"Broom, brroom, brrroom!" Chuls imitated the intermittent blasting of the engines. "I'm hungry, Rikud."
The old man turned and strode off down the corridor toward the dining room, and Rikud was glad to be alone once more.
Now the vapor had departed, except for a few tenuous whisps. For a moment Rikud thought he could see the gardens rearward in the world. But that was silly. What were the gardens doing in the viewport? And besides, Rikud had the distinct feeling that here was something far vaster than the gardens, although all of it existed in the viewport which was no wider than the length of his body. The gardens, moreover, did not jump and dance before his eyes the way the viewport gardens did. Nor did they spin. Nor did the trees grow larger with every jolt.
Rikud sat down hard. He blinked.
The world had come to rest on the garden of the viewport.
For a whole week that view did not change, and Rikud had come to accept it as fact. There—through the viewport and in it—was a garden. A garden larger than the entire world, a garden of plants which Rikud had never seen before, although he had always liked to stroll through the world's garden and he had come to know every plant well. Nevertheless, it was a garden.
He told Chuls, but Chuls had responded, "It is the viewport."
Crifer, on the other hand, wasn't so sure. "It looks like the garden," he admitted to Rikud. "But why should the garden be in the viewport?"