A Pilgrimage to Plaka Kalada - Section 3

Section 3 - click here for section 1

Section 3 - click here for section 2

---

         Now Ida was really angry, angry enough to kill. She had worked it out. Midvoyage, Doctor Defrock must have roused her from stasis and indoctrinated her. Probably used the ship's psych clinic for the purpose.
         What he had done was plain enough. He had programmed her for lust. Specifically, to lust after him -- old Purple Face. God knows what exactly he had used. Drugs, or nanotechnological intrusions, or tutored tissue implants, or maybe all those in combination, plus perhaps a little joyshock and some addictives.
         Well. After she had completed her pilgrimage on Plaka Kalada, and had successfully unraveled the Velpa Dora question on Borboth, then she would be able to turn her attention to the business of hunting down Doctor Defrock and --
         Up ahead was another guy in uniform. Abandoning thoughts of Doctor Defrock, Ida prepared for her next confrontation. But the uniform was waving her on in a bored, offhand manner. And Ida escaped into a big hall, where the first sign she saw was a multilingual billboard saying WELCOME TO ELISTAN SAPURA. Which was very confusing.
         Am I on the wrong planet? Impossible! And yet --
         "Excuse me," said Ida, addressing herself to a big burly policeman. "Is this Plaka Kalada?"
         "Yes," he said, with a big white grin. "Of course!" And then: "Welcome to Elistan Sapura!"
         "Thank you," said Ida.
         Elistan Sapura. Local name for the spaceport, undoubtedly. Okay. What next? Change money.
         From the new moneybelt which the Purser had given her, Ida withdrew a single currency note -- a hundred-dollar bill -- and fronted up to the currency exchange desk.
         "Change this, please."
         In return for one hundred dollars, Ida was given a big heap of local banknotes which appeared to be made out of paper. Paper? Yes, paper! And dirty paper, at that. With odd pictures on it. And squiggles. Writing in squiggles. And standard numbers.
         "This is -- ten?" said Ida, holding up one of the banknotes.
         "Correct," said the money change man. "Ten dalshar." Then he handed her a brochure with a buff cover. "You will need this."
         "What is it?"
         "A list of prices recommended. Please to pay nothing more. The inflation is criminal warfare, you will not to make war on us."
         "Oh, I come in peace," said Ida. "I come in peace."
         "That is happy to hear. Price to taxi to Camel is one dollars, is thirty dalshar. Everyone understands, but some pretend. Read me right. Even if they cannot language your language, all understand."
         "What is the local language?"
         "Oh, the local! It is the Habis-Habis in the city, mostly, but Otonian to the north, then the peasant folk, they language the Elem. But you are going to the mountains? Yes? No? Hip-hop?"
         "Hip-hop," said Ida, trying the taste of it in her mouth.
         "Ah, excellent, excellent! There they have many languages, yes, many, I am sure it will be very interesting for you."
         "Very interesting, I'm sure," said Ida politely, though in point of fact she would definitely not be going to the mountains.
         Ida stuffed most of the local money into her moneybelt -- with difficulty, since there was not much room let -- then opened her suitcase to put the brochure inside.
         Someone jostled her, and the mysterious envelope marked "Ida" fell out, spilling papers across the floor. The sacred Nu-chala-nuth scripts were beginning to fade, and big orange and blue letters were coming to life where they had been. Evidently, unsealing the envelope had triggered a transformation. At a glance, Ida registered the contents of the topmost page:
         "Doctor Defrock has killed me."
         Hastily, Ida scooped up the papers and shoved them back into the suitcase. Was anyone watching? No.
         Ida proceeded outside to language the language, wondering what the hell she had got herself into, and what precisely the emerging messages might say.

*
         Outside, sky. The planetary surface. A line of taxis were waiting, their burbling engines emitting fumes which smelt like burnt hair. Now -- where was she going?
         "Wake up, brain!"
         Camel, that was it -- the tourist area of Durbar Maslok. Go to Camel, check in at the Hotel Pearly Snakes. Okay. Let's get a taxi.
         "The Hotel Snakes," said Ida imperiously. "Pearly Snakes! Thirty dalshar, and no detours!"
         Her taxi plunged into the pool of brown water at the spaceport exit, lumbered laboriously up the corrugated rise beyond, then came to a halt at a set of traffic lights. There, policemen wearing green sunglasses were beating up a hapless cyclist, who was writhing on the ground as two enforcers energetically kicked him in the kidneys.
         On seeing the taxi, the policemen abandoned their endeavors and headed in Ida's direction. Juicier prey, obviously. Nervously, Ida looked back, wondering if she could make a bolt for the starport buildings. And, in the taxi behind her, she saw -- no, it couldn't be! Not Doctor Defrock!
         "I left you on the Cornstalk Blue," muttered Ida, trying to blink away the hallucination.
         From the following taxi, Doctor Defrock waved. And Ida remembered. At the boarding gate, she had turned her back on him and had not looked back. Evidently, he had simply followed her.
         While Ida had been computing this, her driver had been paying an informal toll to the police. And now, payment done, the driver gunned the engine. Ida's taxi lurched forward. Doctor Defrock's taxi tried to accelerate past the police. It clipped a policeman, then the engine stalled. Looking back, Ida saw the driver being hauled out of his cab. Then her cab turned a corner, and the scene of the incident was lost to sight.
        

*
         Outside the Hotel Pearly Snakes, Ida paid off her taxi. Any sign of Doctor Defrock? No. The only person who was taking any interest in her at all was a policeman with a rifle, who was grinning at her.
         Under the policeman's supervision, young men were stripping illicit revolutionary posters from the walls. At a glance, Ida took in the manacles which encumbered their legs, and the marks of unhealed beatings livid on their backs. She smiled back at the policeman as politely as she could. Then, hurrying past the clamoring voice of a blind lottery ticket seller, she entered the hotel lobby.
         Inside, all was gloom, the narrow windows denying the exterior daylight. As at the spaceport, the lights were not working, or else nobody had bothered to switch them on.
         "Hi," said Ida, fronting up to reception. "I'm Ida Brahma, uh -- no, no I'm not! I didn't say that! Gosh! I mean, pardon me. I'm -- uh, who am I? Hicamus hocamus! Who am I, who am I? What? Val -- Val something. Sorry, let me take this slowly. Say it again, say it again. Right. Valahaj. Valahaja -- hajajaka -- well, something. Look, I'm sick, okay? I've got a headache. My brain's stopped working. Uh, I had a reservation. Oh, they gave me this paper. There you are. Valahajakalisa Nanchurstingapata. That's my name, right? The room was -- three dollars, I think? What's that, local? Ninety dalshar? Yes, I guess so."
         The male clerk at the reception desk listened to this incoherent womanish gabbling with the gravitas appropriate to a male of his caste. Then he pushed a massive leather-bound guestbook in Ida's direction, plus a bunch of forms.
         "This is the guestbook, madam. You will please to copy. These also. These are the enlistment forms, madam. You will please to triplicate in completion mode."
         "Why?" said Ida. "What am I enlisting in?"
         "The cigarette dreams of the river but is unappeased," said the clerk, with the air of someone quoting an important text, possibly some kind of scripture.
         "That doesn't answer the question," said Ida. "And why in triplicate?"
         "Three is the sacred number of the clerks."
         "Is it?" said Ida. "Okay, if you say so. Triplicate it is."
         The piece of paper which Ida had been given at the spaceport's vouching point provided her with the details she needed to fill in both the guestbook and the enlistment forms. Task accomplished, she found that she was now five dalshar in debt.
         "Five?" she said. "Additional to my hotel bill?"
         "Yes."
         "But why?"
         "Five dalshar. It is the government tax."
         "The what?" said Ida. "Let me get this straight. I tell you my name, and that means I owe you money?"
         "Not me, madam. The government."
         "What! I tell you my name and I owe the government money?"
         "That is correct."
         "So what if I decide I'm just going to be anonymous?"
         "Madam is pleased with her little joke, that we can see. But it is the system. We have the saying, madam. It is the system. Wait here, please."
         "Why?"
         But the clerk was already going. Ida stashed her vouching point paper in her moneybelt, then waited impatiently until a second clerk showed up. Without a word, the second clerk began checking her paperwork.
         "Ah," said the second clerk, fingering a blank space in the guestbook. "You must write down the passport number."
         "Well, what's that?" said Ida.
         "The number on your passport."
         "Passport?"
         "Yes."
         "What's a passport?"
         "You showed it at immigration, madam."
         "I have no idea what you're talking about."
         "Your travel document. To prove your identity."
         "The ship vouched for me."
         "Ah. Yes. Then immigration will have given you something, madam. The documentation, madam."
         "Hang on a moment ... uh, this?"
         From her moneybelt, Ida produced the vouching point paper -- a grayish piece of paper which a computer had trilingually imprinted with mauve script. The paper which identified her as Valahajakalisa Nanchurstingapata. This bit of gray paper came complete with a grimy likeness of Ida Brahma's disguised face, and a blurred facsimile of her thumbprint.
         "Yes, this is your travel document," said the receptionist. "It is equivalent to a passport. See, the number here, this is your number."
         "Okay," said Ida, writing down the number in the space provided for passport numbers. "So, as long as I can remember the number, I'm all right, is that it?"
         "It is the piece of paper, madam, the paper which is important. Not the number, the piece of paper. You must keep it always, the police will want to see it."
         "Will they?" said Ida, baffled. "But, why? I'm in the system, aren't I? They would've entered me at the spaceport."
         "It is the regulation, madam."
         "You're not answering the question. I am in the system, aren't I?"
         "Madam is talking about computers. We do not have such systems, madam. At the spaceport, yes. Checking up, checking down. Arrival and departure. But not elsewhere. Elsewhere it is paper. It is very, very important, the paper. You must not lose it."
         "Why not?"
         "If you do not have the paper, nobody can know who you are."
         "But I can tell them!"
         "Yes, madam, but words are just air. It is the paper which is important."
         This was conceptually difficult, but Ida thought she understood. Absent computers capable of checking identities, identity necessarily resided in a little bit of paper. Lose that scrap of paper, and your identity was lost with it. You were nobody -- or, to put it another way, you were in an unlimited amount of trouble.
         "But that's nuts!" said Ida, as the full monstrosity of this notion struck home. "It's just a silly bit of paper!"
         Only now did she appreciate the full significance of the Right of Recognition, a right which she had always taken for granted. Under the Constitution of the Zafari Jahar, the Harmonious Commonwealth into which she had been born, every citizen had the unassailable right to have all their identifying details -- including facial features, fingerprints, DNA profiles, voice prints and brain-function profiles -- recorded by the government and published free of charge. What this meant, in practice, was that a computer could vouch for your identity any time that was necessary.
         But now!
         Now, insane as it sounded, her very identity reposed in a silly bit of paper.
         "Keep it in a plastic bag, madam," said the clerk. "I recommend."
         "The paper?"
         "Yes, your travel document. It must not be degraded, this is very important. There can be big trouble with the degraded documents."
         "I had started to suspect there might be," said Ida darkly. Then a happy thought occurred to her. "But if I did -- "
         She closed her mouth, aborting the sentence. She had been about to say it was surely possible to make herself a new travel document, given time, patience and a little equipment. But she vaguely suspected that do-it-yourself travel documents might not be an entirely acceptable expression of personal initiative.
         "Are we done?"
         "Madam is registered. Here is your key."

*
         Upstairs, madam's metal key unlocked a mechanical lock to admit her to a musty bedroom. Wooden floor, sagging bed, dirty windows. As a veteran of the Zafjar prison system, Ida immediately noticed that her room failed to meet the Minimum Individual Incarceration Standard. Too small, to start with.
         "You can't do this!" she protested. "Haven't you people ever heard of human rights?"
         Well -- business.
         Now that she had privacy, Ida hastily opened the envelope marked "Ida", the envelope which she believed had been placed in her luggage by Bobby the Purser, he who had allegedly been eaten by a hammerhead shark. But the message she had glimpsed at the spaceport -- the message in big blue and orange letters -- had vanished. Instead, the pages once more contained the original sacred scripts.
         "Obviously," said Ida, "I was supposed to read the message once."
         Obviously. Read it and memorize it. Then it will self destruct. A great system. But only if you actually have the chance to read it.
         "Well, the hell with it," said Ida. "Let's go do this pilgrimage. One cup of coffee, then I'll hit the road."
        
*
         In the hotel restaurant, Ida ordered a cup of coffee, and was served a cup of lukewarm muddy water. On protesting, she was told it was exactly what she had ordered.
         "I claim diplomatic immunity," muttered Ida.
         Sipping her cup of diluted mud, she took stock of the hotel restaurant, which was rich in authentic ethnological details. There was even what looked like a dripping sewer pipe running across the ceiling at the far end of the room. Just what every tourist longed for -- real authenticity!
         "All right then," said Ida. "Let's go out and get this pilgrimage done."
         It was unlikely that she was under surveillance, but it was just conceivable that she was. Therefore, she should act like a proper woman of the Nu-chala-nuth. Given the opportunity to make a pilgrimage, she should do exactly that.
         The alleged signposts which supposedly marked the route to the temple were nowhere in evidence. Probably, they were hidden behind the improvised displays of postcard salesboys and the like. But, after half an hour of asking, pleading, begging, bribing, consulting maps and looking at other people's guidebooks, Ida did finally find the temple of Mingu the Tramp, five minutes by foot from her hotel.
         As she entered the temple precincts, Doctor Defrock stepped out from between two pillars, and fell in step with her.
         "Hi," said Ida.
         "Beloved one," said Doctor Defrock.
         "You murdered Bobby the Purser, didn't you?" said Ida.
         "Love knows no rules," said Doctor Defrock. "Will you marry me?"
         "And you did something horrible to my brain," said Ida. "And, probably, you even manipulated the lottery to make sure I would win. So you could get me here."
         "That's all true," said Doctor Defrock, "but it doesn't answer my question. Will you marry me?"
         "No," said Ida. "Of course I won't! Quite apart from anything else, I'm already married."
         "You are?"
         "Yes! I was married twenty years ago! I've been married to the same man for two decades, and we have two children, and I have absolutely no interest in you!"
         "Oh," said Doctor Defrock. "I thought ... well ... I thought you were a virgin."
         "At thirty nine?" said Ida. "Dream on!"
         "I see we have a lot to talk about," said Doctor Defrock. "How about a drink?"
         "Hey!" said Ida. "I'm in the middle of a pilgrimage here."
         "I can assure you," said Doctor Defrock, "that there is absolutely no need to proceed further with this."
         "I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much," said Ida. "Now get out of my way or I'll hit you."
         Ida said this with the confidence of someone who had hit more than a few people, usually with very satisfactory results. Looking shocked and bewildered, Doctor Defrock backed off.
         "Men are such fools," said Ida to herself. Then, consulting her itinerary, "Well, what's next?"
         Obedient to her itinerary, Ida bowed to the Orb of Vapors, walked widdershins thrice around the Prophet's Boxing Glove, kissed the leftmost hind leg of the Golden Cockroach, and recited the Holy Equations, which are thus:-
         (a) One plus one equals nine.
         (b) Pi equals four, and thus the circle is squared.
         (c) The square root of forty-nine is a dancing doe and the acorn's shadow.
         (d) Minus one multiplied by minus one, inverse compounded by inverse, is incarcerated infinity divided by half, hence equals the soul's quandary.
         This sounded crazy to Ida. But she had, that day, learnt that there is something even crazier: a scientist's quaint belief in logic. At the age of thirty nine, her identity as a Disciple of Logic had finally cracked. Maybe you can apply logic to aliens. (The notion that you can is, after all, at the heart of the science of xenology.) But to humans, never.
         Her pilgrimage completed, Ida contemplated the exit. Doctor Defrock had enthroned himself on an ornamental granite frog right by the exit. How was she going to get past him?
         As Ida was thinking through this problem, she was approached by a wizened personage dressed in black, a human being so old and shriveled that Ida could not at first tell whether it was male or female. Around his neck he wore a bronze amulet in the form of a crocodile.
         "Blessed one," said the human.
         The voice was surprisingly strong. A man's voice.
         "What can I do for you?" said Ida.
         "Does the pilgrim bear donations?" said Crocodile Amulet. "A sacrifice for the temple, perhaps?"
         "What kind of sacrifice do you like?" said Ida. "You don't by chance go in for human sacrifice, do you?"
         "What human?" said Crocodile Amulet. "Yourself?"
         "No," said Ida. "I was thinking more of my husband. That's him, over there, sitting on the, uh, frog."
         "Sitting on the Sacred Shrine of the Established Soul, yes, my eyes are still good enough to see that," said Crocodile Amulet. "However, despite the provocation, one hesitates to dispossess a woman of her husband."
         "Oh, that's perfectly all right," said Ida. "I have another."
         "You do?" said Crocodile Amulet.
         "Yes," said Ida. "So this one is entirely superfluous to requirements."
         There was some paperwork to be done -- so much paperwork, in fact, that it took a full thirty minutes to get through it all. But Doctor Defrock sat on his frog throughout, perfectly patiently. He was still there when the temple guards came up behind him and dropped a big blue capture bag over his head.
         "All's well that ends well," said Ida, watching the thrashing blue bag being hauled away into the inner sanctum of the temple, the one which featured a rather large crematorium chimney.

*
         Ida got back to her hotel alive, her pilgrimage to Plaka Kalada successfully completed, and made it to her bedroom just as the sun was setting.
         "I did it!" she said.
         She felt quite pleased. All she had to do now was wait for the next ship out of this place.
         Despite the odor of decaying corpses drifting in through the window's mosquito mesh, she fell asleep without any trouble at all, sinking into oblivion as soon as her head hit the pillow. And she slept solidly until just before dawn, when she laughed in consequence of an amusing dream, and an exploring cockroach toppled helplessly into the chasm of her laughing mouth.
         In the Book of Proverbs, it is written that travel is a foretaste of hell -- and Plaka Kalada was exactly the kind of place which makes that saying true.
         "What time is it?" said Ida, crossly. "Good grief, it's barely nine o'clock!"
         Nine o'clock, and she was hungry. Did she dare try the hotel restaurant? Well, it was probably safer than daring the city streets.
         Half an hour later, Ida was dining on a dish of meat which was allegedly chicken. It was not. So what precisely was it? She preferred not to speculate.
         She was picking at her meat when she realized that the people at the next table were talking about Borboth. Covertly, she glanced at them. They were a group of shaven-haired Holy Wanderers, tattooed all over with scorpions. One, who favored blue scorpions, was showing another, who favored red scorpions, a photo of a device constructed of odds and ends of wire and pipe, a kind of junkyard assemblage with no conceivable useful purpose.
         "And that's it," said Blue Scorpion. "The Velpa Anx."
         "Doesn't look like much," said Red Scorpion.
         "That's because it isn't much," said Blue Scorpion. "Skip it. Don't feel you have to see everything."
         "Excuse me," said Ida, unable to restrain herself. "Excuse me, but is that, uh, thing in the photograph on Borboth?"
         "Yes," said Blue Scorpion. "It is."
         "Then ... excuse me for asking, but what exactly is it?"
         "It is said to be art," said Blue Scorpion, "though I have my doubts."
         "Art?" said Ida.
         "Yes," said Blue Scorpion. "An embodiment of the Velpa Anx."
         "And what," said Ida, "what exactly is the, uh ... the Velpa thing? Is it a kind of ... I don't know. Games machine?"
         "Oh no. The Velpa Anx -- maybe you've heard of the Velpa Dora? No? Another word for the same thing."
         "The Anx is a Dora?"
         "The Velpa Anx is a Velpa Dora, yes. Their identity is unitary. The Velpa Dora is a weapon, one of the Weapons Major, and this is the artist's commentary on this weapon."
         "So," said Ida, "Is this thing famous? On Borboth, I mean."
         "Oh, no," said Blue Scorpion. "This is the work of a Secret Artist."
         "Ah," said Ida. "I see."
         She did, too.
         All in all, a very good day. She had avenged the murder of Bobby the Purser and solved the mystery of the supposed Velpa Dora on Borboth, and now -- praise God and sunlight! -- she was free to go home.

The End

Section 3 - click here for section 1

Section 3 - click here for section 2

This story, "A Pilgrimage to Plaka Kalada", made its first appearance when posted on Hugh Cook's website zenvirus.com on 2003 January 17 Friday.