The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage Read online

  Pornsen said, ‘When I first realized you were on the Gabriel, I was sure that you were not on it because of a desire to serve the Sturch. I [puff] thought at the time that you signed up for one reason. And now I am shib, shib to the bone, that your reason was your wicked desire to get away from your wife. And, since barrenness, adultery, and interstellar travel are the only legal grounds for divorce, and adultery means going to H, you [puff] took the only way out. You became legally dead by becoming a crewman of the Gabriel. You—’

  ‘Don’t talk about anything legal to me!’ shouted Hal. He shook with rage and, at the same time, hated himself because he could not hide his emotion.

  ‘You know you were not carrying out the proper functions of a gapt when you sidetracked my request! I had to sign up—’

  ‘Ah, I thought so!’ said Pornsen. He smiled and puffed out smoke and said, ‘I turned it down because I thought it would be unreal. You see, I had a dream, a very vivid dream, in which I saw Mary bearing your child at the end of two years. It was not a false dream but one that had the unmistakable signs of a revelation sent by the Forerunner. I knew after that dream that your desire for a divorce was a desire for a pseudofuture. I knew that the true future was in my hands and that only by guiding your conduct could I bring it about. I recorded this dream the day after I had it, which was only a week after I reviewed your petition, and—’

  ‘You proved that you were betrayed by a dream sent by the Backrunner and did not see a revelation sent by the Forerunner!’ shouted Hal again. ‘Pornsen, I am going to report this! Out of your own mouth you have convicted yourself!’

  Pornsen turned pale; his mouth hung open so the cigarette dropped to the ground; his jowls quivered with fright. ‘Wha—what do you mean?’

  ‘How could she have my child at the end of two years when I am not on Earth to father it? So, what you say you dreamed can’t possibly become a real future! Therefore, you allowed yourself to be deceived by the Backrunner. And you know what that means! That you are a candidate for H!’

  The gapt stiffened. His lower left shoulder drew level with the other. His right hand shot to the handle of the whip, closed around the crux ansata on its end, and he pulled it from his belt. It cracked in the air, a few inches from Hal’s face.

  ‘See this?’ shrieked Pornsen. ‘Seven lashes I One for each of the Seven Deadly Unrealities! You’ve felt them before; you’ll feel them again!’

  Harshly, Hal said, ‘Shut up!’

  Again, Pornsen’s jaw dropped. Whining, he said, ‘How, how dare you? I, your beloved gapt, am—’

  ‘I told you to shut up!’ said Hal, less loudly but just as bitingly. ‘I’m sick of your whine. I’ve been sick of it for years, my whole life.’

  Even as he spoke, he watched Fobo walking toward them. Behind Fobo, the antelope lay dead on the road.

  The animal is dead, Hal thought. I thought it had managed to get away. Those eyes staring through the bush at me. Antelope eyes? But if it is dead, whose eyes did I see?

  Pornsen’s voice recalled Hal to the present.

  ‘I think, my son, that we spoke in anger, not in premeditated evil. Let us forgive one another, and we’ll say nothing to the Uzzites when we get back to the ship.’

  ‘Shib with me if it’s with you,’ said Hal.

  Hal was surprised to see tears welling in Pornsen’s eyes. And he was even more surprised, almost shocked, when Pornsen made an attempt to put his arm around Hal’s shoulder.

  ‘Ah, my boy, if you only knew how much I loved you, how much it has hurt me when I’ve had to punish you.’

  ‘I find that rather hard to believe,’ said Hal, and he walked away from Pornsen and toward Fobo.

  Fobo, too, had large tears in his unhumanly large and round eyes. But they were from another cause. He was weeping because of sympathy for the beast and shock from the accident. However, with every step toward Hal, his expression became less grieved, and tears dried. He was making a circular sign over himself with his right index finger.

  It was, Hal knew, a religious sign which the wogs used in many different situations. Now, Fobo seemed to be using it to relieve his tension. Suddenly, he smiled the ghastly V-in-V smile of a wogglebug. And he was in good spirits. Though supersensitive, his nervous system was hit and run. Charge and discharge came easily.

  Fobo stopped before them and said, ‘A clash of personalities, gentlemen? A disagreement, an argument, a dispute?’

  ‘No,’ replied Hal. ‘We were just a little shaken up. Tell me, how far will we have to walk to get to the humanoid ruins? Your car’s wrecked. Tell Zugu I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do not bother your skulls … heads. Zugu was ready to build a new and better vehicle. As for the walk, it will be pleasant and stimulating. It is only a … kilometer? Or thereabouts.’

  Hal threw his mask and goggles into the car, where the Ozagenians had put theirs. He picked up his suitcase from the floor in the compartment back of the rear seat. He left the gapt’s on the floor. Not without a slight pang of guilt, however, for he knew that as Pornsen’s ward, he should have offered to carry it.

  ‘To H with him,’ he muttered.

  He said to Fobo, ‘Aren’t you afraid the driving clothes will be stolen?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Fobo, eager to learn a new word. ‘Stolen means what?’

  ‘To take an article of property from someone by stealth, without their permission, and keep it for yourself. It is a crime, punishable by law.’

  ‘A crime?’

  Hal gave up and began walking swiftly up the road. Behind him the gapt, angry because he had been rejected and because his ward was breaking etiquette by forcing him to carry his own case, shouted, ‘Don’t presume too far, you—you joat!’

  Hal didn’t turn back but plunged on ahead. The angry retort he had been phrasing beneath his breath fizzed away. Out of the corner of his eye, he had glimpsed white skin in the green foliage.

  It was only a flash, gone as quickly as it had come. And he could not be sure that it was not a bird’s white wing opening. Yes, he could be. There were no birds on Ozagen.

  7

  ‘Soo Yarrow. Soo Yarrow. Wuhfvayfvoo, soo Yarrow.’

  Hal woke up. For a moment, he had trouble placing himself. Then, as he became wider awake, he recalled that he was sleeping in one of the marble rooms of the ruins. The moonlight, brighter than Earth’s, poured in through the doorway. It shone on a small shape clinging upside down to the arch of the doorway. It glittered briefly on a flying insect that passed below the shape. Something long and thin flickered down and caught the flier and pulled it into a suddenly gaping mouth.

  The lizard loaned by the ruins custodians was doing a fine job of keeping out pests.

  Hal turned his head to look at the open window a foot above him. The bugcatcher there was also busily tonguing the area clean of mosquitoes.

  The voice had seemed to come from beyond that moon washed and narrow rectangle. He strained his ears as if he could force the silence to yield the voice again. But there was only more silence. Then, he jumped and whirled around as a snuffling and rattling came from behind him. A thing the size of a raccoon stood in the doorway. It was one of the quasi-insects, the so-called lungbugs, that prowled the forest at night. It represented a development of arthropod not found on Earth. Unlike its Terran cousins, it did not depend solely on tracheae or breathing tubes for oxygen. A pair of distensible sacs, like a frog’s, swelled out and fell in behind its mouth. It was these that had made the snuffling sound.

  Though the lungbug was shaped like the sinister praying mantis, Hal didn’t worry. Fobo had told him it was not dangerous to a man.

  A shrill sound like that of an alarm clock suddenly filled the room. Pornsen sat up on the cot against the wall. Seeing the insect, he yelled. It scurried off. The noise, which had come from the mechanism on Pornsen’s wrist, stopped.

  Pornsen lay back. He groaned, ‘That makes the sixth time those sib bugs have woke me up.’

  ‘Turn off the w
ristbox,’ said Hal.

  ‘So you can sneak out of the room and spill your seed on the ground,’ replied Pornsen.

  ‘You have no right to accuse me of such unreal conduct,’ said Hal. He spoke mechanically, without deep anger. He was thinking of the voice.

  ‘The Forerunner himself said no one was beyond reproach,’ muttered Pornsen. He sighed and mumbled as he fell asleep, ‘Wonder if the rumor is true … Forerunner himself may be on this planet … watching us … he predicted … aah …’

  Hal sat on his cot and watched Pornsen until he began snoring. Hal’s own lids felt heavy. Surely, he must have dreamed of that soft, low voice speaking in a tongue neither Terran nor Ozagenian. He must have, because it had been human, and he and the gapt were the only specimens of Homo sapiens for two hundred miles in any direction.

  It had been a woman’s voice. Forerunner! To hear a woman again! Not Mary. He never wanted to hear her voice again or even hear other. She was the only woman he had ever—dare he say it to himself?—had. That had been a sorry, disgusting, and humiliating ordeal. But it had not taken from him the wish—he was glad that the Forerunner was not there to read his mind—to meet another woman who might give him that ecstasy of he knew nothing except from spilling his seed—Forerunner help him!—and which was, he was sure, only a paleness and a hollowness compared to that which waited …

  ‘Soo Yarrow. Wuhfvayfvoo. Sa mfa, zh’net Tastinak. R’gateh wa f’ net.’’

  Slowly, Hal rose from the cot. His neck was cased in ice. The whisper was coming from the window. He looked at it. The outline of a woman’s head tilted into the solid box of moonlight that was window. The solid box became a cascade. Moon wash flowed over white shoulders. The white of a finger crossed the black of a mouth.

  ‘Poo wamoo tu baw choo. E’ooteh. Seelahs. Fvooneh. Fvit, seelfvoopleh.’

  Numbed, but obeying as if shot full of hypno-lipno, he began walking toward the doorway. He was not so shocked, however, that he did not look at Pornsen to make sure he was still sleeping.

  For a second, his reflexes almost overcame him and forced him to wake up the gapt. But he withdrew the hand reaching for Pornsen. He must take a chance. The urgency and fear in the woman’s voice told him that she was desperate and needed him. And it was evident that she did not want him to arouse Pornsen.

  What would Pornsen say, do, if he knew there was a woman outside this very room?

  Woman? How could a woman be here?

  Her words had clicked something familiar. He had had the strange and fleeting notion that he should know the language. But he did not.

  He stopped. What was he thinking of? If Pornsen woke and looked over at the cot to make sure his ward was still in it…He went back to the cot and shoved his suitcase under the sheet which the custodian had provided for him. He rolled up his jacket and packed it next to the case. One end of it stuck out of the sheet and lay on the pillow. Perhaps, if Pornsen was very sleepy, he might mistake the dark lump on the pillow and the bulk under the sheet for Hal.

  Softly, on bare feet, he walked again toward the doorway. An object about eight decimeters high stood on guard in it. A statuette of the archangel Gabriel, pale, wings half-extended, a sword in its right hand held above its head.

  If any object with a mass larger than a mouse’s came within two feet of the field radiating from the statuette, it would cause a signal to be transmitted to the small case mounted on the silver bracelet around Pornsen’s wrist. The case would shrill—as it had at the appearance of the lungbug—and up would come Pornsen from the bottom of his sleep.

  The statuette’s purpose was not only to insure against trespassers. It was also there to make certain that Hal would not leave the room without his gapt’s knowledge. As the ruins had no working plumbing, Hal’s only excuse to step outside would be to relieve himself. The gapt would go along to see that he did not try to do something else.

  Hal picked up a fly swatter. It had a three-foot-long handle made of some flexible wood. Its mass would not be enough to touch off the field. Hand trembling, he very gently pushed the statuette to one side with the end of the handle. He had to be careful not to upset it, for tilting triggered its alarm. Fortunately, the stone floor was one of those which had had the debris, piled on by centuries, cleaned out. The stone beneath was smooth, polished by generations of feet.

  Once outside, Hal reached back in and slid the object back to its former spot. Then, with his heart pounding under the double strain of tampering with the statuette and of meeting a strange woman, he walked around the corner.

  The woman had moved from the window into the shadow of a statue of a kneeling goddess about forty yards away. He began walking toward her, then he saw why she was hiding. Fobo was strolling toward him. Hal walked faster. He wanted to intercept the wog before he noticed the girl and also before Fobo was so close that their voices might waken Pornsen.

  ‘Shalom, aloha, good dreaming, Sigmen love you,’ said Fobo. ‘You seem nervous. Is it that incident of the forenoon?’

  ‘No. I am just restless. And I wanted to admire these ruins by moonlight.’

  ‘Grand, beautiful, weird, and a little sad,’ said Fobo. ‘I think of these people, of the many generations that lived here, how they were born, played, laughed, wept, suffered, gave birth, and died. And all, all, every one dead and turned to dust; Ah, Hal, it brings tears to my eyes and a premonition of my own doom.’

  Fobo pulled a handkerchief from the pouch on his belt and blew his nose.

  Hal looked at Fobo. How human—in some respects—was this monster, this native of Ozagen. Ozagen. A strange name with a story. What was the story? That the discoverer of this planet, upon first seeing the natives, had exclaimed, ‘Oz again!’

  It was only natural. The aborigines resembled Frank Baum’s Professor Wogglebug. Their bodies were rather round, and their limbs were skinny in proportion. Their mouths were shaped like two broad and shallow V’s, one set inside the other. The lips were thick and lobular. Actually, a wogglebug had four lips, each leg of the two V’s being separated by a deep seam at the connection. Once, far back on the evolutionary path, those lips had been modified arms. Now they were rudimentary limbs, so disguised as true labial parts and so functional that no one could have guessed their origin. When the wide V-in-V mouths opened in a laugh, they startled the Terrans. They had no teeth but serrated ridges of jawbone. A fold of skin hung from the roof of the mouth. Once the epipharynx, it was now a vestigial upper tongue. It was this organ which gave the underlying trill to so many Ozagen sounds and gave the human beings so much trouble reproducing them.

  Their skins were as lightly pigmented as Hal’s, and he was a redhead. But where his was pink, theirs was a very faint green. Copper, not iron, carried oxygen in their blood cells. Or so they said. So far they had refused to allow the Haijac to take blood samples. But they had promised that they might give permission within the next four or five weeks. Their reluctance, so they had stated, was caused’ By certain religious taboos. If, however, they could be assured that the Earthmen would not be drinking the blood, they might let them have it.

  Macneff thought they were lying, but he had no good reasons for this. It was impossible for the Ozagenians to know just why their blood was wanted.

  That their blood cells used copper instead of iron should have made the Ozagenians considerably less strong and less enduring in physical exertion than the Terrans. Their corpuscles would not transport oxygen as efficiently. But Nature had made certain compensations. Fobo had two hearts, which beat faster than Hal’s and drove blood through arteries and veins larger than Hal’s.

  Nevertheless, the fastest sprinter or marathon runner of this planet would be left behind by his Terrestrial counterpart.

  Hal had borrowed a book on evolution. But, since he could read very little of it, he had so far had to content himself with looking at the many illustrations. The wog, however, had explained what they represented.

  Hal had refused to believe Fobo.


  ‘You say that mammalian life originated from a primeval sea worm! That has to be wrong! We know that the first land lifeform was an amphibian. Its fins developed into legs; it lost its ability to get oxygen from sea water. It evolved into a reptile, then a primitive mammal, then an insectivorous creature, then a pre-simian, then a simian, and eventually into the sapient bipedal stage, and then into modern man!’

  ‘Is that so?’ Fobo had said calmly. ‘I don’t doubt that things went just as you said. On Earth. But here evolution took a different course. Here there were three ancestral se”ba’ takufu, that is, motherworms. One had hemoglobin-bearing blood cells; one, copper-bearing; one, vanadium-bearing. The first had a natural advantage over the other two, but for some reason it dominated this continent but not the other. We have some evidence that the first also split early into two lines, both of which were notochords but one of which wasn’t mammalian.

  ‘Anyway, all the motherworms did have fins, and these evolved into limbs. And—’

  ‘But,’ Hal had said, ‘evolution can’t work that way! Your scientists have made a serious, a grievous, error. After all, your paleontology is just beginning; it’s only about a hundred years old.’

  ‘Ah!’ Fobo had said. ‘You’re too terrocentric. Hidebound. You have an anemic imagination. Your thought arteries are hardened. Consider the possibility that there might be billions of habitable planets in this universe and that on each evolution may have taken slightly, or even vastly, different paths. The Great Goddess is an experimenter. She’d get bored reproducing the same thing over and over. Wouldn’t you?’

  Hal was sure that the wogs were mistaken. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to live long enough to be illuminated by the superior and much older science of the Haijac.

  Now Fobo had removed his skullcap with its two imitation antennae, the symbols of the Grasshopper clan. But, even though this removal lessened his resemblance to Professor Wogglebug, his bald forepate and the stiff blond corkscrew fuzz on his backpate reasserted it. And the bridgeless, comically long nose shooting straight out from his face doubly strengthened it. Concealed in its cartilaginous length were two antennae, his organs of smell.