RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WAGE or The Great Gavage

by Philip José Farmer

  "Let the critics make the analysis, young man!" Ruskinson snaps. "Do you have a double Ph.D., one in psychiatry and one in art? Have you been certified as a critic by the government?

  "Winnegan, who has no talent whatsoever, let alone this genius that various self-deluded blowhards prate about, this abomination from Beverly Hills, presents his junk -- actually a mishmash which has attracted attention solely because of a new technique that any electronic technician could invent -- I am enraged that a mere gimmick, a trifling novelty, can not only fool certain sectors of the public but highly educated and federally certified critics such as Doctor Luscus here -- although there will always be scholarly asses who bray so loudly, pompously, and obscurely that ..."

  "Isn't it true," the fido man says, "that many painters we now call great, Van Gogh for one, were condemned or ignored by their contemporary critics? And ..."

  The fido man, skilled in provoking anger for the benefit of his viewers, pauses. Ruskinson swells, his head a bloodvessel just before aneurysm.

  "I'm no ignorant layman!" he screams. "I can't help it that there have been Luscuses in the past! I know what I'm talking about! Winnegan is only a micrometeorite in the heaven of Art, not fit to shine the shoes of the great luminaries of painting. His reputation has been pumped up by a certain clique so it can shine in the reflected glory, the hyenas, biting the hand that feeds them, like mad dogs ..."

  "Aren't you mixing your metaphors a little bit?" the fido man says.

  Luscus takes Chib's hand tenderly and draws him to one side where they're out of fido range.

  "Darling Chib," he coos, "now is the time to declare yourself. You know how vastly I love you, not only as an artist but for yourself. It must be impossible for you to resist any longer the deeply sympathetic vibrations that leap unhindered between us. God, if you only knew how I dreamed of you, my glorious godlike Chib, with ..."

  "If you think I'm going to say yes just because you have the power to make or break my reputation, to deny me the grant, you're wrong," Chib says. He jerks his hand away.

  Luscus' good eye glares. He says, "Do you find me repulsive? Surely it can't be on moral grounds ..."

  "It's the principle of the thing," Chib says. "Even if I were in love with you, which I'm not, I wouldn't let you make love to me. I want to be judged on my merit alone, that only. Come to think of it, I don't give a damn about anybody's judgment. I don't want to hear praise or blame from you or anybody. Look at my paintings and talk to each other, you jackals. But don't try to make me agree with your little images of me."

  THE ONLY GOOD CRITIC IS A DEAD CRITIC

  Omar Runic has left his dais and now stands before Chib's paintings. He places one hand on his naked left chest, on which is tattooed the face of Herman Melville, Homer occupying the other place of honor on his right breast. He shouts loudly, his black eyes like furnace doors blown out by explosion. As has happened before, he is seized with inspiration derived from Chib's paintings.

  "Call me Ahab, not Ishmael.

  For I have hooked the Leviathan.

  I am the wild ass's colt born to a man.

  Lo, my eye has seen it all!

  My bosom is like wine that has no vent.

  I am a sea with doors, but the doors are stuck.

  Watch out! The skin will burst; the doors will break.

  "You are Nimrod, I say to my friend, Chib.

  And now is the hour when God says to his angels,

  If this is what he can do as a beginning, then

  Nothing is impossible for him.

  He will be blowing his horn before

  The ramparts of Heaven and shouting for

  The Moon as hostage, the Virgin as wife,

  And demanding a cut on the profits

  From the Great Whore of Babylon."

  "Stop that son of a bitch!" the Festival Director shouts. "He'll cause a riot like he did last year!"

  The bolgani begin to move in. Chib watches Luscus, who is talking to the fido man. Chib can't hear Luscus, but he's sure Luscus is not saying complimentary things about him.

  "Melville wrote of me long before I was born.

  I'm the man who wants to comprehend

  The Universe but comprehend on my terms.

  I am Ahab whose hate must pierce, shatter,

  All impediment of Time, Space, or Subject

  Mortality and hurl my fierce

  Incandescence into the Womb of Creation,

  Disturbing in its Lair whatever Force or

  Unknown Thing-in-Itself crouches there,

  Remote, removed, unrevealed."

  The Director gestures at the police to remove Runic. Ruskinson is still shouting, although the cameras are pointing at Runic or Luscus. One of the Young Radishes, Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, the science-fiction authoress, is shaking with hysteria generated by Runic's voice and with a lust for revenge. She is sneaking up on a _Time_ fido man. _Time_ has long ago ceased to be a magazine, since there are no magazines, but became a government-supported communications bureau. _Time_ is an example of Uncle Sam's left-hand, right-hand, hands-off policy of providing communications bureaus with all they need and at the same time permitting the bureau executives to determine the bureau policies. Thus, government provision and free speech are united. This is fine, in theory, anyway.

  _Time_ has preserved several of its original policies, that is, truth and objectivity must be sacrificed for the sake of a witticism and science-fiction must be put down. Time has sneered at every one of Heinsturbury's works, and so she is out to get some personal satisfaction for the hurt caused by the unfair reviews.

  "_Quid nunc? Cui bono_?

  Time? Space? Substance? Accident?

  When you die -- Hell? Nirvana?

  Nothing is nothing to think about.

  The canons of philosophy boom.

  Their projectiles are duds.

  The ammo heaps of theology blow up,

  Set off by the saboteur Reason.

  "Call me Ephraim, for I was halted

  At the Ford of God and could not tongue

  The sibilance to let me pass.

  Well, I can't pronounce shibboleth,

  But I can say shit!"

  Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury kicks the _Time_ fido man in the balls. He throws up his hands, and the football-shaped, football-sized camera sails from his hands and strikes a youth on the head. The youth is a Young Radish, Ludwig Euterpe Mahlzart. He is smoldering with rage because of the damnation of his tone poem, _Jetting The Stuff Of Future Hells_, and the camera is the extra fuel needed to make him blaze up uncontrollably. He punches the chief musical critic in his fat belly.

  Huga, not the _Time_ man, is screaming with pain. Her bare toes have struck the hard plastic armor with which the _Time_ man, recipient of many such a kick, protects his genitals. Huga hops around on one foot while holding the injured foot in her hands. She twirls into a girl, and there is a chain effect. A man falls against the _Time_ man, who is stooping over to pick up his camera.

  "Ahaaa!" Huga screams and tears off the _Time_ man's helmet and straddles him and beats him over the head with the optical end of the camera. Since the solid-state camera is still working, it is sending to billions of viewers some very intriguing, if dizzying, pictures. Blood obscures one side of the picture, but not so much that the viewers are wholly cheated. And then they get another novel shot as the camera flies into the air again, turning over and over.

  A bolgan has shoved his shock-stick against her back, causing her to stiffen and propel the camera in a high arc behind her. Huga's current lover grapples with the bolgan; they roll on the floor; a Westwood juvenile picks up the shock-stick and has a fine time goosing the adults around him until a local youth jumps him.

  "Riots are the opium of the people," the police chief groans. He calls in all units and puts in a call to the chief of police of West-wood, who is, however, having his own troubles.

  Runic beats his breast and howls

  "Sir, I exist! And don'
t tell me,

  As you did Crane, that that creates

  No obligation in you towards me.

  I am a man; I am unique.

  I've thrown the Bread out the window,

  Pissed in the Wine, pulled the plug

  From the bottom of the Ark, cut the Tree

  For firewood, and if there were a Holy

  Ghost, I'd goose him.

  But I know that it all does not mean

  A God damned thing,

  That nothing means nothing,

  That is is is and not-is not is is-not

  That a rose is a rose is a

  That we are here and will not be

  And that is all we can know!"

  Ruskinson sees Chib coming towards him, squawks, and tries to escape. Chib seizes the canvas of _Dogmas from a Dog_ and batters Ruskinson over the head with it. Luscus protests in horror, not because of the damage done to Ruskinson but because the painting might be damaged. Chib turns around and batters Luscus in the stomach with the oval's edge.

  "The earth lurches like a ship going down,

  Its back almost broken by the flood of

  Excrement from the heavens and the deeps,

  What God in His terrible munificence

  Has granted on hearing Ahab cry,

  Bullshit! Bullshit!

  "I weep to think that this is Man

  And this his end. But wait!

  On the crest of the flood, a three-master

  Of antique shape. The Flying Dutchman!

  And Ahab is astride a ship's deck once more.

  Laugh, you Fates, and mock, you Norns!

  For I am Ahab and I am Man,

  And though I cannot break a hole

  Through the wall of What Seems

  To grab a handful of What Is,

  Yet, I will keep on punching.

  And I and my crew will not give up,

  Though the timbers split beneath our feet

  And we sink to become indistinguishable

  From the general excrement.

  "For a moment that will burn on the

  Eye of God forever, Ahab stands

  Outlined against the blaze of Orion,

  Fist clenched, a bloody phallus,

  Like Zeus exhibiting the trophy of

  The unmanning of his father Cronus.

  And then he and his crew and ship

  Dip and hurtle headlong over

  The edge of the world.

  And from what I hear, they are still

  F

  a

  1

  1

  i

  n

  g

  Chib is shocked into a quivering mass by a jolt from a bolgan's electrical riot stick. While he is recovering, he hears his Grandpa's voice issuing from the transceiver in his hat.

  "Chib, come quick! Accipiter has broken in and is trying to get through the door of my room!"

  Chib gets up and fights and shoves his way to the exit. When he arrives, panting, at his home he finds that the door to Grandpa's room has been opened. The IRB men and electronic technicians are standing in the hallway. Chib bursts into Grandpa's room. Accipiter is standing in its middle and is quivering and pale. Nervous stone. He sees Chib and shrinks back, saying, "It wasn't my fault. I had to break in. It was the only way I could find out for sure. It wasn't my fault; I didn't touch him."

  Chib's throat is closing in on itself. He cannot speak. He kneels down and takes Grandpa's hand. Grandpa has a slight smile on his blue lips. Once and for all, he has eluded Accipiter. In his hand is the latest sheet of his Ms.

  THROUGH BALAKLAVAS OF HATE, THEY CHARGE TOWARDS GOD

  For most of my life, I have seen only a truly devout few and a great majority of truly indifferent. But there is a new spirit abroad. So many young men and women have revived, not a love for God, but a violent antipathy towards Him. This excites and restores me. Youths like my grandson and Runic shout blasphemies and so worship Him. If they did not believe, they would never think about Him. I now have some confidence in the future.

  TO THE STICKS VIA THE STYX

  Dressed in black, Chib and his mother go down the tube entrance to level 13B. It's luminous-walled, spacious, and the fare is free. Chib tells the ticket-fido his destination. Behind the wall, the protein computer, no larger than a human brain, calculates. A coded ticket slides out of a slot. Chib takes the ticket, and they go to the bay, a great incurve, where he sticks the ticket into a slot. Another ticket protrudes, and a mechanical voice repeats the information on the ticket in World and LA English, in case they can't read.

  Gondolas shoot into the bay and decelerate to a stop. Wheelless, they float in a continually rebalancing graviton field. Sections of the bay slide back to make ports for the gondolas. Passengers step into the cages designated for them. The cages move forward; their doors open automatically. The passengers step into the gondolas. They sit down and wait while the safety meshmold closes over them. From the recesses of the chassis, transparent plastic curves rise and meet to form a dome.

  Automatically timed, monitored by redundant protein computers for safety, the gondolas wait until the coast is clear. On receiving the go-ahead, they move slowly out of the bay to the tube. They pause while getting another affirmation, trebly checked in microseconds. Then they move swiftly into the tube.

  Whoosh! Whoosh! Other gondolas pass them. The tube glows yellowly as if filled with electrified gas. The gondola accelerates rapidly. A few are still passing it, but Chib's speeds up and soon none can catch up with it. The round posterior of a gondola ahead is a glimmering quarry that will not be caught until it slows before mooring at its destined bay. There are not many gondolas in the tube. Despite a 100-million population, there is little traffic on the north-south route. Most LAers stay in the self-sufficient walls of their clutches. There is more traffic on the east-west tubes, since a small percentage prefer the public ocean beaches to the municipality swimming pools.

  The vehicle screams southward. After a few minutes, the tube begins to slope down, and suddenly it is at a 45-degree angle to the horizontal. They flash by level after level.

  Through the transparent walls, Chib glimpses the people and architecture of other cities. Level 8, Long Beach, is interesting. Its homes look like two cut-quartz pie plates, one on top of another, open end on open end, and the unit mounted on a column of carved figures, the exit-entrance ramp a flying buttress.

  At level 3A, the tube straightens out. Now the gondola races past establishments the sight of which causes Mama to shut her eyes. Chib squeezes his mother's hand and thinks of the half-brother and cousin who are behind the yellowish plastic. This level contains fifteen percent of the population, the retarded, the incurable insane, the too-ugly, the monstrous, the senile aged. They swarm here, the vacant or twisted faces pressed against the tube wall to watch the pretty cars float by.

  "Humanitarian" medical science keeps alive the babies that _should_ -- by Nature's imperative -- have died. Ever since the 20th century, humans with defective genes have been saved from death. Hence, the continual spread of these genes. The tragic thing is that science can now detect and correct defective genes in the ovum and sperm. Theoretically, all human beings could be blessed with totally healthy bodies and physically perfect brains. But the rub is that we don't have near enough doctors and facilities to keep up with the births. This despite the ever decreasing drop in the birth rate.

  Medical science keeps people living so long that senility strikes. So, more and more slobbering mindless decrepits. And also an accelerating addition of the mentally addled. There are therapies and drugs to restore most of them to "normalcy," but not enough doctors and facilities. Some day there may be, but that doesn't help the contemporary unfortunate.

  What to do now? The ancient Greeks placed defective babies in the fields to die. The Eskimos shipped out their old people on ice floes. Should we gas our abnormal infants and seniles? Sometimes, I think it's the merciful thing to do. But I can't ask somebody e
lse to pull the switch when I won't.

  I would shoot the first man to reach for it.

  --from Grandpa's _Private Ejaculations_

  The gondola approaches one of the rare intersections. Its passengers see down the broad-mouthed tube to their right. An express flies towards them; it looms. Collision course. They know better, but they can't keep from gripping the mesh, gritting their teeth, and bracing their legs. Mama gives a small shriek. The flier hurtles over them and disappears, the flapping scream of air a soul on its way to underworld judgment.

  The tube dips again until it levels out on 1. They see the ground below and the massive self-adjusting pillars supporting the megapolis. They whiz by over a little town, quaint, early 21st century LA preserved as a museum, one of many beneath the cube.

  Fifteen minutes after embarking, the Winnegans reach the end of the line. An elevator takes them to the ground, where they enter a big black limousine. This is furnished by a private-enterprise mortuary, since Uncle Sam or the LA government will pay for cremation but not for burial. The Church no longer insists on interment, leaving it to the religionists to choose between being wind-blown ashes or underground corpses.

  The sun is halfway towards the zenith. Mama begins to have trouble breathing and her arms and neck redden and swell. The three times she's been outside the walls, she's been attacked with this allergy despite the air conditioning of the limousine. Chib pats her hand while they're riding over a roughly patched road. The archaic eighty-year-old, fuel-cell-powered, electric-motor-driven vehicle is, however, rough-riding only by comparison with the gondola. It covers the ten kilometers to the cemetery speedily, stopping once to let deer cross the road.

  Father Fellini greets them. He is distressed because he is forced to tell them that the Church feels that Grandpa has committed sacrilege. To substitute another man's body for his corpse, to have mass said over it, to have it buried in sacred ground is to blaspheme. Moreover, Grandpa died an unrepentant criminal. At least, to the knowledge of the Church, he made no contrition just before he died.