The novelty of her new cabin, and a significant increase in the numbers in her bank account following her promotion, had thrilled Gillian. But the palatial bedroom was too spacious for her. She chose to sleep in a small second room because it felt cosy and secure. Lying in her bed on the first night in her new quarters, Gillian considered how the Captain and his officers had thought they were gently dragooning her. She knew the sudden visit to the Bridge, her promotion and her new accommodation was an attempt to lock her into her new role. But she didn't care whether she was manipulated or not. She had to be a Walker. Something was driving her to it.

Celia visited her and was impressed. "This is bigger than the cabin I'm in with my parents! But it's in a much nicer spot." Gazing through the windows out at the forest, she sat down, a little heavily, and grimaced with embarrassment. "I'm still not used to one-G!"

On the morning of the first Walk session after her incident, Gillian did not feel an icy pit in her stomach, and her hands were steady as she brushed her hair. Something within her had hardened, smothering her fears.

Since she was now just a few minutes from the Navigation centre, Gillian decided to collect her Walker skin suit so she could change in the privacy of her cabin, instead of the awkward struggle behind the medical curtain that Dr Morris had wheeled in for her. Her suit was a tight fit. It was time-consuming to slide on, and she felt silly and vulnerable as she wriggled into it. She wanted to avoid becoming flustered before a Walk.

Her two assigned marines followed her double trip to the Navigation Centre, back to the cabin with her fresh Walk suit and her return to the Centre without comment. As the little group marched down through the forest and across the meadows for the second time, with Gillian dressed in her figure-hugging suit, idling passengers snapped pictures of her.

Mr Dryen and Mr Rogers were waiting for her. McWhirter was also present. Gillian noticed how he gazed at her with open curiosity.

Mr Rogers welcomed her. "Good morning Gillian. How are you today?"

"Good!" Gillian replied.

Mr Dryen remarked, "If you want, Gillian, we can have a fresh Walker skin suit delivered to your cabin each morning."

"Oh!" Gillian was embarrassed. "Ok, thanks. I didn't want to make a fuss over it."

Mr Rogers added, "We've finished reinstalling and testing the previous version of the Walk software. It seems ok to us, but let us know if you spot something wrong."

Abel Yegg arrived in a wheelchair, assisted by Dr Morris, a few minutes later.

They reviewed the day's plan for a second time. Mr Rogers and his team had now completed sufficient mapping to make serious Walker navigation beyond the local bubble possible. In this new environment, Gillian was to conduct a simulated Walk of about ten light years, towards the bubble's closest boundary.

In the training session, Gillian would encounter macro-quantum structures, copied in from recordings of earlier walks, and added to the real cloud environment mapped by Mr Rogers and his team.

Gillian slipped off her shoes, stepped up on to the stage and slid the mask over her head. She held herself still for a couple of seconds, allowing her mind to become calm. She took in a breath, put her hands together briefly and let her breath out, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, she was back in the dusty, dank place she had described as being like a musty old wardrobe.

This time, a green translucent arrow appeared in the lower part of her vision, with flickering galactic coordinate numbers that she found confusing. She turned until the arrow pointed straight ahead of her. The coordinate information figures spun in response.

Following the arrow, she Walked cautiously from hole to hole between the clumps of dirty interstellar gas, using the fall-avoidance technique she had developed from her last experience. The distance to the edge of the bubble began to count down a light year every ten to twenty steps, depending on the size of the gaps between the clouds.

"Oh! I think I can hear a wind!"

"Yes, you're walking into a small current, it's slightly angled across your course."

"It seems quiet, rather gentle."

"Good."

Gillian noticed two blue pinpoints blinking at her, one near the navigation coordinate numbers display, the other right at the top of her vision.

"What are these blue points? They've got labels: 4715 and 1351."

"They're pulsars. Actually there are three, but the other one is behind you. Anyway, sorry, you don't need to see them." As Abel spoke, the two blue points disappeared. "We'll be relying on pulsars as beacons because we're in such thick cloud. Normally the system will also take sightings on ordinary stars."

"Ok."

A few moments later, Gillian struck her first challenge. She banged her knee on something, but she couldn't see what it was.

"What's happened, Gillian?" Mr Dryen asked.

"I've hit something invisible."

She heard Abel Yegg's voice. "You can make it visible, Gillian, remember your first time?"

"Um - yes." Gillian concentrated her gaze hard ahead. The endless gas cloud clumps filled her view, and above and below.

"Relax, Gillian!" Abel said.

She tried to make her mind clear of thought, to stop worrying about what she was doing, and what lay ahead on her course. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, opened them again, and gazed off track.

In the corners of her vision, she saw them: translucent geometric shapes of mixed sizes and configurations. The one that had blocked her looked like a squat diamond balancing on its tip. She turned her head, slowly, trying to bring them into her full vision without vanishing.

"Ok, I've got them."

"So: they're macro-quantum structures. You saw them during your first simulation."

"I'll step around the one straight ahead of me."

"Okay, but when you've done that, take a little time to examine it, think about it. Imagine it's a work of art you've come across."

"Like an abstract piece?"

"Yes. Or, to give you another perspective: these things are multi-dimensional objects extruding into our universe. You're seeing a three dimensional projection, like a tennis ball in a painting appears as a circle in two dimensions. People used to think these shapes were just useful mathematical models, but they really exist. They're blossoming little bits of the future, that may or may not be."

Gillian said, "I've got an inkling of why the ship's not allowed to go through them. What will these little bits of the future be if they become something?"

"Empty space, mostly."

"Ok, very mystical."

"I wish it was that, Gillian, but it's not. It's our reality - moving on."

Gillian saw, through the transparent diamond object, a good clear spot right ahead. She tried to Walk straight at it again, but slower. It felt like bumping her knee on a low wall or some garden furniture, but that was just her skin suit, she knew. She chose the nearest gap between the strange shapes that seemed large enough to take her, and Walked carefully towards it, stepping over a few cloud clumps along the way, then turning into the opening. She went through without difficulty, then realigned herself to the green arrow.

"Ok, I got past it!"

"Great, Gillian!"

Gillian turned back and looked at the squat diamond that had blocked her way. She gazed all around: above, below, ahead and behind, while the green coordinate numerals flickered before her. The objects were everywhere, like angular blossoms made of hard-edged, almost invisible glass. She noticed that some of them had shimmering surfaces. Watching, she saw that the faces ran with colours like the surface of soap bubbles, and bent close to examine the diamond shaped one. She poked at it. Her finger went straight through as if it there was nothing there. She tried to Walk through it and once more struck a solid barrier.

"Damn!"

"What's up, Gillian?"

"Nothing, I'm just playing around with these things."

"Ok. Take your time." Abel's voice sounded relaxed.

Gillian turned to a cloud clump next to her and deliberately attempted to walk through it. It was like trying to push her way through thick mud. Her skin suit wanted to prevent her going too fast. A small warning light flashed among the green information displays at the bottom of her vision. She squatted to examine the cloud. It wasn't like the pictures of Earth clouds she remembered, made up of white globular bunches. This cloud appeared to be flatly faceted: spiky, if anything. She ran her hand through the greyish-brown vapour, half expecting it to swirl and flow. Nothing happened. She thought she discerned spidery filaments inside it, but they were equally unaffected by her hand's movement.

She knew that the dirty looking cloud before her could in reality be several tens or even hundreds of millions of kilometres across. Her hand movements had been ignored by the ship's system, since they were meaningless to it. Gillian glanced downwards, at the cloud clumps below her, and up, at the ones overhead. Some of them looked low, nearly as low as the top of her head.

"How much does it matter if my head and chest goes through one of these cloud clumps?" she asked.

Mr Rogers replied, "The ship's not as tall as you are in this simulation, and it's the same when we're live, so it doesn't matter at all."

"Where is the ship, in relation to me?"

"Around your feet, Gillian. Wherever your leading foot is after a step, that's where the ship is."

As Gillian squatted on her heels, gazing at the universe, she felt the stage floor. No matter what she saw of interstellar space, she could always feel that carpeted stage floor beneath her bare feet. She glanced down and saw that her feet appeared to be wearing stylised, nondescript white slippers. Their appearance wasn't convincing. She looked at her hands. They weren't real either. They were generic hands, drawn with an artificial looking texture. When she bent the index finger on her right hand, the system made the flesh on the knuckle tighten, and on the other side of the finger, the make-believe skin creased. But it still wasn't her finger.

The system had drawn non-existent shoes on her bare feet and given her hands that weren't hers.

A second or two passed while Gillian stared. A barely accessible, inner part of her mind deliberated.

She realised that she had been too accepting of all she experienced. Whether working under a simulation or performing a live Walk, the interpretation was the same: everything Gillian perceived was an elaborate representation of something like the green coordinate numbers, but much more complicated. It was derived from data that the ship's telescopes and other sensors detected, and it was designed to help her rapidly absorb the information she needed. It allowed her to make swift choices by taking advantage of her unconscious analysis abilities. It wasn't reality.

Gillian, or rather the Xinglong Hao, could not travel through a macro-quantum structure, so her Walk suit would stimulate her nervous system to simulate a bump if, by accident or on purpose, she attempted it. And if she persevered, she suspected the Walk suit might become severely violent with her. It was advisable to avoid the clouds because they caused wear and tear on the ship and in the long run were a health hazard, but otherwise - they were only clouds, and, in fact, far less substantial than that.

And phantom shoes enclosed her feet. She wiggled both toes together, looking down to see if that would register in her vision.

Her green information display jittered and vanished.

"What's happened, Gillian?" It was Abel's voice.

"I don't know. All I did was look down at my feet, with the pretend shoes that the system generates, and I wriggled my toes. Then my information display vanished."

"Hmm, one of the system modules crashed." A pause. The green figures reappeared in her lower vision. "There you are again - fixed."

"We'll check out that incident, Gillian," Mr Dryen said. "You carry on. No more toe wriggling until we identify a fix."

Gillian gazed at nothing for a moment, her mind blank.

"Gillian?"

"Oh - yes, sorry! I was just, um, contemplating for a sec." Gillian stood up, pleased that she was now more aware of herself and the environment in which she worked. She Walked off on track again, comfortable and confident. She diverted several times to find a path between the strange geometric objects that threatened the ship.

It all seemed easier now, although she still had questions.

"What do I do if I find a solid line of these things, with no gaps?" she asked.

"You have to go above or below them."

"You mean I climb over them, or try to bend beneath them somehow?"

"No - you change your frame of reference. Tilt your view so you're above them or below them. Remember, whatever you do, you're still really on this stage in the Navigation Centre."

"Ok."

"Try it with the next one. But tilt your view upwards first, not down. We know that direction's tricky don't we?"

"You're not wrong there!" Gillian said. "Ok, here come some more! I think I'll try what you said." She had arrived at a long row of several dozen shapes.

"Here we go!" she said, and patting her palms together first, slowly rotated her hands around each other anti-clockwise. The scene before her tilted, as if she had lifted an infinite tabletop, and she Walked over the shapes. She noticed that the green arrow grew another green arrow at its tip, pointing down. There were a few more clouds and one or two other structures, but she navigated among them in the usual manner.

"I've made it! I'm on the other side! So, er, I have to rotate back now - down."

"Fine. But instead of rotating your hands around each other, hold one palm out, vertical, and imagine there's a control knob or dial on it. Turn it slowly clockwise. It's a lot safer."

"Oh!" Gillian yelled. "I didn't know about that one!"

"Yes, sorry about that."

Mr Dryen said quietly, "I didn't know about that gesture either."

Gillian followed the instructions. It was like turning a bicycle wheel to make the pedals rotate: agonisingly slow. But she felt safe and in control. The second green arrow sank down to nothing, and her universe was restored.

"Thanks! Thank you!" Gillian cried, her voice gleeful.

"Like to continue?"

"Ok."

Gillian followed her course for a few more minutes, carefully stepping over the clouds and easing her way around more of the strange macro-quantum objects. Then an idea occurred to her. She paused, and asked, "Would you mind if I rest and experiment with my scale control for a minute or two?"

"Go ahead!" Abel said.

Gillian stood still, brought her hands together in a prayer-like fashion, then spread them apart, as if she was in a swimming pool, using breaststroke.

The gas clumps, the clouds and everything else flew away from her, diminishing in her field of vision. She repeated the gesture until all the individual clouds had dwindled and collapsed together to form a massed cloud, like the view she had seen from the bridge of the Xinglong Hao. A few hundred stars shone; most were dim, their light struggling to pass through the interstellar gases and dust that formed the cloud. Just four or five stars, above her towards the top of a spiral arm, gleamed brightly.

"I'm looking at the view from the Bridge!" Gillian said. She gazed around. "There's a small orange dot blinking at me down next to the coordinate readings."

"It's telling you that the system won't allow you to Walk at this scale. It's too dangerous, any step you took would be so large it could put the ship into danger because we don't know what's there."

"Ok." Gillian remarked, "On this scale, I must be hundreds of trillions of kilometres tall."

"Taller than that, I would think," Abel replied.

Gillian laughed. "My mum always used to tell me I was a big girl!" Suddenly she regretted mentioning her mother, and almost trembled. She made the reverse gesture to return to her natural "working" environment.

"Want to Walk a little more? Why don't you carry on for few more minutes, and we'll stop for the day."

"Ok!" Gillian set off again. After a few seconds, she said, "I've got a small red light blinking at me down at the bottom of my vision. Is there a problem?"

"No, there's no problem," Abel said. "It's just us changing something. We'll tell you about it after we've finished for the day."

Gillian walked on, almost as if she was taking a casual sightseeing stroll.

"How are you feeling, Gillian?" It was Mr Dryen's voice.

"Oh, Mr Dryen! You've taken over from Abel?"

"You're making great progress, Gillian!"

"Thanks!"

When they decided it was time for Gillian to stop, as she took off her mask and turned to step off the stage, she was shocked to see Captain Xing waiting for her. Mr Barry had also appeared, standing by the two nurses. Gillian stared at the small crowd in surprise.

Abel said to her, "Congratulations, Gillian, in those last few minutes you piloted the Xinglong Hao five-light years along our course back to the bubble!"

"What!" Gillian screamed. She nearly fell off the stage.

"That blinking red light you mentioned: it's only on when you're live. We turned the simulation off and you were out there, real-time. You were in command of the ship's helm."

"Well done, Mr Berry!" the Captain said.

The Executive Officer Joan Rubilio had arrived with the Captain, bringing a bottle of champagne and glasses. She offered everyone a glass and filled them with the champagne.

"To Gillian!"

Gillian was so excited that she was lucky not to dribble the fast flowing liquid down her chin.

"We'll debrief tomorrow," Abel whispered to her. She smiled at him, elated. Abel added, "You're becoming good at this; your Walk looked elegant!"

Gillian smiled with pleasure at this. Mr Barry approached her.

"I'd like to offer my congratulations too, Ms Berry."

Gillian smiled up at him. "Thank you!"

Mr Barry gazed at her in silence. His silence became too long and Gillian was aware of an awkwardness. Barry was smiling but his eyes seemed anxious, almost supplicating.

"Well, I should be off, back to my assigned tasks!"

Mr Barry's joviality wasn't convincing. With a quick nod, he strode off to the exit and out into the rim park, leaving Gillian puzzled.

She heard Mr McWhirter's voice nearby, and when he said, "Is there any chance I could try out a mask?", she turned to look at him. He was talking to the Captain, Mr Dryen and Abel.

"I know I failed the Walker test, but I'd like a try anyway, if that's possible."

As he spoke, McWhirter glanced at Gillian, his eyes considering her, assessing her. Gillian recognised that this wasn't a male, admiring gaze. She was observed, monitored. She knew that she must be wary of McWhirter. Then she realised that what she had seen in Mr Barry's face wasn't like Mr McWhirter's. Mr Barry's had been a male, admiring gaze, she realised. Gillian felt a little shocked.

Dryen and Abel glanced at the Captain, who nodded. Dryen fetched a new mask in its hygiene wrapper and helped McWhirter slide it on. He fitted anklets around McWhirter's legs, and helped him step up on to the stage.

"What do I do now?" McWhirter asked.

"Nothing," Dryen answered. "Just wait. We'll put the simulator on." He nodded at Rogers, who glanced down at his pad and tapped out a short sequence.

"Is it ready?" McWhirter called out. "Is it working?"

"Yes," Rogers replied. "All you need to do is clap your hands together once."

McWhirter did as instructed, and stood on the stage with his hands on his hips. He turned his head from side to side occasionally. He looked up, he looked down.

Gillian noticed Mr Dryen shake his head at Mr Rogers.

McWhirter muttered, "Damn!" and pulled the mask away. He stepped off the stage, his face grim. "Nothing, as we expected. I'd really, really wanted to see the stars!" He looked so disappointed that, for a moment, even Gillian was sorry for him.

Later, Abel and Mr Dryen accompanied Gillian back to her cabin, followed by the two marines. Abel said, "We want you continue with medium length Walks for the next few days, at least. No more than twenty light years or so. You still have more theory to cover, and we need to be slow and cautious because we're outside the bubble. These gas and dust clouds are new territory for everyone, not just you."

Gillian glanced down at him in his wheelchair, which hummed softly as it propelled him. "Sounds sensible to me," she said.

"Mr Rogers is still surveying around us, and as far ahead as possible," Mr Dryen added, "but of course, the further we probe, the more out of date our information is. But we know there could be some difficult stuff coming up, unfortunately."

"What sort of difficulties?" Gillian asked.

"It looks like we've got a particularly dense area of macro-quantum blossoms up ahead, in a day or two."

"I like that term, don't you? What else?"

"We think there's a really tight globular cluster not far ahead of us. It's lighting up the clouds, ionising the interstellar gases. It looks very odd."

"A globular cluster is a small sphere of stars, right? They're very closely packed."

"Yes."

"What's strange about it?"

"Even as a globular cluster, it's particularly small, only two light years across."

"So we should avoid it?"

"Probably, but we'll pass by close enough to examine it."

"What other problems have you got for me?"

"That'll do for now."

At her cabin, which opened directly on to the forest, they parted. Gillian noted that Abel and Mr Dryen separated and went off in different directions. She went in, sat down and tried to relax for fifteen minutes. She gazed through the windows at the forest, thinking about the events of the day. It had been a long, successful one for her, and she was happy. She had achieved something.

She closed her eyes and waited for twilight. Her thoughts slowly grew calm, logical. Emotion faded.

When it was time, she stood, turned out the cabin lights and chose a headscarf to cover her hair and obscure her face. She selected a jacket with a hood, pulled it over her head, slid the panoramic window-door open and peered out. The marines were long gone.

Swiftly, she crept outside, secured her cabin and stole down into the forest. Avoiding the meadows, she took a forest path that ran parallel with the West Side, and walked spinward along it for twenty minutes. Next, she went down to the meadows and scanned the valley. There were few people: some joggers, a few couples strolling along holding hands. Gillian picked a moment when she thought there were the least number of people, and walked briskly down into the valley, aware of being visible in the artificial twilight, and vulnerable. She crossed rapidly to the forest on the other side. Wary of prowlers, she hurried up a path to one of the East Side entranceways, deciding that next time she should remember to come equipped with something heavy and dangerous, concealed in her jacket.

She took an elevator to the Upper East Side, the low-G, sleazy levels.

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