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

simple tores that compel obedience. (Ironically, these "ramas"
are part of the direct hominid line that climaxed in Homo
sapiens six million years later.) Humans occupying positions
of trust or engaged in vital occupations under the Tanu usually
wear gray tores. These do not amplify the mind, but do allow
telepathic communication between humans and exotics; the de-vices
also incorporate pleasure-pain circuits, through which the
Tanu reward or punish their minions. The tores are not easily
made, requiring a rare barium component in their manufacture,
and so they are not used on the majority of "normal" (that is,
metaphysically nonlatent) humans, who are coerced into obe-dience
by other means. If Tanu testing shows that an arriving
time-traveler has significant latent metafunctions, the lucky
person is given a silver torc. This is a genuine amplifier similar
to the gold collars worn by the TanuтАФbut with control circuits.
Silver-torc humans enjoy a privileged position; rarely, they may.even be granted golden torcs and
full freedom as citizens of
the Many-Colored Land.
The eight members of Group Green, like all new arrivals,
were taken for mind-testing to a Tanu fortress, Castle Gateway.
Almost at once, the Group proved to be anything but typical. The starship captain, Richard,
temporarily escaped and had a
terrifying encounter with a Tanu slave-mistress, Epone, who
administered the tests for latent metafunctions.
Elizabeth, the former farsensor and metapsychic teacher,
discovered that passage through the time-warp had triggered
restoration of the awesome mental powers she feared had been
lost forever. Her discovery was noted with excitement by an-other
Tanu, Creyn, who promised Elizabeth that a "wonderful


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life" lay ahead of her in the Many-Colored Land.
Stein Oleson, the huge driller, was driven temporarily insane
by the trip back through time. Smashing the door of his de-tention
cell, he was subdued only after killing a number of
gray-torc bondsmen. To insure Stein's future docility, he was
fitted with a gray torc of his own. His heroic physique made
him a candidate for the Tanu-Firvulag ritual war, the Grand
Combat. Still unconscious from his recapture, he was readied
for a trip south to the Tanu capital city of Muriah.
Also torcedтАФbut with silverтАФwas the trickster youth, Aiken
Drum. The exotic testers had detected strong metapsychic la-tencies
in him, which would be brought up to the operant level
as he became accustomed to wearing the amplifier.
The anthropologist, Bryan Grenfell, possessed no signifi-cant
mental latencies. But his professional talents seemed
strangely valuable to the Tanu, with the result that Bryan was