“You live in a wonder,” Laure said

Graydal moved toward him. She had had no logical reason to come down out of Makt’s orbit with him and Hirn. The idea was simply to break out certain large ground-based instruments that Jaccavrie carried, for study of their goal before traveling on. Any third party could assist. But she had laid her claim first, and none of her shipmates argued. They knew how often she and Laure were in each other’s company.

“Wait until you reach our world,” she said low. “Space is eldritch and dangerous. But once on Kirkasant—We will watch the sun go down in the Rainbow Desert; suddenly in that thin air, night has come, our shimmering star-crowded night, and the auroras dance and whisper above the stark hills. We will see great flying flocks rise from dawn mists over the salt marshes, hear their wings thunder and their voices flute. We will stand on the battlements of Ey under the banners of those very knights who long ago rid the land of the firegarms, and watch the folk dance welcome to a new year—”

“If the navigator pleases,” said Hirn, his voice sharpened by an unadmitted dauntedness, “we will save our dreams for later and attend now to the means of realizing them. At present, we are supposed to choose a good level site for the observing apparatus. But, ah, Ranger Laure may I ask what you meant by saying we are already back in the Cloud Universe?”

Laure was not as annoyed to have Graydal interrupted as he might normally have been. She’d spoken of Kirkasant so often that he felt he had almost been there himself. Doubtless it had its glories, but by his standards it was a grim, dry, storm-scoured planet where he would not care to stay for long at a time. Of course, to her it was beloved home; and he wouldn’t mind making occasional visits if—No, chaos take it, there was work on hand!

Part of his job was to make explanations. He said: “In your sense of the term, Physicist Hirn, the Cloud Universe does not exist.”

The reply was curt through the static. “I disputed that point on Serieve already, with Vandange and others. And I resented their implication that we of Makt were either liars or incompetent observers.”

“You’re neither,” Laure said quickly. “But communication had a double barrier on Serieve. First, an imperfect command of your language. Only on the way here, spending most of my time in contact with your crew, have I myself begun to feel a real mastery of Hobrokan. The second barrier, though, was in some ways more serious: Vandange’s stubborn preconceptions, and your own.”

“I was willing to be convinced.”

“But you never got a convincing argument. Vandange was so dogmatically certain that what you reported having seen was impossible, that he didn’t take a serious look at your report to see if it might have an orthodox explanation after all. You naturally got angry at this and cut the discussions off short. For your part, you had what you had always been taught was a perfectly good theory, which your experiences had confirmed. You weren’t going to change your whole concept of physics just because the unlovable Ozer Vandange scoffed at it.”