| $@%&! level: Low “Bedroom” level: Low Violence level: Low Back Cover: "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..." |
Actually, it's not so much that they're selfless as that they're a once-persecuted minority who have learned to band together, to stand up for themselves, and to become highly useful. They watch out for each other, a bit like a family, and since most of the other families shown are the ones selling their children, the Talents sort of stand out. It's a bit of a paradox, perhaps, that in a society where all the basic needs are provided by right, actual human charity seems to be an uncommon commodity.
Over the course of the story, the Talents deal with several problems, such as employers who pay no attention to their special needs, crashing space shuttles, and kidnappers. The problems mostly manage to be linked together one way or another, but as the back cover implies, this is a story more about the characters than the things that happen.