Earth Fathers Are Weird (Earth Fathers #1) - Lyn Gala Page 0,63

help keep his brother warm or if that was a poorly worded vow. Max would come back and check on them soon, but he had to trust that Xander could speak up if he needed more help.

Grabbing his shirt off the chair as he passed, Max followed Rick through the pool room door closest to the control room.

The corridor was empty, but Max turned right. His instincts were still sharp because he found Rick halfway to the control room.

“Hurry, hurry,” Rick said before he headed for the lift. Max broke into a trot. Rick’s excitement was infectious. Max smiled as he crowded onto the lift with Rick’s oversized head. They went up one level and then the lift opened onto the corridor right outside the control room.

Rick placed a tentacle at Max’s back and urged him forward. Max frowned, but he followed Rick’s tacit suggestion and touched the control to open the door. Back when he’d been exploring the ship, he’d found this door locked every time. Now it opened. Max raised an eyebrow and headed into the control room.

“Go, go go,” Rick said. He was spinning slowly, which reminded Max of Kohei and his pirouettes. Max followed the gentle pushes to a door on the other side. Now they were in a section that Max had seen on the computer diagram that James had displayed. None of the access shafts led to this part of the ship, or at least none of the ones large enough for a human did. And as far as Max could tell, the only access was through the command room.

The second they entered the new area, Max could immediately tell the difference.

The corridors were wider, the floor softer. Instead of the simple grayish white color that dominated the lower ship, this deck had colors—blues and greens and grays that swirled together in a way that made Max think of water. Even the lights overhead flickered and wavered in a way that reminded him of sunlight as it filtered through the lake when he was a child and swam under its surface. Max ran his hand across the wall.

“Query. Color preference?” Rick asked.

“I prefer this. It's beautiful,” Max said.

Rick shimmied. “I chose designs. I fabricated colors and lights.”

“You created a feeling like water without water. It is impressive.” Max meant it. This part of the ship had a soul in a way that the rest didn’t. The lower decks were functional, not beautiful. Rick gave a quarter turn and then continued down the hallway, but he kept his largest eye on Max.

Max ran his hand along the wall. There were slight texture differences between the metallic gray and the shimmery blue and the soft green. Rick had chosen different materials rather than applying a color on a single material. It was stunning.

They entered the lift, and a large red jellyfish creature decorated the upper corner. Max touched one of the long tendrils that hung down from the bell-shaped body. They were far thinner than Rick's or even the children’s tentacles, and the body appeared far too insubstantial to hold anything approaching a brain. “Query. Is this from your home world?”

“Yes.”

“It looks like a jellyfish from my world.”

Rick touched the figure with a single tentacle before saying, “They are most dangerous.”

“So are jellyfish,” Max said. It was strange to think that two planets light years apart with dominant species as different as him and Rick could have such similar animal life.

Then again, maybe all inhabited planets had some version of a jellyfish. Certainly tentacles were more common than boned limbs, so it made sense that jellyfish would be more common than horses. Max wondered what these people would think of a horse... or giraffe. Having a little tiny head so far away from the body would have to seem strange to beings that had, for the most part, developed a head and body structure that was joined. Max figured they thought he looked pretty funny with a weird sticklike neck separating the two.

Rick stopped near a metallic teal ripple and touched the pad to open the door. “Option. You sleep here.”

Rick moved to one side and Max walked into the room. It was substantially larger and sections of wall stuck out, almost like someone had hung cabinets and forgot to add doors.

Max walked to the far wall where the bed had been in his own quarters. It had the same sorts of abstract swirls, only greens and yellows interrupted the shades of blue. It reminded Max