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

by Philip José Farmer

  The Shemibob took a cylinder from her bag. Its end shot out a bright light through the transparent material of the window. They pressed close to it to look within. But all they could see was a floor many inches thick with dust.

  The window was smooth and cool, and so was the House around it. The material of which both were made was very hard. After some discussion they agreed that they might as well test the material. If they made so much noise that they attracted the tenant of The House – if there was one – they were not necessarily making a mistake. He or she or it -Deyv hated the ominous sound of that it – probably knew they were here. If it did not, it would find out sooner or later, so why not sooner?

  Deyv thought of several reasons why, but he knew they would not dissuade The Shemibob and Sloosh.

  Sloosh hammered on the window and the wall with the great metal axe. He made neither dent nor scratch.

  The Shemibob said, ‘We can look for a door or we can try Phemropit’s cutting ray. It might be more polite, and politic, to seek a door.’

  They agreed that would be best. First, though, Vana insisted that the vessel should be expanded and attached to Phemropit’s back. She would put the baby in it and so be unhampered by him if fast action was needed. The baby would be safer there, too.

  They did that, and then they started round The House. This took a very long time, during which they counted one thousand and fifty windows before they returned to the one from which they had started. Sloosh had made a small cairn of rocks to mark this.

  The same number of windows as the number of strokes,’ Deyv said.

  Sloosh’s reply to this was inevitable. ‘Must you always point out the obvious?’

  Deyv forbore to mention that they had found no door. Or, at least, nothing that looked like one.

  None of the windows showed anything but darkness and dust. If there were walls beyond, they were too far for The Shemibob’s or Phemropit’s lights to penetrate.

  They went into the vessel to eat. It seemed very cosy there, warm and well lighted, a place to stay for a long time. The baby had awakened and was making small whimperings. Vana nursed him while they talked about what to do next. The Yawtl and the humans, except for Feersh, were all for giving up and getting out of this dreary spooky land at once. The witch was logical about the situation, saying that there was no sense in coming this far just to give up.

  The three dissenters looked at one another, their thoughts evident. Logic might get them killed; emotion was rational in this situation.

  This House has been here for a long time,’ The Shemibob said. ‘It was here when I came to Earth. Sloosh, do you know when it was built?’

  ‘No. But I do know when it emerged from the ground. At least, I presume it did. That would be when The Dead Place first came into existence.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something about this before?’

  ‘You didn’t ask me, and I never thought the time was relevant for bringing the subject up. Now it is.’

  The Shemibob was more than irritated. Deyv had to grin. So it was not only lowly humans who found the Archkerri maddening.

  ‘Well, when was it?’ The Shemibob asked. Under her silvery skin was a bright pink glow.

  ‘You understand that the plants from which I get my data have no sense of time,’ he said complacently. ‘It’s up to the operator of the prism to work out the chronology from the nature of the data and from various referents and comparisons. Also, for the plants to record something they have to be where they can see and hear it. In this case, they didn’t record when The House was built. Therefore, they were not present when it was.

  ‘They first recorded its existence at the beginning of the civilization preceding the last two. This was when The House rose along with a part of a sea-bottom. I assume that all three civilizations knew of it, but their records have been lost. Even the traditions about it vanished among the humans and other sentients.

  ‘Actually, the plants didn’t directly record the House. They recorded the existence of The Dead Place. They must also have recorded the speech of the civilized peoples when these spoke about The House and The Dead Place in the presence of plants. But that does we Archkerri no good, since we don’t know how to interpret any of the languages used.

  ‘The origin of The House and its purpose are mysteries. It’s possible that the three civilizations managed to decode the flying figures. But I wouldn’t know what they read – if anything. In any event, it’s obvious that they never managed to get into The House.’

  ‘If the ancients, with all their wisdom and powers, couldn’t read the message of the flying figures, then we surely won’t be able to,’ the Yawtl said. ‘And if they couldn’t get into The House, how can we? Also, O Shemibob, you surely have had a chance to study the figures during your long Long life? If you don’t know what the figures mean after all that time, how –?’

  ‘Little thief,’ she said, ‘there may be a key to the code with The House. If we can’t get into The House, then perhaps we can see something through a window which will enlighten us. In any event, we will act as if we will be successful.’

  ‘What about you Archkerri?’ Deyv asked. ‘I know you take your time getting around to investigating certain things. But you’ve known for a long long time about this place. Why –?’

  ‘At least fifty expeditions came here. None ever returned.’

  The Yawtl cried, Then what are we doing here? Let’s get out! Now!’

  ‘And you didn’t tell us that either!’ Vana said disgustedly.

  There’s always a first time,’ Sloosh said.

  The Shemibob told Phemropit to use its cutting ray on the window. The tight beam lanced out and stayed on one spot for a minute. Phemropit turned it off then, saying that it did not want to use any more energy when doing so was useless. It was right. The window was still whole and unmarred.

  ‘I just had a strange thought,’ Vana said. She was shivering. Think of when this building was on the bottom of the ocean, in the black and terrible cold of the waters. Did that great gong ever boom out then? Did its vibrations sound along the mud, disturbing only the weird forms that scuttled there? And how many times?’

  ‘They knew just as much about it as we do,’ Deyv said. ’But they probably had the good sense not to go near it.’

  The Yawtl urged that they should leave immediately. It was obvious that they could not get inside, and he was happy about that. Perhaps whatever had eaten up the nosey Archkerri was sleeping now. But who knew when it might wake up? Especially now, when they were making such an uproar.

  The Shemibob said, ‘Look!’

  She pointed upward. They turned to see, against the light in the notch, the first of the flying figures in the sky. After it, in single file, came others, and then the leader was lost in the darkness. Phemropit, at The Shemibob’s request, backed until it came to a slope. It went down this until it was at an angle from which its fan-light fell upon the top of the column. Dimly seen, the first of the figures, a giant #, dipped down, shrinking swiftly, and was swallowed. Those behind it also went into the opening. It could not be seen by the watchers, but the top of the black column must be open.

  ‘Unless,’ Sloosh said, ‘the figures just evaporate there.’

  ‘Hardly likely,’ The Shemibob said. ‘But then this is not a likely phenomenon.’

  ‘If they can get in, we can,’ the plant-man said.

  ‘When did we start to grow wings?’ the Yawtl growled.

  His comment was not far off the mark. The walls went straight up for two hundred feet and then curved out to make a wide overhang. The roof was a squat pyramid, an estimated one hundred feet high. From its tip the column rose for perhaps four hundred feet. It seemed to be about fifty feet in diameter.

  ‘There wouldn’t be an opening in it, anyway,’ Sloosh said. ’The rain and dust would get in.’

  They talked for a long time but could think of no way to enter. Nevertheless, the Archkerri and The Shemibob did not want to give
up. Not yet. After checking the supplies, they estimated that there was enough for the return journey plus seven more sleep-times.

  The others did not like the idea of staying in the dismal and frightening place a second longer than necessary. Phemropit’s opinion was not asked for. It would go along with the majority; one place was as good as another. But then it had not heard the mighty clanging.

  Thunder growled from the direction from which The Dark Beast came. After a while a strong wind arose, and lightning flashed. The wind became a hurricane. Rain, half-frozen, struck them. They went round The House to the side where the wind would be weaker. They huddled inside the vessel and waited for the storm to pass. Finally, they went to sleep, and when they awoke and opened the door, they found that the elements were still raging.

  Moreover, the small valley in which The House stood was in three feet of water. Heavy cataracts were pouring over the edge of the large valley.

  The Shemibob got out and struggled against the wind to the front of Phemropit. There she signalled that it should take them out of the small valley. If the water there was getting deeper, Phemropit should go up onto the mountain slope. She came back dripping wet, her porcupine-like hair bending like riverbank reeds after a flood had subsided. She stationed herself by the door, opening it now and then to check on Phemropit’s progress. It took a long time to get out of the small valley; the water rose almost as fast as Phemropit did up the slope.

  The floor of the big valley was by then three feet under the surface of the boiling flood. Before Phemropit reached the foot of the nearest mountain, it and the vessel it bore were underwater. It slogged on ahead, and presently the tilt of the floor showed that it was on a steep incline. After waiting to make sure they were high enough, The Shemibob opened the door. Phemropit’s fan-light revealed a broad and wide ledge of rock a few feet ahead. She got out and directed the creature to go under the ledge. Here they were safe from the direct blast of the howling wind, but the rain pouring down the mountainside curtained the ledge. They were under a waterfall which made invisible anything beyond it.

  Another sleep-time came. They ate sparingly, since they could not know how long they would be stuck there. Suddenly, the wind began to die, and the rain stopped. When the cataract had finally thinned to a number of trickles, they looked down the mountain. The clouds were losing their grim blackness, and some of the bright sky behind The Beast was silhouetting the peaks to the left. They still could not see well, so they went back into the vessel. In another sleep-time, though, the clouds were gone, and enough of The Beast had passed for them to see the situation.

  Far off, the upper part of the roof of The House reared put of the water.

  ‘There’s no way the water can drain out,’ Sloosh said. ‘It’ll have to evaporate. Meanwhile –’

  ‘We can go in the vessel to The House and get on the roof,’ The Shemibob said. ‘Maybe there are windows on it.’

  The Yawtl and the humans sighed, but they made no useless protests. The Shemibob unglued the vessel from the Phemropit’s back after it had gone down to the waterline. She took out ten more coils of the very thin and light but very strong rope and glued their ends together. After connecting one end to Phemropit and one to the nose of the vessel, she gave the creature detailed instructions. The door was closed, and the passengers settled down for a long ride.

  Now and then the door was opened so they could be sure they were going in the right direction. It was also necessary to make sure that there was enough rope to keep them on the surface. When Phemropit got to the floor of the small valley, there was only about a foot extra. But that was enough.

  The creature, following its instructions correctly, stopped when it was alongside The House. Leaving Feersh with the baby and the animals, they climbed up the steeply sloping roof. Halfway between the edge of the roof and the column were windows as large as those at ground level.

  They braced themselves around one and looked within it. Below, illuminated dimly by The Shemibob’s device, was a gigantic room. The walls were bare. The floor was covered with dust, and here and there, on pedestals, were what they at first thought were rough columns of rock.

  The Shemibob said, ‘No. They were once statues of granite.’

  Nobody said anything.

  She said, ‘Don’t you realize what that means? Look at them. You can still make out the general shapes. Some were statues of human beings. Others were of bipeds of some kind, and some were of quadrupeds. That one there’ – she fixed her light on it – ‘was a bird. You can see that those projections were once wings.’

  Sloosh started to buzz but changed his mind.

  The Shemibob spoke with a note of exasperation. ‘Those were statues carved from granite. But they are eroded. Yet there have been no winds in here. The air, I’m sure, doesn’t even move. Or, if it does, very slowly. And I’ll wager that there has been no change of temperature or humidity in there since The House was built.

  ‘But the hard granite has decayed and has eroded as if it had been subjected to aeons of exposure to sun, wind, sand and extremes of heat and cold.

  ‘Now can you see how old this House is?’

  They were awe-struck.

  The Shemibob had brought along another device from her bag. She unfolded it into a thing which looked like an egg that had been cut in half and the cut part sealed over with a silvery screen. A tripod was folded round the artifact. She put the three legs down against the window with the round end of the egg pointing downward. The discs on the ends of the legs stuck to the transparent material.

  She turned a little dial on the side. On the flat end of the device a picture appeared. She adjusted the dial, and the objects in the centre of the room became large and bright.

  There was a huge block of dark material, the same unchanging stuff of which The House was made. Twelve steps up it led to a large chair, also of the same material. It had a high back and arms covered with designs. Deyv could not see them clearly because of the angle and also because the arms of the being in the chair partly covered them.

  The man sat stiffly, upright, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

  Deyv had a creepy feeling that the man was looking into eternity. Perhaps into infinity.

  He wore a cap of scarlet edged with white fur. Its long tasselled top lay behind his head against the back of the chair. Under it was a broad round face, red-nosed, red-cheeked, red-lipped. The thick eyebrows were white, as was the long hair flowing from under the cap.

  A long and thick white beard fell over a large round paunch to the belt-line. His jacket was scarlet, edged with white fur. His belt was wide and black. His pants were scarlet. His calf-length boots were scarlet with white fur around the tops. On the third finger of his left hand was a simple gold ring.

  ‘It certainly looks life-like,’ Sloosh said. Tt must be made of the same material as The House, though.’

  ‘I am not sure that it’s just a statue,’ The Shemibob said.

  Deyv felt like leaving at once. If he had been alone, he might have. However, if that had been the case, he would never have thought that the figure might be anything other than a figure made by the ancients.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Sloosh asked.

  ‘There’s no dust on it. Also…’

  She swung the device so that they could see the floor in front of the block. There were footprints in the dust. They led away from and to the block.

  ‘Let’s get away from here!’ the Yawtl said.

  Nobody replied, but Deyv wondered if the others felt their skin prickling coldly, too.

  The Shemibob moved the device so that they could see on its screen the thin slab towering behind the block. This bore a gigantic yellow arrow attached at one end to a knob in the centre of the slab. In a circle around the arrow were very small characters evenly spaced. These startled Deyv and added to his unease. They were the same figures as those that flew through the sky. They were in the same order, if the character at the top was taken to be the fi
rst and those that followed were read towards the right.

  A little to the left and below the top character was a knob. The point of the arrow rested against the knob.

  ‘Aha!’ The Shemibob said loudly.

  A moment later, Sloosh said, ‘I know what you mean.’

  Deyv asked what they were talking about.

  ‘The hand and the figures constitute a thrigz,’ Sloosh said. ’Your language doesn’t have a word for it. It’s a machine to tell the passage of time.’

  ‘Be still,’ the snake-centaur said. ‘I’m counting.’

  After a long while, she looked up from the screen.

  ‘One thousand and fifty characters,’ she said. ‘Exactly the number of those that have appeared over the Earth since I’ve been here and probably long long before that. Exactly the number of strokes we heard. These, I presume, came from the time-teller.’

  ‘And the hand has stopped,’ Sloosh said. ‘Does that mean that time itself… no, that couldn’t be.’

  ‘Earth’s time is done,’ she said. ‘Practically done, anyway. What is a few hundred or even a few thousand more circlings of The Beast to the passage of time this instrument has registered?’

  ‘Then,’ Sloosh said, ‘when the hand has passed from one figure to the next, twenty-one million years have passed?’

  ‘Approximately.’

  ‘And this machine strikes each such passage?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But why? What is all this about?’

  ‘That is the type of question which humans have sometimes asked you. And you have told them that the questions are unanswerable. Therefore, foolish.’

  Sloosh said, ‘I am justly reprimanded. My apologies.’

  ‘We heard the final telling of the time. The flying figures have come home to roost for ever.’

  ‘Until the new universe is formed,’ Sloosh said.

  Deyv did not understand this. The Shemibob, however, looked as if she comprehended it too well.

  ‘The flying figures,’ the Yawtl said. ‘They must have come from somewhere in the column. But you’ll never be able to open it and see what mechanism makes them, sends them out round the world, pulls them back, shrinks them so they can enter the column. Even if you could, you still would not be able to learn what they mean.’