The Gate to Futures Past (2 page)

Sira di Sarc could pass for Human. She isn't. She's one of the humanoid Clan, aliens who live, scattered, on Human worlds. The Clan have an innate ability to move their thoughts—and bodies—through the dimensionless M'hir, an ability they use to manipulate Humans vulnerable to mental suggestion and to keep their true nature secret.

Sira is the most powerful of her kind yet born, and a Chooser, a female ready to Join for life and Commence, her body becoming reproductively mature. To the dismay of her kind, no unChosen is a match for her strength in the M'hir; should they try, she can't help but kill them. Deliberate breeding for greater strength has brought the Clan to this, and Sira knows she's only the first. Within a generation no Joinings will be possible. The Clan faces extinction.

Desperate for a solution, willing to experiment only on herself, Sira blocks all memory of who and what she is, adding compulsions to seek out a Human telepath and attempt to Join with him. Clan find Humans repugnant, their vast numbers terrifying. Sira's hope, however faint, is that being near one with a similar Power will trigger her body to Commence.

Instead, she meets Jason Morgan, captain of the
Silver Fox
and learns how to love.

Together, her mind and memory restored, Sira and Morgan fend off attempts by the Clan and others to seize Sira's Power for themselves. In so doing, they learn the M'hir isn't simply a dangerous void, but filled with its own version of life, including the Rugherans, who exist there and here. Sira assumes leadership of her people and, with the help of Enforcer Lydis Bowman, brings the Clan into the Trade Pact.

Surely, with the expertise of thousands of other species, her own can be saved.

But the Clan didn't evolve in Human space. They arrived there, through the M'hir, having fled their original home. Their memories were left behind and most Clan believed their kind went through a stratification, into those able to use the M'hir and those who could not. All they have is a handful of tattered belongings and family names. To most Clan, including Sira, their past is unimportant.

They are wrong.

The Clan have forgotten they were once the Om'ray, sharing the planet Cersi with the sluglike Oud and the agile Tikitik. Oud and Tikitik managed separate Clans of Om'ray, each in their place, providing each the necessities of life.

And ending that life when they chose.

One of Sira's ancestors was Aryl Sarc, also powerful. Aryl was the first Om'ray to detect the M'hir and to move through it. She was the first to meet and befriend a totally new sort of being, a Human named Marcus Bowman. For Cersi was a world of interest to those who traveled the stars, rumored to be possessed of singular treasure: relics of the Hoveny Concentrix, the greatest interstellar civilization ever known. Marcus and his people arrived first, to conduct research and observe.

Others came to pillage.

Already strained by the rise of new abilities in the Om'ray, the pirate incursion disrupted the Balance, the agreement between Cersi's races. The Oud and Tikitik lashed out, Om'ray caught between. Marcus was captured by pirates and tortured. Aryl gathered her people, the M'hiray, to do the only thing they could:
run. They believed without them, the Balance would be restored and the rest of the Om'ray be saved. Using a device to strip away their connection and memories of Cersi, Aryl and her people used Marcus' final memory to decide where to go, for the M'hir has no markers or guide, only remembered places.

Their great Passage brought the M'hiray into a part of the universe teeming with Humans and other strange aliens, adrift on a world full of technology they didn't understand and faced with dangers they couldn't have imagined. Desperate, Aryl and the others hunted for help only to find the wrong kind. Criminals tried to kill them for the Hoveny artifacts they'd brought, and they were forced to use their Power against Humans to survive. Afraid of the consequences, the M'hiray used their new wealth to buy seclusion and privacy. Calling themselves the Clan, they made secrecy their new way of life, protecting it with their abilities.

But choices made generations ago create consequences of their own. When Sira exposes her people in order to find them a future, she also exposes them to their waiting enemies. The Clan of the Trade Pact are decimated by attacks coordinated by those they'd once manipulated, carried out by the alien Assemblers. They flee back to Cersi. Sira, their leader still, carries new life within her, life created by parthenogenesis and filled with the stored consciousness of her ancestor Aryl. They find themselves in the Cloisters of Sona, but there's no welcome waiting.

Cersi's Om'ray are on the brink of annihilation, for the Balance was never restored between Tikitik and Oud. The Oud are now in ascendance, their new Minded caste hunting Om'ray who can awaken the Hoveny technology they covet. The Om'ray are trapped where they live, dying as the Oud reshape their world. Only the Vyna Clan are safe, able to travel through the M'hir, but they use their ability to dreadful purpose: stealing children and resources from other clans.

Morgan and the newly arrived M'hiray scientists uncover the truth: that Cersi was an experiment designed to test if Om'ray could become capable of using the M'hir. The giant Cloisters are starships, not buildings, built to maintain and monitor the
participants. Although begun as a cooperative venture between Om'ray, Oud, and Tikitik, the experiment faltered, imprisoning them all until even the memory of why they'd come and who they'd been was lost.

Until now. Sira is the culmination of those long-ago hopes, as are the other M'hiray, returned at last. Sona's starship reveals they are the descendants of the Hoveny and heirs to that civilization's technology. Guided by the starship's memory, Sira and the others activate its great engines using the power of the M'hir. They lift from Cersi in time to escape the Oud. Trying to do the same, the Vyna are caught by the Rugherans.

Sona's starship travels through subspace, carrying the M'hiray who survived the Trade Pact, the Om'ray who survived Cersi, and one Human. Its course was set before the Trade Pact existed and its hapless passengers must wait to learn their destination.

And if it is, at last, their home.

D
AMAGE . . .

Though infinitesimal, the gashes
bleed
, drawing the ever-hungry.

Though shallow, the wounds do not heal, being between reality and
something
other.

Damage . . .

Those who hunt Power gather. Mindless, they extend what aren't mouths and begin to feed. They fight for position, greedy and never-full.

Scattering when attacked, for their frenzy attracts those larger and more deadly to the feast.

Damage . . .

Feast . . .

In AllThereIs, a matter of perspective.

The starship cut through subspace with the ease of a knife through soft flesh, systems dormant since their construction at
last awake, carrying the answer to a desperate hope, not that it knew.

An answer late in coming, not that it cared.

For its builders were dust and their sacrifice for the future?

Scars upon the past.

“T
HIS IS NEW.” If glaring could melt metal, the innocuous green wall in front of me would be a puddle. Of course, if anything about our present situation paid attention to what I wanted—I glared harder. Take a walk, I'd suggested. Have a precious moment alone, I'd thought. Was that asking too much?

Apparently so, hence the new wall. My hair, the ever-expressive feature of a Chosen Clanswoman, writhed against my back and shoulders. Even if I could control it, there was no keeping my aggravation from my Chosen, the barrier between our thoughts and emotions thinned when we were alone, as now.

Chuckling, Jason Morgan lowered his scanner. “New to us,” he concurred. “But according to these readings, this bulkhead could have been in place as long as anything on the ship. Impressive tech.”

Inconvenient, annoying—I'd a list. “Impressive” wasn't on it.

When Sona Clan's Cloisters had been a building with its foundation properly in the ground—half submerged in a swamp, to be exact—this wide corridor had spiraled up the levels used by the Om'ray. The corridor, like the rest of the building, was illuminated by strips of light where walls met the ceiling, walls featuring tall arched windows interspersed with framed panels on
the outermost side, with a series of doors to small rooms on the inner.

When the Cloisters became a starship, more changed than its location. Along this corridor the lighting remained the same, but windows had disappeared behind green metal plates. The panels glowed in varied colors, linked by pulsating blue lines across walls and ceiling, lines that converged to wrap the frames of those now-sealed doors.

While behind those doors, filling what we'd believed spare, empty rooms, was seething
darkness.
The starship, built by the Hoveny, had been designed to draw power from the M'hir, something it could only do once we, their descendants, followed its instructions and
brought
the M'hir here to be harnessed.

All of which was quite reassuring in a building that roared its way into the sky and beyond so we could escape certain death.

What wasn't? The starship,
Sona,
hadn't stopped its self-modification. Once moving through subspace, walls like the one in our way began to appear, severing some rooms or, as now, sealing off stretches of corridor.

These paled beside other changes. Doors once locked now opened, with others sealed. Lifts stopped at levels previously unknown to any of the Om'ray Adepts on board.

The same lifts bypassed levels once in use; according to Morgan's scanner, they'd been collapsed, as though the ship folded sheets for storage.

At least it waited until those spaces were empty—leading to a brief experiment where we left belongings everywhere, but the ship knew the difference between living and stuff and we only had so many socks—which wasn't the point.

From early childhood, the Clan moved by
pushing
our bodies through the M'hir. So long as the distance, translated by the M'hir into subjective time, was within an individual's strength, all we needed was a remembered place, called a locate.

Locates
Sona
kept removing.

Another reason, I thought grimly, we couldn't trust the ship. Hadn't its programming proved fallible already? When we—the M'hiray—first arrived, it had used a device called a Maker to
forcibly alter our minds. It blocked our memories, giving us false ones to suit our new lives on Cersi, complete with skills and the local language. Being able to converse with our cousins, the Om'ray, had been vital; being transformed into eager farmers prepared to live near the Oud, when the land outside was Tikitik and a water-ruled jungle?

The error came close to costing our lives.

Fortunately, before it did, Morgan had saved us all. The Maker had no effect on his Human mind, and he'd helped us return to our former selves, though we retained the implanted information. With one exception. Me.

For some reason comprehensible only to the shipbrain, I remained its Keeper: the ancient ship's sole conduit to those aboard. Another mistake, for the person who should be Keeper stood beside me, diligently running his scanner along the seam between new wall and old.

The supple brown vest Morgan wore, with its useful array of hidden pockets, was old, though still new to me. The beginning beard, dark brown with a trace of red in certain light was new to me as well, the why of it another mystery. Clan didn't grow such facial hair; my Chosen may have sported a bristled chin on occasion, but never for long. As I'd grown to like the feel of it, I asked no questions.

Jason Morgan, however, would have a reason. He was careful and methodical by nature, leaving nothing to chance, traits that had made him a superb starship captain. More than anyone here, he understood space travel—and machines.

I'd a history of breaking them, especially any with plumbing, and suspected
Sona
had figured that out for itself. The ship had lifted on my command; it hadn't obeyed me about anything more important than lighting since.

That didn't stop me trying. I glared at the new wall.
Sona,
I sent, gaining the ship's instant attention.

>
Keeper, what is your will?<
The reply wasn't in mindspeech, not the sort we used. This was unsettlingly more as if the ship had stuck something in my head to allow me to receive a transmission.

Stop doing this!

The ship's voice remained placid. >
I require specifics, Keeper. What is it you wish stopped?<

Servo brain. I gave up.
Nothing. Everything's fine. Wonderful.
Nine shipdays since leaving Cersi. Nine shipdays, I'd tried to argue with it. Tried commanding it to restore a level. Tried ordering the ship to shut itself down which, in hindsight, might not have been the right approach. It didn't help having Morgan caution me, several times, to not ask it anything at all.

In case it finally decided to obey, that was.

“Tell me how this makes sense,” I muttered. “Why close off a perfectly useful corridor?” Except to be a nuisance, which by now wouldn't surprise me.

Morgan tucked away his scanner and patted the wall approvingly. “My take?
Sona
's conserving resources. It was built to carry more.”

The
Fox
had been “she,” but nothing about
Sona
was like our former home.

Nothing was.

“How many more?” I'd led one hundred and ten M'hiray to Cersi, fleeing Trade Pact space. Eight had died within days, for Cersi proved no safer; worse, our coming led to disaster. The Oud decided to end their part of the Agreement and violently reshaped the world.

Of our cousins, the Om'ray, seventy-seven survived our arrival. Not our doing.

Our fault—my fault—all the same.

Two more had slipped away our first night in subspace, but they'd been Lost and already gone from us: Cha sud Kessa'at, once Chosen of Deni, and Ures di Yode, once Chosen of Tekla, the Sona scout who'd given her life in a futile attempt to save Deni from a clawed nightmare. That the final remnants of their minds stayed behind with their Chosen, in the M'hir around Cersi, was to me, a mercy.

None of us said it, but I knew the rest believed as I did, that we, the one hundred and seventy-eight now on board, were all that remained of the Clan.

Plus one Human.

Presently shaking his head, blue eyes somber. “Sira. Don't.” We both knew, even if
Sona
could have transported thousands, it made no difference now.

I wrinkled my nose at him, but left the matter. “Have you marked our new wall on the map?” Anyone who discovered part of the ship reconfigured did so; even the Om'ray, who otherwise relied on their inner sense to navigate, understood the value of such warnings.

Morgan pulled the flat black disk of the placer from his vest pocket. “Already done.” Deni's legacy, the Trade Pact device recorded spatial information. My Human used it to keep up with
Sona
's modifications.

Modifications we didn't control and couldn't anticipate. “I hate losing more of the ship.”

He grinned. “Just because you can't go ‘poof' where you used to doesn't mean
Sona
's shrinking. There are lifts. Doors. Remember doors? Walking?”

“We don't go ‘poof,'” I protested, but my lips twitched. As Hindmost on the
Silver Fox,
I'd learned 'porting inside a working starship had its risks, chief among them startling my captain when he was busy welding. He was right. The Om'ray wouldn't care; most still preferred Morgan's ‘walking.' The M'hiray, though accustomed since childhood to going ‘poof,' had resigned themselves to what couldn't be changed.

I eyed the wall I couldn't change, resolved to be sensible. “So, air on the other side?” We hadn't found anything resembling a space-ready suit, nor tools to make one. We did have an abundance of knives and rope, not to mention seven fabric coats well-oiled against rain, but our technical resources consisted of the placer, Morgan's scanners and assorted lethal equipment, plus some packs of archaeological equipment.

Next time I ran for my life, I'd grab a wrench.

“Temp's dropping fast, but there's air.
Sona
's doors can't open while in subspace,” he reminded me, that having been the only reassurance we'd gleaned from the ship. “So, Witchling.” Morgan took my chin between his finger and thumb. “What's this about?”

A lock of my hair wrapped around his bare wrist and I felt myself sink into the uncanny warmth of his blue eyes, reactions he knew full well I couldn't control. My Human wasn't above cheating when he thought it in my best interest.

Two could play that game. I leaned forward, hair sliding around his shoulders and neck, pulling us together. Our lips were a breath apart, my own breathing deeper than an instant ago, when Morgan suddenly chuckled. “You're mad at the ship again.”

I pulled back. My hair, disappointed, stroked his cheek as it withdrew, diluting the impact of my scowl. “I am not. It's a machine.”

One you talk to,
came another voice.
I'd be angry at it, too.

Great-grandmother,
I greeted, surprised to find her
listening
. Aryl di Sarc respected the rare moments I could be alone with my Chosen, fading to little more than a second, smaller heartbeat.

Her consciousness inhabited my unborn, a baby I shouldn't have been able to conceive in the first place. Among other species, when a female reproduced on her own it was called parthenogenesis. For the M'hiray, the term was Perversion.

The Om'ray Adepts, however, considered such unborn to be Vessels, waiting to be filled. The Vyna Clan had taken that to the extreme of bottling themselves up before death, then installing such Glorious Dead into new Vessels, to be born again.

It was enough to want to be Human.

An opinion I didn't share with Aryl. If she'd not
tasted
change in our future, a change dire enough to destroy worlds; if she'd not had the daunting courage to sacrifice her own future to prevent it, storing her consciousness; if she'd not entered what grew within me? We would not have found Cersi and saved as many as we had.

While I did my best not to think of the future, I also owed mine to Aryl. An empty Vessel wouldn't leave the mother's body; her presence meant I'd survive this pregnancy.

That Aryl spoke up now meant I'd been a bit too fervent in expressing my feelings and disturbed her. I owed her an apology. Instead, I tightened my shields.

“I am not mad at the ship,” I informed them both.

“Right.” Morgan's grin broadened. He nodded the way we'd come. “Walk or poof?” fluttering his hands in the air.

Incorrigible, impossible . . . My temper hadn't a chance. I held out my hand. “Walk,” I decided, laughing. I felt Aryl's
satisfaction
before my sense of her faded.

After all, walking gave us more time alone.

Where large arched doors once opened on a world, with a wide pillared antechamber for those ready to greet new arrivals, or refuse them,
Sona
had left behind a cubby half the size of our cabin on the
Fox,
its floor become another mysterious panel of glowing shapes connected by streaks of blue to the walls
.

A floor upon which I was not about to set foot or anything else. “On that?”

My Chosen, ever prepared, whipped out a blanket from the pack he carried on every excursion, spread it out gallantly, and bowed with a smile that held as much mischief as charm.

The bow was another message. It had to hurt; Morgan insisted time would heal the ribs cracked by an explosion, but there hadn't been enough of it. The truth was, we'd not enough Healers either, nor should their Talent be, as he put it, “wasted on minor injuries” when there were those who'd lost limbs or had internal injuries, crushed in the Oud attacks.