The Many-Colored Land and The Golden Torc

748 pp. Two books in one volume. This is a spellbinding tale woven of equal parts epic and myth--with a liberal dash of hard science fiction. When a one-way time tunnel to Earth's distant past, specifically six million B.C., was discovered by folks on the Galactic Milieu, every misfit for light-years around hurried to pass through it. Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years. In the early twenty-second century, many humans are being born with psychic powers and are linked in a single galactic mind. Those without these psychic powers--the misfits, undesirables, criminals, and radicals--have a choice: mental reprogramming or exile. Exile, voluntary or otherwise, takes them back six million years, to a time between the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of Homo sapiens, and to a time of exotic surprises and unknown dangers. Six million years in the past, a proto-Europe is inhabited by two extraterrestrial races, the chivalric Tanu and the dwarfish, forest-dwelling Firvulag—both of which possess far-reaching psychic powers. But now, time-traveling humans from a future society have become involved in the age-old struggle between the two. One group of captured humans is brought to Muriah, the stately capital of the Tanu kingdom. Among them is Elizabeth Orme, who was once, in her own world, a Grand Master Metapsychic. In spite of Tanu harassment, she begins to recover her lost powers. The other human group, which has managed to overcome its Tanu guards and escape into the northern forests, includes Chief Burke, a Native American, and Felice Uindry, an athlete gifted with certain psychic powers of her own. This group, with the ambiguous aid of the Firvulag, determines to launch an attack against the very heart of Tanu dominance. At the end of the Grand Combat tournament between Tanu and Firvulag comes the astonishing climax to this astonishing novel.