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

by Philip José Farmer

  When they reached the highway, the woman and the Archkerri whistled some more at each other. Finally Vana stopped and tried to explain to Deyv what was going on. He spread his hands out and hunched his shoulders in the age-old gesture of incomprehension. She shrugged and then started down the road. The thing slowly followed her. Aejip and Jum were even more nervous than Deyv, but they were willing to go wherever he wished.

  When he could stand the suspense no longer, he stopped Vana. He made signs asking her why the thing was going with them. At first she did not understand. When she did, she went up to the Archkerri and pointed at its chest. Or at what might be a chest under the foliage. Then she pointed at her chest and Deyv’s.

  ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that its soul egg has been stolen, too?’

  She must have understood his tone if not his words. She shook her head. Yes.

  His attitude changed somewhat. The thing was no longer a monster. Not entirely, anyway. If it had had a soul egg, then it must be a human, even if it did not exactly resemble one.

  Deyv also conveyed the message to her that he would like to know the creature’s name.

  Vana blew a series of groups of long and short whistles. By then his ear was becoming sensitive. There were five sounds of unequal length. If the shortest was I, the next longest 2, and so on, then its name was… what? It was too hard to figure out at the moment. Besides, it would not mean anything.

  Vana appeared to be thinking hard about the problem. After some brow-wrinkling and lip-chewing, she said, ‘Sloosh.’

  He did not ask her how she arrived at that. She could not have told him, anyway. But she had made some correlation between the sounds of her speech and the thing’s.

  Deyv felt he was getting somewhere, though not very far. The time he had spent teaching her his language was wasted. Now he had to learn hers so he could translate the buzzes of the Archkerri. It irked him to have to do this. Since he was the leader, he should teach them his speech.

  They went on after Deyv had signed to Vana that she should speak to the plant-man as little as possible. It was safe to converse in a low tone. Loud whistles were out. They carried too far. She shook her head and whistled at the thing. It came close to them and buzzed a series of groups in a very low tone. They could talk under these conditions.

  Deyv put himself to the task of speaking her language. Sleeps went by and he learned swiftly, even if its structure was not at all like any of those of the nine tribes. After a while he understood that the Archkerri was not using his own language. It was the Trade Language of the tribes in Vana’s area. The Archkerri had arbitrarily matched certain groups of buzzes to the sounds of the trading language. This enabled the Archkerri to carry on a fluent if simple conversation with the humans.

  Deyv carved a whistle for himself from the leg bone of a dead bird. While he was learning Vana’s tongue, he learned how to transpose it into the whistling. Later, he started learning Archkerri.

  Meanwhile, they found no more footprints or camp-sites of the Yawtl. Deyv would have been worried except for one thing. The Archkerri had its – his, rather – infallible means of tracking the thief.

  Vana said, ‘He is following its ghostly prints.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Deyv asked, turning pale; ’It’s a ghost?’

  ‘No,’ she said scornfully. ‘Can a ghost carry a soul egg? Of course it can’t. The egg would burn it, send it screaming.’

  ‘I never heard of that.’

  ‘Everybody knows that. At least, I thought they did until I met you. What I’m talking about is the ability of Sloosh, of all his people, to see what we humans can’t. He says that every living thing leaves in its path the impress of its form. To him it is a reddish colour which looks vaguely like the thing which left it behind.’

  After some more questioning, Deyv understood that the ’tracks’ were psychic impressions. When he could converse with Sloosh, he asked for more details.

  ‘Yes. What Vana said is true. I feel sorry for you humans. Your world must be very pale and comparatively uninteresting. I not only see what you see – and, I don’t mind saying, much more understandingly – but I see many more things.

  ‘My world is filled with the forms not only of what is but of what has been. It glows with the designs made by these trails, designs of breath-taking beauty and complexity. Of course, that is redundant. I mean, complexity is beauty. Beauty is complexity.’

  Sloosh paused, then said, ‘Vana is mistaken when she tells you that these forms are reddish. I told her that the thief’s prints are reddish. But every form of life leaves its own colour. I see hundreds of hues and shades of every colour. The thief’s impressions are not, as Vana said, tracks like footprints. They are one continuous impression, linked, like a thousand Yawtl standing in line, each one pressing closely against the next. A thousand Yawtl that are yet one. Shimmering with a pale-red fire. Transparent yet clearly visible.

  ‘You and Vana, though, are pale red shot with threads of twisting green, scarlet and black, each a general design yet recognizably individual. Your forms trail behind you like giant caterpillars, getting paler near the end. Which, of course, I can’t see because they drop below the horizon. But if I were to trace you back, I could go for many sleep-times before your impressions faded out.

  ‘It is too bad that you can’t see them. But that is the way things work out. Some forms of life have this ability. Some don’t.’

  Deyv was a little irked by Sloosh’s complacency, his sense of superiority. He did not allow his irritation to show, however. He needed the Archkerri.

  ‘Then we’ll have no trouble catching up with the thief?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said we’d be able to follow his impressions. But he may go somewhere we can’t follow him. Or we may be killed by some beast. Or we may be…’

  Deyv walked away. The Archkerri was too explicit about things that humans took for granted or didn’t say because it was not necessary.

  Nor was Sloosh as superior as he liked to think. For one thing, he was very slow. He either could not or would not walk as fast as his companions. He went at his own pace, a majestic elephantine amble. He ignored the requests of the others to speed up. This had made Deyv nervous for a while because at every sleep the Yawtl was gaining distance on them. However, after some thought, he had calmed himself. Though it would take longer to run the thief down, the Archkerri made its capture inevitable. His presence assured them that they could not lose the trail.

  Still, the time Sloosh spent in finding and eating food continued to be a trial to Deyv. The Archkerri’s mouth was concealed beneath the leaves on the ‘chest’ of the upper body. Finding that out had been a shock to Deyv. It had seemed grotesque and also a little frightening. His grandmother had told him about a monster which was human-shaped, unlike Sloosh, but which had its mouth on its breast, and its diet was confined to human children. As a child, Deyv had been threatened with it when he did not behave.

  Sloosh would eat meat, including the rottenest carrion, when it was available. But mostly he ate fruit and vegetables, and he required great amounts of these. To speed up the search for food, the two humans used to forage the edge of the jungle. They had woven some large baskets from reeds, and they used them to store the fruit. Thus, they would walk faster, feeding Sloosh from the baskets. But collecting the food took much time, too.

  ‘You are quite wrong about the Yawtl stealing my soul egg,’ Sloosh said. ‘We Archkerri don’t have such things. Eggs are for humans only. Indeed, they’re an ancient human invention. I don’t know why the ancients made the soul-egg trees, but they must have had what seemed to them good reasons. My people wear a crystal which Vana’s people call caqghwoonma. It is as large as your head but much better shaped. It’s a prism included within six equal rhombic faces. It can be mined, since it grows underground, unlike the soul-egg trees which grow mostly above the surface. These crystals are rare, which is one of fifteen reasons I was in the area of Vana’s tribe area lookin
g for them.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Deyv said. ‘Your tribe doesn’t live in the same area as her people?’

  ‘I don’t have a tribe. That’s a primitive social unit we Archkerri grew out of long ago. No. I was there to investigate. After a long time-’

  ‘How long a time?’

  Vana said, ‘He appeared when I was a child, shortly after I was weaned. But he left shortly before I did. He couldn’t find any caqghwoonma, and he’d found out everything else he wanted to know. Whatever that was. What I think is -’

  ‘Impatience is the mark of a retarded mind,’ Sloosh said. ’And interrupting a person is a mark of impatience and of a great ego. Let me continue. The crystal rhombohedron is an invention of my people. It shows moving pictures. These are the electrical embodiments of the thoughts of the vegetable world. You see – I hope you see – all plants contain ancestral impressions. And all the units of the vegetable world together constitute one body. One mind, I should say to be exact. Though so far the distinction between body and mind has not been satisfactorily made.

  ‘But I must not give you the wrong idea. We Archkerri are not part of this mind. We’re sentients, therefore individuals, though not in the same sense as you. That is because, though of vegetable origin, we Archkerri are half-protein. If we weren’t, we’d be as immobile as that tree there and dependent upon the radiation from the sky and – but I digress.

  ‘The rhombohedra are our means for communicating, or, rather, I should say, for receiving the “thoughts” or impressions of the vegetable world. If we communicated, they, it, would also have to be sentient. Communication is a two-way gate.’

  What Sloosh said, in essence, was that the crystals could tap and then process the ancestral impressions in the cells of vegetable life. The crystals showed visual interpretations of past and present events.

  Deyv was staggered by this revelation. ‘You mean, if you had your crystal now, you could tell us exactly where the thief is?’

  ‘Not exactly. But the general area, yes.’

  ‘Well,’ Deyv said, ‘if this crystal can show you such events, why didn’t you know the Yawtl was going to steal your crystal?’

  ‘An excellent question. But one characteristic of we Archkerri is that we tend to get wrapped up in certain problems. When that happens, we often don’t notice what’s going on around us. I did see the Yawtl in my crystal, but I didn’t pay much attention. After all, the crystal doesn’t read the minds of flesh people.

  ‘Furthermore, I have to sleep, unfortunately, and the Yawtl crept up on me and removed the neck-cord, which was attached to my crystal. Of course, when I woke up, I knew everything about the theft. A lot of good that did me then.’

  You have no idea why the Yawtl took our eggs and your crystal?’ Deyv asked.

  ‘I could find out if I backtracked the thief and if the backtrack didn’t fade out too soon. That would be silly. It will be much faster to run him down and then ask him. I could also contact my vegetable brothers and find out. But that process would take a very long time. Besides, I don’t have the crystal to do this.’

  The Archkerri then fell into a reverie from which he did not want to be roused. Some part of his mind must have been conscious of the outside world, though. He did not wander off the road. And when he was offered fruit, his hand came out and stuffed it into his mouth.

  Deyv asked Vana why the tribes in her land had not attacked Sloosh when he first appeared.

  ‘We thought he was a demon or perhaps a god or goddess in a strange form,’ she said. ‘By the time we found out he wasn’t, we knew he wasn’t dangerous. Besides, he told us a lot of things which we found interesting.’ She paused, then said, ‘Some of them were frightening. For instance, the world will soon end.’

  9

  She said this so calmly that Deyv wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

  ‘What do you mean? The world will end? How? When?’

  ‘Ask Sloosh. He knows about it. I don’t really understand it.’

  The Archkerri was quite willing to enlighten him. It took, however, a number of conversations before Deyv could visualize what he described. Even then, he was not sure that the pictures in his mind corresponded to reality.

  He told Sloosh this, and Sloosh replied, ‘No one, not even I, can see reality. Our senses filter it to make sense of it. We construct concepts with which we can deal. To see the genuine reality, that is, the whole of it, requires the mind of one who made it. If any Person did make it.’

  Deyv did not understand this, and he was not sure that Sloosh did either. No matter. He was convinced that what Sloosh told him, the section of reality he described, was true. He had the good sense not to tell Sloosh that, since the Archkerri would then have gone into a long disquisition on the nature of truth.

  According to Sloosh, the world had started out as an unimaginably large ball of fire and an equally unimaginable amount of empty space. Really empty, with nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a speck of dust, in it. Or perhaps, Sloosh said, there was only the ball of fire, containing all the matter there was. Which meant that there was only a tiny bit of empty space around it – if any. Then, when the ball exploded, its matter created space as it expanded outward. Or perhaps it expanded inward. Where there was no space, there was no ‘direction’ out or in.

  Whether the space was created as the ball blew out or in, or there was already a vast empty nothing for it to explode in, made no difference. Except to Sloosh and his kind. What did matter was that the ball of matter tore itself apart when it blew up.

  ‘What was the ball before it was on fire?’ Deyv asked.

  ‘I’ll get to that in due time. Please be patient.’

  The material ejected by the explosion thinned out as it flew through space. It cooled, and it became dust. Some pieces of dust were larger than others. These attracted small pieces, and many of them began to form larger bodies. These drew to them still more pieces. Eventually, dust pieces spread throughout the space and among these the bigger ones kept on collecting more matter until the space around them was emptied of most matter.

  Some of these formed new balls of fire, much smaller than the original one but still quite respectable in size. The balls of fire attracted other small collections, some of which fell into the larger. But others escaped destruction by going into orbit around the larger, which were the stars. Many stars formed aggregations which circled around a common centre, and these were the galaxies. And some galaxies had a super-centre around which they circled.

  At the same time as the galaxies were circling a centre, they were travelling outward and the space between them increased. However, the process of forming new stars with their planets went on, so that in the spaces between the stars and the galaxies, new stars and planets were born.

  This took an incredibly long time. While some stars were being born, others died. Their fires went out, and they sped black and cold through the universe.

  ‘Towards what?’ Deyv asked. ‘Wasn’t there a wall they would eventually crash against?’

  ‘Perhaps. But that wouldn’t be a tangible wall. It would be a wall composed of limitations. Of principles.’

  Eventually, the big and small pieces of dust in space were so far apart from one another that they had no aggregate effect on space itself. They could not create more space. So, their force lost, they started falling back. And space itself began to shrink, following the retreating matter.

  Meanwhile, during this process, one of the stars had gathered to its round bosom some children. The planets. One of these was Earth, the planet on which Deyv and Sloosh were now talking. At this time, Sloosh did not want to go into how air and water had been formed on Earth and how life had originated. But he would say a few words now on how life had developed from a simple one-celled creature to a complex creature with a nervous system capable of consciousness.

  Deyv later thought that these few words must have been twenty thousand or so.

  ‘Then mankind was the first
sapient creature?’ Deyv observed.

  ‘Yes. Your kind is much more ancient than mine. And, like the even more ancient rat and cockroach, it’s survived in an essentially unchanged form. Though those two have given rise to new forms which survive along with the ancestral forms.’

  Man had come up from an ape-like creature to his present form. He had gone through savagery to a state in which he had had great power. Sloosh described some of this power, which to Deyv seemed like magic. But, time and again, man had reverted to savagery, only to begin the slow painful climb towards power again. Power was the ability to change one’s environment and to make the tools, social or physical, with which to do this.

  During man’s long stay here, he had visitors from other stars and he had ventured to other stars. He had also made new forms of life or altered those pre-existing forms.

  ‘Three times the Earth would have been utterly destroyed,’ Sloosh said. ‘But, fortunately, during those times man had the power to save himself and his planet.’

  Deyv grasped only a fraction of the explanations of moons, red giants and black dwarfs. He could visualize somewhat, though, how the blazing yellow star that was the sun had expanded into a red giant. Before that occurred, man had moved Earth far out into space. To provide heat and light, man had turned Earth’s moon into a small artificial star. Thus Earth had escaped the vaporization of the sun’s inner planets.

  ‘When the sun went into its helium-burning stage,’ Sloosh said, ‘Earth was moved back into an orbit closer to it. And it was moved out again, this time with another planet as its little sun, when the sun went into its second red-giant stage. Now the Earth was a moon around the planet-become-a-sun. When this burned out, another planet was used, and then another.

  ‘During all this time, man’s civilizations crumbled a number of times. But he was lucky enough to have risen to great power each time his planet had to be saved.

  ‘Long long before this, matter had reached its limits and was falling back towards the centre of all things. Stars died; stars were born. Finally, Earth’s sun became a black dwarf. You can see it as a tiny dark speck against the blaze of the jam-packed stars and gas sheets when The Beast is not up. The Beast, by the way, is a gigantic cloud of burned-out galaxies. It shows up during Earth’s very slow rotation on its axis.’