"Fine."
"Please. The very gentlest suggestion of vocalizing will do. That was like a cannon."
"Sorry."
"Much better. Now, gently, out. Think of rising slowly.... That's right."
They rose away from the Earth.
"Over there," she prompted, "is the galactic spiral arm we are in. See, running from Orion? The Solar System is out here on a limb. Over here is where we're going, deep into the Galaxy, our own galaxy. You'll soon pick up the main roads. See that fan-shaped arch? That's a T-Tauri variable, signposts to us. Think of being just off that one now."
He did—and there they were, in a dark lane of the Milky Way.
"Now you can imagine what would happen if we were moving separately and turned our minds to different points. You have to go back and start again then. Now, we're going down this dark lane."
They moved through the splendor of the Milky Way, through vast lanes of fine dark nebulae, across a giant rift, past glowing clouds of hydrogen and oxygen and bright expanding shells, rings within rings, flowing out from intense stars in their center as if the star were a pebble dropped in a pond of burning space, the planetary nebulae.
The Sagittarian region was well known to Pat and she commented on the Lagoon, and Omega and Trifid Nebula suspended around them. The local system they sought lay off a loose globular star cluster, one of a crowd here deep in toward the center of the Galaxy, the bright core around which the spiral arms of the entire Milky Way ponderously swung.