The Raintree Rebellion

by Janet Mcnaughton

  When they finish making arrangements for the Saturday night patrol, Cadence introduces me to everyone. I’m afraid she’s going to ask me to speak about my past, but instead she says, “Everyone here is really interested in what happened in Terra Nova, Blake. Why don’t you explain how you managed to get elections so quickly?”

  I’m happy to talk about Terra Nova. These people listen intently and ask intelligent questions. By the time the evening’s over, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in days. People start to leave. Every one of them shakes my hand or pats me, as if I’m some kind of talisman, some kind of lucky charm. But I like them and what they’re doing so much, it doesn’t bother me.

  I know the driver is waiting, but I don’t want to go yet. This house is such a welcoming place, if I didn’t know what had happened here, I’d never suspect. Somehow, Cadence has put her life back together. I wish I understood how.

  “I’ll help you gather up the dishes,” I offer.

  When the plates and cups are collected, Cadence turns to me. “Child, something’s troubling you. What is it?”

  I don’t realize what I’m going to say until it’s out. “I want to know why my father doesn’t want to see me.”

  Cadence pats my arm. “Let’s sit down and talk,” she says. We sit at her small kitchen table. “What makes you think your father doesn’t want to see you?” she asks.

  I explain about my micro-dot and the information from Code Tracking. “He’s been notified by now. He knows I’m alive, and he hasn’t asked to see me,” I finish. “Why?”

  “I don’t know your father, so it’s hard for me to guess,” she says. “But what would you do in his place? Would you want to see your child?”

  A snort escapes from me. “If I’d done everything he has, I wouldn’t imagine I’d be worthy to talk to my child.” This stops me. “Oh.”

  Cadence smiles. “Maybe you just answered your own question.”

  I sit in silence for a moment, taking this in. It makes sense. “So what do I do?” I ask at last.

  “If you want to talk to him, I’d say you have to make the first move.”

  “But what if we’re wrong? What if he really is a monster and he isn’t interested in me at all?”

  “Do you know anything about your mother?”

  This question surprises me. “Quite a bit. I even have a voice recording she made for me before we started to run.”

  “Does she seem like the kind of woman who would have married a monster?”

  “No,” I say. “But people change. He changed. He must have.”

  “If you have reason to believe there was good in his heart once, I think you’ll find it’s there still,” Cadence says.

  “What if I’m wrong?” My voice is small and miserable.

  “If you’re wrong, you have to hold your head up high and walk away. There’s lots of people in this world ready to love you, child. You’re a special person.” She says the word “special” in a way that almost makes it possible for me to believe her this time.

  27

  To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

  —Nelson Mandela, twentieth-century leader

  The courage Cadence gives me may not last. If I wait long to see my father, I might change my mind. On the way home, I ask the driver to arrange a meeting with Hanif.

  “You already have your security clearance,” Hanif says the next morning. “I should be able to arrange this soon.”

  I was afraid it might take weeks. I’m amazed. “But they were so careful about letting the Justice Councillors in.”

  “Allowances are made for relatives,” he says, and then he smiles. “Besides, you come highly recommended.”

  I’m supposed to spend the morning summarizing the broadcasts of RTLM, but I’m too stressed to concentrate. I keep writing the same sentences over and over. I jump when Hanif appears at my door a few hours later. “We can go now,” he says.

  I can’t believe this. “To the prison?”

  He nods. “I’ll take you myself.”

  Erica is waiting in the outside office. “Do you want me to come?” she asks.

  I hug her, then I say, “I have to do this alone.”

  Hanif and I travel in silence. I’m too nervous to talk, too nervous to think ahead. I’ve imagined meeting my father so many times, but never like this. Don’t expect anything, I warn myself. I’ll get through this and get on with my life, like Cadence said.

  We pass through several security barriers before we even approach the main walls of the prison. It’s a huge, imposing structure. Then we leave the vehicle and go to a small door in the wall. Every door is unlocked to let us pass and locked again behind us. I’m beginning to feel trapped. Finally, Hanif says, “I’ll wait here.” I go through the last doorway alone.

  The room is empty except for a table with two chairs, one on either side. There are guards by both doors, but otherwise, I’m alone. “You can sit,” one says. His voice is not unkind. I do sit, but when the other door opens, I stand and lean forward across the table before I can stop myself.

  The man who enters with a guard at either elbow is tall and dark, but otherwise unexceptional. No one I’d notice in a crowd. I sit down, propelled by the weight of my disappointment. I feel no spark of recognition.

  He keeps his head down until he’s seated. Then he raises his eyes and looks at me, reluctantly. And he pales. “You look . . .” he begins, but his voice falters. He tries again. “You look so much like Emily. Do you remember her?”

  I shake my head. “I was too little.”

  He agrees. “You were very little.” I hope he’ll say more, but there’s just a long, uncomfortable silence. I consider telling the guards I want to leave, but then he speaks again.

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “I do,” I say, and I tell him everything we learned. He listens without moving, staring down at his hands. When I finish, there’s another long silence.

  Finally he says, “Thank you for telling me.” Then he adds, “Suppose you tell me what brought you here.” I can’t read his voice. It could be empty of emotion, or filled with all emotions, in the way the colour white is really composed of all colours.

  “I want to know how this happened,” I say. “I want to know what happened to you.”

  He looks startled. Then he looks scared. “I guess you have a right to know,” he says finally. “My area is—was—remote sensing. I designed tracking systems. Before all this happened, I was possibly one of the ten best in my field. Not in Toronto. In the world. That must sound arrogant, but it’s true.

  “I lived for my work; it was everything to me. I never expected to marry. Then Emily came into my life. Her brother, Tony, worked in my lab. We met at his wedding.” For the first time, a ghost of a smile flits across his face. “I almost didn’t go, but that’s how I met her. Most people, when I mentioned remote sensing, their eyes would glaze over, but Emily was interested. She knew very little about it, but she listened and she asked intelligent questions. She was pretty and funny, but what I really loved about her was her intellectual curiosity. We shared an almost insatiable hunger for knowledge. We were so lucky to find one another. The first years of our marriage, I used to lie awake at night and wonder, ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this happiness?’”

  I wonder the same thing, but I don’t say so. I just wait for him to continue.

  “When you were born, I designed the chip for you myself. I thought it would let me find you anywhere.” There’s bitterness in his voice, but I can’t tell if it’s because he lost me, or because his design didn’t do what he expected.

  “I didn’t pay attention to politics,” he continues. “People were talking about hostility toward technology, but I thought they must be exaggerating. I expected it to pass. But Emily didn’t. She was the one who made plans. By the fall of 2353, everyone was nervous. We agreed then that she would take you
and run if anything happened to me. I was so sure I’d be able to track you.

  “And then I was taken. It was a big sweep, lots of people were picked up that week. We were all held in the Hippodrome for questioning. Once they latched on to me, they didn’t let go. Have you ever heard of a man named Falcon Edwards?”

  “I have.”

  “Edwards wanted me for Internal Security. I was held in his ‘private suites’ he called them, his own personal prison. At first, I refused to cooperate.” He sighs. “He was a clever man. He pretended to be friendly, learned all he could about me. It didn’t take him long to realize that you and Emily were my weak spot. He told me you were gone, then he promised me access to long-range tracking systems if I cooperated. They wanted me to develop a system that could track down people they wanted to find without their knowledge.”

  This piques my curiosity. “But how? You’d need to plant some sort of homing device on them to begin with, wouldn’t you?”

  For the first time, he looks at me with real interest. “A lot of these people had security clearances. Their retinal scans were already in the database. I was supposed to develop a tracking system for a retinal scanner that could be hidden in public places. In ads on the public transit, for example. The scanner would capture the retinal scans of anyone who looked at these devices long enough to read what was written on them. If we got a match, we’d know where that person was.”

  “You’d know where they had been,” I say. “That wouldn’t let you catch them, would it?”

  “It would if we found patterns in their movements. A lot of people take the same routes every day, even if they’re in hiding. Edwards expected to pick up enough fugitives to make it useful.”

  I’ve been so caught up in the originality of this plan, I let myself forget what it was used for. Now he’s reminded me.

  “How could you agree to help?”

  “I wanted to find you and Emily more than anything,” he says. “And I was arrogant about my abilities. I thought I could design a system that would look as if it should work, but build in enough bugs so it would never really be functional. I thought, if Internal Security invested enough time trying to find people with a system that wasn’t working, some of them might escape.”

  “So you never really cooperated?” I ask. For the first time since I’ve entered this prison, I feel a faint hope.

  “Never is a long time. You’d better let me finish.

  “I agreed to develop the system. I took as long as I reasonably could to design it, hoping people still on the run would escape in the meantime. It took eighteen months to get everything in place. I had hoped they’d let me access the tracking systems I needed to find my family when that was done, but Edwards said my design had to work before he’d give me the passwords. Alone, I could have hacked into the systems, but my access was always closely monitored. Of course, the scanning system I’d developed didn’t work. After three months without a single match, they figured it out. I tried to pretend the flaws were accidental, but that didn’t help. ‘Fix it,’ Edwards said. I took as long as I could, but you have to understand, I was frantic by then. I had to know where you were.

  “I held them off for almost two years, but finally, I gave them a system that did what they wanted. Some key people were captured. People who might have escaped without me.” He pauses again. “When that happened, I was finally given access to the long-range tracking systems. Edwards wasn’t around by then. They told me he was dying. But when I looked, it seemed as if you were dead. And without you, I could never hope to find Emily. After that, I lost interest in everything but my work. I hardly noticed when the technocaust ended. I stayed on at Internal Protection. A real collaborator, because that was the only life left to me.

  “I deserve to be here. I don’t expect forgiveness. When I found out you were alive, they told me about the work you’re doing here. You shouldn’t be burdened with a father who’s a criminal. That’s why I didn’t ask to see you. There’s only one thing I wish I knew,” he continues. “How were you declared dead? Did your chip fail?”

  “No, it still works perfectly. They’ve been using it to track me here.”

  A smile of satisfaction flickers across his face. “I knew it,” he says.

  “Security says someone must have removed my code from the system.”

  He frowns. “That’s hard to believe. The security around those systems was amazing. The Protectors knew people they were looking for had the ability to break into most systems.”

  “I was told it must have been done internally, by someone who had access.”

  He looks at me in amazement. “If they let me into the system, I could tell who did it.”

  “How?”

  “I designed it so no one could make changes without leaving a signature code. If the person who deleted your code had a security clearance, I can tell who it was.” His face lights for a moment, but just as quickly his excitement fades. “I’d never get to talk to anyone who could let me do that,” he says. “The paperwork for an interview alone would take years.”

  I stand up and go to the door. “I think the man who can give you permission is right here.”

  28

  No employee of the Transitional Council, or any of its related bodies, may contribute to policy-making with knowledge that there is an opportunity to further that person’s private interests.

  —Ethical Guidelines, Transitional Council of Toronto, May 2369

  Hanif sends for me a few days later. “It wasn’t difficult to convince the Transitional Council to give your father access to the code-tracking system,” he says. “They want to unravel this mystery too. But he won’t be allowed to work inside the prison. It’s too much of a security risk to take the equipment in there.”

  “But that makes it impossible for him to do anything, doesn’t it?” I ask.

  “Not if we bring him here. He can use secure equipment while I monitor his activities.”

  “They’ll let you do that?”

  “He committed no violent crimes, and he’s always cooperated fully. We think it highly unlikely that he’d try to escape, and our building is secure.”

  “That means yes, doesn’t it?”

  “That means yes. Do you want to see him while he’s here? That would require a higher security clearance, but I can get it for you.”

  I hesitate. My father seems more interested in his tracking systems than me. Still, I want to know what happened. “I’d like that,” I finally say.

  “Do you want to watch him work on your code?” Hanif asks.

  “Could I? Thank you.” I’m so grateful to Hanif for doing all this for me.

  I look for Kayko in her office to tell her what’s happening.

  “So you might actually figure out who took your code out of the system?” Kayko says. “Do you think you’ll ever know why?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “It doesn’t seem likely, does it? My father knows a lot, but I’ll be surprised if even he can unravel that.”

  “Blake, how do you feel now that you’ve met your father? I’ve been waiting for a chance to ask you.”

  “He’s not what I’d hoped for before I knew he was a collaborator. But he’s not as bad as I was expecting him to be after I found out. Erica said he was just a person who got caught up in things beyond his control, and she’s right.” I tell Kayko how he tried to sabotage the tracking system he was forced to design.

  “Most people would understand it wasn’t his fault,” Kayko says when I finish.

  “But who will ever hear his story? It may be years before he comes to trial. Anyway, even if he resisted, he’s not the father I was hoping for. He’s more interested in remote sensing than people.”

  I find life easier this week. I’m not so angry and I’m not working alone. We’ve come back together to produce a report from our summaries. In the halls, I sometimes pass Cadence and Mimi, who smile but pass without stopping. The Living Lost have stopped demonstrating outside the b
uilding. I wonder what they’re up to now.

  Over the next few days, Kayko’s ability to take our disparate bits and fit them together into a coherent whole amazes me. I’m not alone. “You’re a born editor,” Griffin says to her one afternoon, and it’s true.

  The work is so satisfying, I’ve almost put my father out of my mind by the time Hanif sends for me. I follow his messenger through the maze of tunnels and security checks, deep into the sub-basement of the Security building, until a door opens, and I find Hanif with my father in a small room jammed with equipment. Hanif gestures to a chair. My father is hunched over a console, lost to everything. He barely acknowledges me.

  “You can start now,” Hanif says. I’m grateful they waited for me.

  My father enters the code-tracking system. ‘Here’s Blake’s file,” he says after a moment. Then he hits a few keys and the display changes completely. “This is the programming code,” he says. “Anyone making changes would work at this level.” He hits a few more keys and the display changes again.

  Hanif looks startled. “What’s that?”

  “This is the sub-code. It’s my system for tracking changes,” my father replies. “When I started to cooperate, they finally gave me a security clearance and some freedom. I wasn’t really expecting this layer to be useful, I just did it because I could.”

  “We didn’t know it existed,” Hanif says. He sounds stern.

  “I’m sorry. There was so much to communicate, it escaped me. I’ll give you the access codes before I leave and explain how it works,” my father says as he continues to search the screen.

  “You didn’t check her file when you were told Blake was dead?” Hanif asks.

  “No, I just accepted the news at face value. So many people died in those days; I’d been expecting it so long. It never occurred to me it might not be true.

  “I’m switching back to code now, so we can see where changes were made in Blake’s file,” he says. “This is where the micro-chip was brought online, just after Blake was born. That predates my sub-code system, but I know who made that entry. I did. I wasn’t working directly for the government then, but I designed the system, so I knew everyone in Code Tracking. They let me come in and make this entry. That was such a great day.”