text: > Look around
  Utility Room (on the personal float unit)
  Little more than a chilly concrete box. It continues some distance to the north.
  
  Something resembling the root system of Yggdrasil covers the south wall; from close up it appears to be a complex heating system with pipes and tubes.
  
  > examine the system
  A curious combination of metal and organics. A potbellied brass shell contains a living organism with pinkish, sparsely-furred flesh visible at the openings. Metal pipes lead out of the shell into the walls, and a metal switch controls whether it is on or off. There's an intake gill along the front, also made of metal.
  
  The only thing not protected by metalwork is the heater's mouth, which has a black beak as long as your hand.
  
  > go north
  Basement (on the personal float unit)
  Unlike the upper levels of the Embassy, the basement is built for practical purposes, and resembles the inside of a concrete cigar box. It continues to the south, dimly lit and cold.
  
  Along the west wall, a chute from above empties into a large metal container.
  
  > Go upwards
  Museum (on the personal float unit)
  The Museum is a presentation on Earth -- geography, culture, and everything else. The selection is idiosyncratic, but apparently compelling, to judge by the healthy crowd currently looking it over.
  
  To one side there is a ramp leading down. The studious way the crowd ignores this ramp suggests that they consider it private space.
  
  A map of Earth covers the east wall, so large that you can barely reach across South America with both arms outstretched. It has attracted several groups of interested visitors, who are pointing out to each other details of the topography of Mongolia and making excited gestures at the Sahara.
  
  There is a display case in the middle of the room.
  
  The widget readout changes to SOC 15.8891, POW 20.19617, INT 12.0329.
  
  > go south
  Embassy Foyer (on the personal float unit)
  Like most buildings here, the Embassy is built with an eye for organic color and form: windows and doorways framed with curved ironwork, accents of bright enamel, wooden floors grown in place. All conspicuously wasteful of both materials and labor. It might be intended to make Earth representatives uncomfortable, or it might be meant as an honor, or it might be an advertisement for a standard of living that Earth lost some time ago. Too hard to tell.
  
  There's a large Receiving Room to the west. Less prominent rooms lie north and south -- the south with a locked private door, the north an archway offering a mercifully limited view of the "Museum". Shallow stairs, almost a ramp, rise to a second story.
  
  > go to the west
  Receiving Room (on the personal float unit)
  None of the rooms of the Embassy are ordinary, but this one is spectacular: the floor glittering with blue and gold glass, the vault a basketry of interwoven branches of interwoven branches. The lower half of the wall is covered with feathers, yellow and deep blue, like a parrot's.
  
  Something like a glass flower grows from the wall, a disguised bracket for holding a recording machine.
  
  > look at the flower
  It looks like a glass tulip with a round red seed in it.
  
  > look at the seed
  It looks like a round red seed. You've seen these before, on the ship over: they're recording devices that mature as they fill up with data, and will show their contents when squeezed. It is around the size of an apricot pit.
  
  > examine the feathers
  They have the gloss of real feathers, and that doesn't change the complete strangeness of having them there. The whole room seems like a thematic allusion to a lost Amazonian jungle, as interpreted by aesthetes with no experience of a natural biome of any kind. Which is true.
  
  > think
  You run over the things various people have decided you ought to do: acquire vaccine from the research facility (HC's orders)
  wear white jacket (Valenti's idea)
  summon Liam and show him the gift box
  meet with Ambassador Aylene to present your gift
  
  > go north
  Museum (on the personal float unit)
  The Museum is a presentation on Earth -- geography, culture, and everything else. The selection is idiosyncratic, but apparently compelling, to judge by the healthy crowd currently looking it over.
  
  To one side there is a ramp leading down. The studious way the crowd ignores this ramp suggests that they consider it private space.
  
  A map of Earth covers the east wall, so large that you can barely reach across South America with both arms outstretched. It has attracted several groups of interested visitors, who are pointing out to each other details of the topography of Mongolia and making excited gestures at the Sahara.
  
  There is a display case in the middle of the room.
  
  > Open case
  You open the display case.
  
  > get the card
  Picking the pink card up is challenging because, you discover, it's embedded with a couple of floatpoints -- probably a security-override device. You can grasp it by the edges, though.
  
  > look at it
  The pink card appears to say cure/serum fatal-sickness primitive borrowed -- research center room 58 -- card-that-grants-access.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  a pink card
  a kumquat
  a puffy white jacket
  a silver kiddush cup
  some fuzzy bunny slippers
  a yellow paper note
  a mail packet
  an empty gift box
  a handheld computer (in which is a data disk)
  a grey widget saying SOC 15.6347, POW 20.42796, INT 12.0493
  a magnificent ensemble of flowing scarlet robe, chronometer, grey undersuit, shoes, and socks
  
  > Go east
  Front Stairs (on the personal float unit)
  The Embassy proper is directly west. The entrance is flanked by orange trees, familiar and earthly.
  
  From the top of the Front Stairs you have an excellent view of the whole interior of the Solarium, the sunlight catching in the curved triangular panes of glass.
  
  East, at the bottom of the stairs, is the mirror-glass of the pool. Beyond it the botanical garden has a structure invisible from the inside.
  
  > Go east
  You urge the float unit east down the stairs: quickly it gathers speed and sends you shooting across into the middle of...
  
  Reflecting Pool (on the personal float unit)
  On the float unit, you are able to float above the water. The water underneath the float unit goes flat. The fish bump into the surface and bounce off as if from a sheet of aquarium glassthe western end of a shallow rectangular pool -- no doubt part of the reason the air is softer and more humid here than it was outside. The garden paths open at the east end of the pool; the Embassy is west, at your back.
  
  If you look down, you catch the reflection in the surface, and a number of small red fish swimming around, in formation, making symbols which you cannot read.
  
  > Go east
  You wander between plots: what catches your eye this time is purplish moss several inches deep but with no identifiable purpose.
  
  Grand Solarium (on the personal float unit)
  The Grand Solarium is an enormous dome with an oval roof of glass and grown metalwork. Inside is a botanical garden, which, on this planet, is a kind of art museum. Each plot displays some invented shrub that would be illegal on Earth.
  
  The southern end of the dome, where they grow edible crops, is hidden by a decorative screen of hanging flowers. The garden also continues to the east; away to the west is the front of the Earth Embassy, now your home.
  
  A double set of insulating doors leads north to the outdoors.
  
  > go north
  You head out of the Solarium and down a brief slope, into the clearing at the center of town.
  
  Clearing (on the personal float unit)
  The street runs north/south, so that you have an uninterrupted view of Cordia Peak, and the leading edge of the glacier at the northern edge of town.
  
  Both sides of the street are built up. A substantial building of metal and glass lies to the east, houses to the west.
  
  The rings in the southern sky are partly obscured by the buildings on the horizon, but are still bright enough to catch the eye.
  
  A double set of insulating doors leads south into a huge glass and metal dome, a greenhouse and Solarium where most of the local population now lives; the Embassy is inside.
  
  At the center of the open space here is a monument shaped like a tusk or tooth.
  
  > Go east
  Research Facility (on the personal float unit)
  The lobby of the building is surprisingly open: you would have expected security and a receptionist. But there are no industrial secrets to protect.
  
  Mounted on the east wall are colorful project proposals.
  
  A baffling number of doors lead out to smaller rooms around the perimeter of the central space. They are all protected by security fields, so that you can't even approach them without a way to breach the barrier.
  
  A glance around reveals a Door 58 to the northeast.
  
  > examine the proposals
  Several different proposals of varying complexity: at one end, in childlike handwriting, is a proposal with sketches of fish; at the other, something about colonist eye color and brain function, with many pages of additional notes. You also note one with what looks like a map of Africa.