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

recommend anything so crude as

an outright ban on the miracle groups. Alderson seemed less convinced. Disapproval registered clearly on his face even in the dim light. Gabby smiled to deprecate the importance of what she had

said. This plumpish pretty girl would hardly be talking to the

media anyway, and even if she did the media would not take her

seriously. And Alderson already knew Gabby’s position, so he

could not take offence at that.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the music,’ the girl said. ‘It’s healed

my fin tonight. Look. It was all swollen before. My back was.’ She

turned to show them her back. The brown flesh cushioning the

dorsal fin was completely whole, as if she had been born with the

addition to her spine. Gabby believed her, though, about the

swelling.

‘Come with us,’ Alderson said decisively to her as the decibels

increased. ‘W hat’s your name?’

‘Bianca.’

‘We’ll both talk to you, Bianca.’

‘There’s something I had to say to you,’ Bianca said, reaching inside her for something lost. ‘But I don’t understand it, and I can’t quite remember . . ,

‘Come on, then.’

They struggled through the rhythmic swinging arms. Gabby

was glad to reach the hotel’s top foyer, through the Searoom’s rear

exit. Wide stairs with thick rails of brightly-polished wood went

down to street level. ‘W hat does profane mean?’ Bianca asked.

Alderson opened his mouth, closed it.

‘Clairvoyance in action,’ Gabby said to him. ‘Why?’ she asked the

girl.

‘Is there a book . . . or something . . . somewhere where God

says: Who are you calling profane? W hat does it mean?’

‘The Devil quotes Scripture — ’

‘But more exactly, I imagine,’ Gabby said.

‘W’hat if he’s subtle?’

Gabby felt the predictable burn of exasperation before she

realised that Alderson had actually cracked a slightly self-mocking

joke in his deadpan way. He was a man of contradictions, after all.

She recognised the joke as Alderson’s attempt to deflect his all-too-

real anxieties.

For Alderson, such anxieties were unavoidable: there was a

question for every certainty — always a deeper ambiguity to wrestle

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with. Amused by his casuistic misgivings, Gabby gave up on arguing with him. ‘You’re getting absurd,’ she told him without heat.

H er line from Coleridge had been a good one, but Saint Luke had

done better: What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane. ‘It

means the opposite of holy,’ she said to Bianca. ‘We can all talk later.’

She. gave Alderson a sympathetic smile, made a jerky movement of

her head in the direction of the Searoom. ‘I’m going in to hear the

last set.’

They followed her.

Tigershark looked with horror at the cut under his chest. It hurt,

hurt terribly, throbbingly. And it was not closing. The most recent

wounds under his arms had begun to bleed freely. He could not

express any pain; it would be the ruin of his act, his art. As if he

could avoid forever drawing attention to the blood which would not

stop, he lowered his maimed hand to knee height, and dropped the

knife, flicking it away from his vulnerable feet, and kept on

dancing.

Baker, like the musicians, could affect only latents. Unlike them, he

had been trained to manipulate the healing effect directly and with

purpose. And he could reverse it.

He concentrated his unhealing hatred on the flick-dancer. Blood

oozed. The boy’s wounds would never stop bleeding. And next

Baker would turn to older wounds —the knife lines of his dancing

and of his extensive surgery— opening them afresh.

The Signals U nit strategists had game-analysed the outcome.

They had tags to plant with the m edia—‘Black.Stigmatic’, ‘Blood of

Satan.’ There would be an immediate outcry, and a fruitless

investigation — and that, at least for the interval needed, would be

the end of the music in one State.

Deliberate hatred vomited out of Baker; he conjured the demon

in his mind as he had been coached. H atred spewed from him to

the flick-dancer, and now old incisions were opening, tattoos of

proud flesh rising like initiation scars on his smooth body, welds of

pink flesh starting to tear open like wet paper, and the blood falling

in a pool at his feet. In an eternal moment, the boy was draining

white and falling in his own blood.