"Neal Stephenson & Frederick George - Interface" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

didn't deserve to be mangled by some antique chair day in and day out, Illinois Historical Society be
damned. That chair was everything Cozzano wasn't: fat with padding and glossy with petal-soft leather
where Cozzano was lean and craggy and weathered, a man who had waited his whole life to look the way he
did now, as if carved from a block of white oak with a few quick strokes of an adze.
Cozzano was sitting in the chair one night in January, holding a fountain pen as big as an uncooked hot
dog in his left hand. Cozzano returned to his home in the small town of Tuscola every weekend to mow the
lawn, rake leaves, or shovel snow, so calluses made a dry rasping sound as his writing hand slid across the
paper.
The fountain pen looked expensive and had been given to him by someone terribly important a long
time ago; Cozzano had forgotten whom. He late wife, Christina, used to keep track of who had given him
what and send out little notes, Christmas cards, and so on, but since her death, all of these social niceties had
gone straight to hell, and most people forgave him for it. Cozzano found that the pen's bulk fit his hand
nicely, his fingers wrapped around the barrel without having to pinch it like a cheap ballpoint, and the ink
flowed effortlessly on to the paper, nib scrawling and calluses rasping, as he signed the endless stream of bills,
proclamations, resolutions, letters, and commendations that flowed across his desk like blood cells streaming in
single file through the capillaries of the lung - the stately procession that sustained the life of the body
politic.
His office was on the second floor of the east wing, directly above the capitol's main entrance,
overlooking a broad lawn decorated with a statue of Lincoln delivering his farewell address to Springfield.
The room had only two windows - tall narrow north-facing ones that were blocked even from the late
afternoon sun by the north wing and the soaring capitol dome. Cozzano called it the "arctic circle" - the only
part of Illinois that was in darkness for six months out of the year. This was a somewhat obscure and technical
joke, especially in these days of endemic geographic ignorance, but people laughed at it anyway because he
was the Governor. He kept his desk lamp going all day, but as the sky had darkened and as he worked into
the night, he had not bothered to turn on the overhead fixtures, and he now sat in a pool of illumination in
the middle of the dark office. Around the edges of the room, innumerable pieces of decoration reflected the
light back at him.
Each governor decorated the office in his own way. Only a few things were immutable: the preposterous
fresco on the ceiling, the massive doors with brass lions' heads mounted in their centers. His predecessor had
gone in for a spare, classical nineteenth-century look, filling the place up with antiques that had belonged
to Lincoln and Douglas. This impressed visitors and looked nice for the tour groups who came by every
hour to launch flashcube barrages over the velvet rope. Cozzano had banned the tour groups, slamming
the doors in their faces so that all they could see was the brass lions, and turned the office into a cluttered
Cozzano family museum.
It had started on the day of his first inauguration, with a small photo of his late wife, Christina, placed on
the corner of his historically inaccurate desk. Naturally, photos of his children, Mary Catherine and James,
came next. But there was no point in stopping with the immediate family, and so Cozzano had brought in
several boxes containing pictures of patriarchs and matriarchs going back several generations. He wanted
pictures of his friends, too, and of their families, and he also needed various pieces of memorabilia, some of
which were chosen for sentimental reasons, some for purely political ones. By the time Cozzano was
finished decorating his office, it was almost filled with clutter, smelling salts had to be brought in for the
Historical Society, and, as he sat down for the first time in his big leather chair, he could trace the entire
genealogy and economic development of the Cozzano clan, and of twentieth-century Illinois, which
amounted to the same thing.
There was an old aerial photograph of Tuscola as seen from its own water tower in the 1930s. It was a
town of a few thousand people, about half an hour south of the academic metropolis of Champaign-Urbana
and a couple of hours south of Chicago. Even in this photo it was possible to see gaudy vaults in the town
cemetery, and Duesenbergs cruising the streets. Tuscola was, for a farm town, bizarrely prosperous.
In an oval frame of black walnut was a hand-tinted photograph of his great-grandfather and namesake
Guillermo Cozzano who had come to Illinois from Genoa in 1897. In typically contrary Cozzano fashion he