AFTER WATCHING UNQUILL buy a new set of clothes, go back to the hotel room to take a shower, and then throw his old clothes away, Savannah let him comb her hair.
She winced as he pulled a comb through her tangles. She felt frustrated that, no matter how much she tried getting her hair straight, it always went its own way. Though she didn't want to shave her head bald like the women from the sky transfer station, she envied their freedom from the time-wasting pernicious ritual of beautification that was hair-combing.
Once her hair resembled something closer to normal, she put it in a single long braid, letting it fall down her back. If everything Unquill had told her was true, there would be a lot to do before the day was out. The day already felt longer than most to her.
As she settled down for a breakfast of canned nutrients, she wondered just how much time might pass before she and Kenneth finally got back to the their own time. Though the 73rd century was an interesting time in which to live, Savannah didn't think she wanted to stay.
On the other hand, the more she thought about it, the less she wanted to return to her own family and face her father's red, angry eyes and his white-knuckled hand that always managed to grasp something to strike her with.
She didn't want to stay, but she didn't want to leave. In fact, she didn't know where she wanted to go, if indeed, she could even go anywhere. If she ever made it out of the future alive, she would give a lot more thought as to what she would do with her life.
She had heard the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" so often that she had never thought about answering honestly. The question was meant to provoke her into thinking about a career. She had once said an astronaut, only to have an adult tell her to think of a more realistic goal.
Savannah hadn't answered the question with an honest answer ever since. It appeared to her that adults didn't want an honest answer. They asked the question for themselves, not to hear what she really wanted.
If someone asked her that question while she walked beside Unquill in the hotel lobby on their way to the central computer, she would have said safe.
She wanted to be safe when she grew up. She wanted to feel assured that, no matter what happened, no one would ever threaten her or wish her harm. She wanted someone to ask that of her, so that she could speak the words for others to hear.
No one asked her any questions or even paid her anything more than a curious glance as she stood on the sidewalk while Unquill hailed a taxi. The city of Jakarta, it seemed to her, depended greatly on taxis. So big and sprawling was the city that walking anywhere proved impractical. Though she looked for buses, she didn't see any in the early morning hours.
A taxi driven by a dark-skinned man came by. He pulled up in front of Savannah. He smiled broadly. "Ey-oh, another yonder child come here to see the computer? Well, today you're in luck, little one. The president says come one, come all! The computer works again! Never in my life would I have believed it."
Savannah said to the man, "Yes, that's where we are going. Once we get there, do you mind staying around for a while? We may need you to take us somewhere else."
The taxi driver said, "Sure thing! Hey, the President himself is paying our salaries for today, did you know? That's what he said on the radio this morning. So yeah, I'll take you to the computer, and then stay all day long if you want. Just call me Risto. I'll be your guide for today, ey?"
Risto grinned at her with two gold front teeth. He sported a fuzzy buzz-cut of jet-black hair. The top of his head reminded Savannah of the skin of a peach. He motioned her to get in the car. Savannah waited for Unquill to go in, and then followed him.
The drive to the central computer proceeded apace until an earth-shattering blast occurred to Savannah's right.
An enormous beam of green energy pierced a tall building, sending shards of glass cascading down onto the street. Small and large glass fragments landed all over Risto's vehicle, thudding off the roof, the hood and nicking the glass windshield.
The beam punctured through the building, coming out the other side where it struck the parallel street head-on. The taxi shook with the impact.
Savannah reached about for a seatbelt, only to realize that the taxi didn't have one. Clouds of black, acrid smoke emanated from the building. With the driver's side window open, Savannah smelled the foul odor that must have been everywhere outside.
She saw Risto looking up in shock.
"It's started," Kenneth said to Unquill. Savannah turned to see him take a fistful of jeans in one hand. "The war between nations, up there in orbit. It's started."
"It has," Unquill said, looking forward to a scene where people had frozen in place.
People stood in the middle of the road, or on the sidewalk. So far as Savannah could see, no one had been struck by glass, a fortunate occurrence that she didn't think would occur a second time.
She asked him, "Then what was that? Shouldn't they be firing at each other?"
Unquill, his gaze fixed on the smoking building, said, "That was a deflection. This will happen for a while, until one side gains an advantage. They will fire at each other. The beams that don't get absorbed by their energy shielding get deflected by their hulls. This is probably not the only place that suffered a disaster."
"Ey ey, don't be talkin' like that," Risto said, wiping his forehead with one hand. "If they are at war up there, then that means, well..."
Unquill must have known what Risto was about to say, though Savannah did not. "We don't know that for sure. For now, we have to speak with the president directly. He's the only person in the city who can communicate with the Soonseen directly, so far as I know. We have to get them to stop."
"Yah! Then we gone!" Risto said, pushing down the gas pedal. He honked his horn for the people standing in the middle. Together as one, they looked away from the ruined building, then cleared and went about their normal business.
Savannah put a hand on Unquill's leg, who sat beside her. She asked him, "It will be all right, won't it?"
Unquill's stone-faced expression gave all the answer Savannah needed.
A BRIEF, momentary earthquake shook the police station. Winnow looked away from the computer screen where the Council of Thirds gave him one answer to the question he posed.
He had been through earthquakes before-events that lasted a longer time than this one. After the excitement of the computer coming back online, the officers of the station now stood up together, looking out of whatever window was nearby.
Winnow looked out the window as well. He saw a great, black cloud forming around a neatly burrowed hole sliced diagonally downwards through a large building.
He knew then that an earthquake had not visited Jakarta-a beam from a spaceship had pierced what he quickly learned was the central headquarters of the King's Rosary magazine company.
Normal energy beams, such as those fired from hand-held devices, had a limited range. They were not very wide nor very powerful. Even the best beam weapons had to be fired repeatedly for any amount of damage to take effect.
Coming from a spaceship that could generate vast quantities of power, an energy beam could travel a very long way. The bigger ones traveled very fast so as not to be influenced by nearby gravitational forces. The beam that have struck clean through the magazine's headquarters must have been, from what he could judge, generated by a spaceship with a nearly-impossible potential to generate energy.
Such potentials belonged only to the Soonseen.
Did that mean, then, that Olon Daniel had been killed by a Soonseen weapon, if not a Soonseen itself?
He thought it likely. He stored that theory for later examination. He didn't know anything about the Soonseen, other than what little future historians had written about their military capabilities. If indeed the aliens had attacked the city, or attacked each other, then all bets were off as far as he was concerned.
He decided to leave open the communication channel with the Council of Thirds, in case they issued him another set of orders superseding his investigation. He tried to put the attack out of his mind. He knew he was on to something with the three people found dead, all of whom worked for the same people, people Winnow could not track down.
The organization had no name, so he could not search for it. It had no known base of operation, so he could not search around a specific location looking for traces of its existence. It had not been found responsible for any acts of violence anywhere in the world, so far as the central computer was concerned.
From all that Winnow could tell, the organization existed as smoke. When he tried to grasp it with his hands, he came away with nothing.
Searches into Walid Felor's life had not turned up anything of significance. The man was a religious zealot, a man who held true to the things that people believed many thousands of years ago. When he was mentioned in local news reports, it was usually with disdain or contempt, for he often ran afoul of the law in one attempt or another to enforce his own particular set of beliefs on everyone else.
Aside from a single trip to Jakarta, he had spent all of his life in Alexandria. Winnow could not see what connection he might have with any organization.
Kaloa Syncrate, with her public celebrity life, had always been the subject of gossip. Winnow found many of these reports boring. He skimmed through entire articles written about how her dress was too short, too long, too bright, too dark or too revealing. The information served no practical purpose that he could see.
Only in the middle of an article talking about her sex life did he find something that tickled his curiosity.
Kaloa, it seemed, had once been married to a European farmer named Unquill Hester.
The paragraph talked about Hester's promotion to journeyman in the Temporal Constabulary. The author speculated on whether citizen Hester would use his new position to visit his ex-wife during the days before she divorced him.
Winnow could only smile at this. The author had not understood the constabulary at all.
Kaloa once met with the leader of the constabulary at a charity auction. The man's name was Tinbar Ross. Winnow looked more closely at this meeting. He hadn't heard of many heads of the constabulary leaving the sky for any reason, much less to speak with an heiress of a rather large European fortune.
A photo had been taken of them clinking empty glasses together in a ceremonial gesture of friendship. A strained smile stretched across Tinbar's face while Kaloa's eyes sparkled with mischievous merriment. Winnow looked at every detail of the photograph: her white satin dress, his historical tuxedo, the black top hat he wore on his head, the glass slippers which Kaloa wore.
He saw in the background, in the distance; a grainy, out-of-focus stage.
On the stage, with a portable microphone in hand, was Olon Daniel.
Winnow minimized the picture and then looked back through the Olon's life history. A footnote said that he had been the guest speaker at a charity auction to benefit research into breaking the light barrier though means of something called an "Okuda Drive."
Winnow suspected that if Walid Felor had not been as xenophobic as he had been, he would have ventured out of his native city to attend the auction in Glasgow.
While Winnow didn't know a whole lot about the Okuda Drive, he decided that it might be worth investigating if only to see what connection that might have to the three dead people he had found.
Olon Daniel, a man who in life always appeared displeased with something or other, had been a guest speaker at many charity events. He had been a famous writer right around the year 7230 with the publication of a bestselling work of non-fiction. Then, his star disappeared from the literary sky when he published nothing more. Because he spoke with a high level of diction in a consistently persuasive manner, people had always called upon him to ask folks to open up their bank accounts for this cause or that.
Kaloa Syncrate had used her father's wealth and her own influence to arrange many of those charity functions. She, Winnow discovered, had personally hired Olon every time the man appeared. Moreover, when Winnow dug up the list of people donating through the use of proxies, Walid's name came up six times, each time corresponding with an event at which Olon Daniel had been present.
Nothing in his review of Walid Felor's life had indicated to Winnow that the man from Alexandria had a sizable fortune of any kind. Rather the opposite: Walid lived in a poor district speaking a religious message from days gone by. If future historians had got it right, no one bothered listening to that message.
Why, then, would a poor man who never attended any charity event, continue to donate sizable amounts of money to purchase odd items of historical value?
Perhaps more importantly, Winnow thought to himself, what was so important about the Okuda Drive?