Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  After snickering Satan had left. DeMille punched a phone number. The circuits transmitted this to a station which beamed the pulses up to a satellite which transmitted these directly to the heavenly city. Somehow, he got a wrong number. He hung up quickly when Israfel, the angel of death, answered. The second attempt, he got through.

  “Your Divinity, I suppose. You know what I just did? It was the only way you could get him to play himself. You understand that, don’t You?”

  “Yes, but if you’re thinking of breaking the contract or getting Me to do it for you, forget it. What kind of an image would I have if I did something unethical like that? But not to worry. He can’t get his hooks into your soul until I say so.”

  Not to worry? DeMille thought. I’m the one who’s going to Hell, not Him.

  “Speaking of hooks, let Me remind you of a clause in your contract with The Studio. If you ever fall from grace, and I’m not talking about that little bimbo you were going to make your mistress, you’ll die. The Mafia isn’t the only one that puts out a contract. Capice?”

  DeMille, sweating and cold, hung up. In a sense, he was already in Hell. All his life with no women except for one wife? It was bad enough to have no variety, but what if whoever he married cut him off, like one of his wives—what was her name?—had done?

  Moreover, he couldn’t get loaded out of his skull even to forget his marital woes. God, though not prohibiting booze in His Book, had said that moderation in strong liquor was required and no excuses. Well, maybe he could drink beer, however disgustingly plebeian that was.

  He wasn’t even happy with his work now. He just didn’t get the respect he had in the old days. When he chewed out the camerapeople, the grips, the gaffers, the actors, they stormed back at him that he didn’t have the proper Christian humility, he was too high and mighty, too arrogant. God would get him if he didn’t watch his big fucking mouth.

  This left him speechless and quivering. He’d always thought, and acted accordingly, that the director, not God, was God. He remembered telling Charlton Heston that when Heston, who after all was only Moses, had thrown a temper tantrum when he’d stepped in a pile of camel shit during the filming of The Ten Commandments.

  Was there more to the making of the end-of-the-world than appeared on the surface? Had God seemingly forgiven everybody their sins and lack of faith but was subtly, even insidiously, making everybody pay by suffering? Had He forgiven but not forgotten? Or vice versa?

  God marked even the fall of a sparrow, though why the sparrow, a notoriously obnoxious and dirty bird, should be significant in God’s eye was beyond DeMille.

  He had the uneasy feeling that everything wasn’t as simple and as obvious as he’d thought when he’d been untimely ripped from the grave in a sort of Caesarean section and carried off like a nursing baby in Gabriel’s arms to the office of The Ultimate Producer.

  From the Playboy Interview feature, December, 1980.

  Playboy: Mr. Satan, why did you decide to play yourself after all?

  Satan: Damned if I know.

  Playboy: The rumors are that you’ll be required to wear clothes in the latter-day scenes but that you steadfastly refuse. Are these rumors true?

  Satan: Yes indeed. Everybody knows I never wear clothes except when I want to appear among humans without attracting undue attention. If I wear clothes it’d be unrealistic. It’d be phoney, though God knows there are enough fake things in this movie. The Producer says this is going to be a PG picture, not an X-rated. That’s why I walked off the set the other day. My lawyers are negotiating with The Studio now about this. But you can bet your ass that I won’t go back unless things go my way, the right way. After all, I am an artist, and I have my integrity. Tell me, if you had a prong this size, would you hide it?

  Playboy: The Chicago cops would arrest me before I got a block from my pad. I don’t know, though, if they’d charge me with indecent exposure or being careless with a natural resource.

  Satan: They wouldn’t dare arrest me. I got too much on the city administration.

  Playboy: That’s some whopper. But I thought angels were sexless. You are a fallen angel, aren’t you?

  Satan: You jerk! What kind of researcher are you? Right there in the Bible, Genesis 6:2, it says that the sons of God, that is, the angels, took the daughters of men as wives and had children by them. You think the kids were test tube babies? Also, you dunce, I refer you to Jude 7 where it’s said that the angels, like the Sodomites, committed fornications and followed unnatural lusts.

  Playboy: Whew! That brimstone! There’s no need getting so hot under the collar, Mr. Satan. I only converted a few years ago. I haven’t had much chance to read the Bible.

  Satan: I read the Bible every day. All of it. I’m a speedreader, you know.

  Playboy: You read the Bible? (Pause). Hee, hee! Do you read it for the same reason W. C. Fields did when he was dying?

  Satan: What’s that?

  Playboy: Looking for loopholes.

  DeMille was in a satellite and supervising the camerapeople while they shot the takes from ten miles up. He didn’t like at all the terrific pressure he was working under. There was no chance to shoot every scene three or four times to get the best angle. Or to reshoot if the actors blew their lines. And, oh, sweet Jesus, they were blowing them all over the world!

  He mopped his bald head. “I don’t care what The Producer says! We have to retake at least a thousand scenes. And we’ve a million miles of film to go yet!”

  They were getting close to the end of the breaking-of-the-seven-seals sequences. The Lamb, played by The Producer’s Son, had just broken the sixth seal. The violent worldwide earthquake had gone well. The sun-turning-black-as-a-funeral-pall had been a breeze. But the moon-all-red-as-blood had had some color problems. The rushes looked more like Colonel Sanders’ orange juice than hemoglobin. In DeMille’s opinion the stars-falling-to-earth-like-figs-shaken-down-by-a-gale scenes had been excellent, visually speaking. But everybody knew that the stars were not little blazing stones set in the sky but were colossal balls of atomic fires each of which was many times bigger than Earth. Even one of them, a million miles from Earth, would destroy it. So where was the credibility factor?

  “I don’t understand you, boss,” DeMille’s assistant said. “You didn’t worry about credibility when you made The Ten Commandments. When Heston, I mean, Moses, parted the Red Sea, it was the fakiest thing I ever saw. It must’ve made unbelievers out of millions of Christians. But the film was a box-office success.”

  “It was the dancing girls that brought off the whole thing!” DeMille screamed. “Who cares about all that other bullshit when they can see all those beautiful long-legged snatches twirling their veils!”

  His secretary floated from her chair. “I quit, you male chauvinistic pig! So me and my sisters are just snatches to you, you bald-headed cunt?”

  His hotline to the heavenly city rang. He picked up the phone.

  “Watch your language!” The Producer thundered. “If you step out of line too many times, I’ll send you back to the grave! And Satan gets you right then and there!”

  Chastened but boiling near the danger point, DeMille got back to business, called Art in Hollywood. The sweep of the satellite around Earth included the sky-vanishing-as-a-scroll-is-rolled-up scenes, where every-mountain-and-island-is-removed-from-its-place. If the script had called for a literal removing, the tectonics problem would have been terrific and perhaps impossible. But in this case the special effects departments only had to simulate the scenes.

  Even so, the budget was strained. However, The Producer, through his unique abilities, was able to carry these off. Whereas, in the original script, genuine displacements of Greenland, England, Ireland, Japan, and Madagascar had been called for, not to mention thousands of smaller islands, these were only faked.

  “Your Divinity, I have some bad news,” Raphael said.

  The Producer was too busy to indulge in talking about something He already knew. Mi
llions of the faithful had backslid and taken up their old sinful ways. They believed that since so many events of the apocalypse were being faked, God must not be capable of making any really big catastrophes. So, they didn’t have anything to worry about.

  The Producer, however, had decided that it would not only be good to wipe out some of the wicked but it would strengthen the faithful if they saw that God still had some muscle.

  “They’ll get the real thing next time,” He said. “But we have to give DeMille time to set up his cameras at the right places. And we’ll have to have the script rewritten, of course.”

  Raphael groaned. “Couldn’t somebody else tell Ellison? He’ll carry on something awful.”

  “I’ll tell him. You look pretty pooped, Rafe. You need a little R&R. Take two weeks off. But don’t do it on Earth. Things are going to be very unsettling there for a while.”

  Raphael, who had a tender heart, said, “Thanks, Boss. I’d just as soon not be around to see it.”

  The seal was stamped on the foreheads of the faithful, marking them safe from the burning of a third of Earth, the turning of a third of the sea to blood along with the sinking of a third of the ships at sea (which also included the crashing of a third of the airplanes in the air, something St. John had overlooked), the turning of a third of all water to wormwood (a superfluous measure since a third was already thoroughly polluted), the failure of a third of daylight, the release of giant mutant locusts from the abyss, and the release of poison-gas-breathing mutant horses, which slew a third of mankind.

  DeMille was delighted. Never had such terrifying scenes were filmed. And these were nothing to the plagues which followed. He had enough film from the cutting room to make a hundred documentaries after the movie was shown. And then he got a call from The Producer.

  “It’s back to the special effects, my boy.”

  “But why, Your Divinity? We still have to shoot the-Great-Whore-of-Babylon sequences, the two-Beasts-and-the-marking-of-the-wicked, the Mount-Zion-and-The-Lamb-with-His-one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-good-men-who-haven’t-defiled-themselves-with-women, the…”

  “Because there aren’t any wicked left by now, you dolt! And not too many of the good, either!”

  “That couldn’t be helped,” DeMille said. “Those gas-breathing, scorpion-tailed horses kind of got out of hand. But we just have to have the scenes where the rest of mankind that survives the plagues still doesn’t abjure its worship of idols and doesn’t repent of its murders, sorcery, fornications, and robberies.”

  “Rewrite the script.”

  “Ellison will quit for sure this time.”

  “That’s all right. I already have some hack from Peoria lined up to take his place. And cheaper, too.”

  DeMille look his outfit, one hundred thousand strong, to the heavenly city. Here they shot the war between Satan and his demons and Michael and his angels. This was not in the chronological sequence as written by St. John. But the logistics problems were so tremendous that it was thought best to film these out of order.

  Per the rewritten script, Satan and his host were defeated, but a lot of nonbellìgerents were casualties, including DeMille’s best cameraperson. Moreover, there was a delay in production when Satan insisted that a stunt-person do the part where he was hurled from heaven to Earth.

  “Or use a dummy!” he yelled. “Twenty thousand miles is a hell of a long way to fall! If I’m hurt badly I might not be able to finish the movie!”

  The screaming match between the director and Satan took place on the edge of the city.

  The Producer, unnoticed, came up behind Satan and kicked him from the city for the second time in their relationship with utter ruin and furious combusion.

  Shrieking, “I’ll sue! I’ll sue!” Satan fell towards the planet below. He made a fine spectacle in his blazing entrance into the atmosphere, but the people on Earth paid it little attention. They were used to fiery portents in the sky. In fact, they were getting fed up with them.

  DeMille screamed and danced around and jumped up and down. Only the presence of The Producer kept him from using foul and abusive language.

  “We didn’t get it on camera! Now we’ll have to shoot it over!”

  “His contract calls for only one fall,” God said. “You’d better shoot the War-between-The-Faithful-and-True-Rider-against-the-beast-and-the-false-prophet while he recovers.”

  “What’ll I do about the fall?” DeMille moaned.

  “Fake it,” the Producer said, and He went back to His office.

  Per the script, an angel came down from heaven and bound up the badly injured and burned and groaning Satan with a chain and threw him into the abyss, the Grand Canyon. Then he shut and sealed it over him (what a terrific sequence that was!) so that Satan might seduce the nations no more until a thousand years had passed.

  A few years later the devil’s writhings caused a volcano to form above him, and the Environmental Protection Agency filed suit against Celestial Productions, Inc. because of the resultant pollution of the atmosphere.

  Then God, very powerful now that only believers existed on Earth, performed the first resurrection. In this, only the martyrs were raised. And Earth, which had had much elbow room because of the recent wars and plagues, was suddenly crowded again.

  Part 1 was finished except for the reshooting of some scenes, the dubbing in of voice and background noise, and the synchronization of the music, which was done by the cherubim and seraphim (all now unionized).

  The great night of the premiere in a newly built theater in Hollywood, six million capacity, arrived. DeMille got a standing ovation after it was over. But Time and Newsweek and The Manchester Guardian panned the movie.

  “There are some people who may go to hell after all,” God growled.

  DeMille didn’t care about that. The film was a box-office success, grossing ten billion dollars in the first six months. And when he considered the reruns in theaters and the TV rights…well, had anyone ever done better?

  He had a thousand more years to live. That seemed like a long time. Now. But…what would happen to him when Satan was released to seduce the nations again? According to John the Divine’s book, there’d be another worldwide battle. Then Satan, defeated, would be cast into the lake of fire and sulphur in the abyss.

  (He’d be allowed to keep his Oscar, however.)

  Would God let Satan, per the contract DeMille had signed with the devil, take DeMille with him into the abyss? Or would He keep him safe long enough to finish directing Part II? After Satan was buried for good, there’d be a second resurrection and a judging of those raised from the dead. The goats, the bad guys, would be hurled into the pit to keep Satan company. DeMille should be with the saved, the sheep, because he had been born again. But there was that contract with The Tempter.

  DeMille arranged a conference with The Producer. Ostensibly, it was about Part II, but DeMille managed to bring up the subject which really interested him.

  “I can’t break your contract with him,” God said.

  “But I only signed it so that You’d be sure to get Satan for the role. It was a self-sacrifice. Greater love hath no man and all that. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “Let’s discuss the shooting of the new heaven and the new earth sequences.”

  At least I’m not going to be put into hell until the movie is done, DeMille thought. But after that? He couldn’t endure thinking about it.

  “It’s going to be a terrible technical problem,” God said, interrupting DeMille’s gloomy thoughts. “When the second resurrection takes place, there won’t be even Standing Room Only on Earth. That’s why I’m dissolving the old earth and making a new one. But I can’t just duplicate the old Earth. The problem of Lebensraum would still remain. Now, what I’m contemplating is a Dyson sphere.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A scheme by a 20th-century mathematician to break up the giant planet Jupiter into large pieces and set them in orbit at the distance of Ea
rth from the sun. The surfaces of the pieces would provide room for a population enormously larger than Earth’s. It’s a Godlike concept.”

  “What a documentary its filming would be!” DeMille said. “Of course, if we could write some love interest in it, we could make a he…pardon me, a heaven of a good story!”

  God looked at his big railroad watch.

  “I have another appointment, C.B. The conference is over.”

  DeMille said goodby and walked dejectedly towards the door. He still hadn’t gotten an answer about his ultimate fate. God was stringing him along. He felt that he wouldn’t know until the last minute what was going to happen to him. He’d be suffering a thousand years of uncertainty, of mental torture. His life would be a cliff-hanger. Will God relent? Or will He save the hero at the very last second?

  “C.B.,” God said.

  DeMille spun around, his heart thudding, his knees turned to water. Was this it? The fatal finale? Had God, in His mysterious and subtle way, decided for some reason that there’d be no Continued In Next Chapter for him? It didn’t seem likely, but then The Producer had never promised that He’d use him, as the director of Part II nor had He signed a contract with him. Maybe, like so many temperamental producers. He’d suddenly concluded that DeMille wasn’t the right one for the job. Which meant that He could arrange it so that his ex-director would be thrown now, right this minute, into the lake of fire.

  God said, “I can’t break your contract with Satan. So…”

  “Yes?”

  DeMille’s voice sounded to him as if he were speaking very far away.

  “Satan can’t have your soul until you die.”

  “Yes?”

  His voice was only a trickle of sound, a last few drops of water from a clogged drainpipe.

  “So, if you don’t die, and that, of course, depends upon your behavior, Satan can’t ever have your soul.”

  God smiled and said, “See you in eternity.”

  The Long Wet

  Purple Dream of