"John Varley - Mammoth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

mammoths came into "season," or as scientists call it, estrus, but we think it was in the summer.

The two summers before that, Temba had watched as the male Columbian mammoths joined the
herd and started looking for mates.

Another way humans are different from elephants and mammoths is that during mating season
male elephants and mammoths go through something called musth. No other animals that we know of
do this. During musth a male elephant gets very cranky, like human females sometimes do when they
are having their menstrual period. He will tear up trees and go charging about angrily and attack
anything that comes near him. You do not want to get in the way of a bull elephant during musth!

Poor Temba.

She smelled the bull elephants and she wanted to mate with them. But she was at the bottom of
the pecking order, and so every time a bull in musth approached her she was shoved rudely aside by
one of her older cousins or aunts. She could only watch through two summers as the mature bulls
passed her by.

But this summer it would be different.




7
HOWARD Christian stood in the Eagle's Eye at the 140th-floor level of the Los Angeles
Resurrection Tower and looked out over the city and saw that it was good.

Christian had conceived the tower as a memorial to the atrocities of September 11, 2001. He
had architects design a tower 150 stories high. It was four-sided and square, like the destroyed
World Trade Center, but there the resemblance ended. Christian had always felt the original buildings
were too boxy. The architects had solved this by making the walls swoop out of the ground in what
mathematicians called an asymptotic curve, one that approached a limiting vertical line but would
never reach it.

From the moment the plans were unveiled people called him crazy. A tower that tall, in
earthquake country? The relevant governing bodies would never approve it. A giant, defiant
skyscraper in a world still plagued by horrific terrorist deeds? It would draw zealous maniacs like a
rotten apple draws flies.

Those who predicted opposition from politicians and city planners had underestimated the
determination of Howard Christian, and the Power of money. With a combination of backroom horse
trading, numerous quids pro quo, bullying, public relation blitzes, and a lot of old-fashioned bribery,
minds were changed, including the important minds that held the power of a yea or nay over the
project.

What finally sold it was the stainless steel eagle that perched on the tower's top. Taller than the
Statue of Liberty, the eagle's baleful gaze turned continuously, covering all quadrants of the compass
hourly, a fearsome bird of prey ever vigilant to find and punish America's enemies. At night, two
multimillion-candlepower searchlights beamed from the golden eyes. The tower had weathered the
most recent 6.2 quake with only a few cracked windows.