Gabby touched the backs of her fingertips to his elbow, a gesture
very sensitive 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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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
