The Petal drifted from the memory field with a silence so complete it felt like the hush after a final passion. The great red star and its halo of memory characters sluggishly retreated behind them, not as evaporating points on a screen, but as moping echoes in the minds of those aboard. Though the boat moved forward, the crew did n't feel distance, only depth. commodity had changed. Not in the fabric of the macrocosm, but in the armature of understanding. What they had seen — what they had been given — did not weigh them down. It lifted them.