As he walked along, Clifford brushed his fingertips over the leaves experimentally and paused in wonder as a flush of pink rippled away from where he had made contact and diffused into the stem.
“Covington, are you getting this?”
Lamont heard Ed’s voice in his helmet speaker. There was a long moment of silence. He glanced over at Abigail, who shook her head.
“Well, on the off chance you can hear us,” Ed continued, “we’ve found a way to get to the top of the tower. But we’re making a quick detour to check out another area.”
Rico was already out of the lift, and within moments the rest of the exploration party had followed him. The space that they saw outside the doors was intriguing to the point of being perhaps irresistible. Lamont could hardly imagine that, having seen it, the party would have simply decided to proceed upward without investigation. The six explorers fanned out a few paces from each other and looked around, their eyes round with wonder.
The space in which they stood must have constituted an entire level of the tower, or at least the better part of it, and its mostly circular shape seemed to confirm this. The landing bay had been huge, but it was dwarfed by this. The effect was extended by floor-to-ceiling sections of the curved wall that showed, with amazing clarity, the star-studded nebula of space outside—this despite the fact that Lamont was certain he had not seen windows of any kind on this or any other portion of the tower. Turning around, Lamont could see that the lift was part of a column in the center of the room, and he traced the shaft upward easily 50 feet before it connected to the shallow dome of a ceiling that was a smoky, luminescent green in color. The space was open, but was divided into sections that reminded Lamont of nothing so much as a walled garden, albeit one that would have challenged the imagination, he supposed, of Lewis Carroll. As if to echo this thought, he heard Clifford’s whispered exclamation in his helmet: “Curiouser and curiouser!”
The engineer was, at that moment, tracing his way along a winding path made of large, glass-like slabs that glowed faintly in pinkish hues when weight was put upon them. The path followed along the outside of a curved platform, about three feet high, which was in fact a shallow pool of clear liquid filled with what looked like multicolored jewels. Growing from the water were what looked like plants, though Lamont had no idea whether they were real living plants or facsimiles. The plants were ghostly pale and translucent, with thin stalks terminating in large, fan-like leaves that were all but transparent. As he walked along, Clifford brushed his fingertips over the leaves experimentally and paused in wonder as a flush of pink rippled away from where he had made contact and diffused into the stem.
Objects of equal wonder met Lamont’s gaze wherever he looked. Rico was examining a large structure made of glass-like tiered platforms, at once organically curved and geometrical. Rosemary was stepping experimentally onto a patch of violet-colored mossy substance that was built into another meanderingly shaped platform, at the center of which was something that looked reminiscent of a silver willow tree. He followed her, feeling his booted feet sink into the floor the way they might on a padded carpet. Paying him no mind, Rosemary continued toward the treelike object, stopping near its base to set down the medical bag that was slung over her shoulder.
“What do you want, Townsend?” She asked coldly as she reached up to examine one of the hanging, tinsel-like branches.
Lamont realized that she was probably still smarting from his thoughtless slight back in the asteroid pod. “I’m an ass,” He said.
He was conscious of the other members of the party turning their heads to look for him. He was talking to Rosemary on the open channel shared by the whole expedition, so the confession would have been piped simultaneously to all their helmets.
Rosemary’s mouth broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Aye,” She agreed, “You are.”