Cargo Cult (21 page)

“Very well, human, tell me where to
find the Vinggans we seek.”

Barraclough took two steps
backwards to make himself feel a bit more comfortable and fell over
the invisible table he’d had his meal on. The Agent watched him
impassively, making no gesture of help or sympathy.

“Don’t you think it’s a bloody
stupid idea to have invisible furniture?” the human snapped,
irritably.

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.

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.