Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  Wayne looked down at his ‘energy drink’, a fizzy concoction of sugar, caffeine and artificial flavours that the ads said would boost his mental focus and make him feel great. He thought maybe he should have another one, since it didn’t seem to be working. He’d never been really comfortable with this whole younger brother thing, especially since his sister was this, like, really successful corporate media type and he was, like, you know, into other, more meaningful things. Sam had always been the brains in the family and it was, like, ironic that she’d turned into such a soulless cow, ’cause, he had to admit, she’d always sort of looked after him when they were young. Anyway, what did she think he could do? He wasn’t, like, James Bond or something. He couldn’t just infiltrate secret organisations and then ski off down the slope, machine gunning them over his shoulder or something.

  “Are you listening to me, Wayne? Or are you off with the fairies again?”

  Wayne roused himself with a surly “What?”

  Sam looked at her brother with a sudden, irrational affection. “How old are you, Wayne?”

  “You know how old I am.”

  “You’re 21. You’re a university drop-out with no job and no prospects.”

  Wayne bristled. “I’ve got a job.”

  “No. You’ve got a couple of gigs in pubs. That’s not a job.” She’d been to see him once, playing his guitar so sweetly on a tiny little stage while half-drunken louts shouted and laughed and ignored him.

  Wayne sulked. “I’m building up a following. It takes time.”

  “I worry about you. You need a regular income.”

  “Look, has this got anything to do with the Receivers?” Just a moment ago, he’d decided that the whole idea of helping Sam get a story on the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty had been a really bad idea but, if the alternative was having her lecture him about his job prospects, he’d rather get back to the subject. In fact, he’d rather have his head boiled.

  Sam saw the shutters come down and pursed her lips. “OK. You said you have a friend on the inside. You said that someone was trying to recruit you. All I want is for you to take me to see them and introduce me. I’ll do the rest.”

  “Well, it’s not a friend exactly. It’s just, like, a bloke I met in the pub.”

  “But he is one of these Recipients of Lots of Whatever it is?”

  “Receivers of Cosmic Bounty.”

  “And he did try to recruit you?”

  “He said I should come to one of their prayer meetings or something.”

  “And you can get in touch with him again?”

  “He’s in O’Shaunessey’s sometimes.”

  “And he said they’ve got weapons?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Well, he said that no-one better try and stop them leaving and went like...” He mimed firing a gun.

  “Jesus!” Sam whispered. She could see the headline; “Outback Cult Declares War!” This was front-page stuff in a city where “Wallaby Singed in Brisbane Fire” could push a Middle-Eastern war onto page five. Better still, she could see the by-line, “from our investigative reporter Samantha Zammit”. Sam just had to get in there and find out what was going on. Her whole future depended on it.

  “It’s just so hard to believe,” she said, almost to herself. “A real, loony religious cult, right here in Queensland.”

  Wayne squirmed. “I don’t know if they’re all that loony. The bloke I know seems OK.”

  Sam smiled blissfully. “Of course they’re loony. They’re probably holding mass weddings and kidnapping teenagers and all those wonderful things. I bet we’ll find an arsenal big enough to start a war and five-year-old kids with glazed eyes carrying automatic weapons. I’ve got to get an interview with the cult leader. He probably believes God speaks to him through a radio planted in his nasal cavity by his dentist and that the Australian Labor Party is part of a plot masterminded by the CIA to bring down the world economy so that the Antichrist can take over and start Armageddon.”

  Wayne shook his head, sadly. Clearly the only loony around here was sitting opposite him with a mad gleam in her eyes but he wasn’t going to argue. He’d learnt many years ago just to let Sam have her way.

  “We’ll meet in O’Shaunessey’s tonight,” Sam went on. “God, I can hardly wait! Do you think he’ll be there? Your contact? We’ve got to get in there before some other journalist gets wind of it.”

  “Tonight?” Wayne whined. “I was supposed to -”

  “What? Don’t tell me you can’t fit this into your busy social schedule? O’Shaunessey’s, tonight, seven thirty. No, no, six thirty. Do they do food? We don’t want to risk missing him.”

  Wayne whined again, “Sam...” He’d have to go ’round and see Doug and Nick and tell them he couldn’t make the gig. They weren’t going to like it.

  Chapter 3: Metamorphosis

  The transformation process was not going well. Drukk and Braxx had found how to make the ship search the planet’s primitive ‘Internet’ for pictures of humans so they could pick one. On Vingg, there were many different body forms and infinite variety within forms. For humans, it was clearly different. After an hour of searching, Braxx threw up his lateral tentacle in exasperation.

  “It’s incredible! They all look exactly the same! What are we wasting our time for? Just pick one at random.”

  Drukk peered into the screen. Braxx seemed to be right. They had looked at hundreds, possibly thousands of pictures of these hideous creatures and he still couldn’t tell one from another. The humans obviously could though, since each one seemed to have a name and there were even several categories — such as, “celebrities”, “hot teens”, “lesbians” and “babes”.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter?” he said. “The ones we have seen all seem to be highly revered. If we just pick one of the most frequently-occurring forms, we will almost certainly have selected a high-status type.”

  “Then do it,” snapped Braxx. “If I have to look at one more picture I will shed my dermis!”

  “Should I pick a different form for each of us? Or just one form for all?”

  Braxx was past caring. “Can it possibly matter? Just do what you suggested. Tell the ship to pick the most common form and we’ll use that.”

  So Drukk left it to the ship and, one by one, they filed into the metamorphosis booth and, one by one, they came out again, each and every one of them looking like Loosi Beecham. (Joss, of course, looked like a pregnant Loosi Beecham, the booth having moved her bud into her abdominal cavity so that it would mimic the analogous human gestatative condition.) All fourteen of them stood around, naked, examining their strange new bodies and poking tentatively at bits of themselves and their companions.

  “Oh, this is absolutely awful!” one of them cried. “I look disgusting. I feel disgusting. These humans are monsters. The kind of thing our progenitors used to scare us with when we were budlets.”

  “That’s enough of that!” One of the Loosi Beechams strode forward, scowling. “The Great Spirit requires this sacrifice of us. We must accept this… this… degrading condition in the knowledge that we do Her will.”

  “Yeah, well you accept it if you like. Personally, I would rather look like a Karbassian swamp dog than like this!”

  There was a general murmur of assent from the other Loosies. “Enough, I say!” shouted the scowling one.

  “Oh shut up,” said the first.

  “How dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “No.”

  The scowler, momentarily taken aback, blinked in confusion. “Er, right. Hmm. Well, I’m Braxx, that’s who. Corpuscular Manifestation, third class, of the Great Spirit. So just watch it!”

  “This is ridiculous,” complained another of the Loosies. “How are we ever going to know who’s who?”

  “Apart from me, of course,” said Joss.

  “And me,” said her bud, although it was so muffled only a few of the nearest Loosies heard it.

&nbs
p; Braxx looked around him in mounting irritation. “Drukk! Which one of you is Drukk?”

  “I am,” came a voice from the crowd.

  “Well, in the Spirit’s name, Drukk, go and stand over there so I know which one you are.” A Loosi detached herself and walked over to the other side of the room. “Now, Drukk. How are we going to distinguish each other in these ridiculous bodies?”

  Drukk made the I-haven’t-got-a-clue gesture. Normally, this would have included the knotting of at least three tentacles but, in configuring the metamorphosis booth, the ship had included a large number of gestural translation rules derived from a quick analysis of the human’s television output of the last several hours on all channels. The result was that, instead of knotting his tentacles, Drukk shrugged his pretty little shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know? I’m not an expert on human physiology. I’m just a Space Corps Operative, sixth class. The only xenobiology they ever taught me was where to aim your blaster in order to kill or maim the five most common space pests.”

  “Then what’s the metamorphosis booth for?” Braxx demanded. “Surely it was intended for uses such as this and surely you were given some kind of training.”

  “Actually, I’ve often wondered what it was for. There’s loads of stuff on a ship like this that they just never bother telling us about.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said the ship.

  “There’s another example,” Drukk said. “I never knew these ships could speak. I’ve been in the Corps for years and everyone’s always used the splashboards.”

  “Yeah, it’s like that in the Ministry,” said one of the Loosies. “Everything’s always ‘need to know’—and guess who doesn’t need to know absolutely anything?”

  “Enough! Ship! Tell me your idea.”

  “I’m afraid I can only accept orders from a ranking Space Corps Operative.”

  Braxx’s beautiful blue eyes flashed in fury. “Why you soulless pile of nanocircuits! I could have you dismantled and recycled for trendy jewellery!”

  Drukk hurried forward. “Braxx, I think you’d better let me handle the ship. They can get a bit temperamental around civilians.” Braxx bridled but controlled himself, backing off with a small bow and a taut smile. Drukk breathed a deep sigh. He’d never seen it but he’d heard spacers’ tales of ships getting so annoyed with meddling passengers that they’d shut down the life support, or opened all the hatches while still in deep space, just to get some peace. “OK ship,” he said, nervously. “This is Drukk.”

  “You don’t look like Drukk.”

  “Pardon.”

  “You don’t look like Drukk. You look like some kind of alien monster.”

  “Ship? Are you feeling all right?”

  “Fine thank you. I’m having a bit of trouble with some of my neural processor units but I feel just great.”

  Drukk looked around at the other Loosies and saw that most of them had gone a somewhat paler colour. Like him, they all seemed to be considering their chances of making it to the exits before the ship did something they would all regret.

  “Er, good. That’s, er, really good,” Drukk went on. “You, er, said you had an idea.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. We were talking about how we all look alike now that we’ve been through your metamorphosis booth and you said that you had an idea. Do you remember?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just smash the stupid thing and have done with it!” growled one of the Loosies that Drukk had to assume was Braxx. A small aperture opened in one of the walls and the needle-like muzzle of a disintegrator ray slid out.

  “No, no!” Drukk stammered, his barking, human voice, rising with anxiety. “We wouldn’t want to do that to such a fine and intelligent machine would we?” He waved his hands at Braxx and pointed to the disintegrator.

  “Don’t see why not,” Braxx grumbled, ignoring him. “The stupid machine is obviously only fit for scrap.” The disintegrator swung around, targeting Braxx.

  Drukk, waved frantically, pointing at the gun and miming the cleric’s imminent fate. “No, I don’t think we want to upset this nice, clever machine, that controls all the ship’s arsenal and the life support and the escape hatches, do we?”

  Braxx still didn’t get it. “If you ask me we should just blast it to…” And then he disappeared under a pile of naked Loosi Beechams as his followers dragged him to the ground and held his mouth shut.

  Drukk breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank you,” he said, perhaps to the Great Spirit, and turned back to the ship’s main console. “So, ship,” he said casually, “if you just happened to have the problem that we all have, of not knowing one of ourselves from another, what would you do?”

  “I think I’d do what the humans do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only just got here.”

  Drukk was beginning to feel that Braxx probably had the right idea about smashing this thing up after all. “But, looking at all those thousands of pictures, and using your incredible analytical powers, could you not perhaps form some kind of hypothesis about how the humans do it?”

  The ship was silent for a second or two. “Hmm,” it said. “I’ve just looked at them all again and I think the answer must be to wear clothes.”

  “Clothes? What’s that?”

  The ship threw up an image of a naked Loosi Beecham, rotating it slowly. “This is the human’s natural state. Yet this is how they frequently appear.” The image changed to show the creature’s skin changing colour and texture and hanging in folds. “I thought at first that they were undergoing physical changes in their exodermic layers but now I’m fairly sure that they are covering their bodies in pieces of woven fabric and sometimes skins removed from other species. They call it clothing.”

  There were several cries of “Yeuk!” and similar expressions of disgust. “But why would they do that?” Drukk demanded.

  “That’s what I thought. They obviously don’t do it to insulate their bodies or to protect themselves from the environment. It would be inconceivable that a species would have evolved that cannot live comfortably on its home planet without protection. So it has to be for some other reason. My guess is that they use clothing to identify one another. This would account for the otherwise inexplicable variety of styles, textures and colours.”

  It seemed odd in the extreme but, as the old Corps saying went, “There’s nowt so queer as aliens.”

  “But we don’t have any of this ‘clothing’,” Drukk said. “Where can we get some?”

  In an instant, the Loosi image disappeared and was replaced with a picture of a large building. “This,” said the ship, “is what the humans call a ‘department store’. You will find there are twenty-nine of them within three hundred kilometres of this site.”

  -oOo-

  Wayne went early to O’Shaunessey’s. In fact, he went straight there from meeting Sam. He’d had three pints of Guinness and a cheese sandwich before he started to feel better.

  His life was not really what he’d expected. As a child, he’d been totally oblivious to most of what went on around him. His parents’ coaching in the various social skills had washed over him with barely a trace. His expensive, private schooling had made hardly a dent in his blissful ignorance. Yet he had not had a happy life. His natural intelligence and sensitivity had made him a target for every bullying jock in the school—including the ones that taught there—and his family treated him like an alien being. He had a couple of friends but even Wayne could see that they were sad and dysfunctional types. The three of them clung to each other like men overboard, clinging to deckchairs in a big, cold ocean.

  His only solace had been his music. He learned the piano before he learned to write and played the violin in the school orchestra with a skill his teachers seized on in their determination to find something with which he could help the school win prizes. But his true love was the guitar. His father didn’t understand at first�
�the guitar was a perfectly acceptable classical instrument—but one day he came home from work early to find Wayne playing along to some old Eric Clapton recordings and he knew that all hope was lost, that his only son was a hopeless waster and would never amount to anything. “At least I still have Sam,” he raged at his totally bemused son. “At least one of my children is going to amount to something.”

  “It’s only the blues Dad.”

  “The blues, is it? Let me tell you about the blues, young man. The blues is raising an idiot son who will never find a job. The blues is being a tired old man who can’t even depend on his only son to look after him in his dotage. You want that your mother and me should spend our final years in poverty and die in a public hospital?”

  Wayne sucked morosely at his fourth Guinness. His father had a way of being extra Hungarian when he was upset. Of course, he’d been more-or-less right about his son. Wayne had dropped out of just about everything so far and his prospects were pretty slim. Look at him! Drinking away the last of his dole money instead of… of… well, something more constructive, he supposed. Still, things would be OK after tonight. Damn, no, not tonight. He had to tell Doug and Nick that the gig was off. Jesus! They’d kill him. He had to admit, he was just a bit scared of those two. They’d always been nice enough to him but he could see that, under the surface, they didn’t really like him. They just wanted him for his skills. Still, that was OK, wasn’t it. He needed them too, and, together, they might all make the big-time, get seriously rich.

  He noticed that his glass was empty again. How had that happened? Sam had better hurry up and arrive or he’d run out of money before she got there. He went to the bar and got a refill, returning to his quiet corner to brood over it. Maybe they didn’t have to cancel the gig after all. Wayne just had to introduce Sam to Jadie and then he could clear off, go ’round to Doug’s place, and everything would be sweet. He might not even be late if Jadie turned up early. He wished for the thousandth time he hadn’t agreed to do this but, when it came down to it, he had to admit, he was far more scared of Sam than he was of Doug and Nick.