The Raft: A Novel (15 page)
Authors: Fred Strydom
Dear Jai-Li
You are only a baby as I write this, but I have spent so many nights wondering about the right time to show you the contents of this dossier. Hopefully, you are now almost an adult. If you are only a young girl, it means I’ve had to give you this difficult news early. I can’t imagine the reason for such a thing, but if it means I am no longer around, I hope you find the strength and courage to see yourself through your years. I am sure that you will.
I’m not sure there is a right time to read such a thing as this. Nor do I know if your father ever plans on telling you—indeed, I fear he may not. I must be the one.
Just after you were born, I made a terrible mistake, and agreed to something I shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been easy to disagree with what was planned, to go against your father, but I should have done more to resist him. I should have fled, found a way out of this place. There must have been
something
I could have done. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that you must be told what I did, what happened to me. Hopefully, one day, you will find it in yourself to forgive me, although I do not expect your forgiveness to come easily.
When I met your father he was not the man you probably believe him to be. In the very beginning, we were young and we were in love. We dreamed about leaving the Huang family, the company, about eloping to avoid the terrible trap of a life of laid plans. But those years of hopefulness were short-lived. Somewhere along the line, the pressure from our families became too great. Somewhere along the line, I lost your father.
His own father, the grandfather you never met, filled his head with fear. The world was a wasteland, he said, a place in which your father would stand no chance of surviving. Furthermore, he added, your father was a wretched disappointment of an heir, a
boy
who could never hope to satisfy a woman like me. (Yes, this is what he actually said to him.)
This went on and on. Never once did your grandmother stand up for him. Mostly she smiled behind her husband and kept her tongue.
I turned to my own parents for help, but they would hear nothing of it. They told me to do whatever the Huang family wished. They were meek people of modest origins, overwhelmed by the prospect of their daughter marrying into an empire of such power and repute. I don’t know if they hoped some of that power would come trickling down their way, or if they were relieved I’d be protected from the world in a way they had never been, but they brushed off the thought of the psychological torment that accompanied such a “merger.”
Eventually, it reached a point where your father felt he could do nothing
but
submit—and he has been submitting ever since.
Day by day, I watched him slip away from me. In the beginning he was furious about his father’s cruel taunts and threats, and we promised we’d find a way to deal with it all together. But fury cannot be channelled as one might hope. We can harness a few rays of the sun to do what we need—power a building like the one we live in, for instance—but we cannot harness the sun itself. It will burn as it wishes. And so it is with fury. The rage your father held in his heart for his father began to burn for me. His fuse shortened. Everything I did became an annoyance to him. At first, after one of his explosions, he would apologise, but these moments of contrition were brief, showing the fading remnants of the man I once knew and loved, the final few wisps of smoke before the embers of his love and compassion turned to ash. As if by death or the devil, he was finally lost. To me, and to himself.
Then came the day when the blood clot in your grandfather’s head finally ended him, as embittered and pitiless as he had always been. With his death, something changed in your father. A change that took him from me forever. On that day he truly became a Huang.
For a while he simply withdrew into himself, barely finding the energy to fight with me, let alone communicate his feelings. When this detachment was replaced by something else, it was not by love, anger or even indifference. It was by the work to be done. Your father was consumed by the need to feed the shackled monster in the basement that runs on its wheel to keep the company going. The family legacy. The empire of guilt and shame.
And so came the plans for expansion. Everything was to be heightened and widened. Blueprints were drawn to extend the tower in which you were later born, and in which you are probably reading this: a prison of steel and glass where the outside world would have no domain. A place where every son of a Huang would be able to play out the role of God, a sinister, bloated pantomime for a crowd of spectators held hostage.
When he was satisfied (as much as he could feel for a short period of time), your father decided it was time to get on with the business of producing his son.
Of course, instead of a son, you were born. Since he had never insisted on genetic preparations to ensure your gender, you must understand your father has always accepted you for who you are. Unfortunately, there was more to this acceptance than meets the eye. It was the decision that was later made that haunts me each and every day. This is what I must confess to you.
Your father was not that concerned when you were born because he already had another plan firmly in place. Since he is relatively young, having only recently been made the head of the company, his plan is to hold his position for a significant amount of time, perhaps even until he is a hundred years old, or more. He knows the baton of leadership must be passed on, but he is equally determined to have his own time to reign. He also knows I am getting older and the window for me to have more children is closing.
And so, he told me of his plan: You, his daughter, will provide him with the son he needs. One day you will give birth to a boy and this son of yours will be your father’s heir. In order to ensure this, however, my darling, I’m afraid some choices were made that I can no longer keep to myself.
You must know what is to come.
Merely a few weeks after you were born, on your father’s wishes, you were sent back to the hospital. You were isolated in a laboratory for just under a month, during which time certain preparations were put in place. Your genes were altered so that, using genes extracted from your father’s own skin, your body was set like an alarm clock to fall pregnant on the day you turn twenty years old. Within your blood a genetic clock is ticking, counting down the days until your body begins to produce a child.
Your belly will swell as the months go on. As far as I know, the child you give birth to will look and behave exactly like one produced from normal conception, but it will not be the child of any man you meet and love. It will not be a child of your choice, or even of a chance meeting. In truth, it will not be
your
child. It will come as close to physical and intellectual perfection as your father has ordered. It will exist for one reason and one reason alone: to follow in your father’s footsteps and take over at the end of his years of control. He anticipates being in power for a good sixty to seventy years.
This heir, the one you will incubate, will allow him two things: his long and selfish time at the helm, and
you,
a caretaker for the child in the early years, for I will be too old to be of any worth. Your father has no intention of ever releasing you from this tower, and this is why. You will remain here for the rest of your life, first as the daughter who will never be allowed to fall in love, or marry, or have children and a home of her own, and later as the guardian to his new son …
I do not know whether you understand what it is that I am trying to tell you. You may be too young to grasp all of these details, but take care of this letter and reread it at a later stage if it is too difficult to make sense of right now.
All I can say is that there are no words to express my regret for having allowed this to happen. Once you’ve read this, you may reject every good thought and memory you’ve ever had of me, drench it all in bitterness or hatred. And while I remain the coward who has given up on finding a way to save you from this fate, all I can do is tell you this and pray you have enough courage to find a way of fighting this cruel plot against you.
I love you, and have always loved you, but that has never been enough. I have never been able to tell you all the things I’ve wanted to. You have been fed lies your entire life. You’ve been separated from the other children in this tower so that you never find a partner and fall in love, but also so that you continue to believe this tower is all that remains of a deserted and inhospitable world. This is not true. It is a fear put into your head to contain you.
The world is not a desert. It is full of life and wonder. There are things out there far beyond what you have ever been allowed to imagine. Do not do what I did. Do not give up out of fear.
As I have said, if you are reading this letter, I am no longer with you. But no matter what has happened to me, do not spend a second weeping for me. Do not hold so tightly to your memory of me that I continue to hold you back. I deserve neither your sympathy nor your admiration. What I beg of you is that you do something for yourself. Find a way. Find love. See the world.
With hope and hurt,
Your mother
And that was it. That was the end of the letter. My mother’s final words, scrawled on a few pages.
As she had predicted, I did not understand everything at once, but I understood enough: the tower was not my home. It was my incubator. I was not being kept as a daughter. More of an investment, I suppose.
As I folded the senso-sheets into a tight square, I noticed something else: crude drawings on the back of them. I moved my hand over the pages and thin green lines appeared. I pulled my hand away and the lines began to fade. Ghost print, they call it. Secret digital print that will appear on a page only if brought near a particular, intended hand.
My hand, as it turned out.
I unfolded the pages again, flipped them over on my bed, then smoothed out the creases. It was an image of a maze, like one of the ones my tutor had often made me do. But this wasn’t some meaningless maze from a puzzle book. It was a map.
There were two drawings. The one was a vertical rectangle divided into smaller rectangular segments, with a horizontal line across the final segment. On the bottom right, there was a second square with corners, flaps, angles, and what looked to be a tunnel extending to the top right of the page.
The purpose of the sketch struck me in an instant: it was a map of the underground house. I could see the floor plan of the corridor, the living room and the room containing the weaponry, the oxygen tanks and the gasmasks. Loose words floated between the lines: “squat-hatch,” “keypad,” “air-pod—remember to speak your name,” “Exit A-3,” as well as “Code: 65388.” As the instructions floated in, I remembered the robot’s long, metal finger punching in that very code on the keypad.
My mother had drawn an escape route. For me.
My heart leaped in my chest. I could barely contain my surprise, my fear, my exhilaration. I flicked my head to the door, expecting my father to burst in and rip the pages from my hand. He never came to my room, and there was no reason for him to do so now, but I was filled with sickening fear. My father could never be allowed to see those plans. I folded my mother’s letter and slipped it into the shallow back pocket of my dress. Then I hopped off the bed and left the bedroom.
The house was cold and lifeless, as it had been for months, the black furniture and grey walls a stubborn stand against a world of colour and life. I would never again see that place as my home, I knew that, and what I did next was an easy thing.
I opened the front door and walked out, into the wide boulevard. There was no one around at that hour of the day. With the sun-orb high above me, I made my way towards the tube stop. I watched air bubbles rise in the water within the glass rail-channels. They changed shape as they floated and quivered up and out of sight, a strange blob-like family of their own. The tube pulled up in front of me and the doors hissed open. I entered the empty tube and took a seat. Then I pushed the button I had not pushed often, but was always all too aware of. It would take me to the top floor of the tower: to my father’s office.
Even now I can’t say why I decided to go there, but I do remember feeling both fearless and composed as the magnetised doors came together. I had already decided I would not be staying, but perhaps I needed to look once more at that aloof and uncaring face.
I needed to see it. Remember it. Use it.
Each of the levels flashed by my window. I closed my eyes, but could still tell when a floor had passed by the rhythmic
whomp
of air against the side of the tube. Without needing to stop for other passengers, the tube was able to build great speed as it raced to the peak of Huang-345.
I opened my eyes. The stacked floors flickered before me in succession, a jittery film that showed the vertical world of my childhood: the halls, fields and suburbs, once designed and built as a testament to human ingenuity, now the cluttered shelves of a musty broom closet.
The tube began to slow. The high pitch of my rushing glass vestibule lowered and softened until it came to a complete stop. At the edge of the platform a long red carpet led to the enormous double-doors of my father’s office. The walls of the lobby were lined with dark wood. The tube hissed open and I stepped out and onto the soft red carpet.
I approached the front door. It was an old-fashioned door: no blinking lights, glowing palm-plates, or numbered keypads. My father locked it with an old-fashioned key when he left the room. When he was inside, however, it was usually left unlocked.
I took a deep breath and realised: I had absolutely nothing to say to my father. Why had I even bothered going all the way up there? What was I hoping to accomplish? Besides, my father had never shown any interest in me. Why should this change now? My mind raced with indignant questions all trying to block the fear that was beginning to return. All I was looking for was a good reason for turning around, going back down the tube, and returning to my room for the next sixty to seventy years of my life.