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

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

90

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