The Riddle (Children of Two Futures 1)
Page 4
Chapter Two
SURVIVING THE COLLAPSE of the Unbroken Tower had not been easy for Odro Konna.
He had been on standby for several days while waiting for orders from the Council of Thirds.
After spending a day catching up on his sleep, Odro felt restless during the two days that led up to the incidents that destroyed the council building. From its place high above the planet, it had collapsed into the northern part of the Pacific Ocean.
He hadn't counted on being stir-crazy at his old age of 613. For hundreds of years, he had been a Black Brigade member, constantly on the go, ready for a new assignment. Though he hadn't known it, the lifestyle which left him single, childless and short on friends had also developed in him a sense of routine.
He never expected to stay in one place for very long, nor sleep for longer than four hours at a time, both of which he had done since he had returned from Hensen Var's light-shielded base.
It threw him entirely off guard that he hadn't known what to do with himself. While his fellow Brigade members Jinna Thurman and Sixen Lolon had played card games and traded stories, Odro had set himself apart from them, and had felt both Jinna's and Sixen's discomfort.
He hadn't expected that to happen, since he had always been the sociable one, the person who remained upbeat in any circumstance. Fortunately, they both respected him enough to let him keep his distance.
Odro had ivory colored hair which fell down about his shoulders. Though wrinkles decorated his face, his eyes maintained a curious intelligence. Sitting outside, shaded from the sun by the various beams and structures overhead, Odro had taken off his uniform shirt.
A patch of white hair grew in the middle of his chest while the lower part of his torso, once home to hardened abdominal muscles, had slackened to a slight flabbiness over the years. His white skin had burnt to red in the past few days, and his legs felt sore from sitting down for a prolonged period of time. Standing up did not provide any relief, for he was in a lifeboat with one other person, adrift in the sea.
Ever since the waves created by the Unbroken Tower falling into the sea had subsided, the wind in the Pacific Ocean had not picked up. There was no breeze to improve Odro's spirits. The yellow life raft was calm. While it did not matter one way or the other for the purpose of erecting a sail, the lack of wind left the waters still. Odro could not even count on the current to course the raft wherever it would.
None of them had come back for him or the man sitting across from him on the raft, Plone Hesser.
Plone Hesser could easily have been over six hundred years old. He had a horseshoe pattern of baldness eating away at brittle, tangled white hair. The disaster had caught Plone in his pajamas decorated with small images of half-peeled bananas.
He hadn't said a word to Odro, not since they had both decided to inflate a life raft, then hang on to it while it floated to the surface. That ordeal had left Odro's ears ringing. The smell and taste of salt surrounded him.
Looking back, if his fellow Black Brigade members had tried to bring him into their conversations and games, he might have been better prepared to face what had come. Had he been with them, he would have left with them. Sitting in front of the bay's control station, he saw a notice telling him that three other ships of the Black Brigade had departed at once.
When he heard alarms ring out in earnest, he had scrambled to the nearest shuttle bay with a distracted, restless mind. He had been unable to get the heavy metal bay doors open, no matter how hard he tried.
It had been a miracle that Odro had been able to get the doors open at all. A blast from a Soonseen ship had struck the doors square in the middle, fusing them shut. Even while Plone Hesser ordered him to stop, Odro fired the shuttle's weapons into the door. A large hole opened up, and water poured into the shuttle bay.
They had already fallen underwater. The shuttle, meant only to fly in the air, would sink like a stone in the ocean.
As a result, Odro and Plone sat together in a hot day with nothing to eat, not looking at each other while the world, so far as Odro could tell, ignored them both. He felt a strange sense of disconnection with the world, a world to which he had always felt strongly connected.
He didn't like that feeling, so he said to Plone, "Do you think we'll be rescued?"
Plone turned away from his consideration of the clouds. He scowled, and then scratched the back of his head with a weary impatience. Plone had tried sleeping through the night, but the life raft didn't have enough room in it for them to lie down comfortably, even if Odro tucked his legs in.
Odro hadn't been able to get any sleep either while Plone's toenails kept scratching about in odd places. Though he himself had grown used to not getting any sleep, Plone had not. Dark circles gathered under his bloodshot eyes gave this away. Plone squinted against the sun, and said, "If anyone cares, they might."
Odro wiped at his forehead with his uniform shirt. He said, "Why wouldn't they care?"
Plone grunted, and then let out a short, bitter laugh. "You really don't know? No one cares about the council, or even the government itself. We told ourselves that we ruled the world, but really...did we rule anything? Were we the puppet masters, or the marionettes?
"If a man as old as you cannot reason that together, then no amount of explanation will help."
Odro had to admit that he had never thought of such things before. He had always taken orders and executed these orders as best as he could. To suggest that the Council of Thirds, the most powerful governing body on the planet, might be under someone else's control threw Odro into a moment of doubt that.
He saw all the choices he made in his life, all the mistakes, all the successes, all of them forgotten in the winds of passing time.
He said to Plone, "It's impossible. The council has always had control."
Plone licked his lips, and then spat into the sea. He said, "If you listen to future historians, they will tell you this, but how much of their predictions matter now? Never once did they predict that we would see the day when the Soonseen shot at the council.
"It's a declaration of war, no matter how you look at it. It doesn't even matter that they've stopped firing now. They want to make war upon the whole human race, and yesterday was the first step in that war.
"Now, don't you think that if the fools at the Temporal Constabulary did their job as they were supposed to, they would have informed us about such an event in advance? It should have been on the records for thousands of years.
"One day, the Council of Thirds would be no more. Since that didn't happen, what can you conclude except that future history is a useless discipline? It's about as useful as reading the future in tea leaves."
Since Odro knew as much as about future history and temporal theory as he did about what had kept the Unbroken Tower floating high above the surface for thousands of years, he turned his attention to the horizon where he saw a faint blue light.
He thought, at first, that he saw a refraction of the sun's rays. However, the blue light grew as he observed it. Then, he distinguished a gray, shining bulk attached to the light. He stood up, rocking the lifeboat, using his hand to shade his eyes.
He said, "That's an atmosphere ship."
Plone Hesser stood up as well, looking off into the horizon. He gave out a slow, low growl. "It's not one of ours. It's...that insignia. That symbol belongs to the rebels in southern Africa."
Though Odro could not make out enough of the ship to be certain, he did see a large marking painted onto the side of the ship, one which he did not recognize. "It's going to be an interesting day," he said.