Constance exhaled, pivoting on her booted heel to cast her eyes across the vista of stars before looking up at the iridescent, petaled motif high above them. "An eye like a star," she whispered.
Constance felt her jaw fall open at Abner's frank admission. "Made it up?" She repeated incredulously, standing from her crouch. "Now why would I do that?"
Abner seemed to shrink from her ire, as if he were a small child rather than a thickly built young man of nearly twice her weight. "I don't know, Connie! All I know is that something about you has changed since we've been here. You went into a kinda funk, and when you came out of it, you were spouting all this stuff about lost societies and grand destinies. I sure never heard you talk that way before."
"I know things now that I didn't before," Constance said simply, looking over Abner's head toward the stars beyond. Then she returned her gaze to the young man. "And you've never known me at all."
"I want to," Abner offered quietly.
Constance looked at him sharply, feeling the muscles in her neck tighten. Her mental image of Abner Wade was that of a colonist who wanted more than anything to fit in, to fill his role—and that was a role that implicitly required her to fit into her expected role as well. What her eyes were seeing was a strong and intelligent young man who nevertheless shrank before her ferocity. She didn't like either picture, any more than she liked what she saw in the colonists since they'd come to the tower.
"Is that what you want?" Constance found herself asking, in something of a nonchalant tone. "Because I'm not sure you know what you want."
Abner's pale blue eyes regarded her with an expression of surprise. He seemed to be trying to decide what to say, trying to resolve some inward conflict, and Constance, standing straight with folded arms, wondered if perhaps he would blurt out something surprising.
Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. He straightened his back and tipped his head up toward the center of the nearly invisible ceiling. "I wanted to show you this," he answered. "To see what you think of it."
Constance exhaled, pivoting on her booted heel to cast her eyes across the vista of stars before looking up at the iridescent, petaled motif high above them. "An eye like a star," she whispered.
"What's that?" Abner asked.
"I wish I knew more about it," Constance replied. "I wish I could remember everything you say I said just now. I've only been given glimpses."
"I don't think it's lost," Abner said, rising to his feet. He held out the object he had been clutching to his chest. It was one of the glassy slabs that he had been examining lately, transparent, with rounded edges. As before, its half-inch depth was filled with what looked like bubbles, except that now there were noticeably more of them, several layers deep; so many of them that the slab was rather difficult to look at directly.
"I think that these tablets are information recorders of some kind. I notice tiny changes in the pattern of nodes whenever I take them around to different places or talk with people," Abner explained. "And when I take one up here, it gets—well, like this."