Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

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