* * *

Blindness was not dark. It shone.

Standing on the bridge, amidst the view of space, Laure saw nimbus and thunderheads. They piled in cliffs, they eddied. and streamed, their color was a sheen of all colors overlying white—mother-of-pearl—but here and there they darkened with shadows and grottoes; here and there they glowed dull red as they reflected a nearby sun. For the stars were scattered about in their myriads, dominantly ruby and ember, some yellow or candent, green or blue. The nearest were clear to the eye, a few showing tiny disks, but the majority were fuzzy glows rather than light-points. Such shimmers grew dim with distance until the mist engulfed them entirely and nothing remained but mist.

A crackling noise beat out of that roiling formlessness, like flames. Energies pulsed through his marrow. He remembered the old, old myth of the Yawning Gap, where fire and ice arose and out of them the Nine Worlds, which were doomed in the end to return to fire and ice; and he shivered.

“Illusion” said Jaccavrie’s voice out of immensity.

“What?’” Laure started. It was as if a mother goddess had spoken.

She chuckled. Whether deity or machine, she had the greatest strength of ordinariness in her. “You’re rather transparent to an observer who knows you well,” she said. “I could practically read your mind.”

Laure swallowed. “The sight, well, a big, marvelous, dangerous thing, maybe unique in the galaxy. Yes, I admit I’m impressed.”

“We have much to learn here.”

“Have you been doing so?”

“At a near-capacity rate, since we entered the denser part of the cluster.” Jaccavrie shifted to primness. “If you’d been less immersed in discussions with the Kirkasanter navigation officer, you might have got running reports from me.”

“Destruction!” Laure swore. “I was studying her notes from their trip outbound, trying to get some idea of what configuration to look for, once we’ve learned how to make allowances for what this material does to starlight—Never mind. We’ll have our conference right now, just as you requested. What’d you mean by ‘an illusion’?”

“The view outside,” answered the computer. “The concentration of mass is not really as many atoms per cubic centimeter as would be found in a vaporous planetary atmosphere. It is only that, across lightyears, their absorption and reflection effects are cumulative. The gas and dust do, indeed, swirl, but not with anything like the velocity we think we perceive. That is due to our being under hyperdrive. Even at the very low. pseudospeed at which we are feeling our way, we pass swiftly through various densities. Space itself is not actually shining; excited atoms are fluorescing. Nor does space roar at you. What you hear is the sound of radiation counters and other instruments which I’ve activated. There are no real, tangible currents working on our hull, making it quiver. But when we make quantum microjumps across strong interstellar magnetic fields, and those fields vary according to an extraordinary complex pattern, we’re bound to interact noticeably with them.