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

from one of Ethan’s co-sisters. “Islamic, Zionist, Third-World Debt-defaultist, Basque, Irish.”
    ’Becca appeared on the terrazzo with the palmcorder that she had found under a pile of Luka’s dirty underwear. Luka kissed her flamboyantly and with a rebel yell was over the fence, down on the beach, and running toward the conflagration, viewfinder pressed to eye.
    “You are one lucky lucky bastard, Ethan Ring,” said Masahiko and for the first time Ethan Ring knew and understood and appreciated and valued what he had with Luka. He wanted then to just stand and look at her, flamelit, videoing thirteen million ecus of burning yacht but Marcus was a persistent whisper in his ear.
    “Think about it, Eth. Think what you could get for a graphic image that does everything E-Base does with no side effects no addiction problem no accidental overdose; think what they would pay for a typeface that makes you obey whatever is written in it.”
    “Marcus, it was a joke. A joke, that’s all.”
    “Many a true word spoken in jest, Eth.”

I T WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT looked like… It looked like… Like…
    “There’s nothing there,” said Ethan Ring. The thing slipped from his field of vision like a glass eel. “I don’t see anything.”
    New term in the rainy-day city. Same faces, same places, moved up a year, October outside the computer suite windows. Masahiko had logged off tonight’s installment of Kinjiru Cyber Les-girls. The last technician had issued the ritual admonition to switch off the lights and nothing else and left the room of humming monitors to the three pioneers, and the thing Marcus had found.
    “You can’t see anything,” said Luka Casipriadin.
    “Luka’s right,” said Marcus Cranitch. “It’s the blind spot effect we talked about. It’s there all right.” Qwerty icons were summoned. “If I enlarge the image by a factor of ten…”
    The visual nothingness opened like a lotus blooming and engulfed them.
    It was awe and it was wonder. It was beauty and it was terror. It was purity and it was judgment. It was everything and nothing, void and light, annihilation and creation. Alpha and Omega. The Primal Fiat. The Great I Am. It was love and truth and justice and holiness and might, everything every book, every verse, every mantra, every sutra, said it was. It was every spiritual experience, every dervish dance, every glimmer of nirvana, every shaman trance, every elevation into rapture. It was more. Vastly more.
    It was the face of God. The room shook. The computer suite was filled with the sound of a rushing mighty wind. Tongues of fire seemed to dance on the heads and hands of the trinity of observers, their lips moved with ecstatic utterances in languages never before heard on the tongues of humans.
    After a time that seemed like a foretaste of eternity, Luka’s voice was heard. “ ‘My face you shall not see, for no man may see my face and live.’ ” Her words seemed to come through a cavernous white roar, as of angels’ wings beating before the throne of God. “But we see, we fucking see, and live!”
    Every word of Marcus’s was a boulder of rationality pushed up the asymptotic incline of ecstasy.
    “I accessed the National Gallery’s datacore for religious art and icons and set the program parameters to flag me every time it came on something that corresponded to my definition of the spiritual, the numinous, the irrational. Have you any idea how many Madonna and Childs I had to look at before I got a big enough sample? It took the machine three days to collate and render the samples I stored, another overnight fifteen-hour run to enhance the image.”
    “And what came out in the end is something that stimulates the human facility for religious ecstasy,” Ethan said, his words slipping, sliding into the light-filled voice of God.
    “You got it. All those icons, all those mandalas and Sanskrit mantras and illuminated Celtic manuscripts, they’re just reflections, hints, memories,