The Raintree Rebellion

by Janet Mcnaughton

  “Luisa, give everyone their folders, please. The hard copy may seem a bit retro, but I find it’s easy to work with. And, of course, you’ll have identical text on your scribes if you need to search. This is information about the ones we’re investigating, our persons of interest.”

  Astral interrupts Griffin again. “That’s ridiculous. ‘Persons of interest’ is too awkward to keep repeating.”

  Griffin is not offended. “What would you suggest?”

  “How about ‘suspects’?” Astral says.

  “‘Suspects’ is a nice, straightforward term,” Griffin says. He sounds cautious.

  “Suspect” makes this sound like a criminal investigation.

  Kayko leans forward to argue, then stops herself. I can guess what she’s thinking. If Astral is going to be difficult, she can’t afford to fight about something as trivial as wording.

  Griffin seems determined to ignore our differences. “Identification of these suspects may be difficult if people aren’t named in a projection. Some of the photos in our files are recent, and fifteen years is a long time. I suggest we spend the rest of the morning familiarizing ourselves with the contents of these files.”

  Griffin has managed to inspire us, in spite of Astral’s hostility. I sense intense concentration in the room as we silently work through the files, trying to absorb all the information we can. These middle-aged men and women look so ordinary. But one of them might have signed the warrant for my father’s arrest.

  The alarm on my scribe beeps. I can’t believe how quickly time has passed. “I’ve got an appointment,” I tell the others. “I won’t be gone long.” I leave my bag, taking only the appointment card and my residency card.

  I’ve given myself extra time. The ID codes building is just around the corner, but I walk away from it, into Queen’s Park. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. The park is almost empty. I don’t see Sparrow or any of her Tribe. I cross the road at the traffic light and enter a maze of tall buildings across the street. The road that circles Queen’s Park is always busy, but there’s little traffic on these side streets and the sidewalks are empty. Alleys run beside the buildings. Mid-block, I duck down one to see what’s behind.

  There’s no sign of homeless people here, confirming to me that is the territory of a Tribe. The Tribes don’t let stray homeless people squat on their turf. Children are absorbed and adults are beaten off. Or up, as the old man with the fuel cells almost was. The alley connects to a longer one running behind the buildings, the length of the block. I can see traffic on the busy streets in the distance at either end. I decide to walk farther west, then circle back to keep my appointment.

  “You looking for something?” The voice is so near, I startle. A girl steps out of a doorway at the top of a concrete staircase under a fire escape just behind me. It’s a good hiding place; I walked by without seeing her. She’s young, about twelve, but she’s done up like a fully initiated Tribe member. Her black jacket and pants are ripped in patterns. Her cheeks are ruddy with makeup, her eyes lined with black and highlighted with glitter. Tribes like makeup. Anything that makes them stand out. But underneath, this girl looks like a pinched, pale child. I know why she’s here. She’s a sentinel, on the lookout for anything that might threaten the Tribe, or be useful.

  I should have said something by now, but I froze when she spoke. I thought I’d be braver. I was when I lived on the streets. The girl jumps down and gives me a quick look, head to toe, assessing, but there’s nothing threatening in her manner. “You looking for something?” she asks again. “Because, if you are, I can find it for you.”

  “I—I don’t know where I am,” I say. Strictly speaking, this is true.

  She smiles. “Where do you want to be?” I can’t tell if she’s mocking or friendly.

  I dig the appointment card out of my pocket. “I’m looking for this building,” I tell her. “I thought it was around here.” As I hand her the card, I remember most street kids can’t read. I’m making a complete mess of this. “See?” I say quickly, pointing to the words. “The ID codes building, on Grosvenor.”

  She peers at the card as if she could read it, then gives it back to me. “Sure. That’s near here. I’ll take you.”

  “That’s all right. You can just point me in the right direction. “

  “I said I’ll take you.”

  I know better than to argue with that tone. I can only hope she’s not planning to lead me into some kind of ambush. At least she can see I’m not carrying anything valuable. But even if she’s honest, she’ll expect payment for this. I reach to the bottom of my pocket as I put the appointment card away. When my fingers touch a few cash tokens, I feel giddy with relief.

  “How did you end up back here?” she asks as she leads me back to the street.

  “I have a really bad sense of direction,” I lie. “Do you live around here?”

  She points ahead. “In the old subway station. We all crash there.”

  This makes sense. Tribes like everyone to sleep in the same place. It makes it harder for kids to run away. A subway station would probably be big enough.

  “What’s your name?” she asks. She sounds friendly and curious.

  With my real name, her Tribe might be able to trace me after I get Sparrow away. “Blay,” I tell her, my street name, from before we found out who I really am. It seems fitting, somehow.

  “I’m Spyker,” she tells me proudly. Most Tribe members never give their names to strangers. She should know that by now. I glance at her, sidelong, as we walk. Maybe I’m wrong about her age. By twelve, most street kids are hardened. There’s an openness about Spyker that makes her seem younger.

  “Here you are,” she says. She’s delivered me safely to the ID codes building. I’m sorry the walk went so quickly. I would have liked to learn more.

  I pull the tokens from my pocket and give them to her.

  “Thanks,” she says. She actually waves goodbye. She’s the strangest Tribe member I’ve ever met.

  My encounter with Spyker makes the visit to Code Scanning unreal, as if my past life has come back to distort the present. I wait twenty minutes for the thirty seconds it takes to scan my micro-dot, then wait another twenty minutes for a download of the number I already knew. In the Code Tracking office, I realize I should have brought my scribe with the forms I was supposed to submit with my number, so that takes twice as long as it should. Lunchtime is almost over when I finally leave the building.

  Walking back to work, I pass an entrance to the old subway station, a stairway in the sidewalk leading down, the broken remains of a shelter around it. It’s pitch-black down there. A gust of foul air sweeps up out of it, making me walk faster, my old life chasing me back to the new.

  11

  WE ARE NOT THE CONSUMERS

  STOP TECHNOLOGY NOW

  —Sign from a protest rally, July 2352

  I find the other aides in the cafeteria, just finishing lunch. Now that we’re all working together, Kayko seems content to eat here, and I’m happy, because that makes it easier for me to slip out to see Sparrow at lunchtime. The events of the morning have left me unsettled, though, not hungry. I gulp down a bowl of soup and I’m ready to leave with everyone else.

  “You could stay and eat a proper lunch,” Griffin says, but I shake my head.

  “I don’t want to miss anything,” I tell him.

  “We’ll divide into teams of two, excluding Kayko,” Griffin says when we return to the media conference room. “She can join one team when she’s ready.”

  “Blake and I can work together.” This is Astral, of all people. Luisa looks startled, probably remembering how he treated me last week. Astral notices. As he passes, he grasps her shoulders from behind and gently shakes her. “Don’t worry, Luisa,” he says, “I’ll be nice to her.” Somehow, he makes this sound like a threat.

  “In that case, Luisa and I will work together.” Griffin sounds uncertain, but no one can think of a reason to object to Astral’s
arrangement. Even I can’t. “Ready, Kayko?” Griffin adds.

  “I’ve got the first two disks,” she says, holding them out on the palm of her hand. She consults the master index. “One’s a protest rally held outside this building in July of 2352, the other’s a public meeting held about a month later. The protest rally will be harder to sort out.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll take,” Astral says. He seems determined to make things as difficult as possible. I give him a look of pure annoyance, but he ignores me.

  “Off we go, then,” Griffin says. He can hardly wait to get started.

  I follow Astral into a projection room. It’s large, so we can run the recording full scale. I pick up a remote, hoping Kayko will load the disk quickly, but nothing happens.

  “So what was that appointment about this morning?” Astral asks.

  I’d rather not tell him, but I don’t have the energy to make up a story. “I have a micro-dot implanted in my arm,” I tell him. “I went to get it scanned so the ID code can be traced. I’m hoping to find out who my father was.”

  “Don’t you have any family at all?” He sounds incredulous, scornful. It’s too much.

  “No, I don’t. It’s not my fault, you know.”

  “I’m not blaming you. It just makes me so angry.”

  “You don’t have to be angry on my behalf. I’m angry enough for myself.” I’ve never actually said that out loud before. It feels good to speak the truth for once. I realize I’ve shouted, but somehow this calms him.

  “Good,” he says. “I thought you were all forgiveness.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  Suddenly, the room is filled with people. ‘The holo-projection has started. I have a hard time concentrating, though. Two minutes alone with Astral and I’ve somehow managed to spill my deepest secret. How did that happen?

  The door opens and Kayko joins us. What we see in the holo-projection helps me begin to put the early years of my life into context. The people at this protest are afraid of technology. They express the same fears, speaker after speaker. “We don’t want another Dark Times,” they say over and over. It’s fascinating, but we don’t identify anyone. After two hours, I feel frustrated and exhausted.

  “Let’s look at the last sequence,” Kayko says. “That’s the media report this footage was used to create.” She pages through the menu and brings up the report.

  A South African man stands in the foreground of the scene, with the rally behind him. He must have been superimposed, because we’ve seen this part of the scene before, without him. “At a protest rally at Queen’s Park in Toronto Prefecture today, a coalition of environmental groups expressed concern about rapid technological advances . . .”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” Astral says impatiently.

  “Noticeable by their absence were leaders of Save Earth Now,” the reporter continues, “which seems to confirm rumours that the group has split from the coalition. Earlier today, I put this question to SEN spokesperson Swan Gil . . .”

  The scene changes to an office interior and the projection freezes. At first, I think it must be a glitch, but Kayko says, “I’ve seen that face.” She has paused the disk. She goes to her file and starts leafing through. After a moment, she holds up a sheaf of papers. “See? Swan Gil. Here she is.”

  The woman in the picture is identical to the one frozen in the holo-projection before us, a small, delicate-looking woman with masses of curly black hair.

  “Good work, Kayko,” I say.

  “At least we haven’t wasted the afternoon,” Astral says, but he sounds less than happy. I’m sure he’d rather have been the first to spot a suspect. “Let’s see what she says.”

  “Anyone who says Save Earth Now has split with the protest coalition is spreading idle gossip. We weren’t there today because of internal deadlines for annual reports. That’s all.” She finishes the interview without adding anything.

  “That’s great,” Kayko says when the recording ends.

  “Let’s take a break.”

  “You want to stop now?” Astral says.

  “I’m exhausted,” Kayko replies. “Just fifteen minutes, then we’ll page back and find the raw footage of the interview.”

  I smell coffee as soon as we leave the projection room. We find Griffin and Luisa, talking excitedly over their mugs. “Who did you find?” Griffin asks. He seems to take success for granted.

  “Just Swan Gil,” Kayko replies. “Did you find anyone?” “Six so far,” Griffin says.

  “Do you know how these protest groups relate to the technocaust?” I ask.

  “I have some ideas,” Griffin says, “but I’d rather save them for my briefing tomorrow. I’d hate to make you listen to everything twice.” Griffin’s modesty means I’ll have to live with my curiosity for another day. “We could use some help,” he continues. “Kayko, would you mind working with us for the rest of the day?”

  “I’d love to.” Kayko looks delighted to escape the tedium of our protest rally.

  So I find myself alone with Astral again at the end of the break. This time, I’m determined not to let him get the better of me. He doesn’t waste any time.

  “Why don’t you know your father’s name?” he says as we walk back to the projection room. I’m getting used to his abruptness.

  “I was taken from my mother by a homeless child on the street in St. Pearl,” I tell him.

  “You mean you were stolen?”

  “Yes. I never saw my mother again. She died in a concentration camp. And I was too young to remember anything. We didn’t know any of this until we found the micro-dot in arm.” I’m tired of answering questions. It’s time Astral answered some. “But what about you?” I say. “You have a Truth Seeker name, so why were your parents taken in the technocaust?”

  I expect him to be defensive. To my surprise, he’s not. “I don’t know who my father was either. There was always just my mother,” he says. “Not everyone raised in a religion grows up to believe. My mother lost her faith when she was young. She trained as a marine biologist. Instead of talking to the dead, she wanted to talk to whales. It wasn’t that different, she used to say, except that whales exist.” He smiles. “Her idea of a joke. Astral is actually my middle name. She gave it to me to please her parents.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Darwin.”

  “Darwin?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing. I can understand why you didn’t use it during the technocaust. So, do you believe? I mean, are you a Truth Seeker?”

  “Yes, I am. My mother sent me to her parents before she disappeared. She knew there was a good chance she might be taken, and her parents lived in the interior, where it was safer. My grandparents are very religious.”

  “Yes, but . . .” I hesitate. We should be working now, but I’m too curious to let it go.

  “You think the idea of communicating with the dead is wacky,” Astral says.

  “Basically, yes.”

  “I’ve taken a lot of comfort from the contact I’ve had with my mother over the years.”

  It takes me a second to process this. “You mean, you talk to her?”

  He sighs. “It’s not like making a voice-call. There are layers and layers of interference between her plane of existence and ours.”

  “But you have communicated with her?” I know I’m pushing, but I want to know what he believes. And he’s been pretty hard on me.

  “A few times, yes. When my life was in turmoil and I needed comfort, she was there. Now, we’d better get back to work.”

  “Wait, just one more question. How old were you when she disappeared?”

  “I was ten.”

  “You must remember everything about her. You’re so lucky.”

  “Am I?” Astral sounds angry. Then he looks at me and softens. “Maybe I am. I never thought of it that way.” He presses the menu button and pages back to the raw footage of the interview with Swan Gi
l.

  And there she is. She’s beautiful, and she seems to know it. “Andrew, darling,” she tells the reporter, “if you think you’re going to get me to admit there’s been some kind of split between SEN and the coalition holo-projection” she begins, but he cuts her off.

  “Swan, darling,” he says, “in my experience, people only talk about ‘admitting’ when they’ve got something to hide.”

  She looks furious, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, then finally says, “Do your damned interview and get out of here.” The rest is what we’ve already seen. I wonder how active she was in the technocaust. I hate her already.

  At the end of the afternoon, I can hardly wait to tell Erica what we’ve been doing. We can’t talk about our work on the bus home, of course, but over supper, I lay out my files. She frowns when I use the word “suspects.”

  “Persons of interest aren’t suspects, Blake,” she says.

  I find myself using Astral’s argument. “It’s so awkward to say ‘persons of interest’ over and over.” I pass Swan Gil’s dossier to her. “We found this woman today. Did you meet her in the prison?”

  “Swan Gil? No, Blake,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. “She’s dead.” She pages through the dossier. “See? Here’s a summary of the media reports about her arrest. Not long after the technocaust began. I remember when it happened.” The reports are dated 2354, the year my father disappeared. The other aides probably knew that. I didn’t have as much time to read the dossiers.

  I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “Why is she in this file if she’s dead?”

  “She’s a person of interest because she died. Quite a few of the people in your files are activists who died in the technocaust. We’d like to know what happened to them. That’s why ‘suspect’ isn’t the best word.”