Unit had done well at keeping covert surveillance on the nine m em bers of the Wallace Inquiry. For all that they represented the extreme ends of the Inquiry’s ideological spectrum, Loerne and
Alderson seemed to prefer each other’s company to that of the older
Parliamentarians, sociologists and professors of science who completed the Board of Inquiry. Each was fascinated by the other’s opposed Weltanschauung. Unfortunately, that was all that the Unit
had uncovered: there was nothing scandalous about their relationship that Baker could exploit —not that he would have expected it from Alderson, concerned parent and elder of a fundamentalist
Glass Reptile Breakout,
79
church.
Though only these two were young enough to look at all
plausible in the Searoom, all nine members had made frequent
visits to the Season Hotel and the other Melbourne venues for the
miracle music: the Rocks and Sand Club in the City; the Fishcave
along the Esplanade in Port Melbourne; the more dignified
miracle bars patronised by a slightly older set in Carlton. Among
the Searoom’s complement of extreme young people in their sea-
tribe gear, Loerne and especially Alderson appeared out of place,
but not ridiculously so. Plenty of people were attired more conservatively than Loerne, including an element of hapless men in their twenties and thirties, fooling themselves that they were going to net
the young roe—who, of course, would have nothing to do with
them.
Baker smiled at this thought, and at another: he could tell the
Wallace Inquirers more about the BioFeed miracles than anybody
else here —perhaps more than they would be comfortable hearing.
Gabby Loerne turned squarely to face Alderson. Only one cheek
was jewelled with scale implants. At heart she was a no-nonsense
woman, a tough-minded human scientist, equally at ease, he
assumed, in an academic conference room, a St Kilda dance
venue, or a jungle village. H er arcane expertise in group rites and
her overt gestures of identification with the youth culture she had
publicly defended did not take away from her down-to-earth
manner. H er touches of youthful fashion were entirely within the
bounds of taste; he had never seen her show passionate emotion.
Gabby’s large green eyes gave no offence and clearly expected
none from Alderson.
‘There’s nothing disturbing about this,’ she said in her comforting plain manner.
W hat could he say? In his fashion, he was also a practical human
being, a moralist, true, but it was precisely because he was a
moralist with his feet on the ground that he insisted that his society
required more than law for its morality: enforcement demanded
law, yes, but teaching demanded faith. Theorists who tried to
maintain ethics without religion were merely naive. But now his
experiences were driving him back to the hardest doctrines of his
faith.
Alderson had tried to express his fears to Gabby before, but he
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Russell Black ford
knew that Satan had no place in the formalisms of her cultural
observations — and normally had little enough in his own theology,
much less his pondering of questions of jurisprudence. He tried yet
again to explain.
‘We’ve let ourselves be fuddled by shibboleths; our whole society
has. We thought that tolerance was a value in itself, and we chased
a romantic concept of tolerance until the moral centre got left
behind.’ She knew as well as he did the direction, or directions,
their society had taken: a dozen conflicting moral codes, the young
totally alien to their parents, but their way of life tolerated and even
financed for fear of worse evil —or was it just fear of seeming
repressive? ‘All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t let our society
become something that decent people can’t bear to live in and bring
up kids in . . . for the sake of a word.’ He thought of his own
children: two girls, Michelle now ten years old and approaching the
vulnerable age. He shuddered at the thought of her frequenting a
place like this. ‘If a word like freedom or tolerance won’t fit our needs,
let’s choose another word —not the other way around.’- It was a
position eminently defensible in the philosophy of jurisprudence.
But he knew that Gabby recognised his deeper anxieties.
During the musos’ break, the sharks were milling about aimlessly, many lighting up filters. Some of the little half-nude girls hugged their skinny boyfriends. Angular scaly young sharks
cruised in the direction of the bar and came back with cheap white
wine and frothy beer for themselves and their roe —a patriarchy
offensive to their doggedly non-sexist parents was assumed in their
tribal folkways.
Gabby took a deep breath. ‘Really, I don’t know where to start
with you. You’re a learned man, but you still believe in spooks and
demons. Look: these things have perfectly rational causes. You
know that. The only demon’s the one in yourself. I tell you,
Lachlan, what you’re seeing here is nothing more than an extreme
form of the participative exhibitionism we’ve observed in societies
all over the world. These musicians are the priests of a mystery
religion, if you like —but don’t think of Satanism. Try the angalok,
leading the participative rites in Greenland . . . or the monks of
Tibet. If you must have an analogy.’
‘But there’s no contradiction,’ he said, agitated. ‘Satan can act
through hum an phenomena as well. This suspension of will you’re
talking about is dangerous. My own church distinguishes carefully
between divine presence and collective hysteria, because when God
Glass Reptile Breakout
81
isn’t there in this sort of . . . let’s call it hysteria, then the soul is
especially vulnerable to possession. At least, that’s the terrible possibility
I have to consider. It’s not some lunatic dogma you can just parody
and dismiss; it’s an intelligent idea worked out by scholars over
hundreds of years — and I can’t afford to leave it out of my thinking.
Because’ — he tried to knot the strands of his thought together —
‘our society has lost its faith, its moral centre, and I’m forced to
believe . . . I’m starting to believe that Satan has used well-
meaning “learned” men and women to bring it about.’
‘People like me, Lachlan?’
He started to reply, but the music had returned: music and synthesised words spewed forth from the amps, screaming with a sexual energy healthy enough in itself—but for an audience this
young? H e thought again of his daughters . . .
This set was louder than the last. Alderson reached into the fob
pocket of his baggy seaweed-coloured jeans, drew out a wad of
cotton-wool. He pinched off two comet-shaped lumps, rolled little
plugs to protect his ears against the dreadful blast. He had never
attended one of these earbursting venues for his private entertainment, but he had frequented old-style rock shows as an adolescent, and he remembered how to protect himself.
Gabby touched the backs of her fingertips to his elbow, a gesture
very sensitiv
e to his sensitivity about touch. ‘You should remember
Coleridge,’ she said very clearly, so that he could just construe the
words even in the din and through the cotton-wool. ‘He prayeth best
who loveth best!
He knew the lines well:
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
‘I do love them,’ he shouted back, so that she winced. He did love
the young people — fermble patronising expression that. ‘It’s what’s in
them I can’t necessarily love.’ The implication in his words of
demonic possession embarrassed him deeply; he had not meant it
that crudely, but in some half-defined sense this place was of the
Devil, driven by evil. O f course the meaning of evil was
problematic: a violation of nature and natural good in one person’s
eyes was merely a difference of culture in another’s. So all but a
handful of old churchmen had become restrained in public debate,
perhaps intimidated into abandoning symbols and absolutes which
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Russell Blackford
had been under suspicion a quarter of a century before. Alderson
wondered. In the light of the latest assaults on what was left of
traditional society, had this been an adequate response? Some of
the rock miracles were so physically and morally ugly, such
grotesque, sadistic parodies of divine healing, that they virtually
obliged the Church and Alderson to reconsider their tolerance.
‘Maybe you should try to love that, too,’ Gabby said.
‘W hat —love evil?’ She winced again when he said it. He knew
her metaphysics was barren of such concepts as evil simpliciter. ‘All
right,’ he said, uncomfortable at his own puerile tone of defiance,
‘can you love flick-dancing?’ He pointed at the mutilated boy in the
cage.
H er reply was too soft for him to hear, but he could see her lips
move in their own simple dance. ‘Why not?’
No cotton-wool plugged Bianca’s ears. She opened herself to the
music, to the deep brown sinewy flick-dancer, naked from the waist
up, bleeding —ever so slightly — from his long, fast-healing cuts. At
the corner of her eye the lead musician danced, shouting inaudibly,
his voice overflooded by the music from the stacked black speakers
rearing high in the front corners of the stage. If he sang it was to fill
a private need merely; it was impossible to hear whether he could
even hold a tune. All his true voice, his music, came from the bulky
purple crown whose lights pulsed on his forehead as the device fed
his biofeedback-trained brainwaves into the synthesisers at the
back of the stage and then into the speakers.
Crimson flashed across the stage from the wings, as if in answer
to the BF lights. Yellow strobed; blue.
Insistent rhythm of deep drums and bass guitar caught Bianca in
the top of her bared belly, below her ribs, driving her into a strutting barefooted dance.
The moment stretched forever.
But the song smashed to an end with a heavy clang of metal. An
archaic cylindrical microphone descended to the stage for the lead
musician. He took it in both long-fingered, long-nailed hands; his
full lips almost touched it as he thanked the audience for its
applause and attention. He left the mike to dangle in space as he
bent to sip a glass of water a metre away on the stage’s dusty floor;
he returned to the black mike and panted theatrically over the
applause of the audience. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ His sweaty
Glass Reptile Breakout
83
chest heaved; strain showed in the movements of his great tufted
eyebrows under the glowing headdress. ‘Thank you all.’ Only the
eyebrows and the body scales on his shoulders and forearms conceded anything to prosthetic fashion. He carried himself in a slightly dated style (high-heeled boots over very tight glittermesh
pants), recalling the simpler fads of the mid-90s and emphasising
the band’s purist devotion to its advanced BF-music. Bianca easily
registered this stock pose, but did not now attempt to judge it.
Glass Reptile Breakout hardly paused between songs.
A real healing song for you miracle-lovers,’ muttered the lead
musician, and his microphone flew smoothly back towards the
heavens.
Bianca had no time to fall from dance’s viewless wings before the
music roared back. H er gaze was pulled away from the couple to
her left, at the frosted window. She recognised them from somewhere, from the holos . . .
This time the music seemed almost to claw at the soft inside of
her round stomach, as if some needle-clawed bat were scratching to
fly out of there. Bianca found the muscles of her upper body twisting her through near-spasm. It was hardly under her control, and the graft in her back gave her no discomfort at all.
And she had an important thought. T hat older man, the one
with the glasses —and that woman. She did recognise them. She
knew who they were. She had to speak to them. Especially the man:
something odd had came to her, something she needed to say to
him.
Baker had studied covert recordings of Alderson and Loerne discussing these places. Despite Alderson’s qualms about the miracle bands, he nonetheless visited them every Saturday night, clearly
struggling to come to grips with the phenomenon, with its spiritual
implications. Certainly he was the member of the Wallace Inquiry
who could most easily be shocked.
For the Unit, this night provided an ideal opportunity. Baker
would show them havoc.
Fie had a similar interest in watching Glass Reptile Breakout
live, but his own researches into biofeedback technique and its
attendant miracles, unlike the Inquiry’s, were not public. Indeed,
they were not even known to the State government. Which did not
mean that less rested on them. The Inquiry’s recommendations
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Russell Blackford
were limited to this one State. Yet whatever checks it demanded on
the use of the miracle-inducing equipment in Victoria — and Baker
intended that the ruling would be the unexpected one of total
abolition —his own involvement had a significance extending well
beyond Victoria, would benefit the entire Free World. His American and Chinese colleagues were particularly eager to restrict public access to equipment and techniques which created the
BF-miracles.
Officers of the Signals Unit were compiling a list of Australian
leaders who were suspected latents. It was part of an international
intelligence effort for the benefit of democracy. Eventually even
small fry like Alderson and Loerne would be tested against the
U nit’s criteria. Baker looked forward to seeing the final list. Once
established, it would enable his researches to take on a very practical use. Latents, such as the flick-dancer in his high cage, were potentially so vulnerable.
Baker slapped another pair of two dollar coins down. He stared
through the gaunt feather-cheeked young barm an, w'ho passed
over a pot of weak beer and a modicum of change.
He would w
ait until the end of the night, for the encores. Then
he’d wreak such ugliness that the BF equipment would surely be
suppressed —if not for good, certainly for the span of the resulting
outrage.
The Signals Unit could not maintain its Australian monopoly on
the necessary expertise while gross miracles were publicly flaunted
by these so-called miracle groups. So far no one in Australia outside the Signals Unit had succeeded in replicating the miracle effects under artificial conditions, without the participation mystique of the sharks and roe and their beloved bands. Were research at the Universities and hospitals further advanced, he’d be ham strung, for tonight’s work would then have the effect of spurring rather than halting their studies.
Sipping his beer, he gloated. The flick-dancer would make a
perfect victim.
The song changed tempo. Baker could see why the band called it
a healing song. It became almost parodically tranquil, redolent of
fresh fields and bird calls and all things sentimental. Baker resisted
its cliched charm. His own training with the Signals Unit had developed his detachment as well as skill.
Leaning against the padded bar, Baker could look almost
straight up into the perspex cage, dangling from a network of gold-
Glass Reptile Breakout
85
painted chains, where the flick-dancer performed. The power of
the music! If it could augment a healing process, Baker thought
savagely, it could also reverse it. He would see to that.
It was called flick-dancing, but Tigershark never used a flick-knife.
Some dancers in Sydney did, but he had not seen it on his last trip
there, only on imported American holos. His own instrum ent more
closely resembled a steel-handled wedge-bladed carpenter’s knife,
small enough to fit entirely in his palm. It 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
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