Some unseen medium – viscous, oozing like oil from deep in the tar sands – slides over the skin of our vessel, frictionless, darkly sensual, like black water from an abandoned well, like shadows from beneath the eyes of a Bedouin dancer.
And we have been journeying for so very long that we don’t know, can’t remember, if we are traversing the empty space between two planets, or if we are moving through the deep mantle of our own earth, buried under heavy layers of rock and soil and decaying organic matter.
And the lights we see through the viewport could be either stars or pinpricks in the earth’s crust. And the sounds we hear could be the music of the celestial spheres, but they might just as well be the tortured moaning of vast continents adrift.