Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

was guaranteed not to
pierce the flesh too deeply by accident.
Tigershark was sixteen, smooth and brown as the pouch of
Italian leather dangling from the glittermesh strip about his slim
hard waist, where he kept his beer money.
He moved very deliberately and quietly to the music. His bare
soles hardly slapped the clear floor of his cage enough to rock it. A
great bronze frill arched between his eyes and along the middle of
his shaven skull, spread down his back like the triangular fin of a
shark, ended (the back of his white floppy shorts cut away in a V) at
his coccyx. Tigershark’s implants were so generous, so rigid, that
he could not easily clothe his upper body. That did not matter; it
merely encouraged him to take up a job in Brisbane at the end of
each summer.
W ith a studied, almost ■
ritualised movement, he placed the
chunky sea-green knife in his left palm, closing his fingers about it
so that only the blade was uncovered. Deftly, he sliced up the
underside of his right wrist and forearm, crossing the inward bend
of the elbow and over the flat bicep.
The movement was graceful and safe. Tigershark had no intention of injuring himself. The cut was little more than skin deep, and hardly bled. It was enough to display the ongoing miracle of his
own body: shallow wounds ceased to bleed within seconds, closed
up scabless within minutes, within hours were gone without trace.
Passing the knife to his right hand, Tigershark turned his left
wrist, applied the knife to the base of his left palm, and slashed
upwards with an artist’s grace.
‘T hat’s it, folks.’
The lead muso stepped back into the shadows. No longer exalted
by the music and the lights, the band appeared diminished to
86
Russell Blackford
Gabby Loerne. They seemed almost chastened as they walked from
the stage to the wings.
M omentarily there was silence, then strong whistles and cries of
‘More!’ The stage lights stayed down, but no house lights came on
in the Searoom. Gabby looked about, feeling alienated as the other
members of the audience whipped themselves into a frenzy of will,
the older youths, the real estate agents and clerks, more vocal than
the teenage sharks and roe, but all eager to bring Glass Reptile
Breakout back on stage. The cries of ‘More!’ rose to a raucous clap-
reinforced chant. All eyes fixed upon the stage as if such staring
could set in train mighty engines. Perhaps it could.
‘More! More!’
Everything around her had become unreal: the butts and fragments of discarded filter packets on the deep red carpet about the walls, a dangerously broken beer glass on the hard centre floor. She
lowered her feet to the carpet, palms pressing the sill. W hat she
really cared about was not the show (she had seen many others,
hoped to see more), but Alderson’s reaction.
‘Do you want to take a breather and talk about it?’ she said to
him.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether any of this helps at all.
Maybe we should wait for the encore.’
The band returned to the stage, carrying their brainwave
crowns. They fiddled clumsily for a second, bowing their heads to
fit the apparatus, which began to glow again. Looking up, the lead
musician waved at the audience. He leaped into the air as the amps
let out a preliminary guitar-like chord, and a hot pulse of yellow
light novaed across the stage.
A tentative voice said, ‘I recognise you two.’ Gabby turned. It was
the girl who had been dancing close to them, the girl with the hair
that was pink ostrich plumes.
Gabby said to Alderson, ‘Why don’t you talk to a miracle fan in
her natural environment? It might cure you of this Satan
nonsense . . . ’
‘You’re two of the people that want to stop our music aren’t you?’
the girl said more excitedly. ‘I’ve seen you on holo. Why? W hat do
you have against us?’
‘We’re not going to ban your music,’ Gabby said, raising her
voice to cut through the music she was not going to ban. ‘We just
want to know more about it.’ She was being indiscreet, she knew.
Still, by now it was an open secret, certainly to the media, that the
Glass Reptile Breakout
87
Wallace Inquiry was unlikely to