Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online

would disown them but her words, her speculations, were the seed; the ten parts per thousand piss-water of the Nineteenth House pool the amniotic fluid in which conception took place.
    “Jesus Joseph and Mary, a pool!” was Luka’s first reaction on arriving with Masahiko, Marcus, and ’Becca to take up Ethan Ring’s offer of summer hospitality in the sun. Thereafter she spent a significant part of every day stroking up and down, up and down, up and down; clear, glossy water shedding across her back, the crest of hair slicked across her shaved scalp, her brown shoulders. “Bet you never guessed I had an Esther Williams fetish. Why couldn’t they have had kinships for men, and why couldn’t my dad been in one? I was a deprived child, sympathy sympathy.”
    On the third morning that the thermometer stuck at ninety-eight, they all decided to follow Luka’s example, returned to the primeval semi-aquatic state, and congregated breast-deep in the deep end around a floating tin bath full of slushy ice studded with bottles of import beer. Immersed in cool water, their talk turned to ambitions, hopes, fears, art, ideas.
    “I’ve an idea!” Luka shouted. Bottles were deftly uncapped on the tiled pool edge, bottle caps sashayed down through the green-tinted water to form improbable constellations on the bottom. “Wrap this in a Rizla and toke it. In every piece of art or architecture or design there is an essence, a visual element that bypasses conscious discrimination and stimulates a direct psychological—even physiological—effect. Something that precedes understanding, analysis, interpretation, appreciation; that hits straight home in some deep reptile part of the brain and fires it off. Like, say, patterns of color and shape that create an overpowering impression—even a feeling—of dread, without there being any image you could specifically identify as dreadful. ”
    “Like emotional response?” asked ’Becca, floating on her back with a bottle of Becks balanced between her breasts.
    “More powerful than that. More primal. Pre-emotional. Chemical.”
    “I’m only a mere designer, but isn’t the whole point of abstract art to stimulate this kind of response?” asked Marcus.
    “It strikes me that this effect can only be found in abstract art.” This from Masahiko, pressing a fresh-from-the-bath beer bottle to his forehead. “Ecstasy. In representational art, or design, the strength of the image itself would drown out this… preconscious effect.”
    Ethan considered the flags rattling from the mastheads of the sleek white cruisers down in the marina before speaking.
    “Not necessarily. Not at all. Like I once read this book.” Hoots of derision. Ethan persevered. “Like I said, I once read this book about typography, by this really famous designer from back in the eighties, nineties: Neville Brody. Neville Brody?” Shrugs. “Barbarians. Well, there’s a bit I remember where he talks about a typeface being ‘authoritarian.’ At the time I thought, What is this shit, how can letters on a page convey authority? But he was right; it’s exactly the same thing you’re talking about, Loo.”
    “Call me that once more, Ethan Ring, and you’re catfood.”
    “That the form of the letters in which a message is printed can somehow embed a subliminal meta-text?” asked Masahiko.
    “I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but yes.”
    “You mean, like printing political pamphlets in heavy, dark sans serif type can make the reader subconsciously more susceptible to the message than if it were in an italic or script font?” ’Becca suggested.
    “Conversely,” said Luka brightly, “you could set the Koran in one of those ghastly 1970s fonts made up from Art Nouveau women’s faces as an act of graphic subversion.”
    “To get back to Luka’s original idea,” Ethan Ring said, “does there exist, is it possible to construct, the ultimate authoritarian typeface? One in which the embedded