“But we were mistaken,” Graydal said. “You’ve intimated as much, Daven, but never made your meaning clear.”

“I wanted to see the actual phenomenon for myself, first,” Laure said. “We have a proverb—so old that it’s reputed to have originated on Earth—‘It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the data.’ But I couldn’t help speculating, and what I see shows my speculations were along the right lines.”

“Well?” Hirn challenged.

“Let’s start with looking at the situation from your viewpoint,” Laure suggested. “Your people spent millennia on Kirkasant. You lost every hint, except a few ambiguous traditions, that things might be different elsewhere. To you, it was natural that the night sky should be like a gently shining mist, and stars should crowd thickly around. When you developed the scientific method again, not many generations back, perforce you studied the universe you knew. Ordinary physics and chemistry, even atomistics and quantum theory, gave you no special problems. But you measured the distances of the visible stars as light-months—at most, a few light-years—after which they vanished in the foggy background. You measured the concentration of that fog, that dust and fluorescing gas. And you had no reason to suppose the interstellar medium was not equally dense everywhere. Nor had you any hint of receding galaxies.

“So your version of relativity made space sharply curved by the mass packed together throughout it. The entire universe was two or three hundred light-years across. Stars condensed and evolved—you could witness every stage of that—but in a chaotic fashion, with no particular overall structure. It’s a wonder to me that you went on to gravities and hyperdrive. I wish I were scientist enough to appreciate how different some of the laws and constants must be in your physics. But you did plow ahead. I guess the fact you knew these things were possible was important to your success. Your scientists would keep fudging and finagling, in defiance of theoretical niceties, until they made something work.”

“Um-m-m…as a matter of fact, yes,” Hirn said in a slightly abashed tone. Graydal snickered.

“Well, then Makt lost her way, and emerged into the outer universe, which was totally strange,” Laure said. “You had to account somehow for what you saw. As any scientists, you stayed with accepted ideas as long a feasible—a perfectly correct principle which my people call the razor of Occam. I imagine that the notion of continuous space-times with varying properties looks quite logical if you’re used to thinking of a universe with an extremely small radius. You may have been puzzled by how you managed to get out of one ‘bubble’ and into the next, but I daresay you cobbled together a tentative explanation.”

“I did,” Hirn said. “If we postulate a multidimensional—”

“Never mind,” Laure said. “That’s no longer needful. We can account for the facts much more simply.”

“How? I have been pondering it. I think I can grasp the idea of a universe billions of light-years across, in which the stars form galaxies. But our home space—”