The Talents Universe

Open these pages and discover 14 remarkable stories of fantasy by a grand master of the genre. A wonderful writer, as well as successful and beloved by fans across the world, Anne McCaffrey has created an exciting collection of telepaths, secret gifts, dangerous missions, dragonriders, and more. Contents: Lady in the Tower.—A Meeting of Minds.—Daughter.—Dull Drums.—Changeling.—Weather on Welladay.—The Thorns of Barevi.—Horse From a Different Sea.—Great Canine Chorus.—Finder's Keeper.—A Proper Santa Claus.—The Smallest Dragonboy.—Apple.—Honeymoon.

They were four extraordinary women who read minds, healed bodies, diverted disasters, foretold the future\-\-and became pariahs in their own land. A talented, elite cadre, they stepped out of the everyday human race...to enter their own!

As director of the Jerhattan Parapsychic Center, telepath Rhyssa Owen coordinated the job assignments for psychically gifted Talents. And though she had her hands full dealing with the unreasonable demand for kinetics to work on the space platform that would be humankind's stepping-stone to the stars, she was always ready to welcome new Talents to the Center. Feisty and Streetwise, twelve-year-old Tirla used her extraordinary knack for languages to eke out a living in the Linear developments, where the poor struggled to make ends meet and children were conscripted or sold into menial work programs. Young Peter, paralyzed in a freak accident, hoped someday to get into space where zero gravity would enable him to function more easily. Both desperately needed help only other Talents could provide. With the appearance in her life of one extraordinary man with no measurable Talent at all, Rhyssa suddenly found herself questioning everything she thought she knew about her people. And when two Talented children were discovered to have some very unusual—and unexpected—abilities, she realized that she would have to reassess the potential of all Talentkind...