Chapter Four
The Future: 7013 A.D.
BLACK PAVUN KIRO had joined the United Solar Military two weeks ago.
Since that time, he had been exposed to more privations than he had thought would be possible while living in unsanitary conditions. Cockroaches crawled across the barracks in which 120 recruits had to cram themselves in. They did so by sleeping in bunk beds three beds high.
Unwashed laundry hung from bedposts, metal hooks, anything from which a piece of clothing could be hung. Tomorrow, the division's quartermaster and master-at-arms would gather up all the dirty laundry then send it off to be washed in great silver machines.
For the moment, Pavun found that he couldn't sleep, even though he was not on watch tonight. Four recruits with their heads shaved just like his had stood in their places, ready to spew out phrases that had been taught to them.
Pavun himself had recited the words once before, only to be dismissed out of hand because the man in front of him had forgotten about the challenge to be made to all visitors arriving past midnight. Pavun had felt like a fool, going through the ritual when the Greens had shown up just to pass away the long hours of the morning.
He had trouble keeping track of military rank, as well. He knew that he was a Black, which stood for recruit. Above that was Red, the first rank gained by anyone who survived basic and extended training. Green, though, was further up the list. Was it before or after Yellow? He couldn't quite remember.
So infrequent had been his contact with officers above Red that he never had a chance to gauge their rank by the way they acted with each other.
As a result, when he completed his two-hour watch before going to bed, he pulled out his manual of military rank and tried to find out just how much trouble he might be in by making a fool out of himself. Green, he read, was after Yellow but before Blue. People who attained the rank of Blue could command bases, or ships. Green officers often served at the right hand of Blue officers, so the manual read.
Did that mean that the two Greens would later relate the incident to Blue Coaxl, the base's commander? There was the story of how one recruit from the troublesome division of 385 had sputtered out meaningless words while the other, when asked the question, "And what about you," had shaken in his boots while reciting word-for-word the challenge his division leader had taught him.
Pavun thought that if he was lucky, the two Greens would not know his name.
His division leader, Red Oster, had mentioned on more than one occasion that the easiest way to advance in the military was to be invisible, yet productive. Don't speak up. Don't draw the attention of your superiors. Don't become too friendly too long with anyone. Don't fraternize with people of the opposite sex or the parallel sex.
Pavun had taken that to heart and had been as silent as he could be, trying to complete his tasks as efficiently as possible.
These had involved folding underwear, tying ropes, and arranging his blankets as neatly as possible on his bed. He continually heard Red Oster say that anyone who couldn't be trusted to fold underwear would not be trusted to fire a hand weapon.
After enough times of hearing this line, Pavun thought it meant that he had to obey orders no matter how he might feel about them. Even if he felt tucking in the sheets of his bed every morning was a silly waste of time, if he could not do it, his failure would be taken to mean that he could not follow orders.
For this reason, he had applied himself to his tasks with a zeal he didn't know he possessed. Red Oster began using Pavun as an example of a recruit who got it-whatever it might happen to be. Where other recruits might have tried to show their bunkmates the way to tie one knot or the other, Pavun had kept that knowledge to himself. He had kept his head down, mumbling his words whenever someone asked for help.
The members of the dysfunctional unit 385 hadn't yet realized that obedience came as a result of personal effort, rather than cooperation.
The unit had become dysfunctional from the very first day when recruits who had not gotten any sleep in thirty or more hours marched in the middle of the night to their new dorm, stepping on the heels of each other's feet to the cadence of Red Oster's voice.
From that moment when 120 recruits had marched into their dorm, taken up their bed assignments, then been forced to march off to breakfast without a wink of sleep, the discontent had grown.
The seed of strife had been planted by circumstance. Red Oster had not seen it, and had not taken steps to correct it.
After a sixteen-hour day, most of which was spent waiting around, yawning and getting told not to lean on walls, unit 385 had marched back to their dorms with full bellies, though exhausted in body and mind. Red Oster felt no better, Pavun observed, which accounted for his crankiness the next morning when he found people taking their time waking up.
Red Oster yelled for everyone to wake up, wake up, wake up, for at least fifteen minutes. Some people had slept so deeply that Red Oster pulled them physically out of their beds.
That's when the trouble began, and also when Pavun found the riddle.
He didn't know what it meant at first, but it spoke of fourteen and three people who could save the world.
He thought that someone had slipped the piece of paper into his manual as a prank, just to keep him awake at night. If so, the prankster had achieved his goal for Pavun laid awake at night, thinking about the riddle.
The word choice bothered him. He wouldn't have called himself a master of the universal language, English, yet he knew enough to say that there could be both truth and falsehood in it. He had kept the riddle in his manual, tucking it away in his personal effects when he did not have to carry it to breaks.
He often waited in the hallways for hours at a time, pressed so closely to his fellows that he had to place the manual on the back of the person in front of him. Since Pavun was the tallest person in the division, he was always last in line. Nobody put a manual on his back.
The riddle gnawed at him when he stripped naked in front of his fellow division members for a shower. It gnawed at him when he ran around the gymnasium, always outpacing the other recruits, who had shorter legs than him. The riddle bothered him when he finally got in the cafeteria, where instead of eating as military men had done so in days past, he was given ten minutes in a quiet room to center himself.
During this time, he would make sure that his body's natural processes still worked the way they were supposed to. He could live to be 500 or 600, if he did not eat food and kept centering himself every day. That was what the break time was for-centering himself.
While his body relaxed, he let his mind drift. The rhyming lines of the riddle sprang to mind over and over, no matter how much he wanted to clear his consciousness in the little time he got to himself.
He became more convinced that the riddle served a purpose. It was more than just someone's inane ramblings put to paper. This mystery really meant something.
So he felt when he found himself lying awake in the middle of the night, his gray blanket pulled up to his chest. Something more was needed to unlock this mystery. A piece of information he did not have, perhaps. The riddle might be incomplete, although unlikely. Whatever it pertained to, Pavun felt sure that the riddle ought to be placed in the right hands.
Those hands, as far as he knew, were not his own. He had spent three days thinking of little else except the twelve-line mystery which had appeared in his manual while he'd been in the bathroom.
After spending a restless night in his bunk, he approached Red Oster in his clean, immaculate office. Pavun had never thought himself capable of speaking to any superior officer. He felt that, at the very least, Oster ought to be informed that someone had...done what?
Pavun didn't know what would come of his telling, except that the incident had to be told.
Red Oster's office, situated next to the division's single-door entrance, smelled of cleaning solution. A mostly-full container of purified water sat lodged into a dispenser with two levers, one
blue and one red. The walls had been cleaned and painted consistently, unlike the paint that had peeled off above Pavun's bunk, leaving a patch of gray stone exposed for all to see.
The division commander's computer access terminal appeared state of the art to Pavun, who had freelanced as a repair technician before joining the United Solar Army.
As usual, Red Oster had taken care to make sure his uniform contained no creases or blemishes anywhere. His short, black hair had grown in almost to the point where Oster would have to shave it again. He had started out his time as division commander by being nearly bald.
He wore a pair of square, brown-framed glasses which were too big for his face, giving the effect of making him look mentally incompetent. One day of hearing him bark out orders had disabused every recruit in 385 of that notion.
He sat in a cushioned leather chair with black arm rests on either side. If Pavun ever did get to sit down, he always sat on the floor. By Oster's black and white keyboard lay a worn book with dog-eared pages.
The book was A Manual of Conduct, the only book allowed in the barracks. On the cover, Pavun saw a picture of a smiling man in uniform, standing outside in the wind. The man's purple neck cloth, the symbol of his rank, swayed off to one side. Pavun knew from the manual that the man on the cover held the rank of Violet.
Oster looked up from his study of the computer to Pavun, who waited in the doorway. Red Oster said, "Black recruit, what business do you have?"
Pavun looked away, an excuse passing through his mind. He could just say something under his breath and walk away as he had done before. Was it really worth it to risk being recognized by a superior officer just for the sake of someone's ramblings?
"Well, recruit, speak up. I don't have the next 10,000 years to wait on you."
Pavun gulped. He couldn't walk away, even if he made himself look ridiculous in the process. "Well, Leader Red, I've come about a riddle."
Did that sound as silly to Red Oster as it did to Pavun, who heard himself speak it?
Oster's mouth thinned as he considered the statement. He said, "So you finally found the courage."
Pavun, despite being intimidated as much as he was, couldn't help saying, "What do you mean, Leader Red?"
Red Oster picked up the book with his left hand and placed it his lap. He tapped his index finger on the cover. "It's something of a military tradition. The Temporal Constabulary found the riddle sometime in the future-300 years from now, they say. They brought it back sometime in the sixty-fourth century.
"As a joke, a Blue distributed the riddle to his favorite recruit division. They, of course, took the riddle seriously; though the gesture was not serious at all.
"Since then, in each recruit division that comes through, each division commander is authorized-by unspoken tradition-to give the riddle to the recruit they think is most likely to succeed. You're the recruit I chose-Kiro, was it?
"Usually it takes recruits a lot longer to come to their division commander with the riddle. The way it generally works is that the recruit who receives the riddle asks around the division. Generally, that person makes a fool of himself. They eventually come to the conclusion that they must ask their leader.
"It takes a great deal of courage to do what you did. So far as I know, Black Kiro, you're the first recruit on this base who went straight to their leader."
"It's Pavun, um, Red Leader. Pavun Kiro."
"You still have a bit to learn, though. That's to be expected, I suppose."
Pavun grasped at his right elbow with his left hand, trying not to be seen squirming even while his stomach somersaulted inside his body. He asked, "What do I do with it?"
"Keep it, or burn it," Red Oster said. Then, he smiled. "Or solve it. Now wouldn't that be a trick to remember?"
Journey Through Time (A Time Travel Adventure Collection Part 1) Page 19
