. . .
A dazed and confused humanity emerges from its shelters. It blinks, metaphorically, in the sun. It stares, blankly and dumbly, at the ruins of its habitations; at the corpses of the scissors, sometimes piled up to twelve feet high. People use knives now when they have to cut something — knives or “trissors,” the non-traumatic three-bladed trissoring device that has never attacked the Earth in any sort of swarm.
. . .
People capture and cage the jaguar Bahlum in a zoo near Bibury. He doesn’t get to crack the Earth.
They melt down the scissor-swarm of space’s evil god for scrap.
A bold new age of science . . . begins!
. . .
. . . which is not meant to imply that science is very happy right now.
It isn’t.
Oh, engineers are kind of the cock of the walk now that they’ve built space lasers and defense habitats to protect humanity from the scissors-rain, but purer scientists? They’re not doing so well. They keep trying to explain how it might come to pass that suddenly sextillions of scissors might fall out of space and attack humanity in the first place — and failing. They can’t explain it. Their science proves useless.
It isn’t even a reproducible event!
. . .
There’s even a few maverick physicists who conduct illicit studies in rogue states, throwing handfuls of scissors into the air and trying to reproduce sentience, malevolence, and the swarm in them. This does not succeed and it is generally put down hard.
As for religion, of course, it does little better. Theodicy was hard enough already with just the natural disasters and the turtle-people; it shudders under the introduction of the scissors-swarms.
. . .
Humanity riffles through its entire cognitive toolkit, in short, to explain how the scissors fell, but it cannot find anything apropos. The truth isn’t even in its hypothesis-space.
If there were more evidence, maybe —
or a wider knowledge of such matters as magical jaguars and Hans —
but there is neither.
. . .
In the world as it actually exists, no one can conceive of Thon-Gul X.
Nobody proposes that an evil god, a wicked god of space, entangled in some freakish fashion with humanity, has conquered a distant world, manufactured a scissor-swarm (with a mix of industrial capacity and theological potency) and sent it forth to attack the Earth. There are some horror writers who veer shockingly close but nobody comes up exactly with the truth.
It’s a corner case on the causal graph.
Those happen, but they’re rare enough that inexplicability is just plain built in; and thus science, even in this bold new age of science . . .
Has a sad.
. . .
And the scissors trickle down the great pipes of the Earth. They rattle through the firmament and the substrate. They are still falling, some few of them, beneath the surface of the world; down forbidden and unruly paths. Where the centipede skirls, where the Weave-wid rises, where the thief and the wooden boy crept.
They make their way down to the svart-elves’ realm, where certain fairy tale things survived.
– 9 –
Where Hans is puttering in his workroom. Where Hans the smith, who had hammered down the world into sense and shape, is an old man, a weak man, now — though still strong enough to keep Hell sealed up, to keep the cows plugged in, to whisk the ducks, and to keep two great emus taped up above him on the wall.
His kettle is boiling now. His metal chimney is rattling now. His emus are rolling their eyes.
Down that chimney a pair of scissors strikes. It bounces out and it cuts the tape.
And Hans looks up and he sees his death.
Like an anvil, an emu falls.
– 11 –
Eldri wakes in Bibury. He stares in blank horror at the sky. Joffun scratches lines, circles, crosses into the walls of his prison cell. Navvy Jim throws rock, rock, rock, but against an emu rock cannot hold. Sea captain Drake Steverns, man of legend, wheels and turns his ship for home —
But he is too late.
The world is different. He is swallowed, ship and all, by the paper serpent; it has risen from the sea.
. . .
The child Linus Evans of Sussex, the future Mr. Enemy, cannot sleep. He cleans his room instead — but it does not help. It cannot be clean enough. It cannot be orderly enough. Nothing can be orderly enough, not now.
. . .
Linus doesn’t know about the cleaning man. Not really. Not yet.
He doesn’t know who will seize Hans’ world, or just whose enemy he’s going to become.
Not yet.
All that he knows is that there is something coming — something worse than a wolf, worse than scissors, worse than Hans or the Devil himself — and that there is no reason to oppose it, no reason to bother opposing it, because there is no thing good in all of life.
There is no reason to continue.
Hans is dead; there’s a new covenant now, governing all of the world;
And Linus sits in his room, and he rocks, and cries, and he is hollowed out thereafter.
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