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

by Philip José Farmer

  Bela is on her back now and on the atrium floor, her head driven into the soft folds of the flato.

  Chib gets up slowly and stands for a moment, glaring around him, his knees bent, ready to jump from danger but hoping he won’t have to since his feet will undoubtedly fly away from under him.

  “Hold it, you rotten son of a bitch!” Papa roars. “I’m going to kill you! You can’t do this to my daughter!”

  Chib watches him turn over like a whale in a heavy sea and try to get to his feet. Down he goes again, grunting as if hit by a harpoon. Mama is no more successful than he.

  Seeing that his way is unbarred—Benedictine having disappeared somewhere—Chib skis across the atrium until he reaches an unfoamed area near the exit. Clothes over his arm, still holding the defixative, he struts towards the door.

  At this moment Benedictine calls his name. He turns to see her sliding from the kitchen at him. In her hand is a tall glass. He wonders what she intends to do with it. Certainly, she is not offering him the hospitality of a drink.

  Then she scoots into the dry region of the floor and topples forward with a scream. Nevertheless, she throws the contents of the glass accurately.

  Chib screams when he feels the boiling hot water, painful as if he had been circumcised unanesthetized.

  Benedictine, on the floor, laughs. Chib, after jumping around and shrieking, the can and clothes dropped, his hands holding the scalded parts, manages to control himself. He stops his antics, seizes Benedictine’s right hand, and drags her out into the streets of Beverly Hills. There are quite a few people out this night, and they follow the two. Not until Chib reaches the lake does he stop and there he goes into the water to cool off the burn, Benedictine with him.

  The crowd has much to talk about later, after Benedictine and Chib have crawled out of the lake and then run home. The crowd talks and laughs quite a while as they watch the sanitation department people clean the foam off the lake surface and the streets.

  “I was so sore I couldn’t walk for a month!” Benedictine screams.

  “You had it coming,” Chib says. “You’ve got no complaints. You said you wanted my baby, and you talked as if you meant it.”

  “I must’ve been out of my mind!” Benedictine says. “No, I wasn’t! I never said no such thing! You lied to me! You forced me!”

  “I would never force anybody,” Chib said. “You know that. Quit your bitching. You’re a free agent, and you consented freely. You have free will.”

  Omar Runic, the poet, stands up from his chair. He is a tall thin red-bronze youth with an aquiline nose and very thick red lips. His kinky hair grows long and is cut into the shape of the Pequod, that fabled vessel which bore mad Captain Ahab and his mad crew and the sole survivor Ishmael after the white whale. The coiffure is formed with a bowsprit and hull and three masts and yardarms and even a boat hanging on davits.

  Omar Runic claps his hands and shouts, “Bravo! A philosopher! Free will it is; free will to seek the Eternal Verities—if any—or Death and Damnation! I’ll drink to free will! A toast, gentlemen! Stand up, Young Radishes, a toast to our leader!”

  And so begins

  THE MAD P PARTY

  Madame Trismegista calls, “Tell your fortune, Chib! See what the stars tell through the cards!”

  He sits down at her table while his friends crowd around.

  “O.K., Madame. How do I get out of this mess?”

  She shuffles and turns over the top card.

  “Jesus! The ace of spades!”

  “You’re going on a long journey!”

  “Egypt!” Rousseau Red Hawk cries. “Oh, no, you don’t want to go there, Chib! Come with me to where the buffalo roam and …”

  Up comes another card.

  “You will soon meet a beautiful dark lady.”

  “A goddam Arab! Oh, no, Chib, tell me it’s not true!”

  “You will win great honors soon.”

  “Club’s going to get the grant!”

  “If I get the grant, I don’t have to go to Egypt,” Chib says. “Madame Trismegista, with all due respect, you’re full of crap.”

  “Don’t mock, young man. I’m not a computer. I’m tuned to the spectrum of psychic vibrations.”

  Flip. “You will be in great danger, physically and morally.”

  Chib says, “That happens at least once a day.”

  Flip. “A man very close to you will die twice.”

  Chib pales, rallies, and says, “A coward dies a thousand deaths.”

  “You will travel in time, return to the past.”

  “Zow!” Red Hawk says. “You’re outdoing yourself, Madame. Careful! You’ll get a psychic hernia, have to wear an ectoplasmic truss!”

  “Scoff if you want to, you dumbshits,” Madame says. “There are more worlds than one. The cards don’t lie, not when I deal them.”

  “Gobrinus!” Chib calls. “Another pitcher of beer for the Madame.”

  The Young Radishes return to their table, a legless disc held up in the air by a graviton field. Benedictine glares at them and goes into a huddle with the other teemagers. At a table nearby sits Pinkerton Legrand, a gummint agent, facing them so that the fido under his one-way window of a jacket beams in on them. They know he’s doing this. He knows they know and has reported so to his superior. He frowns when he sees Falco Accipiter enter. Legrand does not like an agent from another department messing around on his case. Accipiter does not even look at Legrand. He orders a pot of tea and then pretends to drop into the teapot a pill that combines with tannic acid to become P.

  Rousseau Red Hawk winks at Chib and says, “Do you really think it’s possible to paralyze all of LA with a single bomb?”

  “Three bombs!” Chib says loudly so that Legrand’s fido will pick up the words. “One for the control console of the desalinization plant, a second for the backup console, the third for the nexus of the big pipe that carries the water to the reservoir on the 20th level.”

  Pinkerton Legrand turns pale. He downs all the whiskey in his glass and orders another, although he has already had too many. He presses the plate on his fido to transmit a triple top-priority. Lights blink redly in HQ; a gong clangs repeatedly; the chief wakes up so suddenly he falls off his chair.

  Accipiter also hears, but he sits stiff, dark, and brooding as the diorite image of a Pharaoh’s falcon. Monomaniac, he is not to be diverted by talk of inundating all LA, even if it will lead to action. On Grandpa’s trail, he is now here because he hopes to use Chib as the key to the house. One “mouse”—as he thinks of his criminals—one “mouse” will run to the hole of another.

  “When do you think we can go into action?” Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, the science-fiction authoress, says.

  “In about three weeks,” Chib says.

  At HQ, the chief curses Legrand for disturbing him. There are thousands of young men and women blowing off steam with these plots of destruction, assassination, and revolt. He does not understand why the young punks talk like this, since they have everything handed them free. If he had his way, he’d throw them into jail and kick them around a little or more than.

  “After we do it, we’ll have to take off for the big outdoors,” Red Hawk says. His eyes glisten. “I’m telling you, boys, being a free man in the forest is the greatest. You’re a genuine individual, not just one of the faceless breed.”

  Red Hawk believes in this plot to destroy LA. He is happy because, though he hasn’t said so, he has grieved while in Mother Nature’s lap for intellectual companionship. The other savages can hear a deer at a hundred yards, detect a rattlesnake in the bushes, but they’re deaf to the footfalls of philosophy, the neigh of Nietzsche, the rattle of Russell, the honkings of Hegel.

  “The illiterate swine!” he says aloud. The others say, “What?”

  “Nothing. Listen, you guys must know how wonderful it is. You were in the WNRCC.”

  “I was 4-F,” Omar Runic says. “I got hay fever.”

  “I was working on my s
econd M.A.,” Gibbon Tacitus says.

  “I was in the WNRCC band,” Sibelius Amadeus Yehudi says. “We only got outside when we played the camps, and that wasn’t often.”

  “Chib, you were in the Corps. You loved it, didn’t you?”

  Chib nods but says, “Being a neo-Amerind takes all your time just to survive. When could I paint? And who would see the paintings if I did get time? Anyway, that’s no life for a woman or a baby.”

  Red Hawk looks hurt and orders a whiskey mixed with P.

  Pinkerton Legrand doesn’t want to interrupt his monitoring, yet he can’t stand the pressure in his bladder. He walks towards the room used as the customers’ catch-all. Red Hawk, in a nasty mood caused by rejection, sticks his leg out. Legrand trips, catches himself, and stumbles forward. Benedictine puts out her leg. Legrand falls on his face. He no longer has any reason to go to the urinal except to wash himself off.

  Everybody except Legrand and Accipiter laugh. Legrand jumps up, his fists doubled. Benedictine ignores him and walks over to Chib, her friends following. Chib stiffens. She says, “You perverted bastard! You told me you were just going to use your finger!”

  “You’re repeating yourself,” Chib says. “The important thing is, what’s going to happen to the baby?”

  “What do you care?” Benedictine says. “For all you know, it might not even be yours!”

  “That’d be a relief,” Chib says, “if it weren’t. Even so, the baby should have a say in this. He might want to live—even with you as his mother.”

  “In this miserable life!” she cries. “I’m going to do it a favor. I’m going to the hospital and get rid of it. Because of you, I have to miss out on my big chance at the Folk Festival! There’ll be agents from all over there, and I won’t get a chance to sing for them!”

  “You’re a liar,” Chib says. “You’re all dressed up to sing.”

  Benedictine’s face is red; her eyes, wide; her nostrils, flaring.

  “You spoiled my fun!”

  She shouts, “Hey, everybody, want to hear a howler! This great artist, this big hunk of manhood, Chib the divine, he can’t get a hard-on unless he’s gone down on!”

  Chib’s friends look at each other. What’s the bitch screaming about? So what’s new?

  From Grandpa’s Private Ejaculations:

  Some of the features of the Panamorite religion, so reviled and loathed in the 21st century, have become everyday facts in modern times. Love, love, love, physical and spiritual! It’s not enough to just kiss your children and hug them. But oral stimulation of the genitals of infants by the parents and relatives has resulted in some curious conditioned reflexes. I could write a book about this aspect of mid-22nd century life and probably will.

  Legrand comes out of the washroom. Benedictine slaps Chib’s face. Chib slaps her back. Gobrinus lifts up a section of the bar and hurtles through the opening, crying, “Poisson! Poisson!”

  He collides with Legrand, who lurches into Bela, who screams, whirls, and slaps Legrand, who slaps back. Benedictine empties a glass of P in Chib’s face. Howling, he jumps up and swings his fist. Benedictine ducks, and the fist goes over her shoulder into a girlfriend’s chest.

  Red Hawk leaps up on the table and shouts, “I’m a regular bearcat, half-alligator and half …”

  The table, held up in a graviton field, can’t bear much weight. It tilts and catapults him into the girls, and all go down. They bite and scratch Red Hawk, and Benedictine squeezes his testicles. He screams, writhes, and hurls Benedictine with his feet onto the top of the table. It has regained its normal height and altitude, but now it flips over again, tossing her to the other side. Legrand, tippytoeing through the crowd on his way to the exit, is knocked down. He loses some front teeth against somebody’s knee cap. Spitting blood and teeth, he jumps up and slugs a bystander.

  Gobrinus fires off a gun that shoots a tiny Very light. It’s supposed to blind the brawlers and so bring them to their senses while they’re regaining their sight. It hangs in the air and shines like

  A STAR OVER BEDLAM

  The Police Chief is talking via fido to a man in a public booth. The man has turned off the video and is disguising his voice.

  “They’re beating the shit out of each other in The Private Universe.”

  The Chief groans. The Festival has just begun, and They are at it already.

  “Thanks. The boys’ll be on the way. What’s your name? I’d like to recommend you for a Citizen’s Medal.”

  “What! And get the shit knocked out of me, too! I ain’t no stoolie; just doing my duty. Besides, I don’t like Gobrinus or his customers. They’re a bunch of snobs.”

  The Chief issues orders to the riot squad, leans back, and drinks a beer while he watches the operation on fido. What’s the matter with these people, anyway? They’re always mad about something.

  The sirens scream. Although the bolgani ride electrically driven noiseless tricycles, they’re still clinging to the centuries-old tradition of warning the criminals that they’re coming. Five trikes pull up before the open door of The Private Universe. The police dismount and confer. Their two-storied cylindrical helmets are black and have scarlet roaches. They wear goggles for some reason although their vehicles can’t go over 15 m.p.h. Their jackets are black and fuzzy, like a teddy bear’s fur, and huge golden epaulets decorate their shoulders. The shorts are electric-blue and fuzzy; the jackboots, glossy black. They carry electric shock sticks and guns that fire chokegas pellets.

  Gobrinus blocks the entrance. Sergeant O’Hara says, “Come on, let us in. No, I don’t have a warrant of entry. But I’ll get one.”

  “If you do, I’ll sue,” Gobrinus says. He smiles. While it is true that government red tape was so tangled he quit trying to acquire a tavern legally, it is also true that the government will protect him in this issue. Invasion of privacy is a tough rap for the police to break.

  O’Hara looks inside the doorway at the two bodies on the floor, at those holding their heads and sides and wiping off blood, and at Accipiter, sitting like a vulture dreaming of carrion. One of the bodies gets up on all fours and crawls through between Gobrinus’ legs out into the street.

  “Sergeant, arrest that man!” Gobrinus says. “He’s wearing an illegal fido. I accuse him of invasion of privacy.”

  O’Hara’s face lights up. At least he’ll get one arrest to his credit. Legrand is placed in the paddywagon, which arrives just after the ambulance. Red Hawk is carried out as far as the doorway by his friends. He opens his eyes just as he’s being carried on a stretcher to the ambulance and he mutters.

  O’Hara leans over him. “What?”

  “I fought a bear once with only my knife, and I came out better than with those cunts. I charge them with assault and battery, murder and mayhem.”

  O’Hara’s attempt to get Red Hawk to sign a warrant fails because Red Hawk is now unconscious. He curses. By the time Red Hawk begins feeling better, he’ll refuse to sign the warrant. He won’t want the girls and their boy-friends laying for him, not if he has any sense at all.

  Through the barred window of the paddywagon, Legrand screams, “I’m a gummint agent! You can’t arrest me!”

  The police get a hurry-up call to go to the front of the Folk Center, where a fight between local youths and Westwood invaders is threatening to become a riot. Benedictine leaves the tavern. Despite several blows in the shoulders and stomach, a kick in the buttocks, and a bang on the head, she shows no sign of losing the fetus.

  Chib, half-sad, half-glad, watches her go. He feels a dull grief that the baby is to be denied life. By now he realizes that part of his objection to the abortion is identification with the fetus; he knows what Grandpa thinks he does not know. He realizes that his birth was an accident—lucky or unlucky. If things had gone otherwise, he would not have been born. The thought of his non-existence—no painting, no friends, no laughter, no hope, no love—horrifies him. His mother, drunkenly negligent about contraception, has had any number of abor
tions, and he could have been one of them.

  Watching Benedictine swagger away (despite her torn clothes), he wonders what he could ever have seen in her. Life with her, even with a child, would have been gritty.

  In the hope-lined nest of the mouth

  Love flies once more, nestles down,

  Coos, flashes feathered glory, dazzles,

  And then flies away, crapping,

  As is the wont of birds,

  To jet-assist the take off.

  —Omar Runic

  Chib returns to his home, but he still can’t get back into his room. He goes to the storeroom. The painting is seven-eighths finished but was not completed because he was dissatisfied with it. Now he takes it from the house and carries it to Runic’s house, which is in the same clutch as his. Runic is at the Center, but he always leaves his doors open when he’s gone. He has equipment which Chib uses to finish the painting, working with a sureness and intensity he lacked the first time he was creating it. He then leaves Runic’s house with the huge oval canvas held above his head.

  He strides past the pedestals and under their curving branches with the ovoids at their ends. He skirts several small grassy parks with trees, walks beneath more houses, and in ten minutes is nearing the heart of Beverly Hills. Here mercurial Chib sees

  ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON, THREE LEADEN LADIES

  drifting in a canoe on Lake Issus. Maryam bint Yusuf, her mother, and aunt listlessly hold fishing poles and look towards the gay colors, music, and the chattering crowd before the Folk Center. By now the police have broken up the juvenile fight and are standing around to make sure nobody else makes trouble.

  The three women are dressed in the somber clothes, completely body-concealing, of the Mohammedan Wahhabi fundamentalist sect. They do not wear veils; not even the Wahhabi now insist on this. Their Egyptian brethren ashore are clad in modern garments, shameful and sinful. Despite which, the ladies stare at them.