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

by Philip José Farmer

  Accipiter: “Anyway, when old Finnegan died, the federal government renewed its pressure to incorporate the construction workers and the company officials as civil servants. But young Finnegan proved to be as foxy and vicious as his old man. I don’t suggest, of course, that the fact that his uncle was President of the U.S. at that time had anything to do with young Finnegan’s success.”

  Interviewer: “Young Finnegan was seventy years old when his father died.”

  Accipiter: “During this struggle, which went on for many years, Finnegan decided to rename himself Winnegan. It’s a pun on Win Again. He seems to have had a childish, even imbecilic, delight in puns, which, frankly, I don’t understand. Puns, I mean.”

  Interviewer: “For the benefit of our non-American viewers, who may not know of our national custom of Naming Day … this was originated by the Panamorites. When a citizen comes of age, he may at any time thereafter take a new name, one which he believes to be appropriate to his temperament or goal in life. I might point out that Uncle Sam, who’s been unfairly accused of trying to impose conformity upon his citizen’s, encourages this individualistic approach to life. This despite the increased record-keeping required on the government’s part.

  “I might also point out something else of interest. The government claimed that Grandpa Winnegan was mentally incompetent. My listeners will pardon me, I hope, if I take up a moment of your time to explain the basis of Uncle Sam’s assertion. Now, for the benefit of those among you who are unacquainted with an early 20th-century classic, Finnegan’s Wake, despite your government’s wish for you to have a free lifelong education, the author, James Joyce, derived the title from an old vaudeville song.”

  (Half-fadeout while a monitor briefly explains “vaudeville.”)

  “The song was about Tim Finnegan, an Irish hod carrier who fell off a ladder while drunk and was supposedly killed. During the Irish wake held for Finnegan, the corpse is accidentally splashed with whiskey. Finnegan, feeling the touch of the whiskey, the ‘water of life,’ sits up in his coffin and then climbs out to drink and dance with the mourners.

  “Grandpa Winnegan always claimed that the vaudeville song was based on reality, you can’t keep a good man down, and that the original Tim Finnegan was his ancestor. This preposterous statement was used by the government in its suit against Winnegan.

  “However, Winnegan produced documents to substantiate his assertion. Later—too late—the documents were proved to be forgeries.”

  Accipiter: “The government’s case against Winnegan was strengthened by the rank and file’s sympathy with the government. Citizens were complaining that the business-union was undemocratic and discriminatory. The officials and workers were getting relatively high wages, but many citizens had to be contented with their guaranteed income. So, Winnegan was brought to trial and accused, justly, of course, of various crimes, among which were subversion of democracy.

  “Seeing the inevitable, Winnegan capped his criminal career. He somehow managed to steal 20 billion dollars from the federal deposit vault. This sum, by the way, was equal to half the currency then existing in Greater LA. Winnegan disappeared with the money, which he had not only stolen but had not paid income tax on. Unforgivable. I don’t know why so many people have glamorized this villain’s feat. Why, I’ve even seen fido shows with him as the hero, thinly disguised under another name, of course.”

  Interviewer: “Yes, folks, Winnegan committed the Crime Of The Age. And, although he has finally been located, and is to be buried today—somewhere—the case is not completely closed. The federal government says it is. But where is the money, the 20 billion dollars?”

  Accipiter: “Actually, the money has no value now except as collector’s items. Shortly after the theft, the government called in all currency and then issued new bills that could not be mistaken for the old. The government had been wanting to do something like this for a long time, anyway, because it believed that there was too much currency, and it only reissued half the amount taken in.

  “I’d like very much to know where the money is. I won’t rest until I do. I’ll hunt it down if I have to do it on my own time.”

  Interviewer: “You may have plenty of time to do that if young Winnegan wins his case. Well, folks, as most of you may know, Winnegan was found dead in a lower level of San Francisco about a year after he disappeared. His grand-daughter identified the body, and the fingerprints, earprints, retinaprints, teethprints, blood-type, hair-type, and a dozen other identity prints matched out.”

  Chib, who has been listening, thinks that Grandpa must have spent several millions of the stolen money arranging this. He does not know, but he suspects that a research lab somewhere in the world grew the duplicate in a biotank.

  This happened two years after Chib was born. When Chib was five, his grandpa showed up. Without letting Mama know he was back, he moved in. Only Chib was his confidant. It was, of course, impossible for Grandpa to go completely unnoticed by Mama, yet she now insisted that she had never seen him. Chib thought that this was to avoid prosecution for being an accessory after the crime. He was not sure. Perhaps she had blocked off his “visitations” from the rest of her mind. For her it would be easy, since she never knew whether today was Tuesday or Thursday and could not tell you what year it was.

  Chib ignores the mortuarians, who want to know what to do with the body. He walks over to the grave. The top of the ovoid coffin is visible now, with the long elephant-like snout of the digging machine sonically crumbling the dirt and then sucking it up. Accipiter, breaking through his lifelong control, is smiling at the fidomen and rubbing his hands.

  “Dance a little, you son of a bitch,” Chib says, his anger the only block to the tears and wail building up in him.

  The area around the coffin is cleared to make room for the grappling arms of the machine. These descend, hook under, and lift the black, irradiated-plastic, mocksilverarabesqued coffin up and out onto the grass. Chib, seeing the IRB men begin to open the coffin, starts to say something but closes his mouth. He watches intently, his knees bent as if getting ready to jump. The fidomen close in, their eyeball-shaped cameras pointing at the group around the coffin.

  Groaning, the lid rises. There is a big bang. Dense dark smoke billows. Accipiter and his men, blackened, eyes wide and white, coughing, stagger out of the cloud. The fidomen are running every which way or stooping to pick up their cameras. Those who were standing far enough back can see that the explosion took place at the bottom of the grave. Only Chib knows that the raising of the coffin lid has activated the detonating device in the grave.

  He is also the first to look up into the sky at the projectile soaring from the grave because only he expected it. The rocket climbs up to five hundred feet while the fidomen train their cameras on it. It bursts apart and from it a ribbon unfolds between two round objects. The objects expand to become balloons while the ribbon becomes a huge banner.

  On it, in big black letters, are the words

  WINNEGAN’S FAKE!

  Twenty billions of dollars buried beneath the supposed bottom of the grave burn furiously. Some bills, blown up in the geyser of fireworks, are carried by the wind while IRB men, fidomen, mortuary officials, and municipality officials chase them.

  Mama is stunned.

  Accipiter looks as if he is having a stroke.

  Chib cries and then laughs and rolls on the ground.

  Grandpa has again screwed Uncle Sam and has also pulled his greatest pun where all the world can see it.

  “Oh, you old man!” Chib sobs between laughing fits. “Oh, you old man! How I love you!”

  While he is rolling on the ground again, roaring so hard his ribs hurt, he feels a paper in his hand. He stops and gets on his knees and calls after the man who gave it to him. The man says, “I was paid by your grandfather to hand it to you when he was buried.”

  Chib reads.

  I hope nobody was hurt, not even the IRB men.

  Final advice from the Wise Old M
an In The Cave. Tear loose. Leave LA. Leave the country. Go to Egypt. Let your mother ride the purple wage on her own. She can do it if she practices thrift and self-denial. If she can’t, that’s not your fault.

  You are fortunate indeed to have been born with talent, if not genius, and to be strong enough to want to rip out the umbilical cord. So do it. Go to Egypt. Steep yourself in the ancient culture. Stand before the Sphinx. Ask her (actually, it’s a he) the Question.

  Then visit one of the zoological preserves south of the Nile. Live for a while in a reasonable facsimile of Nature as she was before mankind dishonored and disfigured her. There, where Homo Sapiens (?) evolved from the killer ape, absorb the spirit of that ancient place and time.

  You’ve been painting with your penis, which I’m afraid was more stiffened with bile than with passion for life. Learn to paint with your heart. Only thus will you become great and true.

  Paint.

  Then, go wherever you want to go. I’ll be with you as long as you’re alive to remember me. To quote Runic, “I’ll be the Northern Lights of your soul.”

  Hold fast to the belief that there will be others to love you just as much as I did or even more. What is more important, you must love them as much as they love you.

  Can you do this?

  About the Author

  Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. A voracious reader, Farmer decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to become a writer. For a number of years he worked as a technical writer to pay the bills while writing. Science fiction allowed him to apply his knowledge and passion for history, anthropology, and the other sciences to works of mind-boggling originality and scope.

  His early novella “The Lovers,” published in 1952, earned him the Hugo Award as “most promising new writer,” and he won a second Hugo, as well as the Nebula Award, for the 1967 novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” a prophetic literary satire about a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. His best-known works include the Riverworld books, the World of Tiers series, the Dayworld trilogy, and literary pastiches of such fictional pulp characters as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the first writers to mash-up these characters and their origin stories into wholly new works. His short fiction is also highly regarded.

  Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2001, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named him the 19th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in the same year.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Lovers copyright © 1961, 1979 by Philip José Farmer

  Dark Is the Sun copyright © 1979 by Philip José Farmer

  Riders of the Purple Wage copyright © 1967, 1985 by Philip José Farmer

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4606-0

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

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