Starship Walker

The Abyss

The following Thursday morning, Gillian ascended the stage in the Navigation centre for a simulation exercise. She wore a Walker skin suit that had been tailored for her, one of several. She took off her shoes, dropping them next to the stage.

Gillian had now completed a significant amount of study. Mr Rogers and his team had introduced her to the complexities of astrophysics and Newtonian mechanics, followed by basic relativistic and macro-quantum theory. She had discovered that she preferred the Newtonian world. It was so simple, almost sweet in its common-sense practicality. Lumps of stuff bounced off each other, or whizzed around each other and it all made sense. It was the everyday world.

But the non-Newtonian world of the Walker was weirder, more alien than she had expected. She found the quantum universe hard to grasp. Mr Rogers had outlined the strange realities underlying ordinary matter: the randomness, the mysterious appearances and disappearances, the things that changed if you looked at them too closely, the invisible influences that might reach in an instant across light years. It was too bizarre.

 Finally, she had accepted Mr Rogers' advice: not to worry too much, nobody really understood this stuff. Everyone just did the mathematics and accepted its results. Then Rogers attempted to explain the implications of this incomprehensible physics for her as a Walker: how the interstellar Walking technology grew out of the abandoned theory of quantum entanglement and the identification of macro-quantum structures. What he and his team had described was, he told her, a crude, cartoonish depiction, and it was just background context for her.

"You should work towards harmony with all this - I'm giving you Abel's words, as I recall them. I don't know what they're going to mean to you in practice, but you have the abilities and the mind of a Walker, so I assume it will come to you eventually."

The astrophysics team had now completed a significant amount of mapping in the region that surrounded the ship. It was enough to prepare a short but realistic simulation session for Gillian. For this exercise, she would not experience any of the strange macro-quantum structures. They did not wish to overload her at such an early stage.

Gillian was excited to be in the Navigation centre again, in a Walker skin suit, alone on the stage. She glanced around the centre. Apart from Captain Xing and Abel, all the committee members were there. McWhirter was whispering with Mr Dryen, and Joan Rubilio looked as if she was explaining a point to Mr Barry. From his stellar observation instruments, Mr Rogers grinned up at Gillian. In the background, she noticed two male nurses.

Gillian pulled the Walk mask down over her head. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands, and opened her eyes again.

She was in interstellar space, but it was not like her first session. It smelt dusty and stuffy, with something unpleasantly damp and sweetish behind it. Dirty looking fuzzy clumps surrounded her, above and below: grey, brown, some darker, some black, a few yellowed like old paper. Here and there, stars glinted through the murk. In a few holes and fissures in the distant clouds, she even glimpsed an occasional glowing nebula and a single small star cluster.

"What is this?" Gillian asked. "It's like being inside a mouldy old wardrobe!"

Mr Rogers replied, "You're seeing our first mapping results. Those clumpy clouds are mostly carbon and a few silicates. They're dense concentrations of what's all around you - that is, around the ship. That's what might seem musty to you. There are ice particles too. We've tried to give that a nice wet smell. There's the usual hydrogen and helium, that should be a background sweetish odour, so you'll notice if it gets stronger."

"What do the different colour shadings mean?"

"Broadly, the proportion of carbon, ice and silicates. Let's not worry about that now."