The Gate to Futures Past by Julie E. Czerneda Read Free Book Online

forgotten song, or new one, let roam free. Such things and any could happen, in AllThereIs.
    Such things and any, here, weren’t the worry.
    Between, was. To be certain, she’d need to be closer. To move within AllThereIs required
purpose
as well as
direction,
and claim the attention of others in turn. Unkind.
    Unwise.
    She would wait, here.
    And Watch.

Chapter 3
    I WASN’T SURE what caught my attention. This wasn’t the
Silver Fox,
prone to mechanical muttering just when I’d settled to sleep.
    The
Fox
was gone, reduced to a mound of slag in a shipcity an unfathomable distance away from here and now, and the great starship we’d continued to call
Sona
for lack of a better name made no perceptible sound as it traveled.
    Maybe that was it, I told myself, closing my eyes. The silence.
    If I didn’t count the deep, slow breathing of the multitude sharing the Core, the loudest of which was right beside my ear. Normally, I quite liked to hear my Chosen, not to mention feel the beat of his pulse against my skin; depending on the moment, such sensations were as apt to arouse as soothe or, as now, reassure me he was here and no longer roaming the ship.
    From the current pace of his breaths, and to my inner sense, Morgan slept soundly. If he hadn’t wakened me, I thought with a smidge of disappointment, what had? I resisted the impulse to sit up and look around. The faintest possible glow outlined the bases of the beds, to prevent stubbed toes during visits to the accommodation, and I was unwilling to disturb Morgan or anyone else. It was, after all, the middle of shipnight.
    Were lights on in the rest of the ship?
    Morgan, who’d again missed the evening meal in order to continue exploring, thought it likely the ship reacted to his presence, illuminating wherever he wandered, corridors going dark behind his back. There were lights on, I’d checked, whenever a door opened. Except if that door opened into here, during ship-imposed night.
    I could ask
Sona,
I supposed, but then it made the whole question of lights seem overly important. I refused to guess what the ship might do then.
    Our tenth shipnight, lying here together, speeding through subspace. Already a challenge to tell one shipday from the next. How many more before they blurred into a sameness? Until more of my people lost themselves like Nyso and Luek?
    Not thoughts to help me fall back to sleep, I scolded myself, pushing them aside. We’d get there—all of us, including the di Kessa’ats, who’d be back to being a nuisance—when we did.
    Wherever “there” was.
    That did it. Like an itch impossible to scratch, thinking about our destination. I’d ordered the ship to take us home. In hindsight, that may have been—
    . . . 
what was that?
    My right hand rested on my belly, not yet round with the life inside.
I’m sorry I woke you, Aryl.
    It wasn’t you.
With a hint of
consternation. Something’s not right—look here.
    She’d felt it, too, whatever had wakened me.
Where?
    Come.
    I let her
draw
my mind after hers, into the M’hir. With no outward sign, Morgan came awake, instantly alert. Just as well, I thought, glad of his warm golden presence as I entered the dark.
    The M’hir. Aryl had named it after the violent mountain winds that swept across her home on Cersi each year. The wind brought the Harvest.
    The M’hir I knew was nothing so benign.
    Its darkness
moved
, to Clan senses. Sometimes with a
snap
of pressure or unpredictable and crushing weight; sometimes, asnow, a
heave
as if it sought to rid itself of me and mine. I didn’t take it personally. Not a good place to linger, the M’hir; it was, however, part of us.
    For a portion of each Clan mind was rooted in that darkness; it claimed the rest upon death, consciousness become ghost, to dissolve and disappear.
    Enough of us, surely, to fill it, those past terrible days.
    I let myself
reach
for