Cargo Cult Read online

  “It could be human,” said one of the does. “We’ve been fooled before.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped another. “Just look at it.”

  “I don’t recognise the insignia,” said a third.

  “That means nothing. It’s a big galaxy.”

  “A big, bad galaxy. Do you want to risk going in there?”

  “I want to get off this damned planet!”

  A small doe bounced to the front of the group. One long ear testily twitched away a persistent mosquito. “All right then. Let’s stop pissing about. We will never get another chance like this. Never. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

  Three or four of them stepped forward at once. The rest, one by one, reluctantly agreed they’d do it. The little doe nodded. The decision was made. She turned towards the spaceship, her face set.

  -oOo-

  “Er, so, Loosi,” Sam cast about for some way of asking this without being crass, or rude, or both. She smiled nervously. How the hell were you supposed to interview a superstar anyway? “So, what are you doing here?” She could have added, “dressed like a tart and wearing no underwear” but refrained.

  Drukk looked about the small apartment. He wished that Sam and Wayne would not keep calling him Loosi but maybe the word had some significance to which his translation field was not sensitive. Perhaps it meant ‘stranger’, or ‘acquaintance of my sibling’ or somesuch. Dealing with aliens was always difficult. There were always so many cultural differences to cope with. Like that question:, “What are you doing here?” What could it mean? Did Sam not remember inviting him up to this room? Or did she suspect he was from outer space and was wondering why he was here on Earth? Did she mean to imply that he should be somewhere else? Or was it simply a conversational convention? Surely it wasn’t an invitation to discuss religion?

  Not knowing what kind of response was required, he tried to change the subject. “Is this your domicile?”

  “My ‘domicile’?”

  “That was the wrong word, it seems,” Drukk said, sadly. A heavy depression was settling on him. Just holding a conversation with these creatures was proving unbelievably difficult. He wished he was more like Braxx. Braxx would probably have disintegrated them both by now. He would also have started off by demanding something or other. Drukk thought it might be worth a go, so he said, “I demand that you take me to your leader!”

  Sam was wondering whether it would be better to get Ms Beecham into bed and call a doctor. Her impromptu plan, devised on the spot in the street below, had been to get her inside where no-one else could spot her, then pump her for information before calling the paper for a photographer. Now that the woman was getting a bit uppity, Sam thought maybe she’d better get the photographer to come straight away. Meanwhile, she ought to humour the drug-crazed woman before she turned violent.

  “Of course,” she said, smiling. “Our leader. I’ll go and telephone straight away. If you’ll excuse me. Wayne will look after you. Won’t you, Wayne?”

  Her brother, who had been sitting with his head between his knees to stave off the nausea, looked up, hollow-eyed and said, “Wha?”

  “Talk to Loosi, Wayne, while I go and make a call.”

  In the cold light of day, sober and hung-over, Wayne was finding it hard to meet the beautiful celebrity's eyes, let alone to make polite conversation with her. His mind kept going back to his grossly embarrassing and humiliatingly feeble attempts to chat her up and grope her. Now, with her sitting there so outrageously sexy and yet coolly staring at him, he just had to find a way to apologise.

  "I've always been a big fan of yours," he said, by way of preface. "I mean, I've never seen any of your films or anything but I sort of check out your fan sites now and then and it's always, like, whoah! check it out!" From the deepening frown on her face, Wayne concluded that maybe he should just have kept his mouth shut. Now she must think he was, like, this loser perv who surfed the porn sites all the time. "Oh God!" he wailed and let his head sink back between his knees.

  Drukk stared at Wayne, frowning in an effort to make sense of the stream of gibberish he had uttered. "Are you perhaps a sub-species of human with limited intelligence?" he asked politely.

  "Oh God!" Wayne cried again from between his knees, feeling the justice of this oddly-phrased insult. "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!"

  -oOo-

  In the bedroom, Sam wasn't having much success communicating either.

  "I tell you," she told her editor for the tenth time. "I have Loosi Beecham, stoned out of her mind and half naked, sitting in my lounge room talking nonsense to my idiot brother. It's the biggest story we've had since we ran the piece about the Queensland Premier's mistress joining the One Nation Party. Yes, I know it was all a big hoax but this is real and I need a photographer right now!"

  She grabbed the handset in both hands and tried to throttle it as her editor repeated, also for the tenth time, the reason why she couldn’t get a photographer. “Yes, yes, yes!” She snapped, interrupting him. “I’m sure the bloody bus is full of nuns and elder statesmen and women about to give birth but it’s just a stupid hijacked bus, Derek! I don’t see why it needs every bloody photog on the staff! It’ll just turn out to be some poor bloody asylum seeker who can’t get his cute kiddies and his dying granny over from Iran. A bus and a scraggy Iranian being arrested by two fat policemen is not going to be as photogenic as Loosi bloody Beecham in that dress! You could double your circulation with this, Derek.”

  She paused for a moment to listen, then started to bang her head on the wall. “All right! All right! When will they be back from the great bus chase? Shit! How am I supposed to keep her amused for the rest of the day? What if she just gets up and walks away, Derek? No, wait! I’ve got it! Whoever gets back first, send them out to this address.” She gave him the address of the abandoned sugar cane farm that the Receivers of Cosmic Bounty cult now inhabited.

  “It’s an old farm, Derek. It’s where I’m going to take her for the day. No-one will find her out there. If I can get her there before she sobers up, she probably won’t even notice she’s being kidnapped. Just make sure the photographer gets there asap, all right, ’cos I don’t know how long she’ll stay put.”

  She hung up and raged at her pea-brained editor through the silent telephone for a full minute before she had control of her temper again. Then she walked back into the lounge room to see about getting Loosi Beecham out of town.

  “Your sibling seems to be in the grip of religious ecstasy,” Drukk told her as she appeared. She looked down at Wayne who was cradling his head and calling on God to finish it now because he couldn’t, like, take being such a total drongo any more. “It is good that you are a religious species. It will make Braxx’s work easier, I think.”

  “He’s just a bit embarr...” Sam began but stopped herself. “Yes,” she said, in an entirely new voice. “We are all very religious. In fact, I was on my way to one of our religious centres when I met you downstairs. Would you like to come and see one of our places of worship?”

  Drukk was suddenly excited. Not only had he been able to understand several whole sentences in a row but the one called Sam was giving him a perfect opportunity to further Braxx’s plan by locating a human centre of worship. If he could not find his conspeciates immediately, he should at least gather whatever intelligence he could, until they turned up again. Things were suddenly looking up.

  “Yes!” he said, leaping to his feet and, in fact, about six inches into the air, having slightly overestimated the strength needed. “Let us leave at once. I am eager to see this human religious centre.”

  Chapter 10: The Bus

  About an hour earlier, Braxx had led his followers out of the Botanic Gardens in which they had spent most of the night and set off in search of a great religious leader. After having debated it among themselves all night, that was the best plan they could come up with. The fact that it was almost identical to Drukk’s plan would not have disturbed any of them. What e
lse could be a more direct route to achieving their goal of converting this dismal planet?

  They had spent very little time pondering Drukk’s fate. The crew member had got himself lost. He was not one of the Pebbles of the New Dawn so it didn’t matter much. He was, of course, the only representative of secular Vingganity and, as such, had a significant role to play in administering this planet on the Communality’s behalf. However, if he would go wandering off on his own, what could he expect? He’d probably turn up again sooner or later.

  So, they decided, they would find the most senior religious leader they could and, by explaining the error of its ways, convert it to the One True Religion. It could then spearhead their conversion of the rest of the humans. Deciding this had been easy. Most of the debate had centred on whether the humans had the intellectual capacity to understand the Great Spirit’s message at all. The ones they’d bumped into so far had not seemed like very promising material and some were worried that humans might be too stupid to know the Truth if it whacked them in the slime gland with a tentacle.

  “We must work with what the Spirit sends us,” quoted Braxx as the group walked up Edward street. There were few people about in the early morning downtown streets and those that saw the thirteen identical women wandering about steered clear of them. It was obviously some kind of marketing stunt, and they were each in a hurry to get to work. Moreover, nobody wanted to get into a depressing conversation about how little financial planning they were doing with some air-head young woman who had only learned the phrase last week during her sales training course. Those that didn’t suspect a marketing stunt, assumed the gaily-clad women had just come carousing out of some kind of wild, all-night party, and expected that, if they stared, or got too close, the women would start drunkenly shouting raucous and embarrassing things at them and just about the last thing an early-morning commuter needs is such a public reminder that, but for their timid souls, their homely looks and their poor parents, they too could be partying all night with crowds of bold, beautiful, rich people.

  So Braxx was getting a bit frustrated in his attempts to catch someone’s eye and ask for directions. However, the Great Spirit finally found them someone who hadn’t been paying enough attention. The hapless commuter walked straight into the crowd of Vinggans and, before she knew what was happening, Braxx confronted her and the others closed in around her.

  “Excuse me, human,” Braxx said, politely, standing in front of her and blocking her way. “We are religious emissaries from a distant star-system and we bring a message of great joy and hope to humanity.”

  Now that Braxx had her attention, the woman looked at him and then at the others who were surrounding her in quite a menacing way. What she saw was Loosi Beecham wearing a wedding dress, accompanied by a dozen other Loosi Beechams in an assortment of odd outfits. She knew it was Loosi Beecham because she was a regular TV Week reader. Well, not a reader exactly. She did the prize crosswords and looked at the celebrity pictures, occasionally reading the captions if the picture was interesting enough. But so many Loosi Beechams didn’t make sense. She gaped, open mouthed at them, looking from one to another in silence.

  “Here we go again,” said Joss, from the back.

  “What’s going on? Tell me. Tell me.” said Joss's bud. “No-one ever tells me what’s going on.”

  “Shush, dear. It’s just another mentally sub-normal human. Braxx is dealing with it.”

  And, indeed, he was. “Tell me, human, where will I find the planet’s greatest religious leader? I must speak to him and convert him as soon as possible.”

  Still, the human did not speak. However, it had blinked and had started closing and opening its mouth. Perhaps it thought it was speaking! Some of the Vinggans wearily drew their blasters, expecting they’d have to discard this one too.

  “Speak, human!” Braxx commanded. “Tell me where we will find your religious leader.”

  Blinking again, the woman turned and pointed towards the street that led to the cathedral. In a slow, dreamy voice, she said, “Down there. You can’t miss it.” She noticed that all of them had the same hairdo, which seemed stranger even than the rest of it. On the other hand, this was Brisbane and it was summer time and standards were falling all the time.

  “Come, my Pebbles,” said Braxx and, without a further word to the demented human, led his people into Elizabeth Street and towards the cathedral.

  -oOo-

  Not far away, in Interrogation Room 3 of the Roma Street Police Station, Detective Sergeant Michael Barraclough was setting new records for not losing his patience in the face of a pain-in-the-arse crimmo unrelentingly taking the piss well past the point where anyone but the most seriously insane could find it funny.

  “Let me ask you yet again, Douggie,” he said, his voice ragged from the strain of not tearing his prisoner’s head off. “What really happened in Steiner’s last night?” Sitting beside him, Detective Constable Larry Baker slumped deeper into his uncomfortable plastic chair.

  “Mr Barraclough,” Doug groaned. “I really don’t feel very well.”

  Barraclough slammed his hand down on the table between them. “Don’t give me that crap, Douggie. The hospital said you were fine. They said there’s not a damned thing wrong with you, or your mate. They said you could have been just sleeping when we found you, or maybe you’d fainted from the exertion of tearing that department store apart! How come we found you and your bloody mate sleeping in the middle of Steiner’s department store in the middle of the bloody night, eh, Douggie?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Tell me again, Douggie.”

  “Me and Nick saw this hole in the wall. We went in to have a look. We was attacked by twenty bloody drug-crazed women all done up to look like Loosi Beecham. That’s it.”

  Barraclough’s patience finally gave up the ghost, packed its bags and headed for the coast. “Right!” he yelled. “Interview bloody terminated!” With a sigh of relief, Detective Baker reached over and switched off the tape recorder. Barraclough leaned over towards Doug. “You’re going back to your stinking, sweaty cell and I’m going home to my nice air-conditioned house. I’m going to have a cold beer and watch the news, then I’m going to bed. I will see you again this evening to continue our cosy little chat. All right?”

  Doug stared at him sullenly. Frankly, he didn’t blame the bloke for not believing him.

  -oOo-

  Braxx had to admit he was disappointed. St Stephen’s Cathedral was, when they finally found it, a dull, low-rise construction dwarfed by many of the modern, secular buildings around it. On the poorest Vinggan colony world this puny little structure would have been considered an insult to the Great Spirit. Still, he told himself, resolutely, it was nothing that a few million human slaves working around the clock for a few years wouldn't fix. The thought brought a smile to his borrowed face.

  "Find the leader and bring it to me," he commanded his acolytes.

  There was a brief hesitation before Klugg spoke up. "Er...It seems to be closed."

  "What!?"

  "Er...The doors are all locked and no-one appears to be home."

  "Locked? Locked? This is intolerable! Search the area! Blast the doors down! Reduce the silly little hovel to rubble if you have to but bring me their leader!" Braxx adopted the great-leader-waiting-impatiently-for-his-incompetent-minions-to-get-their-fingers-out posture, which his new body interpreted as arms folded, one foot tapping and a grumpy pout on his face.

  After scouring the outside of the cathedral with no success, the Vinggans gathered outside the main door to blast their way in. Suddenly a small, middle-aged man in a dark suit was pushing his way through them.

  "Patience, ladies, patience," the verger said as he worked his way past them to the door. "The cathedral will be open to the public in half an hour." He put a key into the lock of a small side door and went inside. The Vinggans followed him in.

  "Ladies! Please!" the little man protested, trying to usher them back towa
rds the door. Finding his upraised hands resting against the large breasts of two half-naked women, he suddenly realised his predicament, pulled his hands back as if they'd been burnt and uttered a plaintive, "Oh my!"

  "Are you the leader?" demanded one of the large-breasted women. She appeared to be wearing a bridal dress and he instantly wondered if this had something to do with a wedding. Had something gone wrong? Were these fleshy creatures here to harangue the vicar about a wedding?

  "I'm sorry?" he said, remembering he'd been asked a question but realising he hadn't heard it.

  "Are they all like this?" one of the women exclaimed.

  "Are-you-the-lea-der?" the wedding-dress woman asked again, slowly.

  "The leader of what?"

  "The-lea-der-of-your-hu-man-re-li-gion."

  "The leader of my..." the verger began to repeat, stupidly, but was stopped by a sudden flaring of righteous indignation. "Who are you people? What do you want?" He glowered at their bizarre and skimpy attire, trying, at the same time, to keep his eyes off all those enormous breasts. Rising to his full height, he added, "This is a house of God!"

  The Vinggans looked at each other, surprised by the strange creature’s outburst. “Actually, that’s what we came here to talk about,” said Braxx. “You see, we are emissaries of the Great Spirit: She who guides the Universe. We have travelled the vast oceans of space from the planet Vingg to bring our message of hope and fulfilment. We seek contact with the spiritual leaders of Earth so that we may convert them from their primitive beliefs and bring them to the Truth.”

  The verger looked from face to face for any signs that this was a joke but all he saw was earnestness and impatience in their identical blue eyes. “From the planet, er, Vingg?” he asked.