Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

DISPLAY OR HARDCOPY?
    HARDCOPY.
    The printer shrieks. I peel off the backing strip, stick the adhesive slip to the television screen, swivel an anglepoise to illuminate the thing printed on it, and go to the side of the bed.
    “Come on, daughter,” I say in English. “Time for thine eyes to see the glory of the coming of the Lord.” With my back to the chaotic un-geometries of the fracter, I open her eyelids with my thumbs.
    No audible response, no tactile change beneath my fingertips. But her pupils dilate. She sees. And being seen, the fracter slips past the defenses of her consciousness into the primal presentient core of neurochemical reaction.
    Minutes pass, slow, stretched, time-dilated. Her eyes close, she slips back into sleep. I am no medico, but I know the difference between this and the shallow, restless drowse from which I woke her.
    Voices in the landing. Mas, Mrs. Morikawa. The bedroom door opens, a crack, a line of yellow light. They cannot see what I am doing here. I slam the door, turn the deadlock.
    “Ethan?”
    “Leave me, Mas. I can help her, trust me.”
    “Mr. Ring?”
    “It will be all right, Mrs. Morikawa. I will not harm her, I swear. Just give me this one night. Please.”
    This has always been the way with the fracters: evil sown with the good. With healing and wholeness, suspicion and mistrust. What other choice did I have but to make them mistrust me? I find a chair out of the line of sight, to sit, to wait. Nightwatch. The clustered lights of the low-orbital manufactories arc slowly overhead and I remember the life of Ethan Ring.

A LL HER MAJOR DECISIONS, she said, were made by contrail-o-mancy. Jet trails. Inbounds, outbounds, conjunctions, and near-misses. Hexagrams of the heavens. “Make a lot more sense than leaves, cards, and bones. Divination should be a product of its time. It’s only logical.”
    “What do you do on cloudy days?” he asked.
    “Cloudy days I don’t even get out of bed.”
    At which precise moment an outbound trans-polar suborbital made a perfect thirty-two-degree trine with an inbound shuttle from Frankfurt and he fell in love with her. Having never fallen in love before, it was a pleasure to discover that falling was the most precise description language could offer of the sudden, shocking emotional vertigo he felt. It terrified him. It thrilled him. It was like being handed the keys to the best ride in the fairground and told to play until dawn. Thoughts of her crept unasked into every stray moment, kept him warm and horny.
    “So when are you going to do something about it?” asked Masahiko the anime hero and Marcus Cranitch the computer junkie and his girlfriend who looked as if her name should end in a “y” and was in fact called ’Becca and all the drinkers thinkers jokers poseurs bozos bimbos nymphos and boyos who comprised first-year B.A. Hons Graphic Communications, who had collectively and individually noticed that Luka Casipriadin was climbing the five flights of stairs between Fine Arts on one and Design on six at least four times a day.
    “Do something?” said Ethan Ring, who had never considered the possibility that so splendid a creature could reciprocally love him.
    “Do something!” thundered Masahiko Marcus ’Becca-without-the-Y and the drinkers thinkers jokers poseurs bozos bimbos nymphos and boyos.
    She came knocking on his apartment door one Tuesday winter evening, waltzed into his kitchenette space, and while washing down fistfuls of Rice Krispies with milk from the bottle (“They snapcracklepop on your tongue”) said, “Got something to show you. Come on,” and shoved him into a waiting taxi.
    “Where?”
    “Here.”
    She unloaded a computer from the front seat, paid the driver.
    “But there’s nothing here.” His breath steamed in the damp November cold. Spirited out without even a grab for a jacket, he shivered and wrapped his long orangutan arms around him for warmth.
    “Yes there is. A building site is here. Not