The musk summit rose before us, a minor-key horizon with a shifting treble for as far as I could smell. It was primitive beauty that made you feel shocking pink inside. The most beautiful vista I had ever tasted, it couldn't be dulled even by the sensation of beef broth under my skin.
"Is this transphasia?" I asked in awe.
"It always has been before," Quade remarked. "Ready to swallow your words about this being something an old hand wouldn't recognize, Captain?"
"I'm swallowing no words until I find out precisely how they taste here."
"Not a bad taste. They're pretty. Or haven't you noticed?"
"Quade, you're right! About the colors anyway. This reminds me of an illiscope recording from a cybernetic translator."
"It should. I don't suppose we could understand each other if it wasn't for our morphistudy courses in reading cross-sense translations of Centauri blushtalk and the like."
It became difficult to understand him, difficult to try talking in the face of such splendor. You never really appreciate colors until you smell them for the first time.
Quade was as conversational as ever, though. "I can't see irregularities occurring in a gravitational field. We must have compensated for the transphasia while we still had a point of reference, the solid reality of the spaceship. But out here, where all we have to hang onto is each other, our concept of reality goes bang and deflates to a tired joke."