Cargo Cult (9 page)

Judging that the out-thrust hand
must be a greeting, Drukk thrust out his own. "I am Drukk," he said
again, his hand hovering in the air near Sam’s. "I wear the orange
clothing."

-oOo-

Out in the blackened bushland
around the
Vessel of The Spirit
, a group of ten,
dirty-looking kangaroos milled about in an uncertain manner. The
place reeked of burnt vegetation and a pall of smoke still hung
over the area. The ground was littered with glowing embers and more
than one of the roos had burnt its paws in coming here.

“There, see?” shouted a young joey,
pointing with a short forelimb.

The
Vessel
of the
Spirit
stood silent and gleaming at the centre of the
devastated forest. A bevy of small maintenance bots were giving the
hull a final polish but most had already gone inside, their repair
tasks completed. Some of the kangaroos seemed reluctant even to
look at the gleaming spaceship while others stared at it in deep
concentration, scratching their woolly bellies as they pondered its
significance.

“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.”

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 else 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.