CHAPTER 14

Polite commentators liked to call the state of affairs between Tau and Het a “rivalry.” In reality it was a fight—a fight for the future of the Affinities. Tau wanted to preserve and defend what Meir Klein and InterAlia had created. Het wanted to take absolute control of it.

Het was winning.

Het had about as many members as Tau, according to a recent census, and we were the most populous of the twenty-two Affinities. So we brought roughly equivalent numbers to the field, but Het had an immediate advantage: in sociodynamic terms, Het was monohierarchical. Which meant it possessed a single hierarchy: just one rigorously denominated chain of command, one leader, stacked ranks of followers. It was a classic form of human collaboration: horizontal equality among members of any rank, but top-down decision-making. Usually that takes a certain amount of policing and coercion, but the genius of Het is that its members tended to fall into place as neatly as Tetris pieces. The result was a kind of instinctive monarchy. They didn’t call him that, but the Hets had a king: I had seen him in passing, during sodality negotiations. His name was Garrison, and when Garrison said jump, Het jumped.

Tau, on the other hand, was polyhierarchical. When we did the leader-follower thing, we did it to address some specific task or local problem. You want to put out a fire, you let the fire chief call the shots. You want to build a house, you defer to an architect and a carpenter. We had hierarchies, but we were constantly constructing and dismantling them, hierarchies like temporary circuits in a vast neural network.

It made us versatile, adaptable. It also made us loose and complex and slow, where Het was blunt and simple and fast.

And Het had brought blunt, simple weapons to the battlefield. Weapons like bribery and expensive lobbyists, backroom threats and hired lawyers. Not to mention, should you step out of the light and into the shadows, actual guns and muscle. Whereas Tau had come to the fight like earnest Quakers, armed with little more than a love of justice and the power of persuasion. In brief, our asses had been kicked.

At least at first. Slowly, slowly, we were bringing our own weight to bear. We didn’t punch with much strength but we knew how to swarm. How to find a vulnerable point and work it from many angles. How to crowdsource a counterattack.

One thing you look for is the unexpected connection: say, between a Tau member and a congressman who might be about to cast a critical vote.

Say, between me and my brother Aaron.

Then you look for an exploitable weakness. A troubled marriage, maybe, in which one partner has a great many secrets to keep.

Like Aaron’s marriage to Jenny.

You find the weak point. Then you press until something breaks.

*   *   *

It was Mama Laura who had engineered this family reunion, and it was Mama Laura who answered the door when I knocked.

Late afternoon, and the sun was behind me. Sunlight came through the branches of the budding willow, and Mama Laura shaded her eyes as the door swung open. She gave me what she sometimes called her “big old welcome-home smile,” but with a hint of uneasiness in it. “Adam,” she said. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened her arms and I hugged her. “Come on in,” she said.

She had grown a little grayer and a little portlier in the years since I had left Schuyler, but time had been relatively kind. The same was true of the house itself, from what I could see from the entrance hall. Same carpet, same faded furniture, same heavy drapes, but all of it freshly scrubbed and dusted. The air smelled of wood polish and savory overtones from a slow roast sweating in the oven. “Geddy absolutely cannot wait to see you! He’s up in his old room. And your father is upstairs, too … Can I get you something to wash away the road dust? We have lemonade, Coke…”

“I’m fine,” I began to say, but I was interrupted by the pounding of footsteps on the stairs.

I doubt Geddy could have reached me any faster if he’d slid down the banister. He had never been good at concealing his feelings, and now he wasn’t even trying. He had a grin as wide as his mouth could make it. He was practically laughing with pleasure. “Adam!” he said, and took me in an embrace that nearly bowled both of us over. “I heard the doorbell!”

“Hey, Geddy,” I said.

He stood back. “You look great! You dress better than you used to.”

Mama Laura and I both laughed. I wasn’t wearing my thousand-dollar suit—it would have gotten me expelled from the house for the crime of pretension, I suspected—but I guessed a tailored shirt and wool pants looked upscale to Geddy. Geddy wore blue jeans with a checked cotton shirt tucked in at the waist, a style Mama Laura called “Walmart formal.” He was thin enough to be called skinny these days: this was what had emerged from the chubby cocoon of his adolescence.

“Still playing the changes?” It was the question I asked whenever I talked to Geddy on the phone. Originally a reference to his music career, now a general-purpose what’s-up.

“Still working at the warehouse,” he said. “Mostly indoors now. I sit in with a band on weekends. Some guys I know. Trad jazz, but we’re pretty tight. Rebecca says—but you have to meet Rebecca! She’s in the basement, going through some old boxes—”

Mama Laura took my arm in a firm grip. “I think Adam should say hello to his father first.”

*   *   *

It was why this reunion had been arranged, after all. It was why Geddy had come from Boston, it was why Aaron and Jenny had traveled from DC, and it was at least one reason why I was here.

My father had received his diagnosis last winter, but he had forbidden Mama Laura to share it with us until a month ago. Even then she had been reluctant to talk about the details, as if his disease were an intimacy she dared not discuss except in the most basic outline. Cancer. Inoperable. Stage IV. Originally in the lungs, now throughout the body.

He had refused chemo out of some combination of terrified denial and stoic acceptance. He said he felt fine, which meant his pain was mostly under control. His main symptoms, Mama Laura said, were debilitating fatigue and loss of appetite. Plus heightened irritability and moments of confusion.

I went upstairs to see him. He was in the bedroom he shared with Mama Laura, but he wasn’t in bed; he was dressed and sitting stiffly upright in the upholstered chair by the window. The little video monitor on the dresser was babbling quietly away, but he had turned his face to the sunlight. Maybe he was appreciating the spring of a year that would likely not include, for him, an autumn or a winter.

“Adam,” he said, swiveling to face me, putting his features in shadow. “Nice you could make it.”

“Good to be here.”

“Laura was real happy about you coming. She sets great store by family.”

“You can tell by her cooking. The roast smells great.”

“It’s lost on me. I can’t smell a damn thing anymore. Food tastes like sawdust and library paste.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault but God. You look like you’re doing all right.”

“More or less.”

“Still working for your club?”

“It’s not a club.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s been in the news. The Affinities. They got in everywhere, didn’t they? Like Communists. Or Freemasons. You don’t know who is one, unless they tell you. But you’ve obviously had some success at it. Good for you, I guess. It’s just that we can’t boast about it, the way we can boast about Aaron.”

“Well, at least you can boast about one of your sons.”

It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to call him. When we were kids Aaron and I had been trained to call him “sir.” But I hadn’t addressed him as “sir” since the day he insulted Amanda. It was decades too late to start calling him “Dad.” And if I had called him by his first name he would have considered it a shooting offense.