Golden Torc - 2 by Julian May Page A

loved. I had expected to become a fisherman or a trader in a primitive Pliocene world. The interest in my profession by my Tanu captors was a complete surprise to me. I'm cooperating because I've been told this is the only way I'll get to see Mercy."
    Gomez-Nolan lowered one black brow in a half-scowl, seeming to scrutinize something floating in the air in front of Bryan. "That's your Mercy?" he inquired cryptically. "Good God." Not bothering to explain himself, he lit his cigar. "Come along. I'll show you the factory and tell you the Changeling's Tale."
    A slab of the paneling swung aside, revealing a long, welllit passage. Bryan followed Gomnol in a wake of smoke. They came to a great gateway of bronze bars that folded aside of its own volition as Gomnol strode heedlessly into it. "Oh, yes. I have PK, too," the psychobiologist said. "And farspeak and redact. Not as strong as the coercive faculty, of course, but enough to be useful."
    They came into a large room filled with what appeared to be jeweler's benches. Human and Tanu men and women in blue smocks, wearing magnifying eyelenses, were making golden torcs.
    "This is the heart of the place, right here. All handwork for these. Subassemblies-the crystalline chips with the circuitry have to be grown, then spattered and etched and sent here for installation within the metal shell. The Tanu brought only a single crystal-growing unit and chip etcher with them from their home galaxy, but I was able to build more to permit an increase in production of about tenfold."
    A rama went by, trundling a cart with containers of glittering components. Gomnol waved his cigar, causing a pink wafer to fly out of a box and into his fingers. "This little widget is my own psychoregulator that I developed for the silvers and grays. It puts the wearer at the mental disposal of any gold." Bryan could not help but envision Aiken Drum.
    Gomnol brightened. "A fascinating case. I wasn't at the feast, but they told me all about him. Too bad old Mayvar has him locked up over in Farsense House. Both Culluket and I are itching to interrogate him."
    "He worries the establishment?"
    Gomnol laughed. "The more naive elements. He doesn't worry me. The boy sounds like he must be a mental nova. Flash-in-the-pan pseudo-operant. The phenomenon wasn't unknown in the Milieu. Certain latents can be shocked into operancy by some profound trauma. We've had it happen here once or twice before, although none of the cases was quite as memorable as this Aiken Drum seems to be. The temporary operant status of the brain overrides the controls of the silver torc. But the thing can't sustain itself and eventually burns out, googol to gaga, just like that."
    "I've heard about the sad cases who couldn't adopt to the torc. But I understand you've been wearing one for forty years without suffering a mental burnout."
    The man in the smoking jacket only smiled around his cigar. They wandered among the benches, watching the painstaking work. It took almost a week for a technician to complete one of the golden neck-rings, even longer for the delicate little torcs worn by Tanu children. These came in four sizes; and when a larger one was put on, the smaller could be safely removed and used on another child.
    "No silver torcs for children?" Bryan asked.
    "Tanu women don't have human offspring, not even when they mate with human males. And human women, whether gold or silver or gray or bareneck, are only permitted to conceive by Tanu males. All of their offspring are exotic as well, but with a much smaller percentage of Firvulag phenotypes in the litter than Tanu women produce. The Tanu hybrids vary greatly in metapsychic faculties, of course. So far, all of them are latent. But in time, the race will produce natural operants, just as humanity has done. The human advent was quite a genetic leg up for the Tanu, as you can imagine. On their own, without any human admixture, they wouldn't have gone operant for millions of years. The