If the Æther was there, in motion or at rest, it was having no effect on the light it carried.
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At first you might think this statement was a bit redundant, after all that was said before. But it's crucial to the idea that the Michelson-Morley experiment did not prove that Æther doesn't exist; it just proved that it had no effect and, thus, it struck the blow that would eventually lead to its demise, at least in the eyes of all but the most religiously devoted to Æther.
This declaration that Æther isn't needed to understand the speed of light or how it travels was foreshadowed by Merle Rideout and Heino Vanderjuice's earlier discussion about how Æther had become a matter of faith among many scientists, some being so devoted to the idea of it that they will try to keep it alive throughout the early half of the 20th Century, long after most scientists had put it in the bin. But most scientists decided, after this experiment, that even if it existed (again, it was not proven not to exist here), it simply wasn't a variable that mattered to the study of light. Thus it was subsequently disregarded. And, as such, in the universe of Against the Day, it suddenly ceased to be. It previously existed in the consciousness of the world, thus it was scene by aeronauts and others, affecting their travels in the sky, but would no longer be an issue. Disbelief causes a physical change in the phenomena of the universe.
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