Riders of the Purple Wage Read online

  UFO VS. IRS!

  “Laurel and Hardy!” Gnatcatcher screamed. “What?” the three agents said in unison.

  Gnatcatcher did not explain. He roared. “Get me the White House! And get another court order! We’re invading the house!”

  “The White House, sir?” Smith said faintly.

  “No, you imbecile! The house of Agrafan and Netter! Have our men armed, ready to shoot the first sign of resistance! Can you get hold of bazookas?”

  Other Tor books

  by Philip José Farmer

  The Cache

  Dayworld Breakup

  Father to the Stars

  Greatheart Silver

  The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

  Red Orc’s Rage

  Stations of the Nightmare

  Time’s Last Gift

  Traitor to the Living

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that the book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WAGE

  Copyright © 1992 by Philip José Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates. Inc.

  175 Fifth Ave.

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  TOR® is a register trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Cover art by David Hardy, used by permission of Luserke Agency

  ISBN: 0-812-51905-1

  First Edition: April 1992

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  One Down, One to Go

  UFO Versus IRS

  The Making of Revelation, Part 1

  The Long Wet Purple Dream of Rip Van Winkle

  Osiris on Crutches

  St. Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye

  The Oögenesis of Bird City

  Riders of the Purple Wage

  One Down,

  One to Go

  This day, for Charlie Roth, would always be the Day of the Locust.

  Twenty-nine years old, a Welfare Department employee, he was now an agent of its new branch, the General Office of Special Restitution. Every workday had been a bad day since he had entered the WD. But in times to come, he would liken today to the destruction wrought in a few hours by the sky-blackening and all-devouring swarms of the desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria.

  Charlie Roth, attaché case filled with sterilization authorization forms, walked up a staircase in Building 13 of the Newstreet Housing Authority. He was headed toward the apartment of Riches Dott, unmarried mother of many. For the moment, his guilt and tension were gone. His mind was on Laura, the seventh child of Riches Dott. Laura was the only one of the fifteen children for whom he now had any hope. An older brother who had a high IQ and an intense but low ambition was a lifer in Joliet Penitentiary. An older sister had had a remarkable mathematical talent, long ago whisked away in the smoke of crack and snark.

  Advising and aiding Laura was not part of his official mission. But perhaps he could be someone to talk to who really cared about her. He would give her money out of his own shallow pocket if that would make firmer a resolve that must be shaking despite her strong will.

  Yet he himself might need help soon. Big help.

  Ever since his wife, five months pregnant, had left him, he had been getting more and more easily angered. But their separation was only a lesser part of the steam-hot wrath he could just barely control. The larger part troubled him whether he was sleeping or awake.

  His mind was like a water strider. One of those bugs (family Gerridae) that walked on the still waters of ponds. Its specially modified back legs skimmed the surface tension, that single layer of molecules that was a skin on the pond to the strider. The legs of his mind, an arthopod Jesus that had suddenly lost its faith in its powers, were poking now and then through the skin.

  “I’m going to sink and then drown! I wanted to save all these wretches because I loved them! Now I hate them!”

  Here he was, God help him, a would-be entomologist who could not master chemistry and mathematics. He had given up his goal before he even got his M.A. A man who loves the study of bugs, what does he do when he can’t do that?

  He becomes a social worker.

  As he turned onto the landing, he heard quick-paced footsteps above him. He paused, and Laura Dott appeared. She smiled when she saw him, said, “Hello, Mr. Roth,” and clattered down the steps toward him. She was in the uniform of a waitress at a local fast-food restaurant. Just turned eighteen, Laura had been removed from her mother’s welfare dependency roll. Though still living with her mother, she was making straight A’s in high school and working five days a week from 4:00 P.M. until midnight, minimum wage.

  She had always been an honor student. How she could have done that while living in the pressure-cooker pandemonium of her mother’s apartment, Charlie did not understand. Equally mysterious was how she had managed to stay unpregnant, drug-free, and sane. Some other youths in this area had done the same, but their mother wasn’t Riches.

  “Hi, Laura,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She went past him, her head turned toward him. She was slim and long-legged, and her skin was as close to black as brown could get. She flashed a beautiful smile with teeth white and regular but long and thick.

  “Busy, busy, busy, Mr. Roth. If it’s important, see me during my mid-break, eight o’clock. Sorry.”

  She was gone. Charlie sighed and went on up the steps. At the top he saw Amin Ketcher coming down the hall from the staircase at the opposite end. He reached the door of Mrs. Dott’s apartment before Charlie got there, and leaned against the wall by the door.

  If he was waiting for Laura, he was too late. Probably held up completing a deal: crack, zoomers, blasters, and snark. The bastard. She’s told him time and again to get lost. He’s street-smart and shadow-elusive, but a loser; at twenty, the known father of twelve children, boasting of it, yet not giving a penny to support them.

  So far he had refused to sign the form authorizing his sterilization. Why should he? He had the cash for a fleet of new cars. Moreover, the ability to knock up a horde of teenagers was, to him, one of the main proofs of his manhood. But they had been pushovers. He wanted Laura Dott because she had only contempt and disgust for him, though she knew better than to insult him verbally.

  Charlie strode down the hall, “Hey, a Charlie Charlie,” Ketcher said. “The General Office of Special Rees-tituutiion man. The white gooser.”

  He inclined his handsome copper-colored face to look down on Charlie’s six feet from his six feet six inches. His oil-dripping kinky hair was cut in the current “castle” style: high crenellated walls and six-inch-high turrets. A silver-banded plastic nosebone, huge gold earrings, and a ticktacktoe diagram, the symbol of his gang, cut by a razor into each cheek, gave him the barbaric appearance he desired. He wore a sequined purple jacket and jeans overlaid with battery-powered electric lights and neon-tube rock slogans. These flashed on and off while the yang-n-yin music of the EAT SHIT AND LIVE band played from a hundred microphone-buttons on his garments.

  The enormous pupils of his glistening black eyes could have been caused by belladonna, used by many youths. But his faint gunpowdery odor told Charlie that he was on snark. The latest designer drug, its effects and chemical traces vani
shed within five minutes after being used. The narcs had to test a suspect on the spot to get the evidence to convict the user. That was possible only if a van carrying the heavy and intricate test equipment was at once available.

  Also, every tiny bag of snark held two easily breakable vials. If the carrier was caught by the police and he had enough time, he threw the bag against anything hard. Bag, snark, and vials went up in a microexplosion. No drug residue was left.

  Charlie passed by Ketcher and stopped in front of the door. He could hear the blast of the TV set and the yelling of children through the door. Something crashed loudly, and Riches’s high-pitched voice drilled through the plastic.

  “I swear, Milton, you knock that chair over again, I slap you sillier’n you already be!”

  The doorbell had long been out of order. Charlie knocked hard three times on the door.

  “Old fat-ass Riches ain’t going to sign,” Ketcher said. “You wasting your breath. Or you waiting till Laura come home from school? You wasting your time there, too, Charlie. She ain’t interested in no small white dongs.”

  “You paleolithic atavism!” Charlie said, snarling. “You’ve been harassing Laura long enough to know she’d sooner screw an ape with diarrhea than you. Anyway, you mush-brained snarker, she isn’t going to be around much longer. She’ll be getting out of this shithole and away from corpse worms like you. Very, very soon, I promise you.”

  Ketcher stepped closer to Charlie. His enormous eyes were as empty of intelligence as a wasp’s.

  “What that mean, paley…whatever? You making a racial remark, you blue-eyed shithead? I turn your skinny ass in to the Gooser Office. And what you mean, Laura gonna be gone?”

  Charlie regretted losing his cool, and so warning Ketcher that Laura would soon be out of his reach.

  The door started to swing open. The TV roared, and the children’s voices shrilled tike a horde of cicadas.

  “You’re extinct,” Charlie said. “A fly in amber still kicking because you don’t know you’re dead. Laura’d sooner eat a live cockroach than let you get into her pants.”

  He stepped through the doorway and closed it while Ketcher yelled, “I’ll cut you when you come out, you white motherfucker!”

  Sure you’ll cut me, Charlie thought. You know I just have to use Riches’s phone, and the troops stationed down on the corner will be up here. If they find the knife on you, you go straight to a prison work camp.

  Though often in the family room, Charlie had now been admitted only because Riches had not heard his knock. One of the ten children living there had happened to be close to the door. He was optimist enough at the age of six to take the chocolate bar Charlie offered and not wonder what it was going to cost him later. But he slid the bar inside his urine-yellowed jockey shorts, his only garment, before his siblings caught sight of it.

  Mrs. Dott answered his greeting with a scowl, and then stared straight at the screen.

  Charlie, sighing, pulled three stapled sheets from his attaché case. This visit, he was required only to read to her Paragraph 3 from Form WD-GOSSR C-6392-T. Though he knew that Riches probably could not hear his voice above the blaring commercial or the shouting and screaming children, he did not care.

  “‘…available to all American citizens (see Paragraph 5 for age, mental, and physical exceptions and restrictions) REGARDLESS OF RACE, GENDER OR RELIGION. Guaranteed free: any new 100% American-made automobile, motorcycle, or pickup truck with 100 gallons of gasoline or diesel oil or alcohol, ten quarts of motor oil, a year’s license plate, one year’s warranty (see Paragraph 4.d for exceptions) and casualty insurance (see Paragraph 4.e for exceptions and restrictions)…’”

  Before he could get to the section dealing with the freedom of the government from lawsuits, Riches shrilled, “I told you time and again! Ain’t nobody gonna mess around with my body!”

  She settled back in the stained, torn, and broken-springed sofa. Riches looks like a huge queen bee swollen with eggs, Charlie thought.

  Despite the anger twisting her face, her gaze was fixed on the soap opera unfolding its story as slowly as the wings of a just-molted dragonfly.

  Holy humping Jesus! Charlie thought. She’s borne sixteen children. Had clap three times. Syph twice. It’s a miracle she’s escaped AIDS. She doesn’t really understand the connection between sexual intercourse and venereal disease, though it’s often been explained to her. All those babies have drained the calcium from her bones, spiders sucking out the juice, leaving her toothless and with a widow’s hump.

  Don’t mess around with her body?

  Though he wasn’t going to change her mind, he had to make his request this final time, then report the failure. The big praying-mantis eyes of Junkers, his boss, would get deadlier and colder. He’d shout, “How you expect this office to keep up its quotas if you piss out on me?”

  “Mrs. Dott,” Charlie said, “all but six in this building have signed up, and I’m sure most of those will eventually come through. You’re forty-five. The cutoff date is forty-six. Why throw all that money away? Chances are high you can’t have any more babies, anyway.”

  Suddenly she looked smug and sly. Patting her anthill stomach, she said, “You think I be too old to have any more? Wrong, Charlie. Got me another. She got one, too.”

  She pointed at thirteen-year-old Crystal, watching TV.

  Her smile became even slier. “The law say Crystal can’t sign up with you goosers ’less I say she can till she fifteen. No way!”

  She did not look at him as he walked away. Nor did she seem to notice that he was lingering by the door. The dusty wall mirror showed his light red hair and pale and grim face. The dark circles around his eyes looked like Sioux smoke rings signaling for help. His guts hurt as if wasp larvae had hatched inside him and were eating their way out.

  Why? What he was doing was rational and humanitarian. It was not just for the good of the people as a whole, though it was that, too. It was also for the good of the people at whom the missions were directed, and it involved no force or cruelty, none that was apparent, anyway.

  He saw a cockroach. Blatta orientalis, inevitable companion of dirt and colleague of poverty, scuttle out from beneath an end of Riches’s sofa. It seized a potato-chip fragment and shot back into the darkness under the sofa.

  The piece contained an antifertility drug harmless to humans. Charlie thought that 99.9 percent of the cockroaches might be made infertile. But 0.1 percent would survive because they had mutated to resist the drug. From that would come billions.

  He went into the hallway. Ketcher was alone with a youth, an obvious customer. Seeing Charlie, both went down the stairs. A faint acrid odor like battlefield smoke hung in the hall. Charlie felt as if he bad gone through a firefight. He was trembling slightly. The hallway with its garbage cans, its dusty light bulbs, and its hot, unmoving air seemed to shift a little. Somewhat dizzy, he leaned against the scabrous, once-green wall for support.

  What he was doing was for the best. How many times had he told himself that? The welfare recipients were in an economic-social elevator, its cables cut, falling faster and faster, nothing but disaster at the bottom for them—and for all citizens, since what happens to a part always affects the whole. At the same time, their numbers were increasing geometrically, far out of proportion to the rest of the population. Misery, hopelessness, disease, malnutrition, violence, and deep ignorance were also expanding.

  The Ronn-Eagan legislation had not passed without vehement, and even violent, opposition, especially from some religious groups. But the nonreligious reaction to the excesses of the last three decades of the previous century was very strong. And though the law had made already burdensome taxes much heavier, it did promise an eventual lightening of the tax load and a large reduction in the welfare populations. But the vehicle-making, insurance, and petroleum industries, and the businesses dependent on these, were booming.

  Someday the welfare problem (which also encompassed a part of the crime-drug prob
lem) would be a small one. Why, then, did he have these dreams in which he strode down a very narrow and twilit hallway with no end? The doors ahead of him were open, but he slammed them shut as he passed.

  “Charlie Roth! A ghost among spooks?”

  Only Rex Bessey used that greeting. He climbed up from the staircase on which Charlie ascended. His face was a full, dark moon. Then another moon, checked black and white, the vest covering his huge paunch, rose above the steps. He smiled as he limped toward Charlie.

  “I got more than today’s quota. Those rednecks go apeshit over pickups. How you doing, Charlie?”

  “Wasted too much time on Riches Dott, a hopeless case.”

  “That asshole Junkers thought he was screwing us when he gave me the white area and you the black,” Rex said. “But when I remind those Neanderthal rednecks I played tackle for the Bears until I wrecked my leg, they get friendly. That makes me one of the good old boys even if I am a fucking nigger. What helps, I give them a few beers to soften them up.”

  His attaché case clinked when he shook it.

  “Why don’t you carry some beer, too?”

  “Principles,” Charlie said.

  Rex laughed loudly. “Sure! You practicing genocide, and you got principles?”

  Charlie did not get angry. Once, when drunk, Rex had admitted that he fully agreed with the sterilization policy. He hated his job, but he wouldn’t like any work unless it brought in big money.

  “This Laura Dott you’d like to rescue.” he had once said. “She might make it, but only because she’s very smart and strong. What about her brothers and sisters? They were born not so smart or so strong. Why should they have to live in the bottom of the shitpool just because they aren’t superhuman? If they were given the environment your average upper-level poor people have…well, why go on? We’ve been through this before. End of lecture. Have another drink?”

  Now he said, “Let’s hoist a few at Big Pete’s.”

  “The quota.”

  “That’s Junkers’s, not the GOOSR’s. Why should we sweat and grunt and crap golden turds so that black-assed bastard can get promotion faster? I knew him when he was extorting lunch money from the little kids in sixth grade. He tried that once with me, and I kicked him in the balls. He hates my guts for that, but he isn’t going to fire me. He knows I’ll tell how he got his job, which he isn’t qualified for, and he’ll be out on his ass. Forget his quota.”