"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 19 - King of the Slavers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

unto hardness, those breasts. Warheads, the currently-in slang called
them. Her skin was pale and her hair was more pale than that and her eyes,
too, a silvery gray with only the ghost of a hint of sky-blue. Her name was
Janja, and she was black and white. Mix those, and the result was gray. Janja
was gray, and she was with The Gray Organization. Actually the super-policers,
the war-preventers, the super-spooks were named TransGalactic Order. That
yielded the initials TGO, and they in turn yielded the 1 2 sobriquet-the
nickname, in plainer terms-The Gray Organization. Aristotle had written that
black represented evil and white represented good and that the two could not
mix. The result, Aristoteles of Athenos wrote, was gray: good and bad, neither
bad nor good, both bad and good. And that, the philosopher-scholar wrote, was
impossible. Good and evil could not at one and the same time exist in the same
entity, Aristotle said. White and black could not coexist; gray was
impossible. (In that, Aristotle was dead wrong. TGO existed, and so did Janja,
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in black and white.) She was from a planet called barbaric, and the planet was
a gentle idyll of lovers where war was unknown. She was from a planet called
Protected and she had been stolen off that world, all unprotected, as a slave.
She had never known violence on that "barbaric" world, and she hated it-and in
time she slew her masters (her owners)-and sliced away their manly attributes
as trophies. She abhorred violence and lawlessness and, back on her own planet
before her capture and use, had been saving herself for marriage; and she
became mistress of a pirate, a space pirate all in black. She wore a weapon
and she had used it. She was of Aglaya where men and women, girls and boys
were Lifemated, and she believed in that, and she had been sex-slave of her
masters on planet Resh-and had killed them-and on planet Knor (she killed
them, too, in order to escape) and lover to a woman named Hellfire and a
non-human named Cinnabar and now a man . . . a man who bore five names (that
she knew about), one of which was Rat. She despised the race that had enslaved
her. Them, the Thingmakers, and she had joined them. She abhorred killing and
had killed two of those men who had stolen her away to slavery to begin with.
One, the one 3 named Jonuta of Qalara, she had killed twice. (And the
anti-Aristotelean contradictions continued: Jonuta was alive.) She was Janja
and she was gray. She moved with the ease and grace of the shadow of a soaring
bird, or of a cat. She did not swagger. Instead she glided, using muscles
developed on a planet whose sun was legend and whose gravity was not. It was
high, that gravity. It created short people, strong people, strong-legged
people of strong will. She was Janja, gray in black, and she was a hunter, a
prowling hunter among the Thingmakers. She had become one of their guardians,
their police. Only she knew that she was an alien among Them, a true
alien. Oh, she resembled their dark race, except only in pigmentation. It was
her mind that was different. In the mind, she was not human, not what They
called "Galactic." She was more than that; more than Galactic and thus a pace
beyond human. In her mind and because of her mind, she was an alien among
Them. Stolen from her own world and her own kind-her very life-and trained
only as slave and pirate and mistress, she refused to be any of those. And so
she was with TGO, because she had to do and to be, and she could not return to