Riddles and Allegories
Prologue
Questions in the Dark
The ComPost was quiet for the most part anyway, if you didn't count the constant bleeping of the range-scanners, the gentle whirring of the engines, the nearly silent footfalls of the ever-wakeful android, THELMA, followed endlessly by the over-attempting and consummate klutz, Gizbot, making their nightly rounds, or the silent turning of the controls at the pilot's, Harlan's, post, in their sockets; their destination priorly plotted into the auto-pilot programs and constantly corrected by Radu's navigation systems.
With a sigh, Radu looked up from where he sat on the raised platform atop which sat the pilot's station. The faces of two people he hadn't seen for nearly a year continued dancing through his head, just as they had been for almost two days now. He couldn't quite remember exactly how it started; how his mind had drifted back to those two individuals. But that was not the most pressing question weighing on his mind.
A third face was mixed in with these flurries of memories; a face he'd never seen before, and the name that accompanied it was strange. Not alien, by any means, only strange. Unknown. How did he know this beautiful woman? How had her image become so fervent and foremost in his mind? It was almost as if she seemed more important than the others did…more real. This frightened him. He wasn't asleep, so it couldn't be Elmira with a warning, yet he still felt some warning, some sense of foreboding in his reverie this night.
If this was a psychic revelation from some unknown force, then what did it have to do with him…and more importantly, who did it involve Elmira, for this was one of the three faces before his minds eye. Secondly, why Chemeru, his acquaintance of so long ago and friend as of late. These, though, he could understand; he knew them. But this woman…why and Andromedan adult?
Radu's eyes searched the stars in plain sight from the Christa's view-screen.
Shaking his head confused, she thought silently, Who are you, Ezra 237?