“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.”