Threshold

Joe South, a young test pilot heading home from a mission, awakens in his ship to discover that he has traveled five hundred years into the future and landed on the planet Threshold, where he soon finds himself embroiled in the dangerous, deceptive, and alien world

Threshold is a space habitat between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter with a population of a quarter million. Run by a latter-day United Nations, one of its duties is to keep humans off of Earth, now a preserve. Thousands of Muslim pilgrims from other systems are not pleased at being kept from Mecca. Their leader's daughter decides to experience Threshold's decadent (to her) society with the heir to a powerful exploration corporation, who is also smuggling illegal life forms into the habitat, thus threatening the stability of a conference on the rights of nonhuman races and ALIs--Artificial Living Individuals which the Muslims treat as they do their women: like property. Captain Joseph South, on a test flight through interstellar spongespace, is translated 500 years into our future to arrive at Threshold just as all this is occurring. He has strange memories of a fly-by of system X-3, which match up with visions from an artifact brought to Threshold by a prospector. The authors ( Outpassage ) tie up the other plots nicely, but leave aliens on X-3 to lead in to the next books in their trilogy.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.