Cargo Cult (10 page)

“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 towards 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.

“That’s right,” said Braxx. “You
may have heard of it.”

“And you got here in a spaceship, I
suppose.”

“Naturally. Matter teleportation is
useless over long distances.”

The verger looked again at the
women that surrounded him. All so voluptuous and so skimpily clad.
No, no! He mustn’t think of that! He must purge himself! Purge the
evil, lustful thoughts! But later. Later. Right now he must get rid
of these lunatics before the vicar arrived. Of course! That’s
it!

“Just a moment, ladies,” he cried,
scurrying off sideways to a small room adjoining the entrance. He
shot inside and immediately reappeared clutching a copy of the
parish magazine. “Here,” he said, rifling through it. “Yes!” He
held it up to show them an article on page five entitled;
UFO
Cult in our own Backyard?
“There,” he said, that’s the lot you
want.” He handed to the magazine to Braxx.

Braxx examined the object
carefully, turning it over, feeling its texture, sniffing it, then
looked at the little human. “What is it?”

The verger was taken aback. “Why
it’s an article about that UFO cult out in the bush.”

Braxx frowned. The number of
questions raised by this sentence alone was dizzying. Rather than
ask them all, he said, “Explain.”

“You ladies need to talk to that
bloke John Saunders who runs this UFO cult. Look,” he took the
magazine back. “This article has his name and the address of his
farm and everything. If you’ve come here from space, it’s
definitely this lot you want to see, not our vicar.”

Braxx took the magazine back from
him. “This object contains information?” he asked.

“The magazine article, right. It’s
all there.”

“I cannot interpret this.” He
showed it to the others and they all shrugged or shook their heads.
“The translation field only works with oral communications.”

As hard as the verger found it to
believe that these weirdos couldn’t read, he wasn’t going to get
into a debate about it. “Just you show it to the taxi driver.
You’ll be right. Well, I suppose you’ll need a bus, actually. Too
many for a taxi, eh? You just go to the bus station and they’ll get
you on the right bus.”

“Bus?”

“Pardon?”

“What is ‘bus’? We have no
translation for this concept.”

The verger took a deep breath but
held onto his temper. Let them play their silly little game of
pretending to be aliens. Once he got them back out on the street,
they could have as much fun as they liked. Suppressing a snarl, he
smiled broadly and herded them outside. “There,” he said,
indicating a large luxury coach parked just up the road. “That’s a
bus. In fact, why don’t you go over and talk to the driver. He
might show you around.”

Braxx examined the vehicle. “I
see,” he said. “A bus is a large multi-person conveyance. I agree,
it would be suitable for my little group. You have been helpful.
When our religion dominates your planet, I will see that you are
rewarded.”

The verger smiled thinly and waved
them off as they walked off towards the bus. His eyes were drawn to
the swaying, bouncing mass of gorgeous, round buttocks and he
stared, mesmerised, until he jumped back with a cry of chagrin.
Bad, bad, bad, bad,
bad
! He told himself, tearing his wicked
eyes away, and ran inside to the cool sanctuary of the
cathedral.

-oOo-

“Come on, Nick, Douggie’s told us
everything,” Detective Sergeant Barraclough was saying. “You might
as well come clean. What’s the point of dragging this out all
day?”

His prisoner looked across at the
lawyer sitting beside him. “Can he keep asking me the same thing
over and over like this?”

“My client is right, Sergeant
Barraclough,” the lawyer said with a heavy sigh. She didn’t believe
her client’s ridiculous story any more than Barraclough did but she
had to go through the motions.

Barraclough sighed too. “Right,” he
said and the defeated tone in his voice was plain for all to hear.
“So you and Douggie were beaten up by a mob of Loosi Beecham
lookalikes whom you interrupted in the act of wrecking the ground
floor of Steiner’s department store?” He stared into the unwavering
eyes of the young thug across the desk for a whole thirty seconds.
Then he stood up and walked out of the interview room without
another word.

-oOo-

Marcus Grogan didn’t like driving
buses. If it wasn’t for the fact that he couldn’t get any other
kind of work, he would not be there sitting at the front of a
Brisbane Holiday Tours air-conditioned luxury coach at seven thirty
on a Wednesday morning, waiting for the last stragglers of the
Kanaka Downs Garden Club outing to Toowoomba to find their way to
him. Marcus wasn’t really a bus driver, you see. He was a writer.
He wasn’t a builder’s labourer, either, nor a waiter, a security
guard, a fruit picker, or an unemployed person—although he had
appeared to have been all of these things in the past couple of
years.

He looked in his big, internal
mirror. The old ladies and gents were spread thinly throughout the
coach, nattering away happily to each other, or, in one case, to
herself. Oh how he regretted the day he had walked out of his
well-paid job as a business development manager for a major
software company. He still cringed as the memories flayed him yet
again. He’d got up early, packed the newly-finished manuscript of
his Great Novel into a Jiffy bag and had dropped in at the Post
Office on his way to work to send it on its way to the biggest-name
publisher he could think of. Then, smiling happily, he had gone
straight into his boss’ office and handed her the letter of
resignation he had typed up the night before.

That had been three years ago. The
Great Novel was never heard of again and, in the ensuing months, he
had sent copies to fifteen other publishers. Only two had even
bothered to reply—with pro forma letters saying they were sorry but
they never accepted unsolicited manuscripts. In a state of rising
panic as his meagre savings had dwindled away, he had started
sending it to literary agents whose names he found on the Internet.
He targeted fifty such luminaries only to find, as told in the
twelve pro forma responses that he got back, that they too had an
aversion to unsolicited manuscripts.

Eventually, his money had run out
and his morale had sunk to the floor. He had gone back to his old
company and asked for his job back but by then there was another of
the world’s cyclic recessions in progress and not only they but
every major and minor software company in town wouldn’t touch him
with a ten foot pole. That’s when his progress through the city’s
low-paid, low-status jobs had begun, landing him here, on a
Wednesday morning two miserable years later, with a bus-load of
crumblies and a depression which he couldn’t afford the pills to
treat.

A movement by the door distracted
him from his self-flagellation. A crowd of women had appeared and
were starting to board.

“Sorry ladies,” he started to say,
in a voice dulled by mental anguish, “this is a private...” He
stopped speaking and gawped in amazement at the mob of
oddly-dressed, identical beauties coming onto his bus. He tried to
speak but his brain just wasn’t sending messages to his mouth any
more. In the eccentric way of many writers, Marcus did not watch
much television. If he had done, he would probably have known the
identity that his new passengers shared and would have been even
more gob-smacked than he was. As it was, he opened and closed his
mouth several times, trying to encourage it to start working before
he gave up and just let it hang open.

Watching him with interest, Braxx
concluded that this was possibly the most intellectually inferior
species he had ever encountered. Not only were the humans stupid
but they seemed to suffer a crippling degree of emotional
instability and possibly insanity. How could a civilisation be
constructed from such unpromising material? How could these
incoherent, volatile creatures build even the crude buildings and
machinery he had seen here? Looking at Marcus, Braxx wondered how
they even managed to find their mouths to put food in them.