Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  Openly, he paints the name of his establishment over the mathematical equations that once distinguished the exterior of the house. (Math prof at Beverly Hills U. 14, named Al-Khwarizmi Descartes Lobachevsky, he has resigned and changed his name again.) The atrium and several bedrooms have been converted for drinking and carousing. There are no Egyptian customers, probably because of their supersensitivity about the flowery sentiments painted by patrons on the inside walls.

  A BAS, ABU

  MOHAMMED WAS THE SON OF A VIRGIN DOG.

  THE SPHINX STINKS

  REMEMBER THE RED SEA!

  THE PROPHET HAS A CAMEL FETISH

  Some of those who wrote the taunts have fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who were themselves the objects of similiar insults. But their descendants are thoroughly assimilated, Beverly Hillsians to the core. Of such is the kingdom of men.

  Gobrinus, a squat cube of a man, stands behind the bar, which is square as a protest against the ovoid. Above him is a big sign:

  ONE MAN’S MEAD IS ANOTHER MAN’S POISSON

  Gobrinus has explained this pun many times, not always to his listener’s satisfaction. Suffice it that Poisson was a mathematician and that Poisson’s frequency distribution is a good approximation to the binomial distribution as the number of trials increases and probability of success in a single trial is small.

  When a customer gets too drunk to be permitted one more drink, he is hurled headlong from the tavern with furious combustion and utter ruin by Gobrinus, who cries, “Poisson! Poisson!”

  Chib’s friends, the Young Radishes, sitting at a hexagonal table, greet him, and their words unconsciously echo those of the federal psycholinguist’s estimate of his recent behavior.

  “Chib, monk! Chibber as ever! Looking for a chibbie, no doubt! Take your pick!”

  Madame Trismegista, sitting at a little table with a Seal-of-Solomon-shape top, greets him. She has been Gobrinus’ wife for two years, a record, because she will knife him if he leaves her. Also, he believes that she can somehow juggle his destiny with the cards she deals. In this age of enlightenment, the soothsayer and astrologer flourish. As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

  Gobrinus himself, a Ph.D., holder of the torch of knowledge (until lately, anyway), does not believe in God. But he is sure the stars are marching towards a baleful conjunction for him. With a strange logic, he thinks that his wife’s cards control the stars; he is unaware that card-divination and astrology are entirely separate fields.

  What can you expect of a man who claims that the universe is asymmetric?

  Chib waves his hand at Madame Trismegista and walks to another table. Here sits

  A TYPICAL TEEMAGER

  Benedictine Serinus Melba. She is tall and slim and has narrow lemurlike hips and slender legs but big breasts. Her hair, black as the pupils of her eyes, is parted in the middle, plastered with perfumed spray to the skull, and braided into two long pigtails. These are brought over her bare shoulders and held together with a golden brooch just below her throat. From the brooch, which is in the form of a musical note, the braids part again, one looping under each breast. Another brooch secures them, and they separate to circle around behind her back, are brooched again, and come back to meet on her belly. Another brooch holds them, and the twin waterfalls flow blackly over the front of her bell-shaped skirt.

  Her face is thickly farded with green, aquamarine, a shamrock beauty mark, and topaz. She wears a yellow bra with artificial pink nipples; frilly lace ribbons hang from the bra. A demicorselet of bright green with black rosettes circle her waist. Over the corselet, half-concealing it, is a wire structure covered with a shimmering pink quilty material. It extends out in back to form a semifuselage or a bird’s long tail, to which are attached long yellow and crimson artificial feathers.

  An ankle-length diaphanous skirt billows out. It does not hide the yellow and dark-green striped lace-fringed garter-panties, white thighs, and black net stockings with green clocks in the shape of musical notes. Her shoes are bright blue with topaz high heels.

  Benedictine is costumed to sing at the Folk Festival; the only thing missing is her singer’s hat. Yet, she came to complain, among other things, that Chib has forced her to cancel her appearance and so lose her chance at a great career.

  She is with five girls, all between sixteen and twenty-one, all drinking P (for popskull).

  “Can’t we talk in private, Benny?” Chib says.

  “What for?” Her voice is a lovely contralto ugly with inflection.

  “You got me down here to make a public scene,” Chib says.

  “For God’s sake, what other kind of scene is there?” she shrills. “Look at him! He wants to talk to me alone!”

  It is then that he realizes she is afraid to be alone with him. More than that, she is incapable of being alone. Now he knows why she insisted on leaving the bedroom door open with her girl-friend, Bela, within calling distance. And listening distance.

  “You said you was just going to use your finger!” she shouts. She points at the slightly rounded belly. “I’m going to have a baby! You rotten smooth-talking sick bastard!”

  “That isn’t true at all,” Chib says. “You told me it was all right, you loved me.”

  “‘Love! Love!’ he says! What the hell do I know what I said, you got me so excited! Anyway, I didn’t say you could stick it in! I’d never say that, never! And then what you did! What you did! My God, I could hardly walk for a week, you bastard, you!”

  Chib sweats. Except for Beethoven’s Pastoral welling from the fido, the room is silent. His friends grin. Gobrinus, his back turned, is drinking scotch. Madame Trismegista shuffles her cards, and she farts with a fiery conjunction of beer and onions. Benedictine’s friends look at their Mandarin-long fluorescent fingernails or glare at him. Her hurt and indignity is theirs and vice versa.

  “I can’t take those pills. They make me break out and give me eye trouble and screw up my monthlies! You know that! And I can’t stand those mechanical uteruses! And you lied to me, anyway! You said you took a pill!”

  Chib realizes she’s contradicting herself, but there’s no use trying to be logical. She’s furious because she’s pregnant; she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced with an abortion at this time, and she’s out for revenge.

  Now how, Chib wonders, how could she get pregnant that night? No woman, no matter how fertile, could have managed that. She must have been knocked up before or after. Yet she swears that it was that night, the night he was

  THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE

  OR

  FOAM, FOAM ON THE RANGE

  “No, no!” Benedictine cries.

  “Why not? I love you,” Chib says. “I want to marry you.”

  Benedictine screams, and her friend Bela, out in the hall, yells, “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  Benedictine does not reply. Raging, shaking as if in the grip of a fever, she scrambles out of bed, pushing Chib to one side. She runs to the small egg of the bathroom in the corner, and he follows her.

  “I hope you’re not going to do what I think…?” he says.

  Benedictine moans, “You sneaky no-good son of a bitch!”

  In the bathroom, she pulls down a section of wall, which becomes a shelf. On its top, attached by magnetic bottoms to the shelf, are many containers. She seizes a long thin can of spermatocide, squats, and inserts it. She presses the button on its bottom, and it foams with a hissing sound even its cover of flesh cannot silence.

  Chib is paralyzed for a moment. Then he roars.

  Benedictine shouts, “Stay away from me, you rude-ickle!”

  From the door to the bedroom comes Bela’s timid, “Are you all right, Benny?”

  “I’ll all-right her!” Chib bellows.

  He jumps forward and takes a can of tempoxy glue from the shelf. The glue is used by Benedictine to attach her wigs to her head and will
hold anything forever unless softened by a specific defixative.

  Benedictine and Bela both cry out as Chib lifts Benedictine up and then lowers her to the floor. She fights, but he manages to spray the glue over the can and the skin and hairs around it.

  “What’re you doing?” she screams.

  He pushes the button on the bottom of the can to full-on position and then sprays the bottom with glue. While she struggles, he holds her arms tight against her body and keeps her from rolling over and so moving the can in or out. Silently, Chib counts to thirty, then to thirty more to make sure the glue is thoroughly dried. He releases her.

  The foam is billowing out around her groin and down her legs and spreading out across the floor. The fluid in the can is under enormous pressure in the indestructible unpunchable can, and the foam expands vastly if exposed to open air.

  Chib takes the can of defixative from the shelf and clutches it in his hand, determined that she will not have it. Benedictine jumps up and swings at him. Laughing like a hyena in a tentful of nitrous oxide, Chib blocks her fist and shoves her away. Slipping on the foam, which is ankle-deep by now. Benedictine falls and then slides backward out of the bedroom on her buttocks, the can clunking.

  She gets to her feet and only then realizes fully what Chib has done. Her scream goes up, and she follows it. She dances around, yanking at the can, her screams intensifying with every tug and resultant pain. Then she turns and runs out of the room or tries to. She skids; Bela is in her way; they cling together and both ski out of the room, doing a half-turn while going through the door. The foam swirls out so that the two look like Venus and friend rising from the bubble-capped waves of the Cyprian Sea.

  Benedictine shoves Bela away but not without losing some flesh to Bela’s long sharp fingernails. Bela shoots backwards through the door toward Chib. She is like a novice ice skater trying to maintain her balance. She does not succeed and shoots by Chib, wailing, on her back, her feet up in the air.

  Chib slides his bare feet across the floor gingerly, stops at the bed to pick up his clothes, but decides he’d be wiser to wait until he’s outside before he puts them on. He gets to the circular hall just in time to see Benedictine crawling past one of the columns that divides the corridor from the atrium. Her parents, two middle-aged behemoths, are still sitting on a flato, beer cans in hand, eyes wide, mouths open, quivering.

  Chib does not even say goodnight to them as he passes along the hall. But then he sees the fido and realizes that her parents had switched it from EXT. to INT. and then to Benedictine’s room. Father and mother have been watching Chib and daughter and it is evident from father’s not-quite dwindled condition that father was very excited by this show, superior to anything seen on exterior fido.

  “You peeping bastards!” Chib roars.

  Benedictine has gotten to them and on her feet and she is stammering, weeping, indicating the can and then stabbing her finger at Chib. At Chib’s roar, the parents heave up from the flato as two leviathans from the deep. Benedictine turns and starts to run towards him, her arms outstretched, her longnailed fingers curved, her face a medusa’s. Behind her streams the wake of the livid witch and father and mother on the foam.

  Chib shoves up against a pillar and rebounds and skitters off, helpless to keep himself from turning sidewise during the maneuver. But he keeps his balance. Mama and Papa have gone down together with a crash that shakes even the solid house. They are up, eyes rolling and bellowing like hippos surfacing. They charge him but separate, Mama shrieking now, her face, despite the fat, Benedictine’s. Papa goes around one side of the pillar; Mama, the other. Benedictine has rounded another pillar, holding to it with one hand to keep her from slipping. She is between Chib and the door to the outside.

  Chib slams against the wall of the corridor, in an area free of foam. Benedictine runs towards him. He dives across the floor, hits it, and rolls between two pillars and out into the atrium.

  Mama and Papa converge in a collision course. The Titanic meets the iceberg, and both plunge swiftly. They skid on their faces and bellies towards Benedictine. She leaps into the air, trailing foam on them as they pass beneath her.

  By now it is evident that the government’s claim that the can is good for 40,000 shots of death-to-sperm, or for 40,000 copulations, is justified. Foam is all over the place, ankle-deep—knee-high in some places—and still pouring out.

  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.”

  “Chib’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?”