Strange Attractors (1985)

by Damien Broderick

  — as to make men show themselves deserving of her deference, and

  so to escape being murdered, past repair!’

  (‘By “m urdered” she means “ravished”, ’ Francis m urm ured in my

  ear.

  ‘Well, of course she does!’ I returned, in some amazement: nor can

  I yet fathom the reason for his senseless interjection.)

  ‘Then, too,’ (Clarinda addressed both Anne and Bellamode) ‘you

  speak of your gaining a husband as though it were a matter of course!

  The woman’s only sphere is the domestic, indeed; yet, be they never

  so pleasing and harmonious, I pity such young women as do not have

  a fortune, for — ’

  The nineteenth-century Dorothea abruptly left the sofa, tossing her

  curls and pouting her lips. ‘Why, I should be ashamed to look at a husband, unless I could bring him dowry enough — there! And I declare that this lady’ (indicating Bellamode) ‘is right, positively, and men are

  dissembling horrid monsters (though I’m sure I don’t know what they

  can have to dissemble, or anything about it) — there!

  And, goodness, I shall be any hundred of times more dutiful and

  adoring and unselfish, good gracious! than dollish, ridiculous wretches!’

  Here she positively stamped her foot at Clarinda, who so greatly outshone, for beauty, every other creature. And a lady doesn’t “woman”

  other ladies — boo!

  And, oh, dear,’ Dorothea burst forth suddenly, ‘I am so absolutely

  ill today!’ She actually dissolved into tears, only to wipe them bravely

  away, and appeal to the room: ‘Oh, if you only knew, though, the

  downright, earnest little thing I am! And how I mean to cherish every

  single aspidistra and muffin-tray and loo-table, and have the house­

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  Yvonne Rousseau

  keeping keys always under my eye — no one shall ever call me an un satisfactory wife!’ She went off into half-hysterics.

  Evadne’s body stirred uneasily. ‘I knew a man once — ah, what the

  heck.’ She began pacing about the room, almost ungracefully: ‘Cap-

  parids, capparids; haven’t we got any capparids?’ Next moment she

  froze, her face masked with tobacco-smoke (at some time she had lit

  what seemed a very small cigar): ‘The street is like a great river:’

  (broodingly) ‘One can walk it, and be nourished by it, and forget one’s

  dreams and the sea.’

  I stared aghast, as she turned to pitch her cigar through the

  window; her intellect appeared utterly alienated! She turned to the

  room again, warmly laughing, and holding all eyes with her incendiary hair: ‘I guess I’m just a neurotic, really . . . or a woman.’ Her jaw slackened slightly, her fingers caressing her furs, fastening on her

  diamond bracelet. ‘I guess that what I really need is a good man — or

  so.’ She frowned, curled herself up on the window-sill, and began to

  lisp a baby’s song, wrenching the pearls from her necklace, one by one,

  and tossing them after the butterflies.

  Francis made another abrupt movement, and Bellamode’s

  rejoinder was quite inaudible to me, though I saw her lips moving

  animatedly.

  ‘Yes, but they are fictional.’ Francis’s querulous m uttering was

  apparently directed to himself. ‘I may have been misleading myself;

  perhaps it’s only an artistic evolution, an artistic perversion. Perhaps

  Nature doesn’t imitate Art; perhaps we’re little changed, no m atter

  how we’re seen or see ourselves . . . ’

  So he maundered on; and as he lapsed further into his preoccupation, my own natural good sense reasserted itself. Francis, and his talk of computers and fictional characters, ceased to impose upon me; I

  looked into the other room and saw Clarinda, set among four women,

  one of whom was undoubtedly mad, while the others were no fit companions for her. Clearly, it was my duty to offer her my protection.

  ‘I’ll see your master,’ I informed Francis: ‘The gentleman of the

  house.’

  His insane response was delivered in a preoccupied tone: ‘I’m my

  own mistress, M r Lockwood.’

  No immediate chance of applying to a better class of person! I’d act

  alone, then. I was out of the room, and had unbolted the right door,

  before Francis could come up with me, crying, ‘Don’t be a fool,

  Lockwood!’ I easily put him aside, stepped through, and smartly

  closed the door between us.

  M r Lockwood’s narrative

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  ‘Why, Elmer!’ exclaimed Evadne: ‘I thought you were the filming

  crew!’ — Bellamode put up the oval mask she held in her hand: ‘Lard,

  it’s M r Bangwell!’ cried she; and Dorothea tittered and tossed her curls

  and dimpled: ‘M r Dominickel, I declare!’ At the same instant, Anne

  came forward frankly: ‘Welcome, Antonio!’ —* Clarinda blushed

  divinely: ‘Why, it is M r Cantworthy,’ said she.

  Never was poor gentleman in so undeserved a predicament! Each

  of the women instantly suspected her lover of falsehood: Anne wept

  most piteously, and sank down as if her heart were broken; Clarinda

  gave me a flaming glance, and turned to Anne’s assistance. ‘So, M r

  Bangwell,’ Bellamode hissed — but her anger, like Dorothea’s, seemed

  to hover between her sisters and myself. Evadne approached, wrested

  the book from my nerveless grasp, and began deliberately to rip it up,

  page by page, her gentle eyes fixed enigmatically upon my face. And

  never had I felt Clarinda more desirable than at this moment, when

  she seemed unattainable! I moved towards her, to explain.

  ‘My true name is Lockwood, Clarinda,’ I began. Her eyes lightened.

  ‘You have been disguised? You are really Lord Lockwood?’ she

  breathed, wholly enchanted.

  But alas! I had demonstrated a preference! No longer able to confide in the superiority of their own charms, Bellamode, Dorothea and Evadne furiously resented the slight: I saw that Evadne dropped the

  book, and was swinging her remaining pearls like a riding-whip —

  then Dorothea fell upon me, pummeling, while the frantic Bellamode

  turned towards Clarinda.

  Buffeted — ludicrously overborne — I distractedly beheld a new

  movement in the looking-glass: Francis was darting into the room —

  the same costume, the same haggard eye — but his mouth and nose

  were masked or muzzled, with nightmare grotesquerie. To and fro he

  sprang, always assuming a Harlequin attitude; but instead of

  Harlequin’s magic bat, Francis brandished a glittering canister. Gusts

  of sweetness came fuming out of it, like gusts of air puffing from the

  nozzle of a bellows.

  My senses were swimming — cloyed with sweetness; the women

  around me swayed; I was sinking to the floor, in a swoon.

  I awoke — to my joy, I awoke from the entire nightmare! Here I am,

  in the familiar study; feeling the bruises, from yesterday’s experiences

  at W uthering Heights, more vividly than I might have hoped; but

  alive, and sane. The clock is at the stroke of four, as I complete my

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  Yvonne Rousseau

  account of this extraordinary nightmare; the house is in silence and

  now, in spite of aching laziness of head and limbs, I too must summon

  courage to go to my rest. But alas! I find myself the
prey of odd sensations — even terrors — that seem to presage worse than the mere obstinate cold I was prognosticating for myself. The fire has long died

  down, and yet — to me — the room seems still perversely warm; and

  my imagination returns with sickly disquiet to an odd symmetry in

  my dream — just upon waking — a trundling sound again, hastily

  fading in the distance. Absurd as it is, I have the fantastic dread that

  when I open the door, my candle will light me, not along the corridor

  to my bedroom, but into one of those nightmare rooms again. And,

  oh, my wearisome wonderings, all devoted to the enigmatic words I

  saw upon the tongs, in my final attempt at mending the fire — ‘Made

  in Taiwan’! Never mind. My good housekeeper shall explain them to

  me, tomorrow.

  Glass Reptile Breakout

  ©

  RUSSELL BLACKFORD

  On this hot Saturday night, past midnight on this delirious Sunday

  morning. Bianca knew nothing of the forces which energised her

  dancing at the Searoom — except that they were holy and not

  perilous.

  The main band was playing, the miracle band —Glass Reptile

  Breakout was playing, and the big high room in St Kilda’s labyrinthine Season Hotel was all noise and smoke, clothing white or the colours of the sea, tight and supple or free and loose, and on the

  half-naked young people the stigmata of fashion: shaven heads

  plumed or finned with implants, bare arms bright with feathers or

  glistening scales, soft dorsal sails, fins or spines (the latest fad) that

  flattened or bristled, depending on what you wore over them —

  though the drastic implants of a flick-dancer would seldom settle

  under any clothing.

  Bianca’s heart was set: she yearned to be a flick-dancer. She could

  dance so slowly or so fast, free and wild in her roe tribe skirt,

  glittermesh strips catching the light at waist, wrists, ankles. She

  practised for hours in her darkened kiddy flat behind her parents’

  home in M ount Waverley, practised until she had the control.

  Didn’t she look right, almost? All her hair had gone for plumes.

  H er father had grudgingly paid for the fin she’d had sewn into her

  sleek olive back, knowing that if he didn’t Bianca would find someone else who would: there were always men after the roe at the Searoom willing to pay with favours. Bending her arm at an

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  Russell Blackford

  awkward angle, she sent her fingertips along her spine where the

  translucent orange fin was grafted. The sutured lines of flesh

  edging the cultured implant were still swollen and sore; she winced,

  waiting for the next song.

  Bianca hated bum ping into people because it jarred and hurt her

  back; dancing, though, she hardly noticed. She’d already had one

  BioFeed-music miracle, the time she went out too soon after a line

  of unfashionable scales had been removed from her ankle. Even

  before that she’d known she was a latent. She’d never heard people’s

  thoughts— that was just make-up stuff—but sometimes she met

  other latents at venues like this and said the strangest things to

  them, or they did to her . . . And it turned out to make sense.

  She believed in miracles, and though she knew she shouldn’t

  have come dancing until her back was completely healed, she

  trustingly awaited one.

  Lachlan Alderson, QC, blinked as he dabbed with a small chamois

  cloth at the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses; the smoke in the

  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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  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 Searoom;

  but he felt, despite protective coloration, conspicuously old. Most

  of the dancers were half his age. He sidled rangily among them,

  cold-eyed and lean, to all appearances an ageing shark after little

  roe, his bony lantern-jawed face embellished with glittering ice-

  blue scales, each the size of a fingernail. U nder his loose jerkin of

  silvery glittermesh, he carried no firearm, and he missed the comforting weight — but he would not need it tonight.

  Baker kept watch on a couple across the thick-aired room, not

  getting close enough to draw their attention. They were even older,

  though the woman did not look her age. The serious-looking man,

  Alderson, spoke earnestly to his fashionable companion. Both were

  in their mid-thirties. The hidden thing they had in common with

  Baker was this: all three had shown the talent to reach positions of

  great responsibility while still comparatively young.

  The room was almost opaque with smoke from the stage and

  from the filters that people here insisted on smoking frenetically.

  Faces came and went behind the wisps of smoke, navigational

  buoys looming from sea-fog, as quickly lost behind its veils.

  Lachlan Alderson’s m anner was older than his face, and he was

  prematurely grey, white at the temples. His wire-rimmed glasses

  added to the enthusiastically serious look. Baker caught himself; he

  was staring at the lawyer. Tracking Loerne and Alderson here was

  counter-productive if they became aware of him. His assignment

  required absolute discretion.

  Baker averted his gaze and worked his way towards the bar. His