But what could have done that? Who could have done it? Who in the whole world had the technology to do such a thing? He already didn’t like the apple corer idea. Using that analogy, he was the core, the bit that was to be thrown away. Maybe that’s why he was here in this damp cave. He’d been extracted and was now in some kind of a human waste bin.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked himself, aloud. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve heard since I interviewed Douggie Mack!”
“To whom are you speaking?” Asked the Agent who had silently materialised two metres behind him.
Spinning around in complete panic, Barraclough yelled again and seeing the two-and-a-half metre monster that loomed over him, began blasting away at it with his handgun. The noise was incredible as he emptied a full clip into the creature. Stunned and deafened, his nostrils full of the gunsmoke, Barraclough staggered back from the creature until his back hit the wall again.
The Agent stared down at him with its unblinking steel eyes. In front of its chest, fifteen lead bullets hung in the air. It studied them for a moment and then, all together, they fell to the floor with a dull splatter. It took a step closer to Barraclough. It looked like a gigantic, deformed, but immensely powerful human being, wearing strangely ornamented, scaly, black armour and a grotesque face mask. Hair, like long porcupine quills sprouted from the back of its head, neck and shoulders. It fixed Barraclough with featureless, grey eyes, fascinated by him.
Frightened beyond anything he’d ever known, Barraclough shouted again and tried to back into the wall. “Get back!” he yelled, waving the empty gun at the unearthly apparition in front of him. “What the fuck are you anyway?”
“You are frightened,” said the Agent in its soft, deep voice. “Do not fear me. I am not your enemy. I merely seek information about you.”
“Me?” Barraclough was regaining control of himself. The thing that had snatched him didn’t seem to want to hurt him, just yet anyway. With his returning composure came a flood of questions. How did he get here? Where was he? What the hell was that thing? How had it stopped fifteen bullets in mid-air? It was like some awful sci-fi movie where mankind’s monstrous descendants from the future come back in time with incredible technologies and some hair-brained scheme to save themselves by killing some key person from the past.
“I will probe your mind now,” the Agent told him.
“No. Wait. You’ve got the wrong bloke,” Barraclough said. It had to be a mistake. “I’m not special at all. I’m just a copper. I don’t even have any kids. You’d better get yourself back to the future and check your facts, mate. This is all a big cock-up.”
“The future?” The Agent pondered this for a moment. “I believe you are the one in error. The future is not formed yet. The wave-front of random froth that makes this universe, creates only an endless present, unravelling the past as it goes. Unfathomable. For, even those few who can grasp the mathematics, even my masters, can find no hint in all that dense calculus of any meaning whatsoever.
“And so this now is all the world we live in. The thinnest possible multi-dimensional surface. A skein of information. A spider-web of relationships. And this substance we feel, these memories we have, these galaxies of stars are only lingering traces of earlier patterns, traces that will blur and fade and become lost in the noise of that relentless random restructuring of reality we call Time.”
Barraclough blinked. “Pardon?”
The Agent stared at him in silence. “Prepare yourself to be probed,” it said.
-oOo-
Wayne and Drukk walked into the kitchen to find Sam practically prostrating herself in front of a nondescript looking bloke in a green polo shirt.
“Hi,” said Wayne.
John looked around, smiled his nondescript smile and gave Wayne a blast of his electrifying, mesmeric eyes. At the same time, Sam seemed to snap out of her little trance. She jumped to her feet and hastily adjusted her clothes and hair as if she’d been caught having sex with the man rather than just listening raptly to him. She felt herself blushing and couldn’t understand why.
John, meanwhile, had noticed Drukk and rose to his feet, looking the alien up and down with a look of just as much astonishment as Wayne was showing. “You’re that woman,” he said. “That celebrity woman. What...?”
“I am Drukk,” said the Vinggan, totally unaffected by John’s hypnotic gaze.
“She wears the orange clothing,” said Sam, helpfully.
John gave Sam a puzzled look, at which she just smiled and shrugged. He turned back to Drukk, holding out his hand. “I’m John,” he said.
“The guru guy,” added Sam and Wayne together.
Drukk saw the outstretched hand. He knew this convention now and confidently put out his own hand, letting it hover a few inches from John’s before withdrawing it. Confused, John also withdrew his hand.
Wayne jumped into the ensuing silence. “Listen, Sam, I’ve got to tell you something about Loosi.”
“I agreed he could call me that,” explained Drukk.
“Loosi Beecham! That’s it!” John burst out. “My God! Loosi Beecham! Here!”
Hearing the commotion, a number of John’s rather vague followers began to drift vaguely back into the kitchen, presumably abandoning whatever vague projects they were loosely engaged on at the time.
“What is it?” Sam demanded around John’s outburst. “She’s all right isn’t she? She isn’t worse or anything?” Her realisation that she had completely forgotten the plight of this poor injured woman astonished her. How could she have done that? How long had she been listening to John talk while Ms Beecham stood outside in the sun with a concussion?
“Of course she’s all right.” Wayne was warming to his announcement. “She’s better than all right.” He looked Sam directly in the eye, something she couldn’t remember him ever having done in his life. “Sam, Loosi Beecham is an alien from the planet Vingg.”
There were gasps and mutterings from around the room. All eyes that weren’t already there, swivelled to the beautiful blonde stranger in the tight orange dress. An alien? A real live alien, here among them?
In any other company, Wayne’s announcement might have caused howls of laughter and yells of scorn and derision. However, in the present company, all it generated was an awed silence.
“Cool!” said Jadie from the doorway, pretty well summing up the general consensus.
“We knew you would come,” said the girl, Laney, in a small, emotion-filled voice and began to cry.
“We’re ready,” said another. “We waited.”
Someone stuck his head out the kitchen window and shouted, “Hey! They’re here! They’ve come!” Then there was a great hubbub as people came running from everywhere and tried to get into the kitchen. There was laughter and shouting and a group in the corner started singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Vague but happy people edged closer to Drukk, reaching out their hands to touch him.
Sam looked about her trying to work out what she should do. Her two stories had suddenly become horribly conflated. That poor, deluded woman had suddenly become part of this insane cult’s own delusions and now the two insanities were feeding off each other in a way she wasn’t at all happy about. Uppermost in her mind was the indisputable fact that Loosi Beecham was not an alien from the planet Vingg and that this could therefore only end badly. Perhaps very badly.
“Wait! Wait!” It was John, holding up his hands and sweeping the hypnotic beam of his eyes across his flock, rapidly gaining their full attention. Even the choir in the corner sputtered to a halt. For the first time, John looked nervous. His unassailable composure was gone and a rather furtive anxiety seemed to have replaced it.
“Patience, everyone, please.” He looked around to ensure they were all hanging on his words. “I know we all want the Sky People to come. I know we all long for their Gift. But we must be sure. We must be certain. We cannot let ourselves be fooled by impostors. There is too much at stake.” A
gain, he swept his gaze across them all. He seemed to be thinking fast. “I will speak in private with our visitor. I will ask her questions only a true representative of the Sky People could answer. I know the secret signs our friends from the sky have prepared. I will not be fooled by false Gifters.”
The crowd, on the whole, seemed happy with this. After all, thought Sam, they were quick enough to believe Wayne, whom they had never met before, so why shouldn’t they believe their guru guy?
“Leave us now,” said John, looking a little too relieved that he still had control of the situation. His followers began to drift out of the room again. “Leave it to me,” he said to their departing backs. “I will not fail you.”
Eventually, only Sam, Wayne, Drukk and John remained in the room.
John turned to Sam. “I’m sorry, would you mind leaving too.”
Sam, began to protest. She needed to be here. She had to get the story. But in the full light of his extraordinary eyes, she felt her will crumbling. She was one the verge of turning to go when Drukk spoke up.
“I wish these two humans to stay,” he said. He wasn’t absolutely sure that these were the same two humans that had brought him here but he thought he recognised Sam from the colour of her business suit and Wayne from the row of symbols across his front. He wasn’t quite sure why he wanted them with him except he knew they had not yet tried to hurt him and they did seem willing to help him in his search for a religious leader.
John looked Drukk in the eye and, using the full force of his hypnotic power, said, “No. They must leave.”
Totally impervious to the effect, Drukk merely replied, “No. They must stay.”
John was seriously taken aback by this. All his life, he’d been able to make just about anybody do just about anything simply by looking them in the eye and asking them to. He had never, ever seen someone just shrug off a direct order like that. For an instant, a tiny curl of fear licked at his insides. Then he pulled himself together. No. It just couldn’t be! The Sky People couldn’t really have come. Could they?
“Very well,” he said, shakily. “Won’t you all sit down, please?”
-oOo-
Barraclough opened his eyes and looked up into the darkness. Man, what a dream! Alien abduction! He laughed out loud. And there had been more. What was it? Oh yes. Multiple Loosi Beechams trashing Steiner’s department store. But, hang on, hadn’t that really happened? He’d been in the office when the call came through. He’d gone to the Royal and picked up Douggie Mack and his mate. He’d interviewed them. Wasn’t that all real? All right, so where did the dream start? He’d been chasing a busload of old folks who’d been kidnapped by the Loosi Beecham mob. He’d spoken to them. He’d stood in the road in the sun in the middle of bloody nowhere and the bus-driver had been wetting himself. Surely that wasn’t a dream? It seemed so real. Where was he, anyway? This didn’t feel like his own bed.
He reached out a hand to turn on the bedside light but there was nothing there. Fear and adrenalin surged through him. He tried to sit up but he could not move. Not a dream, he realised. Not a dream. None of it.
“Who are you?” he shouted into the darkness. “I’m a police officer, you fucker. Every cop in the country is going to be looking for me.” He panted into the blackness, straining against a force that seemed to lay on him like a lead blanket. “At least turn the bloody lights on, mate!”
Instantly, there was light. Barraclough screwed up his eyes against the sudden, blinding glare and, when he could open them, there was that big, ugly black thing, just standing there, staring at him.
He was no longer in the little cavelike room. Now he was in a large, cavelike room. He could move his head but that was all. He looked down at his naked body. Nothing lay on top of him. No straps bound him. There wasn’t even anything under him. He just floated in the air, flat on his back.
“The probe is complete,” the Agent said.
Barraclough remembered. “You... you probed my mind?”
The Agent shrugged. “It didn’t take long.” It moved closer. “You are a most interesting species but I still cannot see your value to the Vinggan machines. Even as slaves you would have limited utility.”
“What?”
“You have a question?”
“You bet I have a question? I’ve got a question all right! Have I got a question for you, mate!”
“Well?”
But Barraclough had so many questions that he foundered on his total inability to pick one above all the rest. Which question do you start with when the whole Universe no longer makes sense?
“What’s all this got to do with Doug McKinnock?” he asked eventually, in despair.
The Agent frowned. “I am willing to answer any question you have. You may ask about the nature of galactic civilisation, the origin of life in the universe, the physical basis of consciousness. Anything.”
So, the big fella was hiding something! “Never mind all that bollocks!” Barraclough snarled. “Just tell me what Douggie and his mate were doing in Steiner’s department store last night.”
The Agent sighed, sadly. His Lalantran creators had built into his genetic memory the knowledge that there was no hope for the lesser species but it was still sad to see it for himself.
“From what I can piece together from memories that are in your mind and from evidence I myself possess, it seems the humans of whom you speak were innocently caught up in events.”
“I don’t believe it. Douggie never did an innocent thing in his life. He probably mugged his mother to get her milk. So how about telling me the truth? Why are you protecting a nasty little tosser like Douggie?”
The Agent was perplexed. “You are not being rational, human. I have no connection with any of your species except yourself. It is most likely a group of Vinggans that invaded this ‘department store’ and who hijacked the vehicle your were pursuing.”
“Vinggans? What the bloody hell is a Vinggan when its at home?” Barraclough was indeed becoming irrational, for all kinds of very rational reasons. Just now, his irrationality was manifesting itself as a growing anger at this oversized troll. Who the hell did it think it was? What right did it have to go around kidnapping people—policemen!—going about their lawful business? “Don’t give me that crap, you gargoyle. I want the full story. Just what are you doing here and why the fuck are you doing it on my patch?”
“You are very single-minded,” the Agent told him. “I admire your persistence. I too am a hunter, created by the galaxy’s most noble species to track down and destroy the machines which are plotting against all life. They have been using the Vinggans as cover for their insidious schemes for galactic domination and now they seek to use your planet in some way to further their heinous plans. I must uncover their intent and prevent them from spreading their unnatural sapience any further.”
Barraclough struggled against the forces holding him for a moment, not really listening to his captor but then, as the words sank in, he had a sudden realisation. “You mean you’re like some sort of alien monster cop thing?” he asked.
“If you wish. I am an Agent of the Lalantrans.”
“Yeah right but that means you’re like a cop, yeah? You’re one of the good guys and you hunt down the bad guys, right?”
“The terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ only have meaning within the framework of an absolute morality based on theistic revelation. The more advanced species use relativistic ethical frameworks based, typically, on the avoidance of suffering. Of course, some members of the Council of Elite Species have created ethical systems based on a duty to increase pleasure. I am thinking particularly of the Growagan Collective who have increased their pleasure so much that they just sit around in Council meetings giggling inanely and tickling each other. Even that’s not as bad as the Acc of Icc who decided to do away with morality altogether. They had to be expelled from the Council of Elite Species for lying about everything and farting in the Council Chamber. Then there were the...”
“Oi! Are you a cop or not?”
With a snort of exasperation, the Agent agreed. “Yes, if you wish to look at it that way, I am a cop.”
“Good on ya! Look, mate, what do you say we help each other out here, eh?”
-oOo-
“Oh come off it Wayne!” Sam was losing patience with her little brother. “Even you can’t be dumb enough to swallow all this alien rubbish.” She turned to Drukk who had sat impassively while Wayne had explained to John and Sam that, as he put it, Loosi Beecham was really an alien from the planet Vingg. “With all due respect to Ms Beecham, here, the woman has had a bad knock to the head and she’s two prawns short of a barbie.” She turned to John, who had sat riveted throughout Wayne’s impassioned presentation. “And with all due respect to Mr Saunders, here, you’d have to be even more of a nutcase than he is to believe anything she says.”
Wayne was peeved. This was so like Sam. Every single thing he ever said was rubbish in her almighty opinion. Well he believed Loosi, and Sam was going to believe it too. He took Drukk by the shoulders. “Loosi, you’ve got to show them, convince them somehow. Do something alien for them. Pull your face off or something.”
“Pull my face off? What in the name of the Spirit do you mean?”
“He means give us a sign,” said John. “If you are one of the Sky People, you will know the signs.”
Drukk knew about signs all right. The Great Spirit was always giving signs to the religious lot back on Vingg. Statues oozed pus, the sick were encysted, water was turned into hydrogen disulphide, the usual stuff. But Drukk was not the Great Spirit and what would a sign from him mean to these primitive people? Was it ethical to dazzle them with technical party-tricks just so that they would take him seriously?
He wished Braxx were there. Braxx would know with the certainty of dogma what was appropriate in the circumstances. The Space Corps never really went in much for ethical training. Obedience is good. Disobedience is bad. They taught them that all right. They even had big posters with it written in metre-high characters all over the dormitories. But that had been as far as it went. He tried to remember his religious education at school and in various compulsory indoctrination camps he’d attended over the years but, come to think of it, none of what he’d learnt about ethics had amounted to much more than that. Obedience is good. Disobedience is bad. Not much use in his present situation.
Cargo Cult Page 13
