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
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,
