Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  The ridges on Kingbrook’s face shifted as if they were the gray backs of an elephant herd milling around to catch a strange scent. He said, “I’m not blasphemous. But now I think I know how Christ fell when tempted by Satan.”

  He stopped, realizing that he had made a Freudian slip.

  “And you’re not Christ and I’m not Satan,” he said hurriedly. “We’re just human beings trying to find a mutually agreeable way out of this mess.”

  Beaucamp said, “We’re horse traders. And the horse is the future. A dream. Or a nightmare.”

  The President looked at his watch and said, “What about it, Mr. Beaucamp?”

  “What can I trade? A dream of an end to contempt, dislike, hatred, treachery, oppression. A dream of the shadow gone, the wall down. Now you offer me abundance, dignity, and joy—if my people stay within the plastic walls.”

  “I don’t know what will develop after the walls of the cities have been built,” the President said. “But there is nothing evil about self-segregation, if it’s not compulsive. It’s done all the time by human beings of every type. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have social classes, clubs, etc. And if, after our citizens are given the best in housing and food, luxuries, a free lifelong education, a wide spectrum of recreations, everything within reason, if they still go to Hell, then we might as well give up on the species.”

  “A man needs incentive; he needs work. By the sweat of his brow…” Kingbrook said.

  Kingbrook was too old, the President thought. He was half-stone, and the stone thought stone thoughts and spoke stone words. The President looked out the big window. Perhaps it had been a mistake to build such a “futuristic” city. It would be difficult enough for the new citizens to adjust. Perhaps the dome of Bird City should have contained buildings resembling those they now lived in. Later, more radical structures could have been introduced.

  As it was, the ovoid shape was supposed to give a sense of security, a feeling of return-to-the-womb and also to suggest a rebirth. Just now, they looked like so many space capsules ready to take off into the blue the moment the button was pressed.

  But this city, and those that would be added to it, meant a sharp break with the past, and any break always caused some pain.

  He turned when someone coughed behind him. Senator Kingbrook was standing, his hand on his chest. The senator was going to make a speech.

  The President looked at his watch and shook his head. Kingbrook smiled as if the smile hurt him, and he dropped his hand.

  “It’s yes, Mr. President. I’ll back you all the way. And the impeachment proceedings will be dropped, of course. But…”

  “I don’t want to be rude,” the President said. “But you can save your justifications for your constituents.”

  Beaucamp said, “I say yes. Only…”

  “No ifs, ands, or buts.”

  “No. Only…”

  “And you, Governor Corrigan?” the President said.

  Corrigan said, “All of us are going along with you for reasons that shouldn’t be considered—from the viewpoint of ideals. But then, who really ever has? I say yes. But…”

  “No speeches, please,” the President said. He smiled slightly. “Unless I make them. Your motives don’t really matter, gentlemen, as long as your decisions are for the good of the American public. Which they are. And for the good of the world, too, because all other nations are going to follow our example. As I said, this means the death of capitalism, but it also means the death of socialism and communism, too.”

  He looked at his watch again. “I thank you, gentlemen.”

  They looked as if they would like to continue talking, but they left. There was a delay of a few seconds before the next group entered.

  He felt weary, even though he knew that he would win out. The years ahead would be times of trouble, of crises, of pain and agony, of successes and failures. At least, mankind would no longer be drifting towards anarchy. Man would be deliberately shaping—reshaping—his society, turning topsyturvy an ancient and obsolete economy, good enough in its time but no longer applicable. At the same time, he would be tearing down the old cities and restoring Nature to something of its pristine condition, healing savage wounds inflicted by senseless selfish men in the past, cleansing the air, the poisoned rivers and lakes, growing new forests, permitting the wild creatures to flourish in their redeemed land. Man, the greedy savage child, had stripped the earth, killed the wild, fouled his own nest.

  His anger, he suddenly realized, had been to divert him from that other feeling. Somehow, he had betrayed an ideal. He could not define the betrayal, because he knew that he was doing what had to be done and that that way was the only way. But he, and Kingbrook, Corrigan, and Beaucamp, had also felt this. He had seen it on their faces, like ectoplasm escaping the grasp of their minds.

  A man had to be realistic. To gain one thing, you had to give up another. Life—the universe—was give and take, input and output, energy surrendered to conquer energy.

  In short, politics. Compromises.

  The door slid into the recess in the walls. Five men single-filed in. The President weighed each in the balance, anticipating his arguments and visualizing the bait which he would grab even if he saw the hook.

  He said, “Gentlemen, be seated if you wish.”

  He looked at his watch and began to talk.

  Riders of the Purple Wage

  or

  The Great Gavage

  If Jules Verne could really have looked into the future, say 1966 A.D., he would have crapped in his pants. And Z166, oh, my!

  —from Grandpa Winnegan’s unpublished Ms. How I Screwed Uncle Sam & Other Private Ejaculations.

  THE COCK THAT CROWED BACKWARDS

  Un and Sub, the giants, are grinding him for bread.

  Broken pieces float up through the wine of sleep. Vast treadings crush abysmal grapes for the incubus sacrament.

  He as Simple Simon fishes in his soul as pail for the leviathan.

  He groans, half-wakes, turns over, sweating dark oceans, and groans again. Un and Sub, putting their backs to their work, turn the stone wheels of the sunken mill, muttering Fie, fye, fo, fum. Eyes glittering orange-red as a cat’s in a cubbyhole, teeth dull white digits in the murky arithmetic.

  Un and Sub, Simple Simons themselves, busily mix metaphors non-self-consciously.

  Dunghill and cock’s egg: up rises the cockatrice and gives first crow, two more to come, in the flushrush of blood of dawn of I-am-the-erection-and-the-strife.

  It grows out and out until weight and length merge to curve it over, a not-yet weeping willow or broken reed. The one-eyed red head peeks over the edge of bed. It rests its chinless jaw, then, as body swells, slides over and down. Looking monocularly this way and those, it sniffs archaically across the floor and heads for the door, left open by the lapsus linguae of malingering sentinels.

  A loud braying from the center of the room makes it turn back. The three-legged ass, Baalim’s easel, is heehawing. On the easel is the “canvas,” an oval shallow pan of irradiated plastic, specially treated. The canvas is two meters high and forty-four centimeters deep. Within the painting is a scene that must be finished by tomorrow.

  As much sculpture as painting, the figures are in alto-relief, rounded, some nearer the back of the pan than others. They glow with light from outside and also from the self-luminous plastic of the “canvas.” The light seems to enter the figures, soak awhile, then break loose. The light is pale red, the red of dawn, of blood watered with tears, of anger, of ink on the debit side of the ledger.

  This is one of his Dog Series: Dogmas from a Dog, The Aerial Dogfight, Dog Days, The Sundog, Dog Reversed, The Dog of Flinders, Dog Berries, Dog Catcher, Lying Doggo, The Dog of the Right Angle, and Improvisations on a Dog.

  Socrates, Ben Jonson, Cellini, Swedenborg, Li Po, and Hiawatha are roistering in the Mermaid Tavern. Through a window, Daedalus is seen on top of the battlements of Cnossus, shoving a rocket up the ass of his son, I
carus, to give him a jet-assisted takeoff for his famous flight. In one corner crouches Og, Son of Fire. He gnaws on a sabertooth bone and paints bison and mammoths on the mildewed plaster. The barmaid, Athena, is bending over the table where she is serving nectar and pretzels to her distinguished customers. Aristotle, wearing goat’s horns, is behind her. He has lifted her skirt and is tupping her from behind. The ashes from the cigarette dangling from his smirking lips have fallen onto her skirt, which is beginning to smoke. In the doorway of the men’s room, a drunken Batman succumbs to a long-pressed desire and attempts to bugger the Boy Wonder. Through another window is a lake on the surface of which a man is walking, a green-tarnished halo hovering over his head. Behind him a periscope sticks out of the water.

  Prehensile, the penisnake wraps itself around the brush and begins to paint. The brush is a small cylinder attached at one end to a hose which runs to a dome-shaped machine. From the other end of the cylinder extends a nozzle. The aperture of this can be decreased or increased by rotation of a thumb-dial on the cylinder. The paint which the nozzle deposits in a fine spray or in a thick stream or in whatever color or hue desired is controlled by several dials on the cylinder.

  Furiously, proboscisean, it builds up another figure layer by layer. Then, it sniffs a musty odor of must and drops the brush and slides out the door and down the bend of wall of oval hall, describing the scrawl of legless creatures, a writing in the sand which all may read but few understand. Blood pumppumps in rhythm with the mills of Un and Sub to feed and swill the hot-blooded reptile. But the walls, detecting intrusive mass and extrusive desire, glow.

  He groans, and the glandular cobra rises and sways to the fluting of his wish for cuntcealment. Let there not be light! The lights must be his cloaka. Speed past mother’s room, nearest the exit. Ah! Sighs softly in relief but air whistles through the vertical and tight mouth, announcing the departure of the exsupress for Desideratum.

  The door has become archaic; it has a keyhole. Quick! Up the ramp and out of the house through the keyhole and out onto the street. One person abroad a broad, a young woman with phosphorescent silver hair and snatch to match.

  Out and down the street and coiling around her ankle. She looks down with surprise and then fear. He likes this; too willing were too many. He’s found a diamond in the ruff.

  Up around her kitten-ear-soft leg, around and around, and sliding across the dale of groin. Nuzzling the tender corkscrewed hairs and then, self-Tantalus, detouring up the slight convex of belly, saying hello to the bellybutton, pressing on it to ring upstairs, around and around the narrow waist and shyly and quickly snatching a kiss from each nipple. Then back down to form an expedition for climbing the mons veneris and planting the flag thereon.

  Oh, delectation tabu and sickersacrosanct! There’s a baby in there, ectoplasm beginning to form in eager preanticipation of actuality. Drop, egg, and shoot the chuty-chutes of flesh, hastening to gulp the lucky Micromoby Dick, outwriggling its million million brothers, survival of the fightingest.

  A vast croaking fills the hall. The hot breath chills the skin. He sweats. Icicles coat the tumorous fuselage, and it sags under the weight of ice, and fog rolls around, whistling past the struts, and the ailerons and elevators are locked in ice, and he’s losing altitude fast. Get up, get up! Venusberg somewhere ahead in the mists; Tannhäuser, blow your strumpets, send up your flares, I’m in a nosedive.

  Mother’s door has opened. A toad squatfills the ovoid doorway. Its dewlap rises and falls bellows-like; its toothless mouth gawps. Ginungagap. Forked tongue shoots out and curls around the boar cuntstrictor. He cries out with both mouths and jerks this way and those. The waves of denial run through. Two webbed paws bend and tie the flopping body into a knot—a runny shapeshank, of course.

  The woman strolls on. Wait for me! Out the flood roars, crashes into the knot, roars back, ebb clashing with flood. Too much and only one way to go. He jerkspurts, the firmament of waters falling, no Noah’s ark or arc; he novas, a shatter of millions of glowing wriggling meteors, flashes in the pan of existence.

  Thigh kingdom come. Groin and belly encased in musty armor, and he cold, wet, and trembling.

  GOD’S PATENT ON DAWN EXPIRES

  … the following spoken by Alfred Melophon Voxpopper, of the Aurora Pushups and Coffee Hour, Channel 69B. Lines taped during the 50th Folk Art Center Annual Demonstration and Competition, Beverly Hills, level 14. Spoken by Omar Bacchylides Runic, extemporaneously if you discount some forethought during the previous evening at the nonpublic tavern, The Private Universe, and you may because Runic did not remember a thing about that evening. Despite which he won First Laurel Wreath A, there being no Second, Third, etc., wreaths classified as A through Z, God bless our democracy.

  A gray-pink salmon leaping up the falls of night

  Into the spawning pool of another day.

  Dawn—the red roar of the heliac bull

  Charging over the horizon.

  The photonic blood of bleeding night,

  Stabbed by the assassin sun.

  and so on for fifty lines punctuated and fractured by cheers, handclaps, boos, hisses, and yelps.

  Chib is half-awake. He peeps down into the narrowing dark as the dream roars off into the subway tunnel. He peeps through barely opened lids at the other reality: consciousness.

  “Let my peeper go!” he groans with Moses and so, thinking of long beards and horns (courtesy of Michelangelo), he thinks of his great-great-grandfather.

  The will, a crowbar, forces his eyelids open. He sees the fido which spans the wall opposite him and curves up over half the ceiling. Dawn, the paladin of the sun, is flinging its gray gauntlet down.

  Channel 69B, YOUR FAVORITE CHANNEL, LA’s own, brings you dawn. (Deception in depth. Nature’s false dawn shadowed forth with electrons shaped by devices shaped by man.)

  Wake up with the sun in your heart and a song on your lips! Thrill to the stirring lines of Omar Runic! See dawn as the birds in the trees, as God, see it!

  Voxpopper chants the lines softly while Grieg’s Anitra wells softly. The old Norwegian never dreamed of this audience and just as well. A young man, Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan, has a sticky wick, courtesy of a late gusher in the oilfield of the unconscious.

  “Off your ass and onto your steed,” Chib says. “Pegasus runs today.”

  He speaks, thinks, lives in the present tensely.

  Chib climbs out of bed and shoves it into the wall. To leave the bed sticking out, rumpled as an old drunkard’s tongue, would fracture the aesthetics of his room, destroy that curve that is the reflection of the basic universe, and hinder him in his work.

  The room is a huge ovoid and in a corner is a small ovoid, the toilet and shower. He comes out of it looking like one of Homer’s god-like Achaeans, massively thighed, great-armed, golden-brown-skinned, blue-eyed, auburn-haired—although beardless. The phone is simulating the tocsin of a South American tree frog he once heard over channel 122.

  “Open O sesame!”

  INTER CAECOS REGNAT LUSCUS

  The face of Rex Luscus spreads across the fido, the pores of skin like the cratered fields of a World War I battlefield. He wears a black monocle over the left eye, ripped out in a brawl among art critics during the I Love Rembrandt Lecture Series, Channel 109. Although he has enough pull to get a priority for eye-replacement, he has refused.

  “Inter caecos regnat luscus,” he says when asked about it and quite often when not. “Translation: among the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That’s why I renamed myself Rex Luscus, that is, King One-eyed.”

  There is a rumor, fostered by Luscus, that he will permit the bioboys to put in an artificial protein eye when he sees the works of an artist great enough to justify focal vision. It is also rumored that he may do so soon, because of his discovery of Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan.

  Luscus looks hungrily (he swears by adverbs) at Chib’s tomentum and outlying regions. Chib swells, not with tumescence but with anger.

  Lus
cus says, smoothly, “Honey, I just want to reassure myself that you’re up and about the tremendously important business of this day. You must be ready for the showing, must! But now I see you, I’m reminded I’ve not eaten yet. What about breakfast with me?”

  “What’re we eating?” Chib says. He does not wait for a reply. “No. I’ve too much to do today. Close O sesame!”

  Rex Luscus’ face fades away, goatlike, or, as he prefers to describe it, the face of Pan, a Faunus of the arts. He has even had his ears trimmed to a point. Real cute.

  “Baa-aa-aa!” Chib bleats at the phantom. “Ba! Humbuggery! I’ll never kiss your ass, Luscus, or let you kiss mine. Even if I lose the grant!”

  The phone bells again. The dark face of Rousseau Red Hawk appears. His nose is as the eagle’s, and his eyes are broken black glass. His broad forehead is bound with a strip of red cloth, which circles the straight black hair that glides down to his shoulders. His shirt is buckskin; a necklace of beads hangs from his neck. He looks like a Plains Indian, although Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, or the noblest Roman Nose of them all would have kicked him out of the tribe. Not that they were anti-Semitic, they just could not have respected a brave who broke out into hives when near a horse.

  Born Julius Applebaum, he legally became Rousseau Red Hawk on his Naming Day. Just returned from the forest reprimevalized, he is now reveling in the accursed fleshpots of a decadent civilization.

  “How’re you, Chib? The gang’s wondering how soon you’ll get here?”

  “Join you? I haven’t had breakfast yet, and I’ve a thousand things to do to get ready for the showing. I’ll see you at noon!”

  “You missed out on the fun last night. Some goddam Egyptians tried to feel the girls up, but we salaamed them against the walls.”

  Rousseau vanished like the last of the red men.

  Chib thinks of breakfast just as the intercom whistles. Open O Sesame! He sees the living room. Smoke, too thick and furious for the air-conditioning to whisk away, roils. At the far end of the ovoid, his little half-brother and half-sister sleep on a flato. Playing Mama-and-friend, they fell asleep, their mouths open in blessed innocence, beautiful as only sleeping children can be. Opposite the closed eyes of each is an unwinking eye like that of a Mongolian Cyclops.