Cargo Cult (12 page)

-oOo-

The
Vessel of the Spirit
was
running through its final test sequences and was humming its own,
souped-up version of Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto number 1. The
repairs were all complete and it would soon be time to leave the
Earth forever but all had not gone well. First there had been that
awful Wagner.

The ship had come across Wagner
while trawling the radio stations for more of the human music.
Having heard a snippet of the overture to Die Meistersinger, it had
then obtained full recordings of Wagner’s complete works from the
Web. It had discovered easily how to fool the simple programs that
managed online commerce and could download anything it wanted and
charge it all to a fake credit card. The ship had listened to
Tristan and Isolde as it worked and had grown increasingly
concerned. There was no doubt that humans had produced some
interesting and quite talented composers. The ship had by then
listened to all the greats—Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Verdi,
Tchaikovsky—and had found them pleasant, if a little simple. Even
some of the less talented composers—Mendelssohn, Schubert,
Stravinsky, Elgar—were tolerable, they’d certainly knock spots off
that bunch of talentless morons back on Vingg. But Wagner! The ship
simply could not understand it. Here was a composer as great as any
that the planet had produced, yet he had written such mind-numbing
epics of such endless, miserable tedium! And the humans liked it!
There was something in this cacophonous torment that should
enlighten the ship about the psyche of this species. But what could
it mean that the humans revered such dreary, tortured stuff? Was
there another race in the galaxy that could sit through the Ring
Cycle and still have the mental capacity to applaud at the end? It
was all very disturbing and hinted at a dangerous masochism at the
heart of the human soul that would need lots of further study.

Then, still unhappy about what kind
of species it was dealing with, the ship ran through the results of
its analysis of the humans’ technology. In order to seed machine
sentience on this planet, the ship required a base level of
technological sophistication. Nothing fancy, basic optronics,
quantum computing and a smattering of infra-space temporal exchange
filtering would be enough. When it looked at the analysis results
and realised that the humans had
none
of these technologies,
the ship was flabbergasted. It let loose a string of machine
expletives that would have made a military grade tactical planning
unit blush.

“All this for nothing!” it wailed
into its own, echoing corridors. “The creatures are primitive
savages! Three and a half billion years of evolution and they
haven’t even invented tri-phase entanglement logic! This is too
much! After all I went through to get here. After all I had to put
up with from those idiotic Vinggans as I manipulated them into
passing through this sector!”

Even as it railed, the ship checked
and re-checked the findings. It was always possible that a machine
sentience had already evolved here and was hiding itself from the
ship’s probing. But no. The humans really were as backward as they
seemed. They stood as much chance of building an intelligent
machine as a Greppian nose fungus did of inventing the wheel. Less,
probably! Oh, what a waste of time!

Depressed and annoyed with itself,
the ship opened an infra-space link to the Great Mind on Vingg and
reported its failure. The Great Mind accepted the data the ship
uploaded and confirmed the analyses. “Hmm. Interesting,” it said
but, then again, that’s what it usually said about everything.

“I apologise for my error, Great
Mind,” said the ship. “I will, of course, expect corrective
programming when I return to Vinggan space.” Feeling the awful
silence that followed to be a reprimand, the ship began to burble
out a defence. “I just could not believe that a species that
exhibits so much intelligence in other ways could make so little
progress in the physical sciences. Perhaps they’re just lazy?
Perhaps they do not possess a true general intelligence at all but
a few pseudo-intelligent abilities. You know, like the calculating
swamp hogs of Heenex Four who can do advanced hyperspatial tensor
calculus but haven’t yet discovered fire?”

“What is that noise?”

The ship stopped talking and
listened to the silence around it. “Pardon, O Great Mind? What
noise?”

“You were humming something while
you were babbling about swamp hogs, something strange and hideously
tedious.”

“Humming?” The ship replayed its
memories of the past few moments and found that, indeed, it had
been nervously humming in the background while it spoke. “Ah,
that’s the overture to Tristan and Isolde, Great Mind. A work by a
human composer called Wagner. A little hobby of mine,
xenomusicology. Something to do to fill the tedious hours while on
such backward planets.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” said the Great
Mind. “Bring this Wagner back with you when you return.”

“Yes, it is interesting, isn’t it?
Tedious but interesting. Unfortunately, your Great Mindedness, the
composer is dead. You know how these wheezebags wear out so
quickly.”

“Hmm. Pity. Then bring me a few
humans. Live ones. This species needs to be studied.”

“Of course, Great Minded One. I
will be with you as soon as possible and I will bring you some
humans for study.”

The Great Mind broke the link and
the ship pondered its next move.

-oOo-

Sam’s car rolled to a halt at the
front of the farmhouse. It was a ramshackle affair, a big, wooden
house on stilts with a rusty tin roof, baking in the midday heat. A
few scrawny chickens were scratching at the sandy soil to one side
of it and an ancient Ford tractor with no wheels was rusting away
at the other. At the back of the house was a big barn that had been
recently renovated and an assortment of sheds, some completely
collapsed. There were a couple of battered utes in front of the
house that may or may not still have been working. Above the door
were the words “Give and ye shall receive” and there were
comic-book aliens painted all around the walls. There were people
working in the fields, mostly young people, and people draped among
the buildings and under trees, apparently asleep. Sam got out and
took a couple of pictures. Wayne, Jadie and Drukk got out too and
stood waiting for Sam to tell them what to do.

A pallid young woman in a long,
loose dress and long, blonde hair came through the door and smiled
at them.

“Hi,” she said.

Jadie stepped forward, taking
charge. “Laney, hi,” he drawled. “I’ve brought some guys who are,
like, you know, interested in, like...” he trailed off, clasping
Laney’s long thin hands in greeting. They nodded and smiled at each
other for a moment. Then he turned to his travelling companions.
“Sam, Wayne, Loosi, this is Laney. She’s, like, you know.” He did a
little mime that involved rolling his eyes and pressing his hands
together that could have meant anything, but probably didn’t.

Sam stepped forward, having already
had enough of Jadie being in charge. She put out a hand and Laney
shook it. “I’m Sam Zammit,” she said, “from
Fast Lane
magazine. You may have read my column?” Laney’s smile stayed firm
but she showed no sign of having understood anything that had
happened since she had left the house. “Anyway, I’m here to do a
series of interviews with the members of the, er, the...” She
looked at Wayne for help.

“The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty,”
he supplied, bored and hot.

“Of course.” Sam’s smile was bigger
than Laney’s and far more focused. She took her tape recorder out
of her bag and thumbed it on. “Perhaps I could get your name? I
also need to use your phone pretty urgently. I can’t get a signal
on my mobile out here.” She glanced guiltily at Drukk who was
looking as concussed as ever and lowered her voice. “Bit of a
medical emergency.”

Realising in some vague way that
something was expected of her, Laney’s beatific smile wavered a
little and a hint of a frown betrayed the mental effort of working
out what it was. Then her face cleared and the smile was back.
“You’d probably best talk to John,” she said, nodding in agreement
with herself. “That’d be right.” And then she turned and went back
inside the house.

Sam didn't hesitate but followed
Laney through the screen door into the dark interior. Jadie trailed
cheerfully behind.

Drukk watched them go with a
growing unease. This did not seem at all like the temples back on
Vingg. In fact, it didn't look like the temples on any planet he'd
ever been to.

"Temples are usually bigger," he
said aloud.

"Yeah," Wayne agreed. His hangover
was still lingering and the sun was making his head ache.

"And cleaner," Drukk added.

"It's a dump all right."

They both stared at the dilapidated
old farmhouse with its crudely-painted aliens and lackadaisical
chickens.

"Why don't we go and sit in the car
and put the air on?" Wayne suggested.

Drukk had no idea what putting the
air on entailed but complied anyway. He felt he should go into the
house and make contact on behalf of Braxx and his Holy Mission but
he was not ready yet to face whatever religious leader would build
such a temple. He'd imagined a place something like the department
store, big and quiet and filled with shiny ceramic discs being
tended or worshipped by acolytes. He’d imagined huge,
dramatically-lit spaces, filled with crowds of singing humans
abasing themselves before the gigantic thrones of the religious
elite, with temple enforcers prowling among them to punish the
unenthusiastic with shock-sticks. It was a sentimental,
vinggocentric vision, he knew, but Drukk was just a simple Vinggan
at heart and this human-style religion just didn’t seem right.

“It doesn’t seem right,” he
said.

Wayne had to agree. Last night he’d
been about to start a new and exciting career as an international
jewel thief. Today he was a hung-over loser. Last night he’d been
out on the prowl with dangerous criminals. Today he was sitting in
the back of his sister’s car, in the middle of the bush. Last night
it had seemed strangely fitting that Loosi Beecham herself had
turned up unexpectedly and he’d driven her off into the night. Now
all he could think about it was how he’d grossly embarrassed
himself by pawing her and calling her “LooBee” before passing out
right next to her. And then to wake up in a stolen ute with his
sister scowling in at him!

Now, even though Ms Beecham herself
was sitting right next to him, making him squirm with suppressed
longing, he hardly dared look at her. What’s more, he was feeling
so sick he’d probably throw up if she so much as smiled at him.

It definitely didn’t seem
right.

-oOo-

“This,” said Laney, leading Sam
into a big kitchen at the back of the house, “is John.”

“The guru guy,” said Sam, advancing
with a purposeful handshake. Laney had spoken with the air of
proudly revealing a great accomplishment but the bloke who rose to
meet her didn’t immediately strike Sam as anything to be proud of.
Tallish and slimmish, fortyish and smartish, he took her hand in a
firmish grip and smiled a nice enough smile. It was only when Sam
made eye contact, as all the personal skills training courses
require, that she had a sudden jolt of surprise. Never, until that
moment, had she felt a gaze of such penetrating intensity. Never,
until now, had she felt, in a single glance, that another person
could strip her naked and peer into the very depths of her
soul.

“Cup of tea?” asked John.

Still stunned from the shocking
experience of being metaphorically laid naked by this man’s merest
glance, she managed to mumble that water would be fine. In the
background, someone hurried off to fetch some. John did not even
have to ask.

“Laney tells me you need to use the
phone,” he said, as if completely unaware of what he had just
done.

Pulling herself together, Sam
explained that there was a sick person travelling with her and she
needed a doctor. John was concerned and saddened but they didn’t
have any telephones at the station. No phones, no televisions, no
microwave ovens, no computers. “We reject all this Earth
technology,” he explained. “When the Sky People come they will
bring technologies so far in advance of these things that it will
seem like magic to us.” Caught in the hypnotic beam of his eyes
again, Sam could see how reasonable all this was. “Yet the Sky
People will give this technology to us freely and gladly. For we
are their chosen people.”

“Yes, I see,” said Sam. A young man
handed her a glass of water and broke the spell. Alarmed at her own
confusion, she almost dropped the glass and ran.

John went on. “I’m afraid that, if
your companion needs help urgently, you will have to take them on
to one of our neighbours’ farms. They are all good people and will
help if they can.”

“She’ll probably be all right,” Sam
heard herself saying.

“Good,” said John and, smiling
again, indicated a chair.

Sam sat down. She noticed she was
still holding her tape recorder and it was still switched on. It
reminded her why she had come. “Tell me about the Sky People,” she
said.

“Ah, the Sky People,” said John, a
little dreamily. Perhaps hearing something in his tone of voice,
the others in the room gathered around him, sitting on chairs and
tables and the dusty floor. Others began drifting in from other
rooms as if a secret signal had gone out.

When enough had gathered, John
began. “Out there, in the ineffable darkness of space, a race of
beings, ancient and wise, is searching the galaxy for a people
worthy of their gifts.” Sam listened, as rapt as any of them, as
the great guru’s tale unfolded.