Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  The Agent shrugged. “It’s the fashion. What can you do?” With a small gesture, the table and chair took on a solid appearance. Surprisingly, a small sideboard, an armchair and a standard lamp also appeared in the room. “There. I suppose no-one else is going to see it. But if we have visitors, it goes back to normal, OK?”

  “Fine,” said Barraclough. “Just as long as I don’t kill myself.”

  “Now. The Vinggans.”

  “Yeah. Right. You remember that convoy of police cars, chasing a bus that I was at the back of? Well the Vinggans are all on the bus, mate. Find that bus again and we’ve got them.”

  -oOo-

  They gathered in the lounge room. It was pretty crowded, what with the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty, the Vinggans, Sam and Wayne, Marcus and the survivors of the Kanaka Downs Garden Club all crammed in there. To Wayne it felt a bit like a party. If everyone had had glasses in their hands, the illusion would be complete. He wondered idly if the Receivers had any music. If they had, maybe he’d ask Loosi—his Loosi, as he now thought of Drukk—to dance with him.

  There was a growing buzz of conversation. Mostly this was the Receivers, excitedly telling each other how happy they were and confessing that they were just a bit surprised that the Sky People had actually come. Jadie was telling whoever would listen that he thought they should pray more because it was, like, more spiritual but most people felt it would be a waste of time. After all, they’d come anyway, so what would be the point?

  The Kanaka Downs Garden Club members were mostly quiet, apart from one octogenarian bloke who kept complaining loudly about the state of the toilets and a couple of kindly old ladies who were trying to pacify him. There had been a lot of cheering and shouting on the bus when the police had opened fire on “those horrible young people.”

  Marcus was explaining to Laney how he wasn’t really a bus driver and he shouldn’t really be here. Laney, in her vague but pleasant way was nodding and smiling and making sympathetic noises, feeling his pain but not really getting whatever his point was. Still, as she told him, seriously, “We all end up being where we need to be.”

  The Vinggans were perhaps the quietest group. It was not their way, being a deeply religious sect, to hang out at parties making small-talk. Anyway, they were waiting for Braxx to take the initiative and do something. Braxx, however, was swapping war stories with Drukk as they brought each other up to date on their respective adventures.

  Drukk, despite the recent scenes of destruction outside and the foreboding this gave him, was still so pleased to see his comrades that he couldn’t stop punctuating everything he and Braxx said with heartfelt exclamations of thanks to the Great Spirit. Despite how annoying this was growing, Braxx tolerated it as being a touching expression of the spacer’s simple religious feeling.

  Sam was poking John Saunders in the chest and saying, “You’ve got to do something.”

  “Why have I got to do something?” the guru whined. This whole thing had got well out of hand in his view. “Why can’t they just take us up in their ship? Then we don’t have to worry about... about...”

  “About blowing up half the Queensland constabulary?”

  “Well, it was their own fault.”

  Sam conceded that point. “Nevertheless, you have to do something. They’re going to come back, you know. And they’ll bring machine guns and troops and tanks. You saw what happened at Waco.”

  “Waco? This is nothing like Waco! They were a bunch of deranged loonies waiting to be carried off in spaceships. We’re just... Oh, yes. I see what you mean. But I thought it was all a big con. How was I to know there really were any bloody Sky People?”

  “Look, mate. The best thing you can do is throw all your weapons out into the yard where they can see them and surrender as soon as you get a chance.”

  “Weapons? What weapons? We don’t have weapons. I haven’t even got a shotgun. What would we want with weapons?”

  Sam was worried. “The police aren’t going to believe you’re not armed. Especially after you’ve just blasted the arses of Brisbane’s finest. If they don’t see you surrendering piles of weapons, they’ll think it’s a trick.”

  “They’re the ones with all the weapons,” John said, lowering his voice and indicating the Vinggans with a tilt of his head. “They weren’t supposed to have weapons, you know. They were supposed to come in peace. Jesus! They shot at the bloody police! Now what are we going to do? What if they turn on us next?”

  Sam whispered back. “I don’t know, they’re your bloody aliens! That’s why you’ve got to do something. Talk to them. Ask them what they want.”

  But the prophet of the new age was in a blue funk and looking like he would bolt like a rabbit at any moment. Blaming him completely for their predicament, Sam pushed him aside and strode up to the Loosi in the wedding dress, the one that was clearly the leader. A silence fell across the room as people saw her stride purposefully forward.

  Braxx turned to face her as Sam approached. He smiled benignly. After all, were these creatures not his new followers?

  “Right,” said Sam. “That’s Drukk.” She pointed. “She wears the orange clothing. So who are you?”

  Braxx thought he could detect a certain aggressiveness in the creature’s tone but he kept his smile in place. “I am Braxx. I wear the white clothing. I am the spiritual leader of these people. And you are?”

  “I am Sam Zammit. I’m a reporter.”

  “You wear the beige clothing with a splash of green,” said Braxx.

  Sam looked down at her business suit and blouse. “Er, yes. I suppose I do.” The observation threw her for a moment and, when she looked back at the smiling alien, she’d forgotten quite what she was about to say. As so often happened with her, a surge of anger came to her rescue.

  “Look, Braxx, I want to know who you people are and what you are doing here. I want to know what you intend to do with us and I want to know why you shot those policemen. I want to know where you are from and how you found these people. I want to know why you all look like Loosi Beecham. I want to know...” She realised she could go on all day telling the woman what she wanted to know and that she’d better shut up if she ever wanted to find out. “Yeah, well, that’s enough to be going on with. So? What’s your story?”

  “Are you the leader of these humans?”

  “No.” Sam was immediately defensive. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish? Who says everyone has to have a leader anyway? What kind of reactionary bullshit is this?”

  “Fish?” asked Braxx.

  “What?”

  Braxx sighed. “You asked me about fish.”

  “No I didn’t!”

  “You humans seem to find it difficult to stick to the point. Is it a general derangement in your species, or is it only those of you who live in this place you call Australia?”

  It was one thing to tell Sam she was talking about fish but it was quite another to insult her country. She squared up to Braxx aggressively. “Now look here, pal. You might think you’re God’s gift because you’re going to carry these poor bloody idiots off to live on Mercury, or whatever your plan is, but let me tell you, I haven’t noticed anything very impressive about your species yet. In fact, apart from the size of your hairdos and an imaginative approach to casual dressing, I’m at a loss to see what makes you think you’re so special.”

  “Er, Sam?” Wayne’s voice tentatively edged its way into the silence that followed her outburst. “Maybe you should just stick to asking them a few questions.”

  It broke the spell and Sam suddenly saw herself nose-to-nose with a bunch of alien life-forms who had recently blasted a squad of armed police into the middle of next week. She also noticed the entire roomful of people staring at her with that expectant look people have when they think some idiot is about to entertain them at great personal cost.

  She took a swallow and eased back from her thrusting, aggressive stance to one rather more relaxed and casual. “Yes, of course,” she
said. “We’re all eager to know what is going on here. So why don’t you just explain who you are and why you’re here?”

  “Ask them why they kidnapped us!” called a lady from the gardening club contingent.

  “Ask them when we can go to Paradise!” shouted one of the Receivers.

  “Ask them why it’s not the end of the world,” said Jadie.

  “What do you mean, the end of the world?’ asked Marcus.

  “Oh yes, that’s right,” said John. “It’s supposed to be the end of the world when the Sky People come. But that’s just a load of...” He looked around at the faces of the Receivers, listening intently. “Er, that’s down to the Sky People to decide, I suppose...”

  “Will you all shut up!” Sam demanded. “I want to know what’s going on.” She turned to Braxx. She even managed a smile. “Now, if it’s not too much trouble, would you be so kind as to explain to us who you are and why you’re here?”

  Braxx looked calmly back at her. “No,” he said, and, while the humans were blinking in surprise, he called to his followers. “Come, Pebbles. We have plans to make. This hovel will be our headquarters for the time being. The humans can be formed into work parties later to build something more suitable. Drukk, you can organise that. You,” he pointed to John, “human in the nondescript colours. Accompany us. I wish to convert you.”

  And with that, Braxx and the other Vinggans left the room with John in tow.

  The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty, the Kanaka Downs Garden Club, Sam, Wayne and Marcus, looked at each other in astonishment.

  A small group of old ladies surrounded Marcus. “What do we do now?” demanded one of them, poking him in the chest.

  “How the hell should I know?” he demanded back at her.

  “Well you’re the bus driver,” she said, trying to be reasonable.

  -oOo-

  Detective Sergeant Mike Barraclough spun around with a wild look. They had been standing in the cave-like room and the Agent had said, “Time we went down to the surface.”

  “Down?” Barraclough had asked. “Aren’t we in some kind of underground caves?”

  “No,” the Agent had said, calmly. “We are on a spaceship.”

  And then they were standing on scrubby grass, in the open air.

  Totally disoriented, Barraclough sat down on the sandy soil. It was late afternoon and they were in gentle, hilly countryside. Farmland, Barraclough thought. A flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos lifted from a nearby stand of gums, disturbed by the sudden appearance of a giant black alien and a rather confused policeman. They screeched and shouted as they flapped away on wide, powerful wings, leaving the newcomers to the relative quiet of the cicadas and a lone, plaintive currawong.

  The Agent was looking at a device strapped to its wrist. “The vehicle you call a bus is over there.” It pointed towards the Sun. “We are some distance away. We will approach on foot.”

  “You’ve got some kind of beam me up Scotty device. Is that it?”

  “I have a teleporter, if that is what you mean.”

  “And that’s how we got here, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So I’m not going mad?”

  “It is hard for me to judge.”

  Barraclough was gradually catching up with the situation. “So, why not beam us down right next to the bus, then?”

  “There is a large number of armed humans in the vicinity of the vehicle. I thought it best that we did not simply”—it made a small gesture with its hands, like a flower opening suddenly—“appear among them. I based my judgement on your reaction to my first appearance to you aboard my spacecraft.”

  Barraclough vaguely remembered emptying an entire clip at the alien in a blind panic. “Yeah, mate” he agreed. “That’d be best.”

  So they set off across the fields. The Agent strode ahead, purposefully, like a monstrous knight in black armour. Barraclough hurried along beside him, almost having to run to keep up. The sun was setting. Soon it would be night.

  Chapter 17: The Night Before

  Galaxies rotate. From a sufficient distance, many of them look like a back and white photo of scummy water swirling around as it is sucked into some gigantic plug-hole. The impression is not too far from the truth. For scummy water, substitute countless billions of stars and endless cubic light-years of dust clouds. For gigantic plug-hole, substitute staggeringly huge black hole. Galaxies rotate as their matter—dust, stars, planets, you and me—is slowly sucked down the plug-holes of their central, super-massive black holes.

  But it’s not just galaxies that twirl in the black cavern of space. Stars rotate too. Spinning on their axes, they trace their orbits around their galactic centres. And the stars in turn are orbited by planets, and the planets, as they orbit the stars, rotate too. And moons orbit the planets and the moons also turn on their axes. Everything endlessly twirling and whirling, round and round and round. And it is gravity that plays the tune to which the whole Universe dances its giddy gavotte. A force whose entire essence can be described in a simple formula gives rise to the whole dizzy complexity of the endlessly turning, rolling, revolving, merry-go-round of the cosmos.

  And so the Earth, moving around the Sun at over thirty kilometres per second, its surface spinning at almost five hundred metres per second, like a jewelled part in the celestial clockwork, twirled the East coast of Australia out of the sunlight and into the shadow.

  “What a day!” said Drukk. He was sitting on the front step with Wayne, watching the sunset and listening to the cicadas.

  “Yeah,” said Wayne, lost in his own recollections.

  Sam and John and Braxx were in the kitchen trying to work out what was going on. The Vinggan leader had decreed that no-one should leave the farm. This had surprised everyone since they had thought they were hostages anyway. Marcus, in particular, had taken the news badly. He began banging his head against the wall after realising that he could have just walked out at any time in the past few hours but now he’d missed his chance.

  The Pebbles of the New Dawn had thrown John’s furniture out of the master bedroom and had established an impromptu temple to the Great Spirit. They were now alternating between what they called ‘communing’ and guard duty. The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty were even more confused than usual. Mostly, they didn’t understand why they couldn’t just get on the bus and go off to Paradise. Eventually they started drifting out to the barn where there were bunk-beds and cooking facilities for those who stayed at the Space Station. The ones, like Jadie, who would normally have headed back to town for the night, had decided to hang around, just in case the Sky People did something interesting.

  The Kanaka Downs Garden Club had proven a godsend to the little group of hostages. With the kind of practical common-sense that comes from decades of raising children and burying husbands, a mob of old ladies had set about organising sleeping quarters and cooking up an enormous meal for everyone. Far from being disgruntled, the old folk were by far the happiest group there that evening. It had started when one of the older ladies had begun complaining that she needed to get home to take her medicine. This had set off several others and, before long, a deputation was in the hallway banging on the door of the master bedroom, disturbing the Vinggans’ ‘communing’ with a list of medical requirements that seemed interminable. Angrily, one of the Vinggans had come out with a small black box, thrust it into an old lady’s hand and said, “There. Use that.”

  Assuming it was one of those newfangled mobile phone things, with which to call a taxi, the old lady had pulled and poked at the box until it had sprung into life, wrapped a number of tentacles around her arm and hummed loudly as her whole body glowed with a blue aura. Then it dropped off her arm onto the floor. Horrified, her fellow garden clubbers rushed to her aid but she brushed them off with that special ungrateful grumpiness that old people practice in front of the mirror each night when there’s nobody to see them. She was fine, she said. In fact, she’d never felt better. In fact, where had her
arthritis gone? And that big cyst on her knee? And her gardening chums agreed, she looked ten years younger. And, holy shit! It was a miracle.

  The next half hour had been a bit chaotic as the old people had fought each other in the hallway to get to use the wonderful alien machine that cured everything that was wrong with them. After the cure, they would skip away, singing lustily, or stagger about in a happy daze, or sit on the floor, despite the rugby scrum nearby, and cry and cry.

  “Is it always so frenetic and confusing on Earth?” asked Drukk.

  “Not really,” said Wayne. He thought about it a bit. “Sometimes,” he conceded.

  The first stars were coming out and Drukk wondered if Kodd, his home star, was out there somewhere.

  “Is Braxx going to kill us all?” Wayne asked. “Only that guy Marcus says she’s a total psycho babe who’s already, like, destroyed Brisbane.”

  Drukk shrugged. “Braxx is very religious. It’s hard to say what he might do.” He looked at the human called Wayne, who looked back at him with what might have been a sort of wide-eyed vulnerability. “He’ll probably just try to convert everyone. Of course, if you choose not to worship the Great Spirit, anything is possible.”

  “What happens to people on your world who don’t worship the Great Spirit then?”

  Drukk shrugged again. “I don’t know. Everyone worships the Great Spirit, so it never comes up. Of course, people who miss church more than three times are publicly de-tentacled but that doesn’t happen very often.”

  “I guess you guys aren’t very big on human rights, huh?”

  Drukk laughed. “Human rights!” That’s very funny.

  Wayne tried to smile but wasn’t really up to it. Gradually, Drukk’s laughter died away. There was a long silence as they both stared out into the darkness, pursuing their own thoughts.

  -oOo-

  Sheila Sullivan downed another cup of strong black coffee. She had just delivered yet another set of updates to the Commissioner of Police, the Mayor of Brisbane and the State Premier. She wondered how long it would be before the Prime Minister and the Governor bloody General were calling her to check on progress. The Media and Public Relations Branch was doing a great job of keeping the press hounds at bay but they were also pestering her for bulletins on the minute every minute. She’d even had to deal with Councillor Molly Bleach whose responsibilities included the sleepy suburb of Kanaka Downs, wanting to know when her gardening club members would be freed and why nothing was being done about it.