate as
individuals, for mutual gain, under systems established to promote and protect such collaboration. Our global economic and social behavior is largely unconstrained. Which means that, under certain circumstances, it can run away with us. It can carry us all unwilling into the land of unforeseen consequences. Which is a very dark place indeed. May I have a glass of water, Damian?”

  “Something stronger, if you like.”

  “No, water is fine.”

  Damian rustled up a glass of ice water while we fidgeted. Navarro accepted the glass, took a sip, licked his lips. “Now, all this is elementary social teleodynamics. But here again, Klein does something daring. Because he knows more about the Affinities than anyone else—and because he can model them with unprecedented accuracy—he has factored their influence into his predictions.”

  Amanda said, “And that makes a difference?”

  “Yes! Quite a startling difference! Klein’s research suggests that the Affinities could become major players in the evolution of a pan-global culture. By which I mean they will increasingly influence politics, policy, and economics. They could in fact come to serve in place of what is so conspicuously absent—a global human conscience.”

  “The Affinities can do that?”

  “Well, no. Not every Affinity. There was a reason Klein entrusted his data to Taus.”

  “What,” Amanda said, “we’re so special?”

  “Apparently,” Navarro said, “we are.”

  * * *

  We’re special. It was something we may have suspected but never said aloud. It sounded arrogant and narcissistic.

  But did we feel it? Of course we did.

  I had felt it when I first walked through the doors of Lisa and Loretta’s house in Toronto. I had felt it when I realized I was in a community of people who loved me, whom I could love freely and confidently in return, and who loved me despite my imperfections as I loved them despite theirs. I had recognized in that house the presence of what was so conspicuously absent in the house where I had grown up: the possibility of being both truly known and genuinely loved.

  Which of course made us special. Special to ourselves; special because we were inside the charmed circle, and others were not. But Navarro was suggesting something different. He was suggesting that we might be special to the world at large … that something in the Tau community might help shepherd everyone into a better future.