Sticks and Stones

Chapter Three-1

Chapter ThreeAs Mariko and the rest of the away team followed their guide through the Vox city, she again felt chills run down her spine…but this time, the chills were inspired by awe, not fear. Though she had seen the wonders of Earth and some amazing sights on alien worlds, she had never in her life seen anything as beautiful as this.

It was a see-through city made of pastel stained glass.

Towers scaled remarkable heights – some squared, some cylindrical, some spiraling into feathery clouds. Vast castles straddled block after city block, turrets shooting sky high. There were domes and cones and pyramids, spheres and cubes. All of it was connected from ground level to highest spire by a filigree of crisscrossing strands, a web of tubing laced around and over and through every structure.

And every tube, every wall, every surface was transparent and flowing with pastel color. Pale yellows and blues and reds and greens and violets swirled and rippled like the clouds on a gas giant planet, mixing and pulsing…but never obscuring the perfect view of what lay behind them. Mariko could see right into every room and tube, could see

fur-covered citizens in motion and at rest and staring right back out at her. Even more, because the floors and ceilings and walls were all transparent, she could see through one building and into the next, could look all the way up through every level of every tower.

It was at once breathtaking and disconcerting to see such a city of people stacked to the heights and strung all around, all seemingly floating, supported only by whorls and bands and streams of color.

Mariko felt like she was floating, too, and not just because she was caught up in the spectacular surroundings. Thanks to the low gravity on Vox, she weighed only half what she did on Earth or onboard the Exogenesis. She felt airy and light on her feet, as if at any moment she could push off from the ground and rise up to glide and pirouette among the filigree and spires.

According to J'Tull, it was the light gravity that made the city possible, enabling such fragile, lofty structures to stand. The chief building material was a light polymer with electrostatic properties that produced the colorful tints. Even stretched into impossibly thin sheets, its high tensile strength supported amazing weight…but on Earth, at twice the gravity, it would have shattered under a far smaller load.

As she stepped lightly down crystalline walkways, her body lit with shifting pastel colors cast by sunbeams poured through rainbow walls, Mariko was glad that she wasn't on Earth.

Alongside her, the brown-furred Vox – whose name was Nalo – chattered away, but Mariko didn't pay much attention. Behind her, a growing mob of similarly vocal Vox generated a rising clamor, but she didn't listen.

For once, she was all eyes, not ears. The linguist was at a loss for words.