The man in the cool shades looked at him unimpressed and frankly quite saddened. It wasn't the money. Money was not the problem. When you're a roving researcher for the Lonely Galaxy Guide, you can rest assured that fiscal issues have been dealt with. For all researchers carry that nifty electronic device known, rather appropriately, as the UCIRICH (Universal Currency Image Reconstructing Inductor Copyright Handset - more on this later). No, what was bothering the man in the cool shades was that the receptionist, a Mr Manzoor Gobiwallah (as his name badge said) had identified him as a feranji (foreigner) and was quite blatantly trying to rip him off. Incompetence one could handle but sheer chutzpah was another matter.
The man in the cool shades began to speak to the receptionist in a grave voice 'There are seedlings that grow to become mighty trees rising above the canopy, and there are those seedlings that grow to become scrawny rootlings that scavenge adulterously on the forest floor' and then to drive the point home he asked moving his face closer 'which are you Mr Gobiwallah? A towering tree or a little adulterous scavenger on the forest floor?'.His voice was strange. It had a weird electric modulation and and the accent was hard to place. In fact it was impossible to place for it was not an earth accent. Mr Gobiwallah looked on weakly shrugging his shoulders and cowering into his jacket. He didn't need this. He was a poor man with a family of three generations to feed - his own, his parents and his grandparents and all living under the same roof. His roof! He hated his job. It paid peanuts and barely afforded him a comfortable existence (if you could call this an existence) and then there was the lack of 'izzat' (respect) to it all; a measly receptionist in a second class hotel in Lahore was hardly something to be proud of, something his wife never failed to remind him every minute they were together.
And what made; what could have been just about a bearable job, things worse were the sour cream faced customers. Always complaining. Always moaning. Always rude and insolent with their lumpy cratered noses and there lizard skins and there blaming him for everything. He hated life and he was miserable. And now there was this, 'this' feranji standing before him, a strange man, with a funny accent - odd sort of bloke with punk-gypsy clothes and a certain way about him, lecturing him on jungle food chains! Mr Gobiwallah knew everything about the food chain, oh yes! He was at the bottom of it!
'OK Sir, how much would you like to pay?'
****
Super-Fly stepped into the shiny hotel foyer which smelled of detergent and bleach, sniffed around, blinked at the sun outside; winced, put on his shades and then stepped across the barrier into the seething sunshine. Lahore reminded him of the markets of Galgaroon II, a planet in the Oryx system. He had been there a couple of solar years back trying to dig out some info on the Whore Houses - for the adult sections of the Guide. Lahore had the same starved look; a populace of wandering nomads in a city of colonial and Moghul splendour. He'd read something about the history and was attempting to link what he was seeing with the words. The city was choked with humans. It was a grand city and the dereliction simply added to the grandeur by making it more empathic. He allowed himself be carried aloft by the crowds. He was taller then everybody and so could enjoy panoramic views above the bobbing heads; a sluice of heads like a river draining away. He couldn't help it, for his five years with the Guide as a researcher had so honed him that he found himself noting everything down - mentally. He had a prodigious memory; something the job required for there was not always time, and sometimes it was not practical, to note everything. Though he had seen much during his Guide days, he still allowed the wonder of a child to enchant him. It was all too easy to grow a thick heart and scabby eyes, and to withdraw into one's shell, into oneself, and mutate into a cynical miserable old sod.
One of the reasons why the Lonely Galaxy Guide sells so well compared to other travel literature is because of the detailed sections on the Whore Houses. It seems that the marketing department of the guide know who there readers are. Newly appointed Guide researchers are given a crash course on how to judge quality standards, cleanliness etc in these whore houses. One of the major problems faced by the Guide in the early days was 'speciation'. Let me explain: the Galaxy is not homogeneous. It comprises many species of many races of of many types. How do you judge Whore Houses across species? The problem is obvious. The answer not so.
The ingenious answer was found, as most great discoveries are, quite serendipitously. Professor 'Haw Nee Scrowtum' (yes, you may have heard of him before) was busy studying the mating rituals of caged Alduvian Hamsters when he discovered something remarkable. Caged Alduvian Hamsters have super sex drives; more so than Earth rabbits. Anyway, one morning, when he arrived in his lab, he found the Hamsters trying to have sex with his Comms device. The device had accidentally fallen into the Hamster 'pit' and it was flashing red and beeping all the time and the hamsters were busy trying to hump it. As soon as he switched it off - the humping stopped. This gave him an idea. After many more experiments the good Professor went on to release a seminal research paper titled 'On humping Hamsters & the sexual urge'.
What the professor had discovered by chance was that all species have a 'sex centre' in the cortex of the brain, which is 'turned-on' by the combination of red lights of a certain wavelength and ultrasonic sounds of a particular frequency. The upshot of the matter was that you could make any species have sex with anything as long as the thing you wanted it to have sex with flashed in the correct shade of red and emitted the correct frequency.
Modernists were joyous with jubilation. Conservatives outraged at what they saw as further indication of society's descent into immorality, and the 'Society for Blind and Deaf Beings' complained that this was unfair discrimination!
To be continued...
