The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  ‘After what?’

  ‘Later. Ah, there’s Kuto.’

  In the waiting room, Hal paced back and forth and puffed Merciful Seraphim out in chains of smoke. Fobo sat on a chair and rubbed his bald pate and the thick golden corkscrew fuzz on the back of his head.

  ‘All of this might have been avoided,’ he said unhappily. ‘If I had known the lalitha was living with you, I might have guessed why you wanted the Easyglow. Though not necessarily so. Anyway, I didn’t find out until two days ago that she was in your apartment. And I was too busy with Project Earthman to think much about her.’

  ‘Project Earthman?’ said Hal. ‘What’s that?’

  Fobo’s V-in-V lips parted in a smile to reveal the sharp serrated ridges of bone.

  ‘I can’t tell you now because your colleagues on the Gabriel might, just possibly, learn about it from you before it takes effect. However, I think I can safely tell you that we know about your plan for spreading the deadly globin-locking molecule through our atmosphere.’

  ‘There was a time when I would have been horrified to learn that,’ Hal said. ‘But now it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You don’t want to know how we found out about it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Hal said dully.

  ‘When you asked us for samples of blood, you aroused our suspicion.’

  He tapped the end of his absurdly long nose.

  ‘We can’t read your thoughts, of course. But concealed in this flesh are two antennae. They are very sensitive; evolution has not dulled our sense of smell as it has among you Terrans. They allow us to detect, through odor, very slight changes in the metabolism of others. When we were asked by one of your emissaries to donate blood for their scientific research, we smelled a—shall I call it furtive?—emanation. We finally did give you the blood. But it was that of a barnyard creature which uses copper in its blood cells. We wogs use magnesium as the oxygen-carrying element in our blood cells.’

  ‘Our virus is useless!’

  ‘Yes. Of course, in time, when you’d learned to read our writing and got hold of our textbooks, you’d have discovered the truth. But before that happened it would be too late, I trust, hope, and pray, for the truth to be of any importance or consequence.

  ‘Meanwhile, we’ve determined just what you were up to. I’m sorry to say that we had to use force to do it, but since our survival was at stake and you Earthmen were the aggressor, the means justified the ends. A week ago we finally found an opportunity to catch a biochemist and his gapt while they were visiting a laboratory in the college. We injected a drug and hypnotized them. It was difficult getting the truth out of them but only because of the language barrier. However, I’ve learned a certain amount of American.

  ‘We were horrified. But not really surprised. In fact, because we suspected something was afoot that we wouldn’t like, and from the very first contact, we were ready to take action. So, from the first day your ship landed, we’ve been busy. The vessel, as you know, is directly—’

  ‘Why didn’t you hypnotize me?’ Hal said. ‘You could have done it easily and a long time ago.’

  ‘Because we doubted that you’d be privy to anything that had to do with our blood. Anyway, we needed someone who had necessary technical knowledge. However, we’ve been watching you, though not so successfully, since you managed to sneak in the lalitha past us.’

  ‘How did you find out about Jeannette?’ Hal said. ‘And may I see her?’

  ‘I am sorry; I must say no to your second question,’ said Fobo. ‘As for the first, it was not until two days ago that we managed to develop a listening device sensitive enough to justify installing it in your rooms. As you know, we are far behind you in some departments.’

  ‘I searched the puka every day for a long time,’ said Hal. ‘Then, when I learned of the stage of development yi your electronics, I quit.’

  ‘Meanwhile, our scientists have been busy,’ said Fobo. The visit of you Earthmen has stimulated us to research in several fields.’

  A nurse entered and said, ‘Phone, Doctor.’

  Fobo left.

  Yarrow paced back and forth and smoked another cigarette. Within a minute, Fobo returned.

  He said, ‘We’re going to have company. One of my colleagues, who is watching the ship, tells me Macneff and two Uzzites left in a gig. They should be arriving at :he hospital any second now.’

  Yarrow stopped in midstride. His jaw dropped. ‘Here? How’d they find out?’

  ‘I imagine they have means about which they failed to inform you. Don’t be afraid.’

  Hal stood motionless. The cigarette, unnoticed, burned until it seared his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it beneath his sole.

  Boot heels clicked in the corridor.

  Three men entered. One was a tall and gaunt ghost—Macneff, the Archurielite. The others were short and broad-shouldered and clad in black. Their meaty hands, though empty, were hooked, ready to dart into their pockets. Their heavy-lidded eyes stabbed at Fobo and then at Hal.

  Macneff strode up to the joat. His pale blue eyes glared; his lipless mouth was drawn back in a skull’s smile.

  ‘You unspeakable degenerate!’ he shouted.

  His arm flashed, and the whip, jerked out of his belt, cracked. Thin red marks appeared on Yarrow’s white face and began oozing blood.

  ‘You will be taken back to Earth in chains and there exhibited as an example of the worst pervert, traitor, and—and—!’

  He drooled, unable to find words.

  ‘You—who have passed the Elohimeter, who are supposed to be so pure—you have lusted after and lain with an insect!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Yes. With a thing that is even lower than a beast of the field! What even Moses did not think of when he forbade union between man and beast, what even the Forerunner could not have guessed when he affirmed the law and set the utmost penalty for it—you have done! You, Hal Yarrow, the pure, the lamedh-wearer!’

  Fobo rose and said in a deep voice, ‘Might I suggest and stress that you are not quite right in your zoological classification? It is not the class of Insecta but the class of the Chordata pseudarthropoda, or words to that effect.’

  Hal said, ‘What?’ He could not think.

  The wog growleld, ‘Shut up. Let me talk.’

  He swung to face Macneff. ‘You know about her?’

  ‘You are shib that I know her! Yarrow thought he was getting away with something. But, no matter how clever these unrealists are, they’re always tripped up. In this case, it was his asking Turnboy about those Frenchmen that fled Earth. Turnboy, who is very zealous in his attitude toward the Sturch, reported the conversation. It lay among my papers for quite a while. When I came across it, I turned it over to the psychologists. They told me that the joat’s question was a deviation from the pattern expected of him; a thing totally irrelevent unless it was connected to something we didn’t know about him.

  ‘Moreover, his refusal to grow a beard was enough to make us suspicious. A man was put on his trail. He saw Yarrow buying twice the groceries he should have. Also, when you wogs learned the tobacco habit from us and began making cigarettes too, he bought them from you. The conclusion was obvious. He had a female in his apartment.

  ‘We didn’t think it’d be a wog female, for she wouldn’t have to stay hidden. Therefore, she must be human. But we couldn’t imagine how she got here on Ozagen. It was impossible for him to have stowed her away on the Gabriel. She must either have come here in a different ship or be descended from people who had.

  ‘It was Yarrow’s talk with Turnboy that furnished the clue. Obviously, the French had landed here and she was a descendant. We didn’t know how the joat had found her. It wasn’t important. We’ll find out, anyhow.’

  ‘You’re due to find out some other things, too,’ Fobo said calmly. ‘How did you discover she wasn’t human?’

  Yarrow muttered, ‘I’ve got to sit down.’

  19

  He swayed to the
wall and sank into a chair. One of the Uzzites started to move toward him. Macneff waved the man back and said, Turnboy got a wog to read to him a book on the history of man on Ozagen. He came across so many references to the lalitha that the suspicion was bound to rise that the girl might be the one.

  ‘Last week one of the wog physicians, while talking to Turnboy, mentioned that he had once examined a lalitha. Later, he said, she had run away. It wasn’t hard for us to guess where she was hiding!’

  ‘My boy,’ said Fobo, turning to Hal, ‘didn’t you read We’ enai’s book?’

  Hal shook his head. ‘We started it, but Jeannette mislaid it.’

  ‘And doubtless saw to it that you had other things to think of … they are good at diverting a man’s mind. Why not? That is their purpose in life.

  ‘Hal, I’ll explain. The lalitha are the highest example of mimetic parasitism known. Also, they are unique among sentient beings. Unique in that all are female.

  ‘If you’d read on in We’enai, you’d have found that fossil evidence shows that about the time that Ozagenian man was still an insectivorous marmoset-like creature, he had in his family group not only his own females but the females of another phylum. These animals looked and probably stank enough like the females of prehomo marmoset to be able to live and mate with them. They seemed mammalian, but dissection would have indicated their pseudoarthropodal ancestry.

  ‘It’s reasonable to suppose that these precursors of the lalitha were man’s parasites long before the marmosetoid stage. They may have met him when he first crawled out of the sea. Originally bisexual, they became female. And they adapted their shape, through an unknown evolutionary process, to that of the reptile’s and primitive mammal’s. And so on.

  ‘What we do know is that the lalitha was Nature’s most amazing experiment in parasitism and parallel evolution. As man metamorphosed into higher forms, so the lalitha kept pace with him. All female, mind you, depending upon the male of another phylum for the continuance of the species.

  ‘It is astonishing the way they become integrated into the prehuman societies, the pithecanthropoid and neanderthaloid steps. Only when Homo sapiens developed did their troubles begin. Some families and tribes accepted them; others killed them. So they resorted to artifice and disguised themselves as human women. A thing not hard to do—unless they became pregnant.

  ‘In which case, they died.’

  Hal groaned and put his hands over his face.

  ‘Painful but real, as our acquaintance Macneff would say,’ said Fobo. ‘Of course—such a condition required a secret sorority. In those societies where the lalitha was forced to camouflage, she would, once pregnant, have to leave. And perish in some hidden place among her kind, who would then take care of the nymphs’—here Hal shuddered—’until they were able to go into human cultures. Or else be introduced as foundlings or changelings.

  ‘You’ll find quite a tribal lore about them—fables and myths make them central or peripheral characters quite frequently. They were regarded as witches, demons, or worse.

  ‘With the introduction of alcohol in primitive times, a change for the better came to the lalitha. Alcohol made them sterile. At the same time, barring accident, disease, or murder, it made them immortal.’

  Hal took his hands off his face. ‘You—you mean Jeannette would have lived—forever? That I cost her—that?’

  ‘She could have lived many thousands of years. We know that some did. What’s more, they did not suffer physical deterioration but always remained at the physiological age of twenty-five. Let me explain all this. In due order. Some of what I’m going to tell you will distress you. But it must be said.

  ‘The long lives of the lalitha resulted in their being worshipped as goddesses. Sometimes, they lived so long they survived the downfall of mighty nations that had been small tribes when the lalitha first joined their groups. The lalitha, of course, became the repositories of wisdom, wealth, and power. Religions were established in which the lalitha was the immortal goddess, and the ephemeral kings and priests were her lovers.

  ‘Some cultures outlawed the lalitha. But these either directed the nations they ruled into conquering the people that rejected them or else infiltrated and eventually ruled as powers behind the throne. Being always very beautiful, they became the wives and mistresses of the most influential men. They competed with the human female and beat them at their own game, hands down. In the lalitha, Nature wrought the complete female.

  ‘And so they gained mastery over their lovers. But not over themselves. Though they belonged to a secret society in the beginning, they soon enough split up. They began to identify themselves with the nations they ruled and to use their countries against the others. Moreover, their long lives resulted in younger lalitha becoming impatient. Result: assassinations, struggles for power, and so on.

  ‘Also, their influence was technologically too stabilizing. They tried to keep the status quo in every aspect of culture, and as a result the human cultures had a tendency to eliminate all new and progressive ideas and the men that espoused them.’

  Fobo paused, then said, ‘You must realize that most of this is speculative. It’s based largely on what the very few human natives we’ve captured in the jungle have told us. However, we recently discovered some pictographs in a long-buried temple that gave us additional information. So we think our reconstruction of the history of the lalitha is valid.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Jeannette didn’t have to run away from us. After we’d learned all we could from her, we’d have returned her to her family. We told her we would, but she didn’t believe us.’

  A wog nurse came out of the operating room and said something to the empathist in a low voice.

  Macneff walked by her and obviously tried to eavesdrop. But as the nurse was speaking in Ozagenian, which he did not understand, he continued pacing back and forth. Hal wondered why he, Hal, had not been dragged away at once, why the priest had waited to hear Fobo out. Then, a flash of insight told Hal that Macneff wanted him to hear all about Jeannette and realize the enormity of his deeds.

  The nurse went back into the operating room. The Archurielite said loudly, ‘Is the beast of the fields dead yet?’

  Hal shook as if he had been struck when he heard the word dead. But Fobo ignored the priest.

  He spoke to Hal. ‘Your larv—that is, your children, have been removed. They are in an incubator. They are …’ he hesitated—’eating well. They will live.’

  Hal knew from his tone that it was no use asking about the mother.

  Big tears rolled from Fobo’s round blue eyes.

  ‘You won’t understand what has happened, Hal, unless you comprehend the lalitha’s unique method of reproduction. Three things the lalitha needs to reproduce. One thing must precede the other two. That primary event is to be infected at the age of puberty by another adult lalitha. This infection is needed to transmit genes.’

  ‘Genes?’ said Hal. Even in his shock, he could feel interest and amazement at what Fobo was telling him.

  ‘Yes. Since lalitha receive no genes from the human males, they must exchange hereditary material between each other. Yet—they must use man as a means.

  ‘Allow and permit me to elucidate. An adult lalitha has three so-called banks of genes. Two are duplicates of each other’s chromosomal stuff.

  ‘The third, I will explain in a moment.

  ‘A lalitha’s uterus contains ova, the genes of which are duplicated in the bodies of microscopic wrigglers formed in the giant salivary glands in a lalitha’s mouth. These wrigglers—salivary ova—are continually released by the adult.

  ‘The adult lalitha pass genes by means of these invisible creatures; they infect each other as if the carriers of heredity were diseases. They cannot escape it; a kiss, a sneeze, a touch, will do it.

  ‘Preadolescent lalitha, however, seem to have a natural immunity against being infected by these wrigglers.

  ‘The adult lalitha, once infected, then builds up an
tibodies against reception of salivary ova from a second lalitha.

  ‘Meanwhile, the first wrigglers she is exposed to have made their way through the bloodstream, the intestinal tract, the skin, boring, floating, until they arrive at the uterus of the host.

  ‘There, the salivary ovum unites with the uterine ovum. Fusion of the two produces a zygote. At this point, fertilization is suspended. True, all genetic data needed to produce a new lalitha is provided. All except the genes for the specific features of the face of the baby. This data will be given by the male human lover of the lalitha. Not, however, until the conjunction of two more events.

  ‘These two must occur simultaneously. One is excitation by orgasm. The other is stimulation of the photo-kinetic nerves. One cannot take place without the other. Neither can the last two come about unless the first happens. Apparently, fusion of the two ova causes a chemical change in the lalitha which then makes her capable of orgasm and fully develops the photokinetic nerves.’

  Fobo paused and cocked his head as if he were listening for something outside. Hal, who knew from familiarity with the wogs what their facial expressions meant, felt that Fobo was waiting for something important to happen. Very important. And, whatever it was, it involved the Earthmen.

  Suddenly, he thrilled to the knowledge that he was on the wogs’ side! He was no longer an Earthman, or, at least, not a Haijac.

  ‘Are you sufficiently confused?’ said Fobo.

  ‘Sufficiently,’ Hal replied. ‘For instance, I have never heard of the photokinetic nerves.’

  ‘The photokinetic nerves are the exclusive property of the lalitha. They run from the retina of the eye, along with the optic nerves, to the brain. But the photokinetic nerves descend the spinal column and leave its base to enter the uterus. The uterus is not that of the human female. Do not even compare them. You might say that the lalitha uterus is the darkroom of the womb. Where the photograph of the father’s face is biologically developed. And, in a manner of speaking, attached to the daughters’ faces.

  ‘This is done by means of photogenes. These are in the third bank of which I spoke. You see, during intercourse, at the moment of orgasm, an electrochemical change, or series of changes, takes place in that nerve. By the light that the lalitha requires during intercourse if she is to experience orgasm, the face of the male is photographed. An arc-reflex makes it impossible for her to close her eyes at that time. Moreover, if she throws her arm over her eyes, she at once loses the orgasm.