The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

Affinity we’d forfeit the fee and forget about it. But it turned out we’re both Taus. Isn’t that great?”
    I said it was pretty great. Loretta was a little younger than Lisa and taller, her long, dark hair just beginning to go white. She pulled me into a hug, then stood back and said, “You look like you have something on your mind, Adam Fisk.”
    I would eventually get accustomed to this kind of shoot-from-the-hip psychoanalysis, but I was new here, and it startled me. Something on my mind? I had quit my courses at Sheridan College, given notice to my landlord, and would probably be back in Schuyler, tail between my legs, before the week was out. But I didn’t want to say so. “Well,” Loretta said before I could answer, “whatever it is, forget about it for a couple of hours. You’re among friends.”
    Thirty people made a tranche. It was rumored that Meir Klein and InterAlia set it up that way after the model of Neolithic tribes—thirty people supposedly being an ideal number for a social unit: big enough to get things done, small enough to be governable, and containing as many familiar faces as the average human psyche can easily sort out.
    Maybe so. I met twenty-three strangers that night. (Some tranche members were away on vacation or otherwise too busy to attend.) Twenty-three faces and names were too many for my post-Neolithic brain to absorb all at once, but some were memorable. Some of the faces would become intimately familiar to me, and some of the names would eventually show up in newspaper headlines.
    Lisa Wei led me to a long table in the dining room. “You’re late for the best stuff,” she said, “just pickings left,” but I wasn’t even remotely hungry; I took a lukewarm egg roll. She introduced me to a couple of stragglers also grazing at the table. “What I can do,” Lisa said, “is show you through the house and you can meet folks as we go, how about that?”
    I was grateful to her for making me feel slightly less ridiculous. It wasn’t just that I was nervous about meeting strangers: I felt like an imposter. I was a Tau, but I’d probably be back in the States before the next scheduled tranche meeting, and I was uneasy about making friends I couldn’t keep. But as I trailed this small, effusive woman through her big, cheerful house, I began to feel genuinely welcome. Every room seemed to frame a mood, contemplative or whimsical or practical, and the people I met and whose names I struggled unsuccessfully to remember seemed perfectly suited to the house. When I was introduced to them they smiled and shook my hand and looked at me curiously while I tried not to let on that I was a one-timer bound for an Affinity-less quarry town in upstate New York. It made me bashful.
    But I began to forget about that. I dropped into a half dozen interesting discussions. No one resented my presence, and when I added a few words people paid attention. I spent a few minutes listening to a guy with a faint Hungarian accent debating Affinity politics with a couple of other Taus in a downstairs room. The talk was too lively to interrupt, but Lisa took my arm and whispered, “That’s Damian. Damian Levay. He teaches law at the University of Toronto. Very bright, very ambitious. He’s written a book or two.”
    He looked pretty young for a tenured professor, but he talked liked someone accustomed to an audience. He had issues with the way InterAlia exercised control over Affinity tranches and sodalities. “If being a Tau is a legitimate identity, aren’t we entitled to self-determination? I mean, InterAlia may own the algorithms, but it doesn’t own us .”
    Lisa smiled as she interrupted him: “‘When in the course of human events…’”
    â€œDon’t laugh,” he said. “A declaration of independence might be exactly what we need.”
    â€œIf not precisely a