Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  “He must have caught her away from the fornixator,” Chib says. “And she must be lonely; she’s not talking to him over fido. My God, she’s fatter than Mama!”

  “Why not?” Grandpa says. “Mr. and Mrs. Everyman sit on their asses all day, drink, eat, and watch fido, and their brains run to mud and their bodies to sludge. Caesar would have had no trouble surrounding himself with fat friends these days. You ate, too, Brutus?”

  Grandpa’s comment, however, should not apply to Mrs. Applebaum. She has a hole in her head, and people addicted to fornixation seldom get fat. They sit or lie all day and part of the night, the needle in the fornix area of the brain delivering a series of minute electrical jolts. Indescribable ecstasy floods through their bodies with every impulse, a delight far surpassing any of food, drink, or sex. It’s illegal, but the government never bothers a user unless it wants to get him for something else, since a fornic rarely has children. Twenty per cent of LA have had holes drilled in their heads and tiny shafts inserted for access of the needle. Five per cent are addicted; they waste away, seldom eating, their distended bladders spilling poisons into the bloodstream.

  Chib says, “My brother and sister must have seen you sometimes when you were sneaking out to mass. Could they…?”

  “They think I’m a ghost, too. In this day and age! Still, maybe it’s a good sign that they can believe in something, even a spook.”

  “You better stop sneaking out to church.”

  “The Church, and you, are the only things that keep me going. It was a sad day, though, when you told me you couldn’t believe. You would have made a good priest—with faults, of course—and I could have had private mass and confession in this room.”

  Chib says nothing. He’s gone to instruction and observed services just to please Grandpa. The church was an egg-shaped seashell which, held to the ear, gave only the distant roar of God receding like an ebb tide.

  THERE ARE UNIVERSES BEGGING FOR GODS

  yet He hangs around this one looking for work.

  —from Grandpa’s Ms.

  Grandpa takes over the eyepiece. He laughs. “The Internal Revenue Bureau! I thought it’d been disbanded! Who the hell has an income big enough to report on any more? Do you suppose it’s still active just because of me? Could be.”

  He calls Chib back to the scope, directed towards the center of Beverly Hills. Chib has a lane of vision between the seven-egged clutches on the branched pedestals. He can see part of the central plaza, the giant ovoids of the city hall, the federal bureaus, the Folk Center, part of the massive spiral on which set the houses of worship, and the dora (from pandora) where those on the purple wage get their goods and those with extra income get their goodies. One end of the big artificial lake is visible; boats and canoes sail on it and people fish.

  The irradiated plastic dome that enfolds the clutches of Beverly Hills is sky-blue. The electronic sun climbs towards the zenith. There are a few white genuine-looking images of clouds and even a V of geese migrating south, their honks coming down faintly. Very nice for those who have never been outside the walls of LA. But Chib spent two years in the World Nature Rehabilitation and Conservation Corps—the WNRCC—and he knows the difference. Almost, he decided to desert with Rousseau Red Hawk and join the neo-Amerinds. Then, he was going to become a forest ranger. But this might mean he’d end up shooting or arresting Red Hawk. Besides, he didn’t want to become a sammer. And he wanted more than anything to paint.

  “There’s Rex Luscus,” Chib says. “He’s being interviewed outside the Folk Center. Quite a crowd.”

  THE PELLUCIDAR BREAKTHROUGH

  Luscus’ middle name should have been Upmanship. A man of great erudition, with privileged access to the Library of Greater LA computer, and of Ulyssean sneakiness, he is always scoring over his colleagues.

  He it was who founded the Go-Go School of Criticism.

  Primalux Ruskinson, his great competitor, did some extensive research when Luscus announced the title of his new philosophy. Ruskinson triumphantly announced that Luscus had taken the phrase from obsolete slang, current in the mid-twentieth century.

  Luscus, in the fido interview next day, said that Ruskinson was a rather shallow scholar, which was to be expected.

  Go-go was taken from the Hottentot language. In Hottentot, go-go meant to examine, that is, to keep looking until something about the object—in this case, the artist and his works—has been observed.

  The critics got in line to sign up at the new school. Ruskinson thought of committing suicide, but instead accused Luscus of having blown his way up the ladder of success.

  Luscus replied on fido that his personal life was his own, and Ruskinson was in danger of being sued for violation of privacy. However, he deserved no more effort than a man striking at a mosquito.

  “What the hell’s a mosquito?” say millions of viewers. “Wish the bighead would talk language we could understand.”

  Luscus’ voice fades off for a minute while the interpreters explain, having just been slipped a note from a monitor who’s run off the word through the station’s encyclopedia.

  Luscus rode on the novelty of the Go-Go School for two years.

  Then he re-established his prestige, which had been slipping somewhat, with his philosophy of the Totipotent Man.

  This was so popular that the Bureau of Cultural Development and Recreation requisitioned a daily one-hour slot for a year-and-a-half in the initial program of totipotentializing.

  Grandpa Winnegan’s penned comment in his Private Ejaculations:

  What about The Totipotent Man, that apotheosis of individuality and complete psychosomatic development, the democratic Ubermensch, as recommended by Rex Luscus, the sexually one-sided? Poor old Uncle Sam! Trying to force the proteus of his citizens into a single stabilized shape so he can control them. And at the same time trying to encourage each and every to bring to flower his inherent capabilities—if any! The poor old long-legged, chin-whiskered, milk-hearted, flint-brained schizophrenic! Verily, the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing. As a matter of fact, the right hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

  “What about the totipotent man?” Luscus replied to the chairman during the fourth session of the Luscan Lecture Series. “How does he conflict with the contemporary Zeitgeist? He doesn’t. The totipotent man is the imperative of our times. He must come into being before the Golden World can be realized. How can you have a Utopia without utopians, a Golden World with men of brass?”

  It was during this Memorable Day that Luscus gave his talk on The Pellucidar Breakthrough and thereby made Chibiabos Winnegan famous. And more than incidentally gave Luscus his biggest score over his competitors.

  “Pellucidar? Pellucidar?” Ruskinson mutters. “Oh, God, what’s Tinker Bell doing now?”

  “It’ll take me some time to explain why I used this phrase to describe Winnegan’s stroke of genius,” Luscus continues. “First, let me seem to detour.

  FROM THE ARCTIC TO ILLINOIS

  “Now, Confucius once said that a bear could not fart at the North Pole without causing a big wind in Chicago.

  “By this he meant that all events, therefore, all men, are interconnected in an unbreakable web. What one man does, no matter how seemingly insignificant, vibrates through the strands and affects every man.”

  Ho Chung Ko, before his fido on the 30th level of Lhasa, Tibet, says to his wife, “That white prick has got it all wrong. Confucius didn’t say that. Lenin preserve us! I’m going to call him up and give him hell.”

  His wife says, “Let’s change the channel. Pai Ting Place is on now, and…”

  Ngombe, 10th level, Nairobi: “The critics here are a bunch of black bastards. Now you take Luscus; he could see my genius in a second. I’m going to apply for emigration in the morning.”

  Wife: “You might at least ask me if I want to go! What about the kids… mother… friends… dog…?” and so on into the lionless night of self-luminous Africa.


  “… ex-president Radinoff,” Luscus continues, “once said that this is the ‘Age of the Plugged-In Man.’ Some rather vulgar remarks have been made about this, to me, insighted phrase. But Radinoff did not mean that human society is a daisy chain. He meant that the current of modern society flows through the circuit of which we are all part. This is the Age of Complete Interconnection. No wires can hang loose; otherwise we all short-circuit. Yet, it is undeniable that life without individuality is not worth living. Every man must be a hapax legomenon …”

  Ruskinson jumps up from his chair and screams, “I know that phrase! I got you this time, Luscus!”

  He is so excited he falls over in a faint, symptom of a widespread hereditary defect. When he recovers, the lecture is over. He springs to the recorder to run off what he missed. But Luscus has carefully avoided defining The Pellucidar Breakthrough. He will explain it at another lecture.

  Grandpa, back at the scope, whistles. “I feel like an astronomer. The planets are in orbit around our house, the sun. There’s Accipiter, the closest, Mercury, although he’s not the god of thieves but their nemesis. Next, Benedictine, your sad-sack Venus. Hard, hard, hard! The sperm would batter their heads flat against that stony ovum. You sure she’s pregnant?

  “Your Mama’s out there, dressed fit to kill and I wish someone would. Mother Earth headed for the perigee of the gummint store to waste your substance.”

  Grandpa braces himself as if on a rolling deck, the blue-black veins on his legs thick as strangling vines on an ancient oak. “Brief departure from the role of Herr Doktor Sternscheissdreckschnuppe, the great astronomer, to that of der Unterseeboot Kapitan von Schooten die Fischen in der Barrel. Ach! I zee yet das tramp schteamer, Deine Mama, yawing, pitching, rolling in the seas of alcohol. Compass lost; rhumb dumb. Three sheets to the wind. Paddlewheels spinning in the air. The black gang sweating their balls off, stoking the furnaces of frustration. Propeller tangled in the nets of neurosis. And the Great White Whale a glimmer in the black depths but coming up fast, intent on broaching her bottom, too big to miss. Poor damned vessel, I weep for her. I also vomit with disgust.

  “Fire one! Fire two! Baroom! Mama rolls over, a jagged hole in her hull but not the one you’re thinking of. Down she goes, nose first, as befits a devoted fellationeer, her huge aft rising into the air. Blub, blub! Full fathom five!

  “And so back from undersea to outer space. Your sylvan Mars, Red Hawk, has just stepped out of the tavern. And Luscus, Jupiter, the one-eyed All-Father of Art, if you’ll pardon my mixing of Nordic and Latin mythologies, is surrounded by his swarm of satellites.”

  EXCRETION IS THE BITTER PART OF VALOR

  Luscus says to the fido interviewers. “By this I mean that Winnegan, like every artist, great or not, produces art that is, first, secretion, unique to himself, then excretion. Excretion in the original sense of ‘sifting out.’ Creative excretion or discrete excretion. I know that my distinguished colleagues will make fun of this analogy, so I hereby challenge them to a fido debate whenever it can be arranged.

  “The valor comes from the courage of the artist in showing his inner products to the public. The bitter part comes from the fact that the artist may be rejected or misunderstood in his time. Also from the terrible war that takes place in the artist with the disconnected or chaotic elements, often contradictory, which he must unite and then mold into a unique entity. Hence my ‘discrete excretion’ phrase.”

  Fido interviewer: “Are we to understand that everything is a big pile of shit but that art makes a strange seachange, forms it into something golden and illuminating?”

  “Not exactly. But you’re close. I’ll elaborate and expound at a later date. At present, I want to talk about Winnegan. Now, the lesser artists give only the surface of things; they are photographers. But the great ones give the interiority of objects and beings. Winnegan, however, is the first to reveal more than one interiority in a single work of art. His invention of the alto-relief multilevel technique enables him to epiphanize—show forth—subterranean layer upon layer.”

  Primalux Ruskinson, loudly, “The Great Onion Peeler of Painting!”

  Luscus, calmly after the laughter has died: “In one sense, that is well put. Great art, like an onion, brings tears to the eyes. However, the light on Winnegan’s paintings is not just a reflection; it is sucked in, digested, and then fractured forth. Each of the broken beams makes visible, not various aspects of the figures beneath, but whole figures. Worlds, I might say.

  “I call this The Pellucidar Breakthrough. Pellucidar is the hollow interior of our planet, as depicted in a now forgotten fantasy-romance of the twentieth-century writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the immortal Tarzan.”

  Ruskinson moans and feels faint again. “Pellucid! Pellucidar! Luscus, you punning exhumist bastard!”

  “Burroughs’ hero penetrated the crust of Earth to discover another world inside. This was, in some ways, the reverse of the exterior, continents where the surface seas are, and vice versa. Just so, Winnegan has discovered an inner world, the obverse of the public image Everyman projects. And, like Burroughs’ hero, he has returned with a stunning narrative of psychic dangers and exploration.

  “And just as the fictional hero found his Pellucidar to be populated with stone-age men and dinosaurs, so Winnegan’s world is, though absolutely modern in one sense, archaic in another. Abysmally pristine. Yet, in the illumination of Winnegan’s world, there is an evil and inscrutable patch of blackness, and that is paralleled in Pellucidar by the tiny fixed moon which casts a chilling and unmoving shadow.

  “Now, I did intend that the ordinary ‘pellucid’ should be part of Pellucidar. Yet ‘pellucid’ means ‘reflecting light evenly from all surfaces’ or ‘admitting maximum passage of light without diffusion or distortion.’ Winnegan’s paintings do just the opposite. But—under the broken and twisted light, the acute observer can see a primeval luminosity, even and straight. This is the light that links all the fractures and multilevels, the light I was thinking of in my earlier discussion of the ‘Age of the Plugged-In Man’ and the polar bear.

  “By intent scrutiny, a viewer may detect this, feel, as it were, the photonic fremitus of the heartbeat of Winnegan’s world.”

  Ruskinson almost faints. Luscus’ smile and black monocle make him look like a pirate who has just taken a Spanish galleon loaded with gold.

  Grandpa, still at the scope, says, “And there’s Maryam bint Yusuf, the Egyptian backwoodswoman you were telling me about. Your Saturn, aloof, regal, cold, and wearing one of those suspended whirling manycolored hats that’re all the rage. Saturn’s rings? Or a halo?”

  “She’s beautiful, and she’d make a wonderful mother for my children,” Chib says.

  “The chick of Araby. Your Saturn has two moons, mother and aunt. Chaperones! You say she’d make a good mother! How good a wife! Is she intelligent?”

  “She’s as smart at Benedictine.”

  “A dumbshit then. You sure can pick them. How do you know you’re in love with her? You’ve been in love with twenty women in the last six months.”

  “I love her. This is it.”

  “Until the next one. Can you really love anything but your painting? Benedictine’s going to have an abortion, right?”

  “Not if I can talk her out of it,” Chib says. “To tell the truth, I don’t even like her any more. But she’s carrying my child.”

  “Let me look at your pelvis. No, you’re male. For a moment, I wasn’t sure, you’re so crazy to have a baby.”

  “A baby is a miracle to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

  “It beats a mouse. But don’t you know that Uncle Sam has been propagandizing his heart out to cut down on propagation? Where’ve you been all your life?”

  “I got to go, Grandpa.”

  Chib kisses the old man and returns to his room to finish his latest painting. The door still refuses to recognize him, and he calls the gummint repair shop, only to be told that all technicians are at the
Folk Festival. He leaves the house in a red rage. The bunting and balloons are waving and bobbing in the artificial wind, increased for this occasion, and an orchestra is playing by the lake.

  Through the scope, Grandpa watches him walk away.

  “Poor devil! I ache for his ache. He wants a baby, and he is ripped up inside because that poor devil Benedictine is aborting their child. Part of his agony, though he doesn’t know it, is identification with the doomed infant. His own mother has had innumerable—well, quite a few—abortions. But for the grace of God, he would have been one of them, another nothingness. He wants this baby to have a chance, too. But there is nothing he can do about it, nothing.

  “And there is another feeling, one which he shares with most of humankind. He knows he’s screwed up his life, or something has twisted it. Every thinking man and woman knows this. Even the smug and dimwitted realize this unconsciously. But a baby, that beautiful being, that unsmirched blank tablet, unformed angel, represents a new hope. Perhaps it won’t screw up. Perhaps it’ll grow up to be a healthy confident reasonable good-humored unselfish loving man or woman. ‘It won’t be like me or my next-door neighbor,’ the proud, but apprehensive, parent swears.

  “Chib thinks this and swears that his baby will be different. But, like everybody else, he’s fooling himself. A child has one father and mother, but it has trillions of aunts and uncles. Not only those that are its contemporaries; the dead, too. Even if Chib fled into the wilderness and raised the infant himself, he’d be giving it his own unconscious assumptions. The baby would grow up with beliefs and attitudes that the father was not even aware of. Moreover, being raised in isolation, the baby would be a very peculiar human being indeed.

  “And if Chib raises the child in this society, it’s inevitable that it will accept at least part of the attitudes of its playmates, teachers, and so on ad nauseam.