"Bull,.Emma.-.War.For.The.Oaks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bull Emma)

Those are things only I could tell you; no writer of introductions, no
matter how insightful, could deduce them from the text of the novel
or the details of my life. But for everything else, the novel can, and
should, speak for itself, and your relationship with it is as true as
anyone elseТs, including mine. All I can do now is step aside and
say, УIТd like you to meet my story.Ф

I hope the two of you hit it off.



Los Angeles

November 2000
Prologue





By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved
canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of
office towers and department stores. The big red-and-white city
buses roar at every corner. On the many-globed lampposts,
banners advertising a museum exhibit flap in the wind that the
tallest buildings snatch out of the sky. The skyway system vaults
the mall with its covered bridges of steel and glass, and they, too,
are full of people, color, motion.

But late at night, thereТs a change in the Nicollet Mall.

The street lamp globes hang like myriad moons, and light glows in
the empty bus shelters like nebulae. Down through the silent
business district the mall twists, the silver zipper in a patchwork
coat of many dark colors. The sound of traffic from Hennepin
Avenue, one block over, might be the grating of the World-WormТs
scales over stone.

Near the south end of the mall, in front of Orchestra Hall, Peavey
Plaza beckons: a reflecting pool, and a cascade that descends
from towнering chrome cylinders to a sunken walk-in maze of stone
blocks and pillars for which УfountainФ is an inadequate name. In
the moonlight, it is black and silver, gray and white, full of an elusive
play of shape and contrast.

On that night, there were voices in Peavey Plaza. One was like the
susurrus of the fountain itself, sometimes hissing, sometimes with
the little-bell sound of a water drop striking. The other was deep
and rough; if the concrete were an animal, it would have this voice.