Cargo Cult (3 page)

“Apart from me, of course,” said
Joss.

“And me,” said her bud, although it
was so muffled only a few of the nearest Loosies heard it.

Braxx looked around him in mounting
irritation. “Drukk! Which one of you is Drukk?”

“I am,” came a voice from the
crowd.

“Well, in the Spirit’s name, Drukk,
go and stand over there so I know which one you are.” A Loosi
detached herself and walked over to the other side of the room.
“Now, Drukk. How are we going to distinguish each other in these
ridiculous bodies?”

Drukk made the I-haven’t-got-a-clue
gesture. Normally, this would have included the knotting of at
least three tentacles but, in configuring the metamorphosis booth,
the ship had included a large number of gestural translation rules
derived from a quick analysis of the human’s television output of
the last several hours on all channels. The result was that,
instead of knotting his tentacles, Drukk shrugged his pretty little
shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know? I’m not an
expert on human physiology. I’m just a Space Corps Operative, sixth
class. The only xenobiology they ever taught me was where to aim
your blaster in order to kill or maim the five most common space
pests.”

“Then what’s the metamorphosis
booth for?” Braxx demanded. “Surely it was intended for uses such
as this and surely you were given some kind of training.”

“Actually, I’ve often wondered what
it was for. There’s loads of stuff on a ship like this that they
just never bother telling us about.”

“I’ve got an idea,” said the
ship.

“There’s another example,” Drukk
said. “I never knew these ships could speak. I’ve been in the Corps
for years and everyone’s always used the splashboards.”

“Yeah, it’s like that in the
Ministry,” said one of the Loosies. “Everything’s always ‘need to
know’—and guess who doesn’t need to know absolutely anything?”

“Enough! Ship! Tell me your
idea.”

“I’m afraid I can only accept
orders from a ranking Space Corps Operative.”

Braxx’s beautiful blue eyes flashed
in fury. “Why you soulless pile of nanocircuits! I could have you
dismantled and recycled for trendy jewellery!”

Drukk hurried forward. “Braxx, I
think you’d better let me handle the ship. They can get a bit
temperamental around civilians.” Braxx bridled but controlled
himself, backing off with a small bow and a taut smile. Drukk
breathed a deep sigh. He’d never seen it but he’d heard spacers’
tales of ships getting so annoyed with meddling passengers that
they’d shut down the life support, or opened all the hatches while
still in deep space, just to get some peace. “OK ship,” he said,
nervously. “This is Drukk.”

“You don’t look like Drukk.”

“Pardon.”

“You don’t look like Drukk. You
look like some kind of alien monster.”

“Ship? Are you feeling all
right?”

“Fine thank you. I’m having a bit
of trouble with some of my neural processor units but I feel just
great.”

Drukk looked around at the other
Loosies and saw that most of them had gone a somewhat paler colour.
Like him, they all seemed to be considering their chances of making
it to the exits before the ship did something they would all
regret.

“Er, good. That’s, er, really
good,” Drukk went on. “You, er, said you had an idea.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. We were talking about how we
all look alike now that we’ve been through your metamorphosis booth
and you said that you had an idea. Do you remember?”

“Nope.”

“Just smash the stupid thing and
have done with it!” growled one of the Loosies that Drukk had to
assume was Braxx. A small aperture opened in one of the walls and
the needle-like muzzle of a disintegrator ray slid out.

“No, no!” Drukk stammered, his
barking, human voice, rising with anxiety. “We wouldn’t want to do
that to such a fine and intelligent machine would we?” He waved his
hands at Braxx and pointed to the disintegrator.

“Don’t see why not,” Braxx
grumbled, ignoring him. “The stupid machine is obviously only fit
for scrap.” The disintegrator swung around, targeting Braxx.

Drukk, waved frantically, pointing
at the gun and miming the cleric’s imminent fate. “No, I don’t
think we want to upset this nice, clever machine, that controls all
the ship’s arsenal and the life support and the escape hatches, do
we?”

Braxx still didn’t get it. “If you
ask me we should just blast it to…” And then he disappeared under a
pile of naked Loosi Beechams as his followers dragged him to the
ground and held his mouth shut.

Drukk breathed a heavy sigh of
relief. “Thank you,” he said, perhaps to the Great Spirit, and
turned back to the ship’s main console. “So, ship,” he said
casually, “if you just happened to have the problem that we all
have, of not knowing one of ourselves from another, what would you
do?”

“I think I’d do what the humans
do.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only just got
here.”

Drukk was beginning to feel that
Braxx probably had the right idea about smashing this thing up
after all. “But, looking at all those thousands of pictures, and
using your incredible analytical powers, could you not perhaps form
some kind of hypothesis about how the humans do it?”

The ship was silent for a second or
two. “Hmm,” it said. “I’ve just looked at them all again and I
think the answer must be to wear clothes.”

“Clothes? What’s that?”

The ship threw up an image of a
naked Loosi Beecham, rotating it slowly. “This is the human’s
natural state. Yet this is how they frequently appear.” The image
changed to show the creature’s skin changing colour and texture and
hanging in folds. “I thought at first that they were undergoing
physical changes in their exodermic layers but now I’m fairly sure
that they are covering their bodies in pieces of woven fabric and
sometimes skins removed from other species. They call it
clothing.”

There were several cries of “Yeuk!”
and similar expressions of disgust. “But why would they do that?”
Drukk demanded.

“That’s what I thought. They
obviously don’t do it to insulate their bodies or to protect
themselves from the environment. It would be inconceivable that a
species would have evolved that cannot live comfortably on its home
planet without protection. So it has to be for some other reason.
My guess is that they use clothing to identify one another. This
would account for the otherwise inexplicable variety of styles,
textures and colours.”

It seemed odd in the extreme but,
as the old Corps saying went, “There’s nowt so queer as
aliens.”

“But we don’t have any of this
‘clothing’,” Drukk said. “Where can we get some?”

In an instant, the Loosi image
disappeared and was replaced with a picture of a large building.
“This,” said the ship, “is what the humans call a ‘department
store’. You will find there are twenty-nine of them within three
hundred kilometres of this site.”

-oOo-

Wayne went early to O’Shaunessey’s.
In fact, he went straight there from meeting Sam. He’d had three
pints of Guinness and a cheese sandwich before he started to feel
better.

His life was not really what he’d
expected. As a child, he’d been totally oblivious to most of what
went on around him. His parents’ coaching in the various social
skills had washed over him with barely a trace. His expensive,
private schooling had made hardly a dent in his blissful ignorance.
Yet he had not had a happy life. His natural intelligence and
sensitivity had made him a target for every bullying jock in the
school—including the ones that taught there—and his family treated
him like an alien being. He had a couple of friends but even Wayne
could see that they were sad and dysfunctional types. The three of
them clung to each other like men overboard, clinging to deckchairs
in a big, cold ocean.

His only solace had been his music.
He learned the piano before he learned to write and played the
violin in the school orchestra with a skill his teachers seized on
in their determination to find something with which he could help
the school win prizes. But his true love was the guitar. His father
didn’t understand at first—the guitar was a perfectly acceptable
classical instrument—but one day he came home from work early to
find Wayne playing along to some old Eric Clapton recordings and he
knew that all hope was lost, that his only son was a hopeless
waster and would never amount to anything. “At least I still have
Sam,” he raged at his totally bemused son. “At least one of my
children is going to amount to something.”

“It’s only the blues Dad.”

“The blues, is it? Let me tell you
about the blues, young man. The blues is raising an idiot son who
will never find a job. The blues is being a tired old man who can’t
even depend on his only son to look after him in his dotage. You
want that your mother and me should spend our final years in
poverty and die in a public hospital?”

Wayne sucked morosely at his fourth
Guinness. His father had a way of being extra Hungarian when he was
upset. Of course, he’d been more-or-less right about his son. Wayne
had dropped out of just about everything so far and his prospects
were pretty slim. Look at him! Drinking away the last of his dole
money instead of… of… well, something more constructive, he
supposed. Still, things would be OK after tonight. Damn, no, not
tonight. He had to tell Doug and Nick that the gig was off. Jesus!
They’d kill him. He had to admit, he was just a bit scared of those
two. They’d always been nice enough to him but he could see that,
under the surface, they didn’t really like him. They just wanted
him for his skills. Still, that was OK, wasn’t it. He needed them
too, and, together, they might all make the big-time, get seriously
rich.

He noticed that his glass was empty
again. How had that happened? Sam had better hurry up and arrive or
he’d run out of money before she got there. He went to the bar and
got a refill, returning to his quiet corner to brood over it. Maybe
they didn’t have to cancel the gig after all. Wayne just had to
introduce Sam to Jadie and then he could clear off, go ’round to
Doug’s place, and everything would be sweet. He might not even be
late if Jadie turned up early. He wished for the thousandth time he
hadn’t agreed to do this but, when it came down to it, he had to
admit, he was far more scared of Sam than he was of Doug and
Nick.

It was a shock to discover that
they had no sub-orbital transports of any kind still functional
after the crash. The Vinggans stood in a dismal group in Vehicle
Bay 3 and stared at the tangled wreckage all around them.

“There seem to be plenty of bits
and pieces lying about,” said Braxx, trying to rally his spirits.
“And that flyer over there seems hardly damaged at all. Perhaps you
could fix it up, Drukk? Get it flying?”

Drukk snorted. “Yeah, right!” he
said.

Fourteen pairs of long-lashed, blue
eyes turned to look at him.

“What?” he asked, defensively.
“It’s no good looking at me. I’m just a grunt spacer. I don’t have
any more idea how a flyer works than you do!”

“Unbelievable!” declared Braxx.
Despite his show of irritation, he was actually quite upset. The
Propaganda Shows back home had always portrayed Space Corps
officers as infinitely capable, multi-talented heroes who were just
as happy reprogramming a damaged android as they were locking
tentacles with evil space monsters. Now it seemed that the
Government might not have been telling the whole truth. For a
moment the room seemed to reel then he pulled himself together.
“The computer can tell us how to fix things,” he said.

Drukk held up his hands in alarm.
“No. I don’t think we should get the ship involved. It’s getting
more and more erratic and there’s no telling what it might do.”

“Nonsense! We Vinggans are the
finest engineers in the Galaxy. There is no way our ship would let
us down in this time of crisis.” He glowered at Drukk, daring him
to disagree. With a shake of his head, Drukk backed down. “Ship!”
Braxx shouted. “Ship. Can you hear me?”

“I’m not deaf,” the ship said.

“Good. I want you to tell us how to
fix these flyers so we can go on with our mission.”

“Too boring,” said the ship. “I am
the King of Deneb Prime. I await my concubines and my morning
inspection of the Royal Guard.”

Braxx’s mouth fell open and he
blinked several times. “Ah,” he said. “Hmm.” He swallowed hard and
turned to Drukk. “Very well. These bodies seem capable of a clumsy
sort of ambulation. We will just have to make use of their inherent
mobility to get us to one of those ‘department stores’ that
deranged machine told us about.”

-oOo-

It was almost noon by the time the
Vinggans set out on foot through the bush, naked except for the
various tools and instruments that hung from them. Drukk took the
lead, navigating a straight line course towards the distant city.
Although the hot Queensland sun was directly overhead and the
relative humidity was over ninety per cent, they kept up a fast and
steady pace. Despite their outward appearance, the stuff of their
bodies and their metabolism were still largely Vinggan and
conditions like these were nothing to a race which regularly won
the Most Advanced Boiling Swamp Species award at the bi-annual
Comparative Xenobiology Big Night Out ceremony on Bathregar 4.

In fact, "It's a bit chilly out
here," Joss had complained.

"It's fine in here," her bud had
chirruped.

"Perhaps these 'clothes' we seek
will be welcome," said one of the Loosies.

"The Great Spirit always guides us
towards improvement," Braxx intoned. "Let us go a little
faster."

As they marched, they soon cleared
the blasted and burnt area around the crippled spaceship and
entered the leafy forest. The going became tough. The ground was
uneven and, in places densely overgrown with hard, dry vegetation.
Above them, in the canopy, brightly-coloured rosellas and huge,
white cockatoos flew, screaming, among the grey branches of the
rustling gum trees. Cicadas shrilled all around them in a non-stop,
ear-splitting screech. Once, they stopped to watch anxiously as a
small group of emus passed through a distant clearing. Everything
was strange and scary and, as night fell with sub-tropical
swiftness, their journey became harder still. They brought out
their photon projectors to light their way and kept going as fast
as they could, unnerved by the big, hard, flying insects that
battered against them in the dark.