Cargo Cult (5 page)

“I was telling Sam about the
Receivers of Cosmic Bounty and she was really keen to meet you,”
Wayne said with obvious difficulty. He had to swallow hard on a
rising giggle before he could get the next words out. “Sam is a
very spiritual person. She’d really like to, you know, get into it
and, you know, stuff...” He breathed a sigh of relief and slumped
back in his seat with his Guinness. He’d done his bit, just like
Sam had wanted. Now it was all up to her.

Jadie just kept on grinning at Sam
as if he hadn’t heard a word of it. “So,” said Sam, fighting down
her irritation. “Tell me how you came to be involved with the
Receivers of... whatever.”

Jadie blinked, slowly registering
that a question had been asked. “Oh. Oh them. I just sort of met
one of them one day and they invited me in. They seemed OK.” He put
on a serious expression. “You know? Genuine.”

Sam nodded. “Genuine. Right. That’s
what I’m looking for in my life. Something genuine. Something, er,”
she sought for an appropriately banal adjective, “something
real
.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jadie and continued
to nod and stare at her for some time.

Eventually, Sam said, “I don’t mean
to be rude, Jadie, but are you on some kind of medication?”

Wayne rolled his eyes to Heaven and
took a long drink. Jadie grinned happily and nodded some more,
appreciating Sam’s wry humour.

Barely concealing her frustration,
Sam changed tack. “So, tell me Jadie. What is it exactly that these
Receivers of Cosmic Thingy believe in?”

Jadie leaned a little closer. “Now
you’ve got me,” he confided. “They’re really into something, you
know, but it’s pretty weird. I’ve never really managed to, like,
get it straight, you know?”

Sam’s smile faltered a little. “But
I thought you were a member of this cul… I mean I thought you were
a follower.”

“Oh I’m a believer all right. The
Sky People are coming and I’m going to be there, don’t you worry.”
Jadie raised his stubbie in salute to the Sky People and downed
half the bottle in one swallow. Sam took the opportunity to shoot a
quick scowl at her brother. Wayne got up to get another round in.
Sam was shouting the drinks so he was going to make the most of
it.

“Sky People?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, John says they’re living on
Mercury in, like, refrigerated domes or something and they’re going
to come and take us off to Paradise in their interstellar space
buggies, or, you know, that kind of stuff.”

Sam struggled to make sense of it.
“So Paradise is on Mercury, then?”

Jadie scoffed. “Shit, no! Mercury’s
a shit-hole! They’re just waiting there until the time’s
right.”

“Right for what?”

“Dunno. The end of the world or
something.” He took another bottle from the returning Wayne and
drank deeply. “Bit of a worry, eh?”

It certainly is, thought Sam. “So
this John guy is the leader then?”

“Yeah, the guru guy. He knows all
about it. You should be asking him, really, not me.”

“But how can I meet him? Does he
hold services here in town that I could go to?”

Jadie laughed. “No way! He never
leaves the Space Station.” He looked at her slyly and said
casually; “Why don’t you come out there with me tomorrow. I could
show you around?”

“To the Space Station?” Sam asked,
nervously. Maybe this guy was more cracked than he looked.

“Yeah. No-one’ll mind.” He waved
his beer around in a gesture of open-mindedness. “It’s only the
cops that get them worked up.” He leaned forward again. “They don’t
like cops sniffing around out there at all—or the media, of
course.”

-oOo-

Although it seemed like a lifetime,
it was just over three hours later that Sam and Wayne left the pub.
By then an Irish folk band had come onto the little stage in the
corner and a shaggy-looking creature dressed in black had mumbled
something about the Republic and begun to warble out "Kevin Barry".
That was Sam's cue to grab Wayne firmly by the shoulder of his
jacket and drag him to his feet saying, "Oh gosh, is that the
time?"

Jadie, by then half smashed on
beers that Wayne had kept supplying at Sam’s expense, had waved his
arms about and shouted that they should all go to a club he knew
and score some ‘E’. Wayne, considerably more drunk than Jadie, had
seemed to think this was a great idea, judging from the excited,
semi-articulate noises he had made in response. Sam, smiling
politely, had thanked Jadie for his time and, keeping a firm grip
on Wayne’s jacket, had dragged him through the now-crowded pub to
the street.

In the warm, still, evening air,
Sam tried to take stock of what she'd achieved. Unfortunately,
Wayne was mumbling his way through some long, rambling story about
gangsters or something. With the deep self-absorption of the
seriously drunk, he absolutely insisted that she pay attention to
him but, what with his mumbling and her own self-absorption, Sam
regarded his incoherent saga as nothing more than an irritating
distraction. Anyway, this was no time to be listening to drunks
retelling the plot of some awful B movie. So she hailed a taxi,
stuck Wayne in the back and sent him home. He'd done his bit. Now
it was all up to her.

It bothered Sam that Jadie had
turned out to be such a drongo but he was going to take her to the
cult's base and that's all that mattered in the end. As she walked
back to the car park, she began composing opening paragraphs in her
head. Maybe there was enough material here for a three-part
feature? Maybe even a book? She stopped walking and took a deep,
steadying breath. No sense getting too excited. Just stay cool
until she met the 'guru guy'. Then she'd know what she had. Until
then she would just need to keep her excitement under control and
her head clear for the important interview that was coming up.

Unfortunately for Sam, she was too
wrapped in thought to notice a beat up old ute pull up at the back
of Steiner's department store two blocks away. Nor did she see the
fourteen, identical, naked women climb out – mostly from under a
tarpaulin at the back – and head into the shadow of the
building.

Drukk was in shock. The drive
through the city streets had been a nightmare. The stolen ute, its
engine screaming in first gear, had swerved and dodged among the
other vehicles as Braxx shouted directions, probably at random.
They had come so close to hitting buildings, metal poles, other
vehicles—some of them gigantic—and startled humans, who gawped at
him and Braxx with bulging eyes and open mouths even as he veered
around them, that Drukk could not believe they had survived the
ordeal, let alone arrived at their intended destination. Could
Braxx really have known what he was doing? Or had the Great Spirit
guided him, as he claimed? Either way, the important thing was that
he was no longer in that metal death-machine and that he would
never, never try to drive one again.

The images of impending destruction
kept running through his mind as his glazed eyes watched his fellow
survivors scrambling through the freshly-blasted hole into the dark
building. He saw their backs, hideously smooth and pallid, their
lower limbs, jerky and stiff, with round wobbling masses of flesh
above them. It was all so endlessly awful, he was not sure that he
could go on. He shuddered, closing his eyes against the nightmare
of his continuing existence.

“Drukk!”

It was Braxx, hissing at him from
the dark hole.

“Drukk! What’s the matter with you?
Get in here at once! Do you want something to see you?”

With a mighty sigh, Drukk clenched
his teeth (horrible, horrible feeling), squared the bony
protrusions below his neck, thrust out the wobbling mounds of flesh
in front of him and held his head up high. Bravely, he forced his
shaky, lower limbs to move and followed the others into the
building.

Inside, the 'department store'
stretched away in all directions, a single huge slab of space. The
low ceiling suggested other, similar slabs above them. The
strangeness of the scene, patchily lit by the Vinggans' personal
photon projectors, was overwhelming. A sudden bright flash was
followed by a crash as someone blasted a mannequin to pieces.
"Oops. Sorry," a voice said. "I thought the stupid thing was a
human. Gave me the fright of my life."

"It must be some kind of museum,"
said someone else out of the semi-darkness. "It's full of
statues."

"Let's just find some clothes and
get out of here," said another, who could have been Braxx.

"Why, they're everywhere!" said
someone. "All this stuff hanging everywhere. It's all
clothing!"

There was an excited murmuring as
the Vinggans examined the racks around them, grabbing the garments,
smelling them, tasting them. Another flash lit up the room and
another mannequin exploded. "Sorry, that was me," an abashed voice
called.

Braxx called his people to order.
Arms filled with assorted clothing, the Vinggans gathered around
him. "All right," he said firmly. "The important thing about
clothes is that they are different from each other." The Vinggans,
who had found rank after rank of identical garments hanging on the
rails, looked at each other, puzzled. But Braxx went on. "So
everybody watch what the others pick and make sure you choose
something else." He reached over and grabbed two items at random
from the armloads that his followers had gathered. "Here," he said,
throwing a bright orange, Lycra mini-dress to Drukk. "You wear that
and I," he held up a white satin wedding dress, "will wear
this."

Suddenly energised by their
leader's example, the others began hunting through their finds and
among the racks. Before three more mannequins had been shot, the
Vinggans had all found outfits and were busy dressing.

Drukk, standing idle among the
frenzied activity, was slowly coming back to his senses. He noticed
the dress in his hand and slipped it on. It's comfortable, he
thought, vaguely. The colour seemed a little bright but Braxx had
chosen it so it was probably OK. He began to notice his
surroundings. Maybe this
was
a museum. A museum of clothes,
perhaps. He realised that the unfortunate mannequins existed to
display particular garments and it occurred to him that they would
be a good guide to whatever social conventions surrounded
clothes-wearing. There were also gigantic pictures on the walls
depicting humans in exotic-looking outfits. He wandered over to
stare at a couple but each was so different to the next that he
could find no pattern. The ship had obviously been right about why
humans wore clothes.

He passed beyond the rails of
clothes to an area filled with display cases containing small
objects constructed from metals and crystals. Again the emphasis
seemed to be on difference as no two were the same. The idea that
these objects might be jewellery and that their purpose was, almost
precisely as he had surmised, to decorate people so that they each
looked a little different, suddenly seemed incredibly far-fetched.
Drukk smiled at his own over-active imagination. No, these objects
must have some more sensible use. Perhaps they were computers or
communicators? Would human photonic devices be so large and crude?
He remembered the gigantic, brutal engine in that awful vehicle
and, shuddering again, forced his mind away from the whole,
horrible experience.

If these were photonic devices,
then maybe there would be useful tools and apparatus in this
building. Maybe even something they could use to help them call
home. The prospect cheered him and he looked around, spraying
photons ahead of him from his personal projector.

A narrow ramp led up from where he
stood into the darkness above. It had slotted metal ledges at
regular intervals along its entire length. He went to it and began
to climb, realising that the ledges were perfectly placed for his
lower limbs to step onto as he ascended. At the top there was
indeed another slab of space and, to his right, another ramp,
presumably leading to the next slab. All around him were more rails
of clothes stretching off into the dark distance, so he turned and
went up the second ramp.

At the top of this ramp, he found
the space filled with all manner of completely inexplicable
objects. Many were made of glass or ceramics although there were
plastics and metals too. Again the idea that he was in a strange
alien museum came to him and he imagined crowds of stiff-limbed
humans teetering and balancing their way between the displays,
admiring these peculiar artefacts and barking and croaking their
appreciation to one another. It was a strangely touching thought
that these simple, sub-Vinggans could create and admire these
objects just like more advanced sapients. He felt almost sorry for
them that Braxx and his disciples were about to bring them into the
light and they would most likely lose their primitive ways and
their crude but evocative arts—if, indeed, that is what he was
looking at.

Many of the objects were smooth
discs of decorated ceramic. Others, also of decorated ceramic, were
simple concave forms. Two or three basic shapes were repeated over
and over endlessly. It was strange, unfathomable, unutterably
alien. It occurred to him that to devote their efforts to making
such numbers of similar, simple objects and then to display them
with such care and reverence might mean these objects had religious
significance to these creatures. Perhaps this whole building was
actually a place of worship, that these shiny discs, the crystal
objects and the clothes might, in fact, be worshipped by the
humans. What strange unvinggan rituals might take place inside
these walls? What incomprehensible ecstasies might the humans
experience as they contemplated these cryptic icons? Oh no! Perhaps
the statues they had destroyed were the gods these creatures
worshipped. He felt the need to discuss his ideas with Braxx, to
question whether a species so strange in its ways could ever be
brought to an understanding of the Great Spirit and Her wisdom.