Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

the smoke in the
Searoom left him bleary and owlish. One question remained for
Alderson to face, too jagged, too ramified to hustle into plain
words, much less the urbane diction of the courtroom or the bland
assurances of a government paper. To his considerable pain and
embarrassment, it was the question of Satan.
The secular attitude of his attractive companion was no option
for Alderson. To D r Loerne, the rock miracles-were a m atter of
enhanced trypsin activity. She saw them, he knew, through the
lenses of a reductive science: as the eerie by-product of participation mystique focused by the expectations brought on by the first miracles. Those, in turn, had been merely the result of an un foreseen resonance between EEG-coupled musicians, the enhanced field-effects of their non-vocal music, and an audience of half-hypnotised young dancers.
True, perhaps, but not the whole truth. It was impossible for
Alderson to disregard the spiritual dimension. He was a rational
man, yes, and he liked to consider himself a sophisticated one; he
was also, by choice and conviction and the recognition of his
brothers, an elder of his church and a defender of its doctrine. The
Assembly of Christ based its teachings in Scripture, taught that the
Great Tribulation was at hand and with it the man of sin working
Satan’s deed with all powers and signs and lying wonders. Despite
Glass Reptile Breakout
11
the inhibitions of intellectual pride, Alderson found himself
increasingly driven to take Saint Paul’s prophecies literally.
On the smoke-filled stage, four spindly musicians pranced like
the demons of a medieval morality play. Body-scales decorated
their lean arms. Smoke drifted across the parquet dance floor; to
Alderson, it seemed to stink of brimstone. Their headgear flashed
like goats’ horns catching coal-glare. It would not have surprised
him to sight, amid the tangled wires of their EEG equipment, a
cloven hoof.
Dr Loerne was fond of explaining that the miracles had precisely
the same cause as the healings at the Ganges, at Lourdes, at charismatic revivals. Alderson shivered, thinking of that ingenuous, inadvertent blasphemy. Gabby was wrong-—the difference in
ambience could not have been more sinister.
A teenage girl screamed. Alderson had a confused impression of
plump naked flesh, bizarrely modified in the m anner of these
sharks and roe. H er finned back, her head of pink ostrich-plume
implants shook in the soup of noise and the yellow smoke eddying
under the dull lights. Alderson stolidly lit a non-cancer filter and
tactfully averted his eyes from the girl’s brown, elated, snub-nosed
face.
Suspended from the high ceiling on the far side of the room, a
flick-dancer in a perspex cage cavorted with his knife. The young
girl screamed again, falling to her bare knees, legs apart. In supplication? None of Alderson’s visits to these venues had given him understanding of how these people thought, any more than his
studies of case law and jurisprudence. A high-slit garment, more
like a long white lap-lap than a skirt, fell across her tanned thighs. A
return to tribalism. She wore little else.
The music ended. The human sounds roared on.
Alderson leaned, unobtrusively, he hoped, against a plaster wall.
Beside him, Dr Gabby Loerne perched handsomely on a broad
window sill, her neat slim ankles crossed above the floor. She
clapped enthusiastically and loudly. No young roe, she was dressed
in a more sedate version of current fashion: green glitter-mesh
tights and blouse. A small cluster of green scales jewelled her cheek.
In front of them, the girl’s torso flailed from side to side. She was
still on her knees, leaning back now on her heels, her body the
shouting tongue of a kinetic language, as if she disported herself in
a choreography of prayer before some voyeuristic deity. Again she
screamed her delight, perhaps an invitation to that deity to join her
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Russell Blackford
in accord.
Lachlan Alderson had to lean closer to Gabby to make himself
heard above the general applause. ‘Doesn’t any of this disturb you?’
At twenty-eight James Baker could pass muster at the