“But the situation got worse. Dido stayed at home, listening to a little radio obsessively, trying to find out what was happening. The other guys in my cell were arrested. Big media event, that was. Then Eric Wong was appointed Environmental Protector. Shortly after, Fern Logos became assistant deputy to the Medical Protector. In October, the government announced the list of restricted technologies, and people with specialized knowledge were told to obtain a ‘technology registration number.’ A few were actually given numbers, but most who reported to Internal Protection never came back.”
“How do you know that?”
“During the winter, a resistance began to emerge. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to connect. I’d been living a double life for years. Ironic, isn’t it? Just a few months after Falcon Edwards cut that deal, I was working with the very people Dido and I had been trying to restrict. The techies knew I was an eco-terrorist, but we didn’t talk about it. I had skills they needed, and we had a common enemy.
“I enjoyed my years in the resistance. We rescued people from under the noses of officials and got them to safety. It was a lot like being an eco-terrorist—hating the Protectors, putting myself in danger, getting the same rush. But things were had for Dido. The technocaust just ate at her soul. And I was too busy playing hero to notice.
“By spring, the technocaust was out of hand. Just a few days after Eric Wong died in that highly unlikely ‘accident,’ Fern Logos was killed, supposedly by eco-terrorists. There were no real eco-terrorists left by then, but the government used his death as an excuse to declare all members of environmental protection groups eco-terrorists. Suddenly, they were all criminals. It’s hard to describe the climate. The military was helping the government, of course, but even gangs of ordinary people went door to door with lists, checking ID cards. The government only had to brand you an eco-terrorist or say you were involved in some sort of advanced technology. When key ‘eco-terrorists’ were caught, there were big media stories, with profiles of their lives and their supposed crimes.
“I was still moving Dido and the baby every few weeks to keep them safe, but not spending any time with them, not understanding how isolating that was.” He stops and looks down at his hands. “I couldn’t see what was right in front of my eyes.” He stops and I wait, saying nothing because I can’t think of anything to say. Finally, he takes a shaky breath and continues.
“The day after Swan was arrested, Dido took the baby and turned herself in. Just walked into an Internal Protection office and told them who she was. We were able to find that much out later, but we lost the trail after that.” His voice chokes. “I couldn’t find them, so I couldn’t save them.”
One hot tear spills down my cheek, taking me by surprise. I had forgotten myself and everything’ around us. I hesitate, then put my hand over his. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve tried to tell myself that. It doesn’t work.” He gestures to the camp around him. “This is my life now. I take the children no one else wants. It doesn’t make up for what happened to Dido and Rosa, but it gives me a reason to keep going. That has to be enough.” He stands and pats me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve lived with this for a long time now.” He looks past the bench to my bodyguard standing at a distance. “Tell your minder we’re putting you inside a tent today, so you’ll be out of sight. It’s too chilly to leave the little ones outside. I’ve got a lot of work to do now. Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I say. Then I cover my face with my hands and burst into tears.
Spending the day with the children helps me recover, but Prospero’s story haunts me. By Sunday evening, I can’t keep it to myself any longer, so I go to Erica and tell her everything. We’re both crying by the time I finish, but I feel better.
“That’s so terrible,” Erica says, wiping her eyes. “But how strong he must be, to pull himself together and go on like that.”
“Yes, and if I’d known about his past a few weeks ago, I would never have spoken to him. I’d have hated him. Just like Astral would have hated me.”
“That’s true,” Erica says. I sense she’s waiting for me to go on.
“I must be changing,” I say, “because it seems to me I don’t have the right to judge anyone anymore.” But I shake my head. “If every change is going to be this painful and confusing, I’m not sure I want to keep going.”
To my surprise, she agrees. “It would be easier to stay the way you are now.”
“No! No, it wouldn’t. I can’t stay like this.” I remember what I said to Griffin. “I want to find some way to put all this anger and bitterness down and just walk away from it.”
Erica smiles.
My mouth falls open in surprise. “You tricked me.” Then, somehow, I find I’m laughing.
She laughs too. “I didn’t trick you, Blake. It’s what you said, you are changing. So, what are you going to do next?”
I’ve already made up my mind about that. “I guess I’d better meet with the Living Lost. Not all of them,” I add quickly. “Just one or two to begin with.”
She smiles again. “I’m sure Hanif can arrange that.”
I shake my head in amazement. “I can hardly believe I’m doing this.”
Erica puts her hand on mine. “It won’t always be this hard, you know. Eventually, you’re going to come out the other side.”
I pretend to agree as I say goodnight, but when I’m alone, I allow myself to wonder how I can get to the other side without going past my father. Maybe this is just a way of stalling.
26
A person can only become a person through other persons.
—A Zulu saying
On Monday morning, I find myself sitting nervously in a meeting room, waiting to see who the Living Lost will send to me. I’m relieved when only two women appear. One is thin and nervous looking, the other is stout and serene. Both have skin the colour of chocolate. The stout one smiles broadly as she speaks. “Blake, child, it’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m Cadence Nkomo. This is Mimi Beaumardi.” Her voice is low and musical. She makes no move toward me, but I feel as if I’ve been hugged. They seat themselves across the table.
I hardly know where to begin, but that doesn’t matter. Cadence has everything under control. “We were so happy to see you on The Solar Flare, honey. So much of what you said was just what we’ve been wanting to say. But we’ve been going around in circles for so long, trying to decide how to tell our stories, if we should tell our stories, not knowing how people might react. Isn’t that right, Mimi?”
“So it is,” Mimi says.
“It took so long for us to all find one another, people of like minds, who want to put the sadness of the past behind them and just forgive. Not forget, just forgive one another and start to work together. Then you come along, just a slip of a child. And now, we have the courage to speak out. All because of you.” She sits back in her chair and beams at me. Mimi smiles too.
“I’m nothing special,” I start to say.
“Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that, child,” Cadence says.
I change the subject to move the conversation away from me. “How did the Living Lost start?”
“Mimi and I were neighbours,” Cadence says.
“Cadence was the one with the idea,” Mimi adds quickly. Cadence smiles her broad, ready smile. “That’s right. During the Recovery, when the Dark Times were ending and knowledge was being restored, my great-grandfather came here from South Africa. He was a bio-technician, and he brought knowledge people here so desperately needed. But he didn’t just bring his knowledge. He brought his wisdom, too. In my homeland, there’s something called ubuntu. That’s the foundation we used to build the Living Lost. That’s our cornerstone.”
I lean forward. “What is ubuntu?”
“In Africa, they say, ‘A person can only become a person through other persons.’ In this society, you would say, ‘You can’t respect others until you respect you
rself.’ But, if a person has ubuntu, she would say, ‘I can’t respect myself if I don’t respect others.’ Because we are all part of humanity. Do you see? If you offer disrespect to others, you diminish yourself. If you hate another, it’s like hating yourself. A person with ubuntu is able to accept others and knows that we all belong together.”
“I didn’t know about ubuntu until Cadence taught me,” Mimi says. “I have seen great sorrow in my life. Bad things were done. I didn’t know how to find peace.”
“And now you do?” I ask.
Mimi nods. “Should I tell her my story?” she asks, and Cadence agrees.
“Before the technocaust, Cadence and I were neighbours. We lived side by side. But I did not love this woman. She had a bigger house than I did. She wore nicer clothes. Her children did better in school. I pretended to be nice, but her happiness ate holes in my heart. My husband felt the same. He worked hard, in construction. He never seemed to get anywhere. Cadence’s husband, he worked in genetic modification. He had a good job and he made more money.
“When the technocaust came, we thought, now, these people who are always happy, they will know some grief. As soon as the government restricted technology, my husband went to Internal Security and reported Cadence’s husband. The military came and took him away.”
“I had to take my children and leave,” Cadence says calmly.
“And I had to stay and live with what we’d done,” Mimi says. “Other neighbours came and looted her house, they took everything away. I learned the hard way, you can’t make your happiness out of someone else’s grief. Every time I passed that empty house, I had to look away. My husband joined a gang that went door to door with lists they downloaded from Internal Protection, rounding up wanted people. He thought this would earn him a job in the government. But later, the military came and took him away, too.”
“What happened?” I ask, and Cadence answers.
“After the most violent part of the technocaust, the Protectors decided to cover their tracks. They took people like Grant Beaumardi and put them in forced labour camps in the industrial zones, so they couldn’t talk about how the government had encouraged them.”
“We got him back after the Uprising,” Mimi says, “and he was a shell of the man I married. By then, Cadence had come back to her house. I couldn’t speak to her, I was so ashamed. But when Grant came home, she showed up at my door to help me. I was too embarrassed to tell her my story, but I needed her help so badly. Finally, one day, I found the courage to tell her the truth, and she forgave me.”
I stare at Cadence. “How could you do that?”
“When I came back to my house, ‘Some of my neighbours brought me things they’d stolen from us after we fled. ‘We kept this for you,’ they said, and I accepted that. It was then that I remembered what I’d been taught about ubuntu. I realized, if I was going to live among these people, I had to forgive them or I’d be asking hate to take a place at my table, to sleep in my bed. I couldn’t do that to my children. I wanted them to grow up without hate. So I started to reflect on the spirit of ubuntu, and then I began to teach it to others.”
“And that was how we started our meetings, and we grew into the Living Lost,” Mimi says.
“We’ve been wanting to tell everyone this is what has to happen now, but we were afraid to speak,” Cadence says. “Then I saw you on The Solar Flare, and you just opened up your soul. I looked inside, and I saw ubuntu there. I know you can show us the way to make things right.”
This is ridiculous. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Cadence must see that she’s upsetting me because she stands. “We’ve taken up enough of Blake’s time today, Mimi. We should leave her be. Besides, we have that meeting with Dr. Siegel soon.” I’m afraid to ask them what that’s about.
Mimi and Cadence hug me warmly as they leave. I hug them back, but I can’t shake the feeling they are just plain crazy.
“You come and meet everyone when you’re ready, Blake,” Cadence says. “We meet every Thursday night at my house. Here’s the address.” She hands me a card. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I start to say, but the disappointment in their eyes is more than I can bear. “Maybe someday,” I add, so they leave the room smiling.
After Mimi and Cadence go, I’m overwhelmed by a tangle of emotions and ideas. I can’t deal with this now. I struggle to clear my mind as I go find the other aides.
They are not busy in the media rooms, as I’d expected. Instead, everyone is sitting in the conference room, looking gloomy. What do they have to feel gloomy about? Are crazy women making demands of them? I check myself before I speak. It isn’t fair to blame them for my problems.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, trying to sound as if I mean it. “We’re not getting anywhere,” Kayko says. “I thought this hologram would tell us so much.”
“It did,” I say.
“It did, but now it doesn’t. We haven’t learned a thing since last Thursday.”
“But I have.” They all look at me in surprise. I tell them about Prospero and Dido, about Cadence and Mimi.
“You learned all that?” Astral says when I finish. “We’ve got to start talking to these people.”
But Kayko shakes her head. “We can’t. That’s what the victim statements are for. If we talk to people before the Council does, it would be like putting ourselves before them.”
“When will they start?” I ask.
“Another week or so, not long,” Kayko replies.
“We’re talking about things that happened fifteen years ago,” Griffin says. “We can wait another week. In the meantime, we should pull together our report for the Justice Council.”
“Griffin’s right,” Kayko says. “We can start by writing summaries of everything we’ve learned. No more than ten pages. Then we’ll share what we’ve got and try to produce a coherent report.”
Everyone agrees. So, without warning, we begin a new phase of work, dividing into our own offices.
The suite I share with Erica is full of people now. I hide myself away in a corner office. My only relief is lunch with the other aides. This is isolating work. It leaves space for thoughts to creep in. Thoughts about my father. Even if he has no access to the media in prison, he must know I’m alive by now. Why hasn’t he asked to see me? What kind of monster wouldn’t want to see his own child? These thoughts feed on one another, building, until I’m furious by the end of every day. At night, I lie under the skymaker, the wheel of anger turning so furiously inside me I can hardly think. When I finally sleep, my father is always lurking in my dreams, no matter what else is going on, somewhere in the background with his back to me. I wake up exhausted.
By Thursday, my distress is apparent. “You look terrible,” Erica says at breakfast. “Maybe you should take a few days off.”
“No!” I cry so forcefully, she drops her knife. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that going to work is the only thing that holds me together right now.” I stop and take a breath. “I didn’t mean that. It sounds too dramatic.”
“Maybe it’s not too dramatic. You’ve been pushing yourself so hard, Blake. I wish I could think of a way to make things easier for you.”
I sigh. “I know what I’ve got to do,” I say. “The Living Lost are meeting tonight. I should go.”
In the morning, meeting with the Living Lost seems bearable, but by the end of the day, I would rather crawl under a rock than meet those people. How can I face their compassion and forgiveness when I find nothing remotely like that in myself? But Hanif has ordered a car and driver for me, so I let the momentum of his arrangements carry me forward.
Cadence’s home is north, in a part of the city I’ve never seen before, very different from the quiet old neighbourhood beside High Park. Most of the houses are new, high-tech but cheaply made. Many have stores on the bottom storey. People line the streets, standing in groups talking while children play around them. The house we stop at i
s more sturdy than others, but it still bears scars that must come from the technocaust.
Cadence herself opens the door. “I’ knew you’d come,” she says quietly. Her voice is filled with such warmth and dignity that my misgivings abate.
Cadence seats me beside her in a room that holds maybe fifteen people. It’s comfortable, but the furnishings have seen better days. The meeting isn’t what I’d expected, though. I’m braced to hear story after story about the technocaust, but the Living Lost turns out to be more than a simple support group. After introductions, they get down to work quickly.
“Everything set for the Saturday night patrol?” Mimi asks. “Who’s collecting the blankets?” A burly-looking man raises his hand. “Good, Ray. Make sure they give you extra, it’s getting cold out there now. What about the food?”
“I got that covered,” an older woman says. “Soup or chili?”
“Both, if you can get those big kettles from the Happy Mouth again. That worked really well last week.”
Mimi nods. “We’ll see what we can do. We should think about buying our own at some point.”
I lean over to Cadence. “What are you planning?”
She whispers her reply. “We take food and blankets and some basic medical supplies down to those debtors at Union Station every Saturday night.”
“What about protection?” Mimi is asking now. “Lolinda, can we rely on that big son of yours?”
“As long as he’s finished by midnight, he says that’s fine,” a woman replies.
I remember the crowd that gathered around Spyker and me the day I found out about my father, and I shudder involuntarily. “That’s dangerous,” I whisper to Cadence.
She nods. “It can be. We don’t take any chances, though.”
I feel comfortable with these people. They remind me of Prospero and of the weavers at home, trying to deal with the problems around them. But I don’t offer to help. The memory of that trip to Union Station is just too painful.
The Raintree Rebellion Page 20
