Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  For inspiration, he looked into his bag to see if there was anything that might be of any use in raising the dead or getting spots out of carpets or something. He picked out a small, black pyramid. He hadn’t a clue what it was for and had only put it in his bag because it was one of the few objects lying around the ship that had been small enough and light enough to carry. He supposed there wasn’t much point in carrying it around with him. “Here,” he said, handing it to John. “You can have that if you like.”

  John leaped back out of his chair as if the object had stung him. His eyes were wide with terror and his face was white. “No! It can’t be!” He looked frantically at Sam. “It’s all a load of rubbish. there aren’t really supposed to be any Sky People! I just made it all up to get those stupid kids to come around and fix up the farmhouse.”

  Wayne was shocked. “What? This whole thing is just a big fraud?”

  “Well, of course it’s a fraud, stupid,” said Sam in exasperation. “Only he’s not supposed to come right out and admit it.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” John was still staring at the pyramid. “The first Gift is the Pyramid of Power. That’s how we will know them. It’s all there in the book I’m writing, only no-one has seen it yet. And, anyway, it’s all a load of crap. It’s not supposed to be real.”

  “What is this, anyway?” asked Sam, picking up the little pyramid. “It’s some kind of plastic toy or something?” She poked at a few protrusions and looked for an ‘on’ switch on the base. Suddenly it pulsed with a pale light and made a small thrumming sound. She dropped it onto the table as if it had bitten her. Then laughed at herself. “John, you’re giving me the creeps with all this... holy shit!”

  They all leaped out of their seats and scrabbled to put some distance between themselves and the pyramid as a bright blue light blazed out of it. Even Drukk was alarmed, fearing for an instant that he’d picked up a land-mine or some other munition. Then he adopted the normally-sensible-being-now-amused-at-its-own-folly posture, which his body interpreted as a nervous giggle.

  “Fear not, humans,” he said and went over to the pyramid and pushed the button labelled ‘review’. A small, full-colour, three-dimensional image appeared in the air above the device showing John, Sam, Wayne and Drukk leaping up from a table in various postures of alarm. “It’s only a camera. It will not hurt you.”

  Feeling a little silly, or, in Sam’s case, feeling rather cross and a little silly, they all moved closer to examine the image. Intriguingly, both front and back of every object within two metres of the pyramid was rendered in full detail. “How does it do that?” Wayne wanted to know.

  “Yes, I’ve often wondered myself,” said Drukk.

  “This is amazing,” said John in a hushed voice, circling the image, awed by its implications. “I... I thought it was all made up but I must have known, somehow. I must have been inspired with the knowledge. I am a true prophet after all!”

  Sam was just getting crosser and crosser. “OK you.” She faced Drukk squarely and took a pace closer to him. “What’s going on here? If this is some kind of hare-brained publicity stunt after all, I’m going to stick that bouffant, marshmallow-filled cavity you call a head up the nearest cow’s backside and beat your over-developed arse with a fence-post until my arms ache.”

  Both Wayne and John scurried to juxtapose themselves between Drukk and the advancing Sam. “Stop!” said John, giving her a blast of the hypnotic eyes.

  While she was momentarily stunned and confused, Wayne spoke up. “Sam, don’t you see? It’s real. Loosi really is an alien. She’s come here from another world.”

  “Bollocks! She’s a low-life, publicity-hungry, self-serving, Hollywood...” —she searched briefly for the ultimate insult— “... actress!”

  “Sam, what do you think that is on the table?” he waved at the pyramid and its bright little tableau.

  “It’s... it’s some kind of trick.”

  “Sam, listen.” He took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye, something he had now done twice in one day. “This is the biggest story of your life. This is the biggest story of all time. Sam, this is the biggest news the world has ever had. Ever! And it’s your story Sam. No-one else even knows. Loosi Beecham is an alien from the planet Vingg and you are the only reporter on the spot.”

  Her brother’s appeal to her self-interest began to work its magic on Sam. If this was true... She looked past Wayne at Loosi Beecham the alien, Loosi Beecham her ticket to overnight mega-stardom, only to find that the fraud, Saunders, was leading her through the door with an arm around her shoulder.

  “Hey!” she shouted but John looked over his shoulder at her and said, “Wait there, Sam. There’s no need to follow us.” She had to agree. What had she been thinking? She calmly stood and watched them walk down the hallway and out onto the porch before her temper flared and prodded her into action again. “Hey!”

  She ran after them, bursting through the screen door only to pull herself up short again as she saw the crowd of devotees in a half-moon outside the house, staring silently up at John and Drukk.

  “I have performed the tests,” John announced in a loud voice. His followers seemed to strain forward in their eagerness to know the outcome. “This is Drukk of the planet Vingg. She has come to us from the sky and has brought Gifts.”

  “He, actually,” muttered Drukk but didn’t press the point.

  “We...” — and here John was overcome with a wild euphoria and laughed aloud in an excess of pure joy — “We are the Receivers of the Cosmic Bounty. Soon we will be Taken. Soon the Ship will come. I have foreseen it all! And even as I told you, so shall it come to pass! Let us give praise to the Sky People! Let us honour their emissary, the beautiful Drukk!”

  Then, as one, the followers dropped to their knees and raised their arms to Drukk, making little gimme, gimme grasping motions with their outstretched hands.

  Chapter 15: Convergence

  “Look, mate, if you could just try and stay calm that would really help us all out a lot, all right?” The Chief Inspector’s tone, even over the tinny little speaker in the bus dashboard, was beginning to reveal just a touch of tetchiness.

  “Calm?” Marcus hissed back on the verge of hysteria. “Stay bloody calm? That’s your expert advice for dealing with this bloody crisis is it? That’s it? Stay calm?” I shouldn’t even be here, he thought. I’m not a bus driver. I shouldn’t even be here.

  “Excuse me,” said Braxx, leaning over his shoulder from behind.

  “Waaaghhhh!” screamed Marcus, leaping sideways in terror. The bus, finding no-one’s hands on the wheel, made a dash for the nearest ditch. “Waaaghhhh!” screamed Marcus, leaping back into his seat and wrestling the wayward vehicle back onto the road. “What do you want?” he shouted. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  Braxx was as alarmed as ever by the strange behaviour of the human. How could such an insane race survive? They could not seem to perform the simplest tasks, or even hold a conversation, without wild mood swings. He offered a small prayer of thanks to the Great Spirit. After all, the fact that these humans were such a challenge must reflect the Great Spirit’s confidence in Braxx’s ability to bring them into the fold. Nevertheless, a part of him wished that his abilities were not quite so well-regarded.

  “I noticed that you were talking to your vehicle again,” Braxx tried to keep his own manner calm and steady. Perhaps the humans would benefit greatly from his example? Perhaps by guiding them towards a more serene and well-balanced way of life, he could raise them above the primitive state he had found them in? For an instant he saw his face on the cover of The Communality with the headline “Braxx Leads Primitives to Enlightenment”. Of course, that was not a reason to bring salvation to these poor creatures, but it would not hurt his career in the Church at all.

  “Er, yes,” Marcus was saying. “I, er, have to give it another situation report.”

  “Marcus? Marcus? Are you still there?” asked the radio.
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  “Yes, yes, still here. Everything is fine, thank you.”

  “What? Marcus, what’s the matter? Can you talk?”

  “Of course it can talk!” snapped Braxx. What foolishness! His previous high opinion of the on-board computer took a nose-dive. “You can hear it talking, can you not?”

  “Braxx? Is that you? Marcus, is Braxx with you?”

  “Yes, this is Braxx. What do you want? Are you functioning correctly?”

  There was the muffled sound of people in the background asking “What the...?” Then Chief Inspector Sullivan came back on. “Braxx, my name is Sheila. I need to know where you are taking that bus and I need to know what you want with all those people. Can you tell me, Braxx? If you tell me, I promise I will help you in any way that I can but we all want to keep everybody safe, don’t we, Braxx. I’m sure you want that as much as I do.”

  Braxx smiled in bemusement. “It is very interesting that you give your vehicles names, just as we Vinggans do,” he told Marcus. He reached for the microphone and held down the talk button. “We are all safe and well, thank you Sheila. You should just do what the driver tells you and all will be well.” He smiled at Marcus. “You humans would do well to make your machines a little less concerned about safety. This vehicle is positively neurotic.”

  “Braxx? I don’t understand,” Sheila said, through the radio. “Braxx? Are you still there? Marcus?”

  Braxx shook his head sadly. “Do not communicate with it again,” he told Marcus. “It serves no purpose.” Then he returned to his seat.

  Marcus sat and listened to the Chief Inspector’s plaintive questions with a hopeless resignation.

  “Marcus? Marcus? What did she mean ‘do what the driver tells you’? Marcus? Marcus? God damn it! Is this thing broken?”

  -oOo-

  Chief Inspector Sheila Sullivan threw down the microphone and stomped away from the desk muttering invective. So much invective, in fact, that a young police constable standing nearby found himself blushing deeply. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped, rounding on him. “Are you crook?”

  “No Ma’am. I feel fine, thank you, Ma’am.”

  “Well just keep it that way. Where’s bloody Barraclough?” This last was shouted to the room in general. About forty police officers were running about with boxes and chairs and computers trying to get the Major Incident Room assembled. Not one of them paid the Chief Inspector’s bellow any attention, preferring to focus instead on the floor in front of them, or that nice wall over there. Things were not going well.

  “Chief Inspector.” A uniformed sergeant had appeared beside her. She glared at him, daring him to give her any more bad news. The sergeant, with twenty years’ service in the Queensland Police Service, was totally immune to superior officers and their tantrums. He looked her squarely in the eye. “One of the helicopters has spotted the D.I.’s car. It’s in a ditch, ten kilometres back from the bus.”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s in a ditch, Ma’am. It seems to have run off the road.”

  “He’s managed to drive his car into a ditch in hot pursuit of a bus doing less than fifty kilometres an hour?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. There’s something else...”

  “Never mind that. Get him on the radio. I want to talk to him right now.”

  “That’s just it. The chopper pilot says there’s no-one near the car and that a big hole has been drilled through the roof and the floor and the driver’s seat has been removed.”

  People aren’t really made to take in information like this, especially when they’re trying to deal with a gang of renegade celebrity lookalikes who have reduced a major CBD thoroughfare to rubble and kidnapped a busload of old dears. Try as Sheila might, she just couldn’t make the information go in. Blokes would know the feeling. Like when the wife says, “I don’t want that racing bike magazine cluttering up the lounge room. Put it away somewhere.” So they pick up the magazine and look around for somewhere to put it and they just can’t think of anywhere it could go that wouldn’t be at least equally likely to cause trouble. Then, after a minute or two of dithering, they just put it back down, telling themselves they’ll deal with it later. Anyway, there Sheila’s mind stood, metaphorically speaking, with this racing bike magazine in its hand, looking around for somewhere to put it and coming up blank.

  “I’ll deal with that later,” she said, firmly, and went off to see how the analysis was going of the witness reports from the morning’s shooting.

  -oOo-

  “Look, Boss, I don’t mean to be funny or anything but you’re not really thinking of capturing a human for that thing are you?”

  The little group of kangaroos was hopping along at a good fast pace. They could keep up this steady speed for kilometre after kilometre over the lightly-wooded hills. Shorty held up her right paw where the Vinggan blaster had been attached. The vicious little weapon lay snug against the doe’s forearm, ready to spring forward into her paw at her command. Of course, the nature of a kangaroo’s paw and the positioning of its short arm on its body meant that accuracy would never be very great. However, as the ship had shown them before they set off, they could still do a lot of damage.

  “You heard the deal,” she said. “We bring back at least one live human and the ship makes the call for us.”

  “Yeah, I know, but what if it was lying?”

  “Oh, right! I never thought of that!” Shorty mocked. “Oh I wish you’d said something at the time. I feel such an idiot now.”

  They bounced along in silence for a while. No-one daring to say anything. They all knew how quickly the Boss could go from sarcasm to violence. But Shorty was in a good mood. In fact, she was feeling great. At the very least, their encounter with the spaceship had given them weapons and universal translators. Even if they didn’t get back to Frofrifrathalionion, they could have a much better time in exile. For three hundred years, they had had to put up with the humans throwing sticks at them, setting their dogs on them and, more recently, shooting them. Now the time had come for a bit of payback.

  “Don’t worry, guys,” she called to them. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  “Yeah!” shouted one of them.

  “Whoohoo!” shouted another and they started jumping higher and frisking as they bounded along.

  After a few minutes of this they settled back into their steady hopping.

  “Hey Boss, where are we going to get this human then?” asked Fats, it having just occurred to him.

  On any other day, this might have earned the big buck a good kicking but Shorty was feeling benevolent. “You remember that farm with the dopey humans in it that like to feed us and pet us?”

  “Yeah, I know it. They give us good nosh. Are we going there?”

  “Yep. I reckon we can grab a couple of those bozos without too much trouble. What do you think?”

  Fats chuckled to himself. “Yeah.” He remembered the dilapidated farm building and the big sign at the end of the drive with a picture of a stupid Zozz D’ai on it. He chuckled again. “Bozos.”

  -oOo-

  “We’re lost again,” wailed Marcus. “I’ve got to get out and ask for directions.”

  Braxx, who was sitting just behind the driver, was losing patience with the whole adventure. What did religion mean to these creatures if a major religious leader could live in such obscurity? Why was the place they sought not back there in that population centre they had left, instead of out here in the wilderness? How much longer could he put up with the Kanaka Downs Garden Club singing Waltzing Matilda at the back of the bus?

  “Very well,” he shouted back. “Stop and ask those police humans again if you must.”

  With a sigh of relief, Marcus slowed the bus and stopped. The air brakes hissed and he pushed the lever that opened the doors. Oven-hot air swept in as the cool air of the bus tumbled out. Marcus readied himself. This time he was definitely going to make a run for it. Sod the police and sod the massacre. He was going to
get out of here and that was that. As soon as he was near the police cars, he would just run like hell and let everyone else sort out the consequences.

  He began to climb out of his seat but Braxx was suddenly there beside him saying, “Wait, human, what is that?” There was a sudden murmur from the passengers and several of the identical women got to their feet. Marcus could see they were all staring forwards through the big windscreen. Knowing he wouldn’t like what he would see, he looked anyway and, having seen it, collapsed back into his seat with a groan of despair. There, not 20 metres from the bus, was a huge billboard with a hand-painted picture of a skinny, green alien. The alien wore a dopey smile and was holding its three-fingered hands out to show a collection of techno-junk of which it seemed quite proud. Marcus read the words, "Church of the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty" with a sinking heart. The "All welcome" below it, seemed like a personal affront.

  “I suppose we’re here,” he said in a voice of doom, starting the bus again.

  “Is that your religious leader?” one of the women asked. They were crowding forward in the aisle now to get a look.

  “Yeah,” said Marcus, flatly. “Cute little fella, ain’t he?”

  “He looks like a Zozz D’ai,” said one of the women.

  “But with too few legs.”

  “And not really green enough.”

  “No, I suppose not, but it could be a Zozz D’ai if you sort of squint at it.”

  “What’s all that stuff in its hands?”

  “Looks like kids’ toys.”

  “Or Zozz D’ai sex toys, maybe!” Several of the Vinggans sniggered in a rather immature way at that.

  They continued to debate the stupid painting as Marcus steered the lurching bus through the farm gates and started it up the long track to the farmhouse. He was devastated. He knew now there would be no further chances for him to escape. They’d drag him inside and the police would surround them and the shooting would start and he’d be dead. Dead! And his life had hardly begun. He had so much more to do. So much to accomplish. All that potential, wasted, just because he had to drive this stupid bus!