Minotaur Maze
Robert Sheckley
To Honor P. Lucas
INTRODUCTION
Rudy Rucker
Thirty years ago, I was a sophomore in high school. My older brother and I were playing on an old swingset that we hadn’t used in several years; we were trying to see who could jump the farthest. Determined to outdo big brother, I pumped the swing up to a dizzying height when *kcnack* the rusty chain snapped. I floundered through a moment of weightlessness and landed awry. My spleen was ruptured; a surgeon cut it out that day.
To cheer my convalescence, my mother brought me my first Sheckley book, his early anthology, Untouched by Human Hands. I loved it more than any book I’d ever read before.
My best friend and closest neighbor Hank Larsen liked Sheckley as much as I did. I’ll never forget the awed tones in which he described Immortality Incorporated to me right after he read it. “It’s about what happens when you die!” Wonderfully situated at the interface between science and mystery, the book showed Hank and me how to think about things we’d never thought of before.
For the next few years, my Mom got me a new Sheckley title every Christmas. Each one of the books was a treasure-house of wry wonder. I still have most of them, and I comb and recomb them once or twice a year for rereads.
The paramount quality of Sheckley’s writing is the purity of his language. The timing of his cadenced phrases is exquisite. His richly charged clarity arises, I would say, from the excellent moral qualities which Sheckley as a writer exemplifies — he is a man in love with writing and with the simple sweetness of life.
Sheckley’s characters are so urgent in their needs that one begins to feel that they are all Sheckley himself. Their needs are real and clear. These men and women don’t want power or knowledge — they want things like food, a mate, time off from work, and adventure. Sheckley gets them into incredible difficulties and then, somehow, he gets them back out — often with a surprise twist. It is easy to make the identification between the characters and the author — in the never-ending struggle of his life as a writer, Sheckley has written on and on for the same urgent reasons: money, avoidance of a “real job,” and adventure. When a Sheckley character is at his wit’s end we feel that, as he wrote that page, Sheckley himself was at his wit’s end, too. The miracle of his stories is that so often everything comes out in such a seemingly predestined way.
It is a strange thing to be a writer who writes science fiction. Like any writer, you want to write about yourself and about the world as you found it. Yet your fictional landscape is crowded with robots, spaceships, and aliens. Sheckley’s trick is to write about the science fiction universe — but to write about it as if he really lived in it. A commuter may use a flying saucer instead of a car, but he’s still a commuter. The way in which Sheckley overlays our world and the sf world varies from story to story — often concepts are comically mismatched for a satirical effect. A classic example of this is his story, “Hunting Problem,” in which boys are mapped into alien boy scouts, and men are mapped into wild game. I’d like to go through the story carefully, showing how it illustrates some of the features of Sheckley’s writing. The story begins:
It was the last troop meeting before the big Scouter jamboree, and all the patrols had turned out. Patrol 22 — the Soaring Falcon patrol — was camped in a shady hollow, holding a tentacle pull. The Brave Bisons were practicing their skill at drinking liquids, and laughing excitedly at the odd sensation.
And the Charging Mirash Patrol, number 19, was waiting for Scouter Drog, who was late as usual.
So here is Drog, a teenage alien who “wasn’t particularly skilled in anything except dreaming away long hours among the clouds at the five-thousand-foot level.” He is the only member of the Charging Mirash Patrol who has not yet made first class or won an achievement award. The Patrol Leader takes Drog aside and tells him that a pride of three bull Mirash has been spotted in the countryside five hundred miles north of the jamboree. Drog is to use Forest and Mountain lore to track and stalk the Mirash. “I want you to bring back the pelt of one Mirash,” says the Patrol Leader.
Drog is of course exactly the kind of person who would be reading this science fiction story — and he is exactly the kind of person who would write such a story, had he Sheckley’s abilities. A pretty remapping is involved in the tasks the scouters try to master. Human scouts learn such pre-Industrial Age techniques as the building of fires. On Drog’s planet, “The modern world had begun with the Age of Submolecular Control, which was followed by the present age of Direct Control,” and the young of the highly evolved Elbonai must play at learning such arcane skills as walking on the ground and drinking liquids.
Sheckley delights in putting in boilerplate sf concepts without the slightest attempt to pass the concepts off as real. He invokes Submolecular Control as smoothly as Shakespeare casts fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sheckley is, after all, a science fiction writer of the mid-Twentieth century.
Drog levitates himself to the correct planetary coordinates, and then we shift to the viewpoint of his prey: three human prospectors named Paxton, Herrera, and Stellman. These are the Mirash. Paxton is a petulant romantic youth with a great deal of money, Herrera is an experienced galactic knockabout, and Stellman is a perpetual student with a pilot’s license. Three faces of the Sheck-man. Drog approaches the trio disguised as a tree. (In several other Sheckley stories aliens disguise themselves as trees. Sheckley delights in clarifying the action of his stories by using the most simple and obvious methods which come to hand.) Herrera casually blasts the tree when Paxton sees it move. A few moments later, Drog returns to consciousness: “There had been no premonitory fear-scent, no snorting, no snarling, no warning whatsoever. … He waited until the hoofbeats of the three Mirash had faded into the distance.”
Drog resolves to use Lures and Snares. When Paxton, Herrera, and Stellman get back to their cave, this exquisitely comedic passage results:
A few feet from the mouth of the cave was a small roast beef, still steaming hot, four large diamonds, and a bottle of whiskey.
“That’s odd,” Stellman said, “and a trifle unnerving.”
Paxton bent down to examine a diamond. Herrera pulled him back.
“Might be booby-trapped.”
“There aren’t any wires,” Paxton said.
Herrera stared at the roast beef, the diamonds, the bottle of whiskey. He looked very unhappy.
“I don’t trust this,” he said.
“Maybe there are natives here,” Stellman said. “Very timid ones. This might be their goodwill offering.”
“Sure,” Herrera said. “They sent to Terra for a bottle of Old Space Ranger just for us.”
…
The long grass Herrera was standing on whipped tightly around his ankles. The ground beneath him surged, broke into a neat disk fifteen feet in diameter and, trailing root-ends, began to lift itself into the air. Herrera tried to jump free, but the grass held him like a thousand green tentacles.
Roast beef, diamonds, and whiskey — real treasure for real people. And the savagery of the sudden attack is surreal. What if your lawn suddenly did that? Is it possible that the mapping from home to science fiction could ever run the other way?
As in any well-paced tale, there must be repeated assaults, so of course Herrera escapes the disk of grass: Paxton grabs the disk which dips steeply but continues to rise as Herrera saws at the entangling grass tentacles. When Paxton’s feet are eight feet off the ground, Stellman grabs Paxton’s ankles, arresting the disk’s flight once more. Now Herrera finishes sawing himself free and the three adventurers fall to the ground. The disk continues to rise until it is out of sight.
In the next scene, a discouraged Drog almo
st loses hope and longs to return to floating at the five thousand foot level. But then in a flash of pure perception he realizes WHY he must hunt:
True, the Elbonaians had outgrown their competition, developed past all danger of competition. But the Universe was wide, and capable of many surprises. Who could foresee what would come, what new dangers the race might have to face? And how could they meet them if the hunting instinct was lost?
…
He was going to get that Mirash hide, or die trying!
…
Quickly, skillfully, he shaped a Mirash horn.
This is of course the kind of justification for hunting that people so commonly make. The satire here is achieved by making it clear that the noble justifications of hunting actually argue for the murder of innocent beings. Despite the message, there’s nothing heavy or didactic here. The thing is, given his protean enthusiasm for the pure act of writing, Sheckley makes the argument for hunting sound convincing. And then comes the quick, skillful sentence, “Quickly, skillfully, he shaped a Mirash horn.” The sentence is over before you understand what it says, and a few seconds go by till you realize that “horn” is “hunting horn,” and that you are a Mirash.
What kind of sound does a Mirash horn make? If it’s a bull Mirash you’re after, the horn makes the noise of a woman crying, “Please, help me, I can’t hold out much longer. Is there anyone who can help me?”
Perhaps we really are no different than beasts. Paxton, in any case, falls for the ruse, but Stellman and Herrera keep him from rushing out: Herrera clubs him behind the ear with a stick of firewood, and Stellman catches him as he falls.
The next scene is daybreak. “Why had the Mirash horn failed?” wonders Drog. “The Scouter Manual said it was an infallible means of attracting the bull Mirash. But perhaps this wasn’t mating season.” Drog considers trevesting the Mirash, but then decides on illitrocy. Made-up sf words of course, but never presented with anything other than complete seriousness.
As the guys head for their ship, a thick fog boils up. Stellman finds himself holding someone’s shoulder — but it’s not Herrera’s or Paxton’s. A sweet-sour odor pervades the air and then Drog is standing alone, smiling triumphantly. He pulls out a long-bladed skinning knife and bends over the nearest Mirash.
Horror? No, for the next thing we know, Herrera, Stellman, and a mildly ill Paxton are on their spaceship. Huh? And then we get the twist and the payoff: proud Drog is now a first-class scout and:
He was carrying the Patrol flag — the position of honor — and everyone cheered to see it.
Because waving proudly from the flagpole was the firm, fine-textured, characteristic skin of an adult Mirash, its zippers, tubes, gauges, buttons, and holsters flashing merrily in the sunshine.
What a wonderful ending! There is hope, life is good, art abounds. Drog is the fourteen-year-old in all of us; Paxton, Herrera, and Stellman are the three alchemical parts of the integrated adult we would all like to become. Most of all, all four of the characters are Robert Sheckley.
Thirty years later in his career Sheckley sits down to write Minotaur Maze, and here we see him as Theseus, right on the first page: “He was broke, as usual, an out-of-work hero, and totally unqualified to do anything but kill monsters and have trouble with women.”
Writers don’t only hunt monsters, though, they design mazes, so of course we have a Sheckley Dædalus as well.
“Gentlemen, let us face facts,” Dædalus said. “As you know, we have designed our maze as a pure entertainment object, untainted by the faintest tinge of moral uplift and incorporating no socially redeeming material whatsoever.”
It would be fun to print the thirty sections of Minotaur Maze on large cards, so that each reader could arrange them in a different order. The story is nonlinear, a maze with no beginning and no ending, a maze inhabited by four or five recurring characters, serious beings who want “a lot of good things to eat, pretty girls dancing on the table, an abundance of wine and plenty of laughs,” or failing that, some shreds of meaning in the random winds of life.
The tale is filled with lovely language and deep, honest thought. In a mazy kind of way a story gets told as well. And at the end:
The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again.
How poignant a closing sentence to take away with us — the dadaistic fusion of grammar with physics, the dreamy hyperbole of Sheckley’s self-description, the touching frankness of his desperation, and coming out of it all, his neverending efforts to put things together yet again.
MINOTAUR MAZE
Robert Sheckley
1. How Theseus got his first Minotauring job.
It is said that Theseus was passing through Delphi, a little town west of the Corinthian Pecos, and went into a saloon for a glass of beer and a hamburger. He noticed a newspaper which someone had left behind on the mahogany counter. He began leafing idly through it.
He was broke, as usual, an out-of-work hero, and totally unqualified to do anything but kill monsters and have trouble with women. He had been drifting through the high country on the old Dorian trail, eating small and sleeping lumpy. He was a long way from home and not planning to go back there anyway, heroes doing their best work on the road, it’s in the nature of the calling. But nothing had turned up so far and, without much hope, Theseus turned to the classified ads. There he read:
“Hero wanted for dangerous job of a mythic nature. Must be fully qualified. Undying fame for right man.”
“Well, now,” Theseus said, rubbing a finger gently along the unshaven left side of his jaw.
Theseus went to the address given in the newspaper. It was a large, gloomy red brick office building on the edge of town. Theseus was directed to an office on the second floor. There Theseus saw filing cabinets, a gooseneck lamp, a coffee maker, a bald man, and a redheaded woman, all arranged in a standard way.
“Take a seat,” said the man. “You’ve come in answer to the ad? Very good, we’re in need of qualified sales personnel on Rigna II and Fortis Minor. Our line of hydrostatically stabilized comfort-controlled woolen outerwear sells itself, though we do need someone to accompany the goods and collect the money. Have you ever had a selling job before, Mister — ?”
“My name is Theseus,” Theseus said, “And I think there’s some misunderstanding. The ad I’m answering called for a hero, not a salesman.”
“Oh, of course, the hero ad,” said the man. “Have you any credentials, Mr. Theseus?”
Theseus showed his graduate certificate from the Famous Hero School of Maplewood, New Jersey, his letter of recommendation from Achilles, with whom he had apprenticed for six months, and his other papers, commendations, proclivities, engagements, statements of exhortio and the like.
“Yes, we do have an opening in the hero line,” the man told him. “It concerns one of our customers, Mr. Rhadamanthys, a very important man in these parts, a Justice on the Supreme Court of Hell and a brother of King Minos. Rhada, as we call him, had a good-sized ranch nearby where he raised filet mignons. They came completely encased in a living animal, of course, and there was quite a lot of work involved in extracting them. But Rhada had invented a process which he called slaughtering and it handled that nicely. Anyhow, Rhada’s business was going along just fine when all of a sudden this Minotaur appeared in the vicinity and started raising merry hell with the filets in their primary stage, when they are known as cows.”
“I see,” Theseus said. “And what is a Minotaur?”
The man explained that the Minotaur was one of those beast-men or men-beasts who used to inhabit the earth together with real men, until Solon passed the Freedom of Suppression Act which allowed the humans to get rid of them.
Theseus later learned that all this had begun in The Age of the Hybrid Monsters, a socially relaxed time
when you wouldn’t be afraid of being seen in public with a chap half goat and half bear, even if he had a pair of eagle’s wings thrown in for good measure. That was back in the Golden Age, when people had no standards at all and thought everything was wonderful because they didn’t know any better. It was a pleasant enough time in its undiscriminating way, but then the spirit of æsthetics was born out of the cauldron of undifferentiated good times, and people became ashamed of having conversations with creatures who grew fur and turned to eating or wearing them instead.
And so began the Last Vast Roundup, when the beast-men were captured and taken to Animal Corrective Hotels, where they were transformed into atoms and molecules and sent out to try again. But the Minotaur and a few other monsters escaped and took to the woods and mountains and lonely places. There the Minotaur lived and planned his revenge upon mankind, a sort of prefiguring of the Caliban figure, sinister, animalistic, cunning, savage, treacherous, disloyal, a mirror reversal of a Boy Scout. And now this creature had come down to the habitations of men and was playing hell with the filet mignons, giving them ideas above their station and even mounting raids against the meat packing plants, as the places where the filet mignons were put into cardboard boxes were called.
“So that’s the situation,” the man said. “Think you can handle it?”
Theseus knew that at this point he was supposed to express his detestation of the Minotaur, and his hatred of the rule-breaking bestiality that he stood for, and to further express his great pleasure at the high honor bestowed on him, a simple hero, for this chance to rid the earth of an embodiment of a detestable principle that rendered human life incomplete, flat, stale, tasteless, the Albanian in the woodpile, as the Hellenes say, the evil principle that keeps us from achieving our oneness.
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