"Julian May - The Golden Torc" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

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SYNOPSIS OF VOLUME I
THE MANY-COLORED LAND
THE GREAT INTERVENTION OF 2013 OPENED HUMANITY'S WAY to the stars, giving the people of Earth
unlimited lebensraum,
energy sufficiency, and membership in a benevolent civiliza-tion,
the Galactic Milieu. Humanity became the sixth of the
Coadunate Races, a commonwealth of planet colonizers who
shared high technology and the capability of performing mental
operations known as metafunctions. The latterтАФwhich include
telepathy, psychokinesis, and many other powersтАФhad lurked
in the human gene pool from time immemorial, but only rarely
were manifest.
By 2110, when the action of the first volume in this saga
began, a kind of Golden Age prevailed. More than 700 fresh
planets had been colonized by exuberant Earthlings. Humans
with overt metapsychic powers were slowly increasing in num-ber;
however, in the majority of the population, the mind-powers
were either meager to the point of nullity, or else
latentтАФthat is, nearly unusable, because of psychological bar-riers
or other factors.
Even Golden Ages have their misfits, and the psychosocial
structure of the Galactic Milieu had its share. A French physicist
named Theo Guderian unwittingly provided these square pegs
with a unique escape hatch when he discovered an apparently
useless phenomenon: a one-way, fixed-focus time-warp open-ing
into France's Rhone River Valley as it existed during the.Pliocene Epoch, six million years ago.
Certain that a prehistoric
Eden must exist on Pliocene Earth, an increasing number of
misfits prevailed upon Guderian's widow, Angelique, to let
them pass through the time-portal into "Exile."
From her husband's death in 2041 until 2106, the rejuven-ated
Madame Guderian operated a peculiar establishment that
the Galactic authorities reluctantly tolerated. Her French inn,
l'Auberge du Portail, served as a front for transporting clients
from Old Earth to a world six million years younger. After
suffering qualms of conscience about the fate of the transpor-tees,
Madame herself ultimately passed through the one-way
gate into Pliocene Exile. Operation of the time-warp was taken
over by the Galactic Milieu, which had found it to be a con-venient
glory hole for dissidents.
On 25 August 2110, eight persons, making up that week's
"Group Green," were transported to the Pliocene: Richard
Voorhees, a grounded starship captain; Felice Landry, a dis-turbed
young athlete whose violent temperament and latent
mind-powers had made her an outcast; Claude Majewski, a
133-year-old paleontologist recently bereaved of his wife and
colleague; Sister Amerie Roccaro, a physician and burnt-out
priest who longed to become a hermit; Bryan Grenfell, an