Give the Hippo What He Wants by Robert T. Jeschonek Read Free Book Online Page A

Vox, whose name was Nalo, whispered back at her. " Mazeesh ."
    Jalila smiled and nodded with understanding. Mazeesh meant "beautiful." She was making progress.
    Returning her attention to the scenery around her, she let herself be overwhelmed by how mazeesh it all was. 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...never obscuring the perfect view of what lay behind them. Jalila 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 and furnishings 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.
    Jalila 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 New Mecca or onboard the Ibn Battuta . 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 Farouk, the science specialist, 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 New Mecca, at twice the gravity, it would have shattered under a far smaller load.
    As Jalila stepped lightly down crystalline walkways, her body lit with shifting pastel colors cast by sunbeams poured through rainbow walls, she was glad she wasn't on New Mecca. She was glad she'd come to Vox on this one last mission and had the chance to experience such wonders.
    Alongside her, Nalo chattered away, but Jalila 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.
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    When Nalo led the team into one of the soaring towers, Jalila gazed upward...and realized that her view was unobstructed by even the tinted, transparent walls and ceilings that honeycombed other buildings. She could see all the way from ground level to the distant pinnacle, seemingly a mile above. It was all one vast cathedral, walled in light and color, lined with a ring of slender, glassy pillars that corkscrewed into the heavenly heights.
    As Jalila peered up into the otherworldly steeple, she half expected to see a host of angels drift downward, so she was startled when she noticed faraway figures descending from the upper reaches. At first, they were so distant that they were little more than specks, but even then, Jalila could see that they were acrobatically inclined. The five figures moved fast, zipping down the slender pillars, leaping from one pillar to another at high altitudes with perfect ease and grace.
    As the figures drew closer, she realized they were Vox, and they were climbing down headfirst, like squirrels descending tree trunks. They scurried downward fearlessly, skinny bodies twisting around the corkscrew