"Julian May - The Pliocene Exiles 04 - The Adversary" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

activities of the Human Polity of the Milieu were carried on by
"normals," but human metapsychics did occupy privileged posi-
tions in government, in the sciences, and in other areas where
high mental powers were valuable to the Milieu as a whole.

At only one period between the Great Intervention and 2110
did it seem that the admission of humanity to the Milieu had
been a mistake: This was in 2083, during the brief Metapsychic
Rebellion. Instigated by a group of Earth-based humans led by
Marc Remillard, this attempted coup narrowly missed
destroying the entire Milieu organization. The Rebellion was
suppressed by loyalist humans, who included Marc's own
brother, Jack, and steps were taken to insure that such a disaster
never would occur again.

A hundred or so battered survivors of the Rebellion managed
to evade retribution by following Marc Remillard through a
unique escape hatch: a one-way time-gate leading into Earth's
Pliocene Epoch, six million years in the past. Eventually the
Rebels settled on Ocala Island, in a part of North America that
would one day be called Florida. Well equipped with sophisti-
cated Milieu gadgetry, they lived in isolation for twenty-seven
years while their leader made a futile search of the Pliocene
galaxy with his artificially enhanced farsenses, seeking another
planet inhabited by metapsychics with high technology. Marc
Remillard never gave up his dream of human domination of the
galaxy--not even when his old allies despaired and their children
openly opposed the plan.

In the Galactic Milieu, six million years into the future, the
crushing of the Metapsychic Rebellion signalled the start of a
new Golden Age for humanity. Human metapsychics achieved
Unity--assimilation into a near-mystical mental fellowship of
the Galactic Mind. Nonmetas on the planet Earth and its hund-
reds of interstellar colonies enjoyed unlimited lebensraum,
energy sufficiency, the challenge of settling and exploiting new
worlds, and citizenship in a splendid galaxy-wide civilization.

But even Golden Ages have their misfits: in this case, humans
who, for one reason or another, were temperamentally unsuited
to the rather structured social environment of the Milieu. These
malcontents chose to exile themselves by passing through the
time-gate that led to an Earth six million years younger.

The time-gate was discovered in 2034, during the heady years
of the scientific knowledge explosion subsequent to the Great
Intervention. But since the time-warp opened only backward
(anything attempting to return became six million years old and
usually crumbled to dust), and since it had a fixed focus (a point
in France's Rhone River Valley), its discoverer concluded that