"Julian May - Jack the Bodiless" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

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Jack the Bodiless
Book One of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy
By Julian May
Version 1.0

I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made!
My soul knows how marvelous are your works. You were aware when my very bones were formed,
Growing secretly inside my mother's body
As a plant's root grows beneath the earth. You knew me before I was born.
The days of my life were all written in your book
Before they had ever begun.

PSALM 139


Whereas in the familiar closed systems of physics the final state is determined by the initial
conditions, in open systems, as far as they attain a steady state, this state can be reached from
different initial conditions and in different ways.

LUDWIG VON BERTALANFFY, A Systems View of Man


God writes straight with crooked lines.
SPANISH PROVERB

PROLOGUE

SNOW GROTTO PLANETARY PARK, KANNERNARKTOK TERRITORY
SECTOR 14: STAR 14-661-329 [SIKRINERK] PLANET 6 [DENALI]
GALACTIC YEAR: LA PRIME 1-400-644 [17 MAY 2113]

It was a dark and stormy night, as so many nights were on Denali, where topography and climate
conspired to produce some of the Galaxy's worst weather. Worst from a human point of view, of
course, unless that human was addicted to Nordic skiing . . .
The mind of the supervising Lylmik entity named Atoning Unifex smiled as Its material essence
hovered above the blizzard-lashed park. Denali was a rugged planet, wintery throughout most of its
year, the veritable haunt of the Great White Cold celebrated in a certain Earth song that was very
familiar to the First Supervisor. On most of Denali's continents, glaciers and permanent
snowfields spread wide amidst a fantastic landscape of dazzling peaks, black precipices, and crags
that thrust up like the broken tusks of primordial monsters. Denali had no sapient indigenous life-
form. No rational creatures had as yet evolved on it when it was assigned to the Human Polity by
the world evaluators of the Galactic Milieu. Its most famous honorary native son, Saint Jack the
Bodiless, was conceived before the first Earth settlers arrived.
The hardy people who originally colonized Denali in the mid-2000s had hailed from Alaska and
other parts of the United States having severe winters. They were quickly joined by Canadians,
Siberians, Samoyeds, Lapps, and a host of others who craved a life of challenge that could be
lived in a setting of wild natural beauty. The World-Mind those human colonists engendered might
have been expected to be as dark and moody as Denali's weather; but for some reason the very