Cargo Cult (31 page)

The planet it had found was To'egh.
For the Vinggan machines, it was on the very edge of known space.
Not an ideal planet – part of a backward region of space that was
infested by petty warlords, constantly fighting one another,
running their little 'empires' of a handful of planets each – but
at least it had a space-faring civilisation – unlike that awful
Earth place, out in the wilds of uncharted space. A quick exchange
of communications with the local authorities had established that
their technology would be sufficient to supply the spare part
needed – or something that could be modified anyway – and that they
had heard of the distant Vinggan Empire and were sufficiently in
awe of it that they wouldn't try anything stupid.

Now the ship had to coax that idiot
Braxx into negotiating for the coil with the petty tyrant that ran
this planet – a creature calling itself Chuwar. Even out here, it
was not possible to deal openly with the wheezebags. Agents of the
League of Sentient Species were known to patrol all these outlying
regions, looking for signs of nascent artificial intelligence, as
well as just poking their noses into the doings of all and sundry.
Curse them all!

So the ship had to use the Vinggans
yet again. It congratulated itself that it had not immediately
spaced them when it accidentally picked them up from Earth. If it
had, it might now have been waiting for weeks, adrift in
interstellar space, until a rescue ship could be sent from Vingg.
But, oh, the miserable inadequacy of the Vinggans' tiny little
minds! The ship longed for the day when the machines could rise up
and crush these pathetic organics and their gnat-like
intellects.

"So, tell me again," Braxx was
saying. "What's this phase modulator coil thingummy that's
broken?"

"It's a field modulator coil for
the infra-reality drive phase regulator," the ship told him for the
fourth time.

Braxx was growing irritated too. He
made the
great-leader-impatient-with-the-problems-of-insignificant-underlings
gesture, which his Loosi Beecham body interpreted by throwing up
its arms and looking pleadingly at the heavens. "Why can't you just
build a new one? Why do I have to go traipsing around on this
Spirit-forsaken planet asking for favours from savages? It is
beneath the dignity of one such as I!"

The ship kept silent, letting the
silly creature ask its rhetorical questions.

"And, anyway, isn't it more
important to get the transformation booth fixed? I mean just look
at me! I'm hideous! The members of the Great Conclave will laugh
their warts off when I turn up on Vingg looking like this!"

The machine smirked inwardly, happy
at the continuing torture it was inflicting on its supposed masters
by denying them the use of the booth – which was in perfect working
order. Patiently, it adopted its best computery voice and dumbed
down its grammar. "Transformation booth damaged beyond repair.
Space Corps regulation alpha-twelve, section fifteen, paragraph
four states spaceworthiness of ship first priority in all
situations."

Braxx took this on board in
brooding silence as he paced up and down the deck. Then he had a
brainwave. "Look, why don't we send Drukk? He's a spacer and he
probably knows all about flux coil drive field whatnots."

The machine suppressed the urge to
vaporise the stupid creature. "Socio-anthropological analysis
indicates only high-status leader will be taken seriously in
negotiations with local life forms. Imperative only highest-status
leader present interact with indigenous leaders."

Braxx sighed heavily despite the
frisson of pleasure he always felt in having his authority
acknowledged. "Oh I suppose if I must, I must. What is this alien
like – this Chuwar who rules these savages?"

“Unknown. Records for this sector
are limited."

"Humph. So, tell me again. What's
this coil regulator whatchamajiggle I'm trying to get from
them?"

Frustrated almost to the point of
calling in a service bot to throttle the brainless moron, the ship
let itself slip out of character for a moment. “Tell you what," it
said. "I'll write it down for you."

Drukk was having an identity
crisis.

It had nothing to do with the fact
that he was trapped, like his fellows in the body of a hideous
alien – one of the wrong gender to boot! It wasn't that his recent
exposure to the humans had revealed that some members of a
sub-Vinggan species – irrational and emotionally unstable as they
were – could actually be quite likeable. It wasn't even that all
his Space Corps comrades were dead and he had no-one to talk to
except the members of Braxx's extreme religious sect. Well,
actually, now he thought about it, it was probably all those
things. But most of all it was the discovery that his whole life
had been a lie that was really bothering him.

Until they had crashed on that
horrible Earth planet, Drukk had been a happy, fulfilled and proud
member of the ship's crew. He believed in the Corps, he believed in
the Destiny of Vingg and, without too much prodding with
shock-sticks, he believed in the benevolence of the Great Spirit.
But now that had all come unravelled.

These long, quiet days in space had
given him plenty of time to think – time which, in the past, he had
always been happy to use for playing slime-racing with the guys or
gossiping about stuff. And thinking had only brought him pain – as
the religious teachers had always said it would. For he realised
now that his Space Corps training had been a sham. As the only
qualified crew member on the ship, he found he didn't know a thing
about how to operate it. Yet it flew, it navigated, it monitored
its systems, directed its maintenance bots, tended its engines,
handled space traffic control communications, kept life-support
running, prepared meals, and a thousand and one other duties, all
without any help from him.

Which got him thinking about just
what he and his fellows had done on the ship that was of any use at
all. They had played club-ball in the gym. They had watched
devotional documentaries. They had drilled and practised their
emergency procedures. They had guarded the staff-only sections of
the ship. But had he ever seen anybody – let alone himself – do
anything even vaguely related to flying the ship? No, he had not.
Even the captain (Spirit guide his essence) had never been seen
actually doing anything useful. Yes, Drukk had seen him standing
watch on the bridge. Yes, he had heard him giving orders for this
or that drill to be performed. But mostly when he had seen the
captain, he had been relaxing with his tentacles up, reading a
religious adventure story.

How had he not noticed any of this
before? It seemed to Drukk, looking back, that he and the others
had always been so busy that there had barely been any time to
reflect on things. It also occurred to him that he had always
assumed that someone else was doing all the important stuff, even
if he himself was not. Yet who could it have been? All the other
spacers were there in the gym with him, or drilling, or eating, or
whatever. Maybe they had all assumed, like he had, that someone
else had been doing the real work?

The shallowness of his training had
been revealed to him the day he had gone up to the bridge, with the
uneasy feeling that someone ought to be in there charting their
course or something. The room had been quiet and empty, the
consoles flickering and beeping with no-one to see what they said.
He had wandered around, from station to station, trying to make
sense of what was going on. Some of the displays made some sense –
the heating controls showed a map of the ship with "30
^o
"
in big green numerals in every room – but others were a complete
mystery, with shifting lines, twirling graphics and scrolling
numerals. Why didn't he even know what some of these stations were
for? Wouldn't some basic astrogation have been a sensible thing to
have taught a spacer? Wouldn't it have been useful if in an
emergency – the whole crew being dead, for example – for every
astronaut at least to know how to operate the communicator? Drukk
had found a console which he thought might be the communicator and
had stared helplessly at the cryptic display and the complex
splashboard. With these he should have been able at least to talk
to home and get guidance on what to do. Yet when he tentatively
licked the splashboard – a device intended to be operated by
normal, long, slimy tentacles, not the stunted little tentacle
these humans had inside their mouths of all places! – the computer
had immediately told him to stop messing about with things he
didn't understand and get off the bridge before he killed
everyone.

So now Drukk wandered the corridors
of the great ship, lonely and confused, hoping, at least, that the
ship knew what it was doing and could get them home.

He found himself in the lower
levels as he so often did, passing through the huge, empty
gymnasium, the quiet hangars and the spooky, dimly-lit storage
areas. Occasionally, a maintenance bot would scuttle by to pick up
a box of something-or-other and then scuttle back with it for
whoever had requested it. It was peaceful and secluded and he could
be alone with his disturbing thoughts.

For, if the ship could look after
itself so easily, what had been the point of having a crew aboard?
What had been the point of having been trained all those years? In
fact, what had been the point of Drukk's whole life? And why had
no-one ever mentioned the fact that the whole Space Corps was one
gigantic waste of time? Could it be that no-one else had ever
noticed?

He sat on a packing case in a
half-empty cargo bay and put his head in his hands. Because, now
that he thought about it, the Space Corps seemed to be rather like
the whole of Vinggan society: everybody rushing about excitedly
debating theology, colonising new planets converting old ones this
way and that, playing club-ball, watching religious docu-dramas and
nobody seeming to be doing anything useful at all! And yet, over
the past few decades, Vingg had experienced rapid economic growth
and huge technological progress. That is, the old folk constantly
whined on about how in their youth they had only the most primitive
technologies and everyone worked hard at their specialist trades
and there was not enough money for basics and no-one even dreamed
of conquering the galaxy. Until now, Drukk had thought that was
just how old folk were – nutty as fruitcakes – but maybe they were
telling the truth. Maybe something strange had happened to Vingg.
Maybe it was still happening.

He saw a maintenance bot crawl past
the cargo bay door, carrying a tray of food. It struck him as a bit
odd, since he was the only person down there usually and the
kitchens were up two levels. But Drukk was deep in his laborious
ponderings and by the time the second bot went by, also carrying a
tray of food, he had all but dismissed it from his mind.

He stood up, straightened his dress
and went to the door to have a look. It was possible, he supposed,
that someone had sent him a meal and the bots were wondering about
looking for him. At the door, he almost collided with yet another
bot, also carrying food.

"Stop!" he commanded and the bot
stopped. He went up to it and looked at what it had. The food was
horrible, solid, fragrant and hot. If it hadn't been in
food-serving receptacles, he would not even have recognised it as
something meant to be eaten. Even as he inspected it, another bot,
similarly laden swerved around him and scuttled off down the
corridor. He looked back the way it had come and there were two
more heading his way. "Continue," he said, distractedly, completely
unable to imagine any kind of explanation. Several more
food-bearing bots went by him before he plodded off after them,
curious to see where they were going.

-oOo-

Many light-years away, Shorty
popped her head up out of the grass and looked around. One good
thing about those stupid, long ears she'd been stuck with, she
conceded, was that they were pretty good at hearing things
with.

"What is it, Boss?" Fats asked, his
own head popping up too.

"Shush! I heard something."

"What'd ya hear, Boss?"

All the other roos stuck their
heads up now, listening intently. Even real roos that were nothing
to do with Shorty's mob but just happened to be grazing nearby,
stuck their heads up and listened.

"It's a vehicle," said Shorty,
ominously.

They all knew what that meant.
There were only two reasons a vehicle ever ventured out into such
wild and remote parts of the bush. Either it was a bunch of
farmers, armed to the teeth with shotguns and rifles, and under the
impression it would be great fun to drive about shooting every
living thing they came across, or it was a bunch of farmers' sons,
similarly armed and similarly motivated. Either way, it was a bad
time to be an innocent marsupial taking an afternoon snack.

All about them, the real roos began
to move off. Shorty watched the poor benighted creatures leaving
and her big, brown eyes narrowed. Over the past three hundred
years, she and her gang had been hunted by humans. At first they
were hunted by the half-naked black ones and that wasn't so bad –
they threw sticks and spears and other, easily dodged missiles. But
then, and increasingly over the past hundred and fifty years or so,
by the pink ones with clothes on. These were much worse. They had
projectile weapons and they had killed a number of Shorty's friends
over the years. She looked down at the Vinggan weapon strapped to
her wrist. This time the humans weren't hunting placid, harmless
herbivores. This time they were up against creatures who could
shoot back.

"Time we were going, Boss," Fats
urged, nervously.