Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

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Glass Reptile Breakout
89
What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane. Alderson
lurched into the room, trying to hide his shock. The girl’s words
went right to the point of difference between natural and cultural
law. But —he had debated the issue with Gabby —where to draw
the line?
He looked heavenwards.
And saw, in the cage, the bleeding flick-dancer.
No.
He had despised the boy; seventy times seven times that evening
he had, in his heart, called the boy profane. ‘Dear God, no,’ he said
aloud, falling to his knees. The girl Bianca must have m isunderstood his action. She knelt in front of him, pressing his pressed hands. Others were looking up, and there was a screaming of terror
or outrage. The band played on, the musicians sightless in their
trance-world.
The crowd and the band were gone. The boundaries of Alder-
son’s identity were breaking up. Where was the girl who clenched
his hand? The boy? There was only the triad, transcending music
or identity, united against the suffering. Alderson spat away blood
which seemed, irrationally, to stream down his face, nauseating
him.
He had misplaced the home of evil; he understood that now.
That part of the triad which had been Alderson was in error. Evil
was in the Searoom, but it did not come from the miracle band.
They had to push the source of evil, thrust the evil away, push the
shadow right out of the dim room. Pushing back . . .
The boy’s shorts were soaked in the same blood which had pooled
at the bottom of his cage and spattered its walls, thrown by his frenzied efforts. He was terrifyingly white, fallen half-fainted to his knees —but his wounds had stopped bleeding. Baker desperately
recalculated the situation: an effect had already been created, a
macabre dose of grand guigno l to terrify the superstitious and delight
the media, but the boy had to die to hold the public’s distracted
imagination, to sustain the repugnance and loathing demanded by
the Signals Unit.
Baker redoubled his effort of hatred, but the black acids had
sucked up out of him, were now ebbing away. He forced his protesting ego back into the depths and found . . . nothing.
Dimly, he sensed that it was he who screamed —lurching out of
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Russell Blackford
the parting crowd, flailing claustrophobically with desperate arms,
not knowing why he ran to the stairs outside the Searoom and
stumbled mechanically down them towards Fitzroy Street, his
assignment forgotten. He knew one thing only: that he must escape
the room where he was obliterating himself, unwinding his self like
a dark thread from a crazy bobbin.
The show was all over; the house lights came on, but the night was
left ragged and uninterpreted. The crowd was not dispersing; it
gathered closer, hushed, to the flick-dancer’s cage racheting on its
golden chains to the floor. A pair of bull-necked T-shirted bouncers
shouldered their way through. One jerked the cage’s front panel,
snapped it open from the top. It hinged down, a transparent jaw
full of bleeding ulcers. ‘Go home folks,’ the other man told them.
‘Go home now—it’s all right. Show’s finished. The boy’s gunna be
okay.’
Alderson was numb, drained from his ordeal as if he had been
bled white. He remained on his knees, his mind silent.
‘It was horrible.’ Bianca’s voice: she sounded so young and
shaken. There was no demon here.
He stood and shoved his way to the boy, who swayed rubberlegged and glass-eyed. ‘Let me through —I have to see him.’ No one cared enough to block Alderson’s way. He gripped the lad by both
skinny shoulders. Tigers hark—that was his name. Tigershark’s skin
was criss-crossed with scars, a lacework of shiny pink raised flesh,
and his unbleeding body was stained with drying blood, his shorts
drenched with it. His eyes looked on Alderson’s with sudden recognition, a smile of victory. Victory shared. Alderson hugged him, taking the red stain on his own flesh and clothing.
‘We’ll take care of him.’ The bouncer spoke gently to Alderson,
perhaps in deference to his grey-headed authority. ‘There’s an
ambulance coming.’
Gabby and Bianca were both there. Alderson