an outright ban on the miracle groups. Alderson seemed less convinced. Disapproval registered clearly on his face even in the dim light. Gabby smiled to deprecate the importance of what she had
said. This plumpish pretty girl would hardly be talking to the
media anyway, and even if she did the media would not take her
seriously. And Alderson already knew Gabby’s position, so he
could not take offence at that.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the music,’ the girl said. ‘It’s healed
my fin tonight. Look. It was all swollen before. My back was.’ She
turned to show them her back. The brown flesh cushioning the
dorsal fin was completely whole, as if she had been born with the
addition to her spine. Gabby believed her, though, about the
swelling.
‘Come with us,’ Alderson said decisively to her as the decibels
increased. ‘W hat’s your name?’
‘Bianca.’
‘We’ll both talk to you, Bianca.’
‘There’s something I had to say to you,’ Bianca said, reaching inside her for something lost. ‘But I don’t understand it, and I can’t quite remember . . ,
‘Come on, then.’
They struggled through the rhythmic swinging arms. Gabby
was glad to reach the hotel’s top foyer, through the Searoom’s rear
exit. Wide stairs with thick rails of brightly-polished wood went
down to street level. ‘W hat does profane mean?’ Bianca asked.
Alderson opened his mouth, closed it.
‘Clairvoyance in action,’ Gabby said to him. ‘Why?’ she asked the
girl.
‘Is there a book . . . or something . . . somewhere where God
says: Who are you calling profane? W hat does it mean?’
‘The Devil quotes Scripture — ’
‘But more exactly, I imagine,’ Gabby said.
‘W’hat if he’s subtle?’
Gabby felt the predictable burn of exasperation before she
realised that Alderson had actually cracked a slightly self-mocking
joke in his deadpan way. He was a man of contradictions, after all.
She recognised the joke as Alderson’s attempt to deflect his all-too-
real anxieties.
For Alderson, such anxieties were unavoidable: there was a
question for every certainty — always a deeper ambiguity to wrestle
88
Russell Blackford
with. Amused by his casuistic misgivings, Gabby gave up on arguing with him. ‘You’re getting absurd,’ she told him without heat.
H er line from Coleridge had been a good one, but Saint Luke had
done better: What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane. ‘It
means the opposite of holy,’ she said to Bianca. ‘We can all talk later.’
She. gave Alderson a sympathetic smile, made a jerky movement of
her head in the direction of the Searoom. ‘I’m going in to hear the
last set.’
They followed her.
Tigershark looked with horror at the cut under his chest. It hurt,
hurt terribly, throbbingly. And it was not closing. The most recent
wounds under his arms had begun to bleed freely. He could not
express any pain; it would be the ruin of his act, his art. As if he
could avoid forever drawing attention to the blood which would not
stop, he lowered his maimed hand to knee height, and dropped the
knife, flicking it away from his vulnerable feet, and kept on
dancing.
Baker, like the musicians, could affect only latents. Unlike them, he
had been trained to manipulate the healing effect directly and with
purpose. And he could reverse it.
He concentrated his unhealing hatred on the flick-dancer. Blood
oozed. The boy’s wounds would never stop bleeding. And next
Baker would turn to older wounds —the knife lines of his dancing
and of his extensive surgery— opening them afresh.
The Signals U nit strategists had game-analysed the outcome.
They had tags to plant with the m edia—‘Black.Stigmatic’, ‘Blood of
Satan.’ There would be an immediate outcry, and a fruitless
investigation — and that, at least for the interval needed, would be
the end of the music in one State.
Deliberate hatred vomited out of Baker; he conjured the demon
in his mind as he had been coached. H atred spewed from him to
the flick-dancer, and now old incisions were opening, tattoos of
proud flesh rising like initiation scars on his smooth body, welds of
pink flesh starting to tear open like wet paper, and the blood falling
in a pool at his feet. In an eternal moment, the boy was draining
white and falling in his own blood.
