"Carrie Richerson - Artistic License" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Carrie)

CARRIE RICHERSON

ARTISTIC LICENSE

*
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura . . .

--Dante, Inferno, Canto I

THE CLIFF FACE WAS GIVING me trouble. I teased out another curl of the stiff,
brittle basalt -- stretching, stretching . . . and winced in pain as it snapped
back on me. Damn. I rubbed my aching head. Serves me right, my old art school
professor would have said. Patience, Antonia, patience! he would chide. You must
work with the material, not against it. Yeah, right.

My theory, on the other hand, has always been, If at first you don't succeed,
try a bigger hammer. I visualized a very large hammer. WHAM! Shocked grains
aligned and surrendered themselves to pliability. That's more like it, I thought
as I pulled the rock, no more resistant than thick taffy now, into a tube shape.

Of course, this "taffy" was part of several hundred thousand tons of cliff, and
any mistake on my part would bring it all thundering down around my sunburned
ears. Or fuse my ganglia into lumpy porridge if I lost my focus. I slapped away
a mosquito the size of a small hummingbird, pushed my sweat-spiked hair back out
of my eyes, and worked my way with intense care along the row of basalt columns,
hollowing some into tubes, leaving others in their natural state. When finished,
if I did my job right, my olympian wind flute would be indistinguishable from
the natural cliff face--until the wind blew. Then it would yield everything from
soft whistling to organ thunder-- and maybe the voice of the god herself, in a
really big blow.

The prospect of that caliber of sound rattling my client from his bed some night
was almost enough to make me cheerful. I had nothing against Lane Forrestal --
except that he was rich, handsome, privileged, and had about as much aesthetic
sensibility as the rock I was goosing. He'd hired me to transform a square mile
of northwest Georgia hills into a pocket Tahiti-- and he was giving me free rein
to embellish the project any way I wanted. Fine. For as much money as I was
charging him, he could have his ecological joke -- and I'd indulge a little
whimsy of my own. Forrestal had wanted the best landscape Artist in the world;
he didn't even flinch at my price or my stipulations. It didn't help my opinion
of him that he'd been so aristocratically nice about it.

I was halfway along the cliff when the back of my brain began to itch. I knew
without turning around that my audience was back. Every day for the last week,
she'd been watching me from the veranda of Forrestal's mansion. She must have
had more than a touch of Talent herself for me to be so sensitive to her
presence, but she wasn't trained and didn't know how to shield herself. She