The Gate to Futures Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

Finger-ready panels.
    Even better, once they left the planet, he’d discovered the lifts accepted verbal commands. In the right language, but he had that now. “Thirty-four,” he ordered, feeling the mechanism engage.
    Sleepteach, reinforced by daily use, had made him fluent to the point where the Human caught himself thinking in the Hoveny tongue every so often. He’d begun to acquire the written language. Nockal di Mendolar had been his first teacher; while bedridden, she’d been glad to trade lessons for stories of other worlds. The elder Adept from Amna had an unClan-like curiosity about aliens; that she’d lost an arm to the Oud might have been part of it.
    There was a fierce courage in all the Om’ray Morgan enjoyed.
    The readout flashed symbols too quickly to read. No matter. He’d made this trip often enough to step forward before the door fully opened.
    Shifting his pack to one shoulder, the Human strode down the bright corridor. A narrower hall, this, lacking the cushioned flooring and touches of art of the main living areas. When he’d discovered it, he’d felt at home. Closer, anyway. What did that say about him?
    Morgan grinned. “Once a spacer, always a spacer.” The walls, here true bulkheads, returned hollow echoes. Alone, at last.
    Never lonely, not with Sira’s warm, if presently distracted, presence along their link. Before her company, he’d had the
Silver Fox,
hard as that was to explain to grounders, the finicky old ship the ideal companion for a telepath who’d struggled to keep out the noise of other minds.
    Not a problem around Clan, taught from childhood to shield their innermost thoughts and emotions. Anything they
leaked
was deliberate. By invitation.
    To make a point.
    Not a problem, regardless; with Sira’s training, he’d added Clan shields to his own cobbled-together training. Morgan’s lips twitched. Besides. Other Human minds?
    No longer a problem.
    He passed two doors, stopping in front of the third. The corridor curved right, with an upward slope. It led to a section of more and larger portals, widely spaced and locked.
    Morgan chuckled and rapped his knuckles on the door in front of him. Once, twice.
    It turned open, just as it had when he’d banged a fist against it in frustration. He hadn’t found another door which would—likely wouldn’t, as
Sona
continued to collapse unused levels.
    Besides, he’d enough to explore right here, with no guarantee of time in which to do it.
    Morgan walked through, the door turning closed behind him. From inside, it opened to the same knocking. He suspected he’d have liked the original user of this room.
    Say, rather, workshop.
    He’d recognized it instantly, despite the alien shapes. Countertops lined three walls, crowded with objects in various stages of assembly. A workbench filled the middle of the room, shaped like an X, with four outstretched arms, each brightly lit. A stool stood waiting beside one such arm. On top Morgan had found what had to be tools, laid as if put down mid-use, and a tipped-over glass mug. Someone had left in a hurry.
    A mattress shoved underneath suggested a reluctance to leave some task. Or a task too important to leave.
    Like his. Setting his pack on the nearest empty arm of the bench, the Human perched on the stool before an array of small objects, including the tools from that first day of discovery, sorted by shape and size, with the larger to the left.
    â€œWhich of you today?” The Comspeak sounded quaint, almost foreign to his ears.
    All the more reason to use it. He’d another. The Hoveny language might be replete with scientific and technological terms, but he wanted to think as himself, for himself.
    He had to. Morgan picked up a tool. The handle fit his hand, with indentations for four fingers and a thumb. Some Om’ray—including those Vyna Clan he’d seen—had a second thumblike digit.