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

it was a useless oddity without practical application.

After the death of the time-gate discoverer in 2041, his widow,
Madame Angelique Guderian, learned that her husband had
been mistaken. The fair numbers of malcontents in the develop-
ing Human Polity of the Milieu were willing to pay handsomely
to be transported to a simpler world without rules. Geologists
and paleontologists knew that the Pliocene Epoch was an idyllic
period just before the dawn of rational life on our planet.
Romantics and rugged individualists from almost all of Earth's
ethnic groups eventually discovered Madame's "underground
railroad" to the Pliocene, which operated out of a quaint French
inn located outside the metropolitan centre of Lyon.

From 2041 until 2106, the rejuvenated Madame Guderian
transported clients from the Milieu to the Pliocene Exile, a
presumed natural paradise. After suffering belated qualms of
conscience about the fate of the time-travellers, Madame herself
passed into the Pliocene, and operation of her clandestine
service was taken over by the Human Polity in a quasi-official
manner: The time-gate was a convenient glory hole for
dissidents.

By 2110, when the gate into the Pliocene Exile had been
operating for nearly seventy years, some 100,000 human time-
farers had passed through it into an unknown destiny.

On 25 August 2110, eight persons, making up that week's
"Group Green," were transported to Exile. These three women
and five men would play key roles in a drama that would affect
not only the Pliocene world, but ultimately that of the Milieu
itself.
Group Green discovered, as other time-travellers had before

them, that the natural paradise of Pliocene Europe was under
the control of a humanoid race from the Duat Galaxy, a star-
whirl many millions of light years away from our own part of
the universe. The exotics were also exiled, having been driven
from their home because of their barbarous battle-religion.

The dominant exotic faction, the Tanu, were tall and hand-
some. In spite of a thousand-year sojourn on Earth, there were
still less than 20,000 of them because their reproduction was
inhibited by solar radiation. Antagonistic to the Tanu and
outnumbering them by at least four to one were their ancient
foes, the Firvulag. Often called the Little People, these exotics
were mostly of short stature, although there were plenty of
human-sized and even gigantic individuals among them. They
reproduced quite well on Earth but were short-lived compared
to the Tanu.