"Mike Resnick - 2 - Oracle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

There was no room for them to breathe and flex their muscles in mankind's
sprawling Democracy, so they gravitated to the distant, barren worlds of the
Inner Frontier, drawn ever closer to the bright galactic Core like moths to a
flame.
Oh, they fit into human frames, most of them, but they were giants nonetheless.
No one knew what had brought them forth in such quantity at this particular
moment in human history. Perhaps there was a need for them in a galaxy filled
to overflowing with little people possessed of even smaller dreams. Possibly it
was the savage splendor of Inner Frontier itself, for it was certainly not a
place for ordinary men and women. Or maybe it was simply time for a race that
had been notably short of giants in recent eons to begin producing them once
again.
But whatever the reason, they swarmed out beyond the furthest reaches of the


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explored galaxy, spreading the seed of Man to hundreds of new worlds, and in
the process creating a cycle of legends that would never die as long as men
could tell tales of heroic deeds.
There was Faraway Jones, who set foot on more than 500 new worlds, never quite
certain what he was looking for, always sure that he hadn't yet found it.
There was a shadowy figure known only as the Whistler, who had killed more than
one hundred men and aliens.
There was Friday Nellie, who turned her whorehouse into a hospital during the
war against the Setts, and finally saw it declared a shrine by the very men who
once tried to close it down.
There was Jamal, who left no fingerprints or footprints, but had plundered
palaces that to this day do not know they were plundered.
There was Bet-a-World Murphy, who at various times owned nine different gold-
mining worlds, and lost every one of them at the gaming tables.
There was Backbreaker Ben Ami, who wrestled aliens for money and killed men for
pleasure. There was the Marquis of Queensbury, who fought by no rules at all,
and the White Knight, albino killer of fifty men, and Sally the Blade, and the
Forever Kid, who reached the age of nineteen and just stopped growing for the
next two centuries, and Catastrophe Baker, who made whole planets shake beneath
his feet, and the exotic Pearl of Maracaibo, and the Jade Queen, whose sins
were condemned by every race in the galaxy, and Father Christmas, and the One-
Armed Bandit with his deadly prosthetic arm, and the Earth Mother, and Lizard
Malloy, and the deceptively mild-mannered Cemetery Smith.
Giants all.
Yet there was one giant who was destined to tower over all of the others, to
juggle the lives of men and worlds as if they were so many toys, to rewrite the
history of the Inner Frontier, and the Outer Frontier, and the Spiral Arm, and
even the all-powerful Democracy itself. At various times in her short,
turbulent life she was known as the Soothsayer, and the Oracle, and the
Prophet. By the time she had passed from the galactic scene, only a handful of
survivors knew her true name, or her planet of origin, or even her early
history, for such is the way with giants and legends.