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

Basin. Sailing over shallow lagoons, it approached the
Tanu capital, Muriah, which lay at the tip of the Balearic
Peninsula. Most of the human passengers were increasingly anxious as the voyage neared its end;
but not Aiken Drum. His
silver torc, instead of merely freeing his metafunctions, had
acted as a trigger to a psychic avalanche. Control circuits that
had easily held normal human minds in thrall burned out before
Aiken's mental blaze; and his powers, unlike the gentle ones
of Elizabeth, were fully oriented toward aggression. Behind
the grinning face of the young man in the shining golden suit
was a personality that might, in time, seek to dominate not
only the exotic races of Pliocene Earth, but humanity as well.
Now begin Volume 2, which follows Aiken, Elizabeth,
Stein, and Bryan on the sixth day after their passage through
the time-gate into the world of Pliocene Earth...1
THE DRAGONFLY HOVERED, A GOLDEN SPARK, JUST ABOVE THE
bare mast of the motionless boat.
As the first breezes broke the water with cat's-paw dimpling,
the dragonfly darted off. He zoomed powerfully into the sky
and hovered once again. The boat below him was now trans-formed
into a lonely speck amid a pastel expanse of shallow
lagoons and saltflats, all blurred in pearly mist.
Higher! His shape-shifted wings lofted him into the dawn.
Keen compound eyes that covered most of his head showed
him the continental slope's dark rampart along the northern
horizon: the brink of Europe punctuated by a single towering
cloud that marked the cascade of the Rhone River, pouring
down a vast slope of sediment into the nearly waterless Med-iterranean
Basin of Pliocene Earth that was called the Empty
Sea.
Should he fly toward the mainland? His wings had the strength
to carry him more than 100 kilometers per hour for brief sprints.
He knew it would be easy for him to retrace the journey the
boat had made on the previous day; or he could fly eastward
to the upthrust mass of Corsica-Sardinia, where Creyn had said
no Tanu lived.
He could go anywhere he liked. He was free now.
Gone were the mental restraints programmed upon him by
the exotic slavemaster. This morning when he awoke, the silver
torc at his throat was cold rather than warm, the neural circuitry
of the psychocoercive device overloaded and rendered useless
by his mind's new power. The metapsychic latencies that the
torc had unlocked remained operant. And were still growing.
He reached out with his farsense, listening. He perceived
the slow-cycling rhythms of the seven people asleep in the craft.beneath him, and farther afield,
telepathic murmurs from other
boats scattered about the Great Lagoon. In the distant southтАФ
he concentrated his farsense, clumsily attempting fine focusтАФ
was a conglomerate mental shimmer. Fascinating! Could it be
coming from the Tanu capital city of Muriah, the goal toward