My name is Blake Raintree. I was born on July 14, 2352.
For the first sixteen years of my life I didn’t know those things about myself. Not my name or my birthdate or my age. I didn’t know who my parents were, or how I had been separated from them. I didn’t know if I was lost or thrown away.
—From the victim statement of Blake Raintree
“Look at the city!” Erica says. She makes for the nose of the airship, lurching a little as it dips into its descent. Her voice is full of wonder and regret. She hasn’t seen Toronto for more than fifteen years.
I trail her through the empty observation deck. Most people are already below, vying to be first off, but Erica wanted me to see this. “Look,” she says again. Tall buildings rise directly in front of us in the bright morning sun, towers of glass and stone and steel, faceted to catch the light. Most have roof gardens. It’s amazing. And it fills me with overwhelming disappointment.
“I don’t remember it,” I tell her. “I thought there would be . . . something. Recognition or a feeling of coming home. I don’t feel anything.”
She puts her arm around me. “Of course you don’t, Blake. Sixteen years is a long time and you were barely two when you left. How could you remember?”
I don’t say anything. I was born here. Something about this place ought to resonate with me. I believed it would.
“You were up and gone before I woke this morning,” Erica continues. “Was it the nightmare again?” I nod. “Can you tell me about it?” she asks. “Come and sit down.”
“I’ll try,” I tell her. I take a deep breath. “It’s a short dream, just a moment, really. I’m with my mother, but I’m very small, I barely reach her waist. It’s night and everything is soaked in dread. The worst part is my mother’s voice. That’s what makes it so awful.”
“What does she say?”
“She’s begging me to keep up with her, over and over. My arm aches right into the shoulder socket, she’s pulling so hard. The pain seems very real. And I know it’s all wrong. My mother isn’t supposed to ask me to do more than I can. That’s not really a thought, but it’s in the dream. You know?” Erica nods and I continue. “I want her to pick me up, so I can go to sleep. I dig my heels in and take a deep breath, and a howl starts inside me, swelling and swelling until it finally breaks out. But it’s more than a sound. It fills everything. My ears, my eyes, the world. When the howl starts, the dream ends. Waking is like falling. My whole body jumps.”
Erica shudders. “No wonder you didn’t want to talk about it. But now we’re here, maybe the nightmare will stop. Maybe this trip caused it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been following the route you took all those years ago, down the St. Lawrence to Nova Scotia and across to Terra Nova. It’s the same journey, in reverse. At some point when you were travelling with your mother you must have felt the way you do in the nightmare.”
“I probably did. But when I’m awake, it’s easier to imagine what it was like for her, how scared she must have been, with the technocaust starting, my father and so many others just arrested because of their special knowledge. She was so brave to make that trip alone with a small child. I would have been a dead weight, too heavy to carry and too little to walk any distance by myself. Without me, she might have survived. And look what happened. A few weeks after we made it to Terra Nova, I was stolen from her by a homeless child and she never saw me again. And then, because she went public to try to get me back, she ended up dying in a concentration camp. Maybe that’s why I’m trying to stop her in the dream.”
Worry lines Erica’s face, making her look her age. I usually forget she’s almost sixty, about ten years older than my mother would have been.
“I wish you wouldn’t torture yourself like this, Blake,” she says. “I almost wish we hadn’t found out so much about your past sometimes. Don’t you think your mother would be happy to know you’ve found people who love and care for you?”
I put my hand on her arm. “Of course she would. She’d love you and William. You’re my parents now. I learned so much about her, these past two years, living in St. Pearl with people who knew her.”
“They knew a lot about her, didn’t they? You have a lot of time to talk in a concentration camp.” A shadow passes over Erica’s face. Because her life was torn apart, too. If the technocaust hadn’t happened, she’d probably still be teaching history at the university in Toronto. Instead, she was forced to run, just like us, but a year later. I sometimes forget she lived in the same camp my mother died in—but after, near the end of the technocaust, when it became possible to escape.
“And your mother would be so proud to know you’re coming back to Toronto to work with people who are trying to put everything back together again,” Erica continues. “I’m happy you agreed to come with me, Blake, even if it does mean interrupting your education. This Justice Council is going to be so important. If we make it work, if hearings about past injustices can be held, the victims of the technocaust will be heard. Maybe we can even make elections possible.” Her eyes shine. Getting the Justice Council to function is going to be a challenge, but Erica is undaunted. She looks to the future, never dwelling on the past, no matter how bitter it might have been. But whenever she talks this way, I add a few wishes of my own. Yes, we can see that justice is done. And, while we’re at it, we can punish the people who ruined so many thousands of lives. I want the ones who took my parents away from me to pay. This anger is a wheel inside my heart that never stops turning, the thing that makes it possible for me to breathe, to think, to be. Without it, I might cease to exist.
Of course, I never say that to Erica. She would try to take my anger away, and it’s what keeps me going. That, and the thought that I will eventually be able to make a victim statement before the Justice Council myself. I’m already working on it.
William, Erica’s husband, was my first science teacher. The idea that I would interrupt my education upset him at first, but when he realized how important it is to me to explore my past by coming here, he relented. Before we left home he gave me two presents for the journey. One was a portable holo-lab, to let me continue my science education, and the other was a notebook. It’s the ancient kind, made of paper with a red metal coil binding so it lies flat when it’s open. And it’s divided into sections. “So you can think about the past and the future all at once,” William said when he gave it to me, smiling. At the time, I didn’t know what he meant, but now I do. In this book I can write about all the new things that happen, but I can also work on my victim statement. I lie awake at night, thinking of things I want to say, and in the morning I write them down in the notebook so I won’t forget. My victim statement is the most important thing I will ever write. It has to be perfect.
Erica has gone to the windows again. “Look, Blake, a jet plane!” She points to a long, slender silhouette in the distance, low in the sky. “It’s landing at the airport north of the city.” Erica sighs. “We could have made this journey in just a few hours in one of those, instead of three days. If I’d known this trip was going to be so hard on you, I might have let the Transitional Council pay the extra money for the plane tickets.”
“I’d never expect you to do that for me,” I say, but I’m touched. The fuel cells that power these airships are too weak for planes. The jets need ancient technology, internal combustion engines that use rare and costly fossil fuel. There are huge taxes on anything that creates so much pollution, so travelling by jet is expensive. The temporary government in Toronto that is bringing us here, the Transitional Council, would have paid the fare, but Erica couldn’t bring herself to travel in one of those C02-spewing monsters. “Throwbacks from the old days when we ruined the earth,” she said. Erica lives by her principles.
When I look ahead again, we seem uncomfortably close to the buildings. “It looks like we might crash.”
“Don’t worry,” Erica says, “we’ll move out over Lake Ontario soon.”
I get a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as we descend even more rapidly. The tall buildings seem to swing to our right. The city beneath us is so vast. Just before we reach the lake, we see something strange in the streets below-crowds of people who seem to be wandering aimlessly.
“That’s odd,” Erica says. “Excuse me,” she calls to a cleaner I hadn’t even noticed, a woman silently making her way through the compartment, picking up garbage. “What are all those people doing down by Front Street?”
The woman comes over to look. “Oh, them,” she says, her voice thick with disapproval. “They really shouldn’t be there.”
“Who are they?” I ask.
“Debtors who left the forced labour camps in industrial zones after the Uprising. You know, the Protectors used to send them there when they failed to support themselves. No one knows what to do with them now. I think they should be forced back where they belong,” she says. “Without their labour, we just can’t get most manufactured goods. It’s getting bad.” She goes back to work, grumbling.
“That explains why there’s so little pollution,” Erica says.
“I knew about those debtors, but I didn’t realize they were camped downtown.”
We’ve already left them far behind. I know they must be a problem, but I’m glad they escaped from the forced labour camps.
“See that green space?” Erica says. She points inland to a large patch of treed land that looks almost wild. “That’s High Park. We’ll live a few blocks from there. And there’s the mouth of the Humber River. The docking port is just on the other side. We’d better go below.” She gives me a look that seems to go right into my heart. “Are you all right?”
“I guess so,” I start to say, and then I shake my head.
“Not really. I’m scared.”
She squeezes me with one arm, a half-hug. “Don’t worry, Blake. I’m sure you’ll be perfect as my aide.”
“It’s not that.” Without meaning to, I grab my left wrist and wring it, giving myself away. I can’t actually feel the micro-dot in there, but at times like this, it seems as if I can.
Erica looks puzzled. “Your micro-chip?”
I nod. “When we found it, we learned so much about what happened to me and my mother, just because I finally knew my real name. We can learn a lot more from the ID code, and the people who can make sense of it are here, in Toronto.”
“But Blake, you made up your mind about that two years ago, after the Uprising, when they opened up access to the ID codes. I wasn’t sure you’d made the right choice, but once you decided not to submit that code you seemed to find some peace. Why change your mind now?”
“Erica, how can I live so close to those offices without looking for answers? What if my father is out there, waiting—” I stop, unable to continue.
Erica takes my left arm and rubs it, as if she could soothe the phantom pain. And somehow, she does. “Blake, sweetheart, your father was taken very early in the technocaust. People like him didn’t survive.” She says this as gently as she can.
“I know. We’ve been through this before. I didn’t get my mother back, but at least I know what happened to her. Maybe I learned enough to give me nightmares, but it’s enough to let me make a real victim statement, too. Most of the street kids who were my age when the technocaust hit can’t make victim statements because they don’t know if the technocaust caused what happened to them.” I square my shoulders. “I’m ready for the other half of the story. I don’t expect to find my father, but I want to know who he was.”
“All right,” Erica says. “Tomorrow, I’ll find out where the ID office is located and—”
I interrupt. “I already know. I checked as soon as I knew we were coming here.”
She smiles through her doubts. “That’s my girl,” she says. And I smile back, because, no matter what happens now, that’s what I am.