"May,.Julian.-.Exiles.3.-.Nonborn.King" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

a disaster never would occur again A certain number of bat-
tered rebel survivors did manage to evade retribution by passing
through a unique kind of escape hatch, a one-way time gate
leading into Earth's Pliocene Epoch, six million years in the
past

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 back-
ward (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
sadly concluded that it was a useless oddity without practical
application

After the time-gate discoverer's death in 2041, his widow,
Angelique Gudenan, learned that her husband had been mis-
taken

The Intervention had seemed to open a Golden Age for
humanity, giving it unlimited lebensraum, energy sufficiency,
and membership in a splendid galaxy-wide civilization But
even Golden Ages have their misfits in this case, humans who
were temperamentally unsuited to the rather structured social
environment of the Milieu As Madame Gudenan was to dis-
cover, there were fair numbers of these, and they were willing
to pay handsomely to be transported to a simpler world without
rules Geologists and paleonlologists knew that the Pliocene
was an idyllic period, just before the dawn of rational life on
our planet Romantics and nigged 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 center of
Lyon

From 2041 until 2106, the rejuvenated Madame Gudenan
transported clients from Old Earth to "Exile," a presumed nat-
ural paradise six million years younger After suffenng belated

THE NONBORN KING

XV

qualms of conscience about the fate of the time-travelers, Ma-
dame herself passed into the Pliocene and operation of her inn
was taken over by the Milieu, which had found the time-warp
to be a convenient glory hole for dissidents By 2110, nearly
100,000 time-farers had vanished into an unknown destiny

On 25 August 2110, eight persons, making up that week's