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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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
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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
