How nice it would be to settle down with this charming feminine person who conveyed her meanings in smiles and nods, how nice to live in an apartment with tall windows on an upper story of a cobblestoned street like this one. How nice to wake up with this warm, fragrant and delightful person beside him. Already he was sure she would get right out of bed, because, true to her waitress heritage, she’d be getting him his coffee. And she’d be smiling, even early in the morning. …
Yes, of course he’d like more coffee! She went off to get it and he leaned back in his chair, wily Theseus wondering yet again if another adventure more pleasurable than this old matter of the Minotaur might not be beginning for him.
7. Ariadne Telephones.
Theseus hailed originally from Troezen, up near Scythian territory. Naturally, that’s where Ariadne tried to telephone him first when she found that the hero had abandoned her on Naxos.
Not that it should come as any surprise to her. She knew the old legends as well as anybody, but she just never believed that Theseus would abandon her in a place like Naxos. And now he’d gone and done just that.
But she couldn’t get through to Theseus, the only person she could reach was Max, Theseus’ agent.
“He’s on a quest,” Max told her. “The new Minotaur gig finally came through.”
Poor Ariadne. Tears streaked her cheeks. She said, “Will you give him a message? Tell him it’s morning in Naxos and it rains all the time. Tell him he has no right to do this but don’t tell him that he’ll just get angry. Tell him I’ve forwarded his blue hero coat which he’ll need if he follows the Minotaur into the northern regions of the maze. Tell him there’s one version of the old legend which says that Theseus and Ariadne settled down in Naxos and lived there for the rest of their lives. Tell him that’s the one we decided was true, in case he’s forgotten.
“Tell him Dionysus arrived last week on his sailboat and told me in no uncertain terms that he’s not responsible for me despite the legend that says he will fall in love with me and marry me and live happily with me on Naxos ever after. Dionysus says it may well turn out that way and he does consider me cute, but he’s got a few things to do before getting to that. He has to find his motorcycle which someone borrowed, and he has to evict some Titans squatting in his apartment in downtown Naxos, and until he settles these things I’m on my own.
“Tell Theseus I’ve had to sell his orange suit of armor, his pin-striped shield, his matched set of swords, and a few other things just to make ends meet.
“Tell him I can’t think of anything I’ve done to warrant this sort of behavior on his part; I’ll admit it was hectic in the last weeks before our departure from Crete when we were searching all over the island for someone to clean the head of the Medusa he’d caught, and build an olivewood presentation case for it with a viewing mirror so they wouldn’t be turned to stone. But it’s not my fault it was raining all the time; do I make the weather? Dionysus asked me to tell Theseus that he’s got the Soma he asked for, and he’ll meet up with him somehow somewhere and get it to him.
“Tell him I think Dionysus is starting to get extremely interested in me despite his gruff manner. I don’t know what to tell Dionysus; which version of which old legend am I supposed to follow? Tell Theseus to please let me know something; I really need some answers, and that I am his loving Ariadne.”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Max said. “I’ll tell him.”
8. The Minotaur.
The Minotaur, despite his enormous stature, his knife-edged hooves, his lashing black-ox tail, his dagger-shaped teeth of a carnivorous bull birthed from a nightmare, despite his needle-pointed horns and dazzling speed, despite his unimpeachable victories over the Nemean lion and the winged oryx of the Sabateans, despite all that, but in keeping with the inner bovinity of his nature, was a fearful and trepidatious creature diseased with compunctions and covered all over with pinpoint doubts.
The Minotaur didn’t spend much time in his lair. It left him too vulnerable to surprise attack; he knew that a moving defense is the best defense, and so he roamed everywhere, up and down and in and out of the convolutions of Dædalus’ maze.
He regretted the loss of the old labyrinth, the one they had built for him under the palace at Knossos, where they sent him the pretty little bull dancers to feast upon each year: He had sneered at it then, a dinner once a year, where’s that at? Now he’d give anything to have it back again — the comforting stone walls, that he once thought were gallingly familiar, the passageways of a thousand turns and complications, which he once knew better than the inside of his own mind. Yes, and considered boring, simple monster that he was back then.
Now it was different. The old labyrinth was gone, or rather, the labyrinth was everywhere, the old world was falling apart, and only Dædalus was holding it together by sheer force of will and magical schemes. This was to be applauded, no doubt, but where had it gotten the Minotaur? Here he is out in the wilderness, and when he sleeps in the forest he is guarded by flocks of tiny birds who feast off the parasites that live in his hairy ears, paying for their dinners by taking turns staying awake and watching out for trouble: “Look, over there, a leaf moved, a branch stirred, a shadow cut across the moon.”
Most of these are false alarms. The Minotaur has asked the birds on several occasions, please, as a personal favor to me, apply to your perceptions of danger a degree of discrimination so that I can get a little sleep without having to jump to my feet twenty times a night in response to your premature reports of suspicious shadows that turn out to be owls, strange noises that turn out to be mice. The tiny birds argue back in their twittering language, with much indignant fluttering of iridescent wings: “Isn’t it enough that we spend our nights in your service listening and watching for danger? We are your early warning system, O Minotaur, indiscriminate but acute, but that’s not enough for you; you want us, poor brainless feathered things though we are, to attempt the logical computations of analysis, not only to detect but to interpret, to decide not only what noise or sight should alert you, but which should not. You are unreasonable, O Minotaur, and unkind, and perhaps you’d like it better if we went away to visit our relatives the humming birds, leaving you to figure out what every little sound means in the darkness of the night by yourself since you’re so smart.”
The Minotaur apologizes, even a poor warning system is better than none, excuse me, I was asking too much, the Minotaur’s got enough trouble without making new enemies or losing old friends, “I’m sorry, stay with me, please.” Although he knows the tiny birds wouldn’t leave him anyhow, these humming birds they speak of, who has ever seen them? But he goes through the formalities of asking them to stay, just carry on as before, and in the end they agree, grudgingly at first, then forgivingly, flying around his head like a circle of dusky motes.
Since he can’t have his old stone labyrinth back, the Minotaur feels safest in the woods, in deep forest where the trees are crowded together shoulder to shoulder and connected by dense and stringy shrubs with hooked and rattly leaves, the sort of mazelike terrain that a monster can slip through without much difficulty, but that a man, even a hero like Theseus, finds difficult and noisy going.
And the forest is filled with good things to eat. The Minotaur’s senses operate by human equivalents. Where a man might see acorns, decayed logs and rotting muskrats, the Minotaur sees olives, pizza, jugged hare. A good place, the forest, with its dappled greens and grays, the primeval colors of camouflage.
The Minotaur would cheerfully spend the rest of his life here. But that’s not to be, the forest seems infinite when you’re in it, but all too soon you come to cleared land, you see human habitations, you see thin streamers of smoke from the cooking fires and hear the sounds of children playing, and you know you’re back in it again, civilization. You even think of retracing your steps, going back into the dear sweet woods, but no, from afar comes the sound of the hunter’s horn, and the yap and squeal of the dogs, and there’s nothing
for it but to go on, keep moving on, moving on.
The Minotaur was by no means without resources when he came into human-occupied territory. You might think that a bull-headed man standing seven feet tall and colored jet black with gouts of foam around his muzzle would be more than noticeable. But this is not the case. People are unobservant. And, the Minotaur has several disguises which have proven effective in the past. One of his ruses is to dress himself up as a Renault police van, painted dark blue, with policemen appliquéd on the windows. Deep in his throat the Minotaur makes the sound of a motor ticking over, the van just crawling through the streets, its tires whispering of atrocious pain and meaningless retribution. People tend to avoid him when he wears his van disguise, and even those who see through it move away and mind their own business, because the police have been known to disguise their vans as Minotaurs disguised as vans; there’s no end to their twisted subtlety, a wise man keeps his nose out of such matters.
That damned elusive Minotaur! With his predilection for flight and his talent for dissimulation you might wonder how anyone, even a hero, even a god, for that matter, could hope to overwhelm him, could dream of finding him, for example, eating a quiet dinner in an Indian restaurant. But they do, and they say, “That’s him, let’s git him, ha, ha, take that, and that, look boys, we got ourselves a Minotaur or whatever they call them critters. Otis, you and Charlie hold his knackers while Blue cuts off his head with the chain saw, and then we’re off to Ma Tatum’s for a little well earned diversion.” Unlikely, but it happens.
Not this time, though. This place looks all right, it feels safe, and the Minotaur, a beleaguered monster, knows about these things. Up ahead, in the middle of a cobblestoned street, is a nice restaurant. It would be nice to go in and have a civilized meal for a change, yes, and a glass of wine. The monster has money, or rather, traveler’s checks, good anywhere in the universe. Monsters with traveler’s checks are always welcome. In fact, the Minotaur has discovered that money is the best disguise of all. If you have enough of it, no one suspects you of being a monster; they just think you’re an eccentric foreigner.
Yes, a nice meal would pick up his spirits considerably. The Minotaur starts toward the restaurant, his hooves clicking on the cobblestones.
9. The Maze Larger than the World.
For a long time it was impossible to be sure of anything. That was because indeterminacy ruled the maze world, and nobody liked it but Dædalus. The inhabitants detested it. Dædalus, they said, you have gone too far. No good will come of this, you’re letting yourself be seduced by a mere proposition. Come, be reasonable, lay down a few hard facts, promulgate some operating instructions; at least give us some defaults. We need a little order around here. A little order is all we ask for, Dædalus; it keeps things nice, please, just for us, okay?
Dædalus wouldn’t listen. He considers his critics negligible, old-world sentimentalists in love with obsolete ideas. The old order that they dream of never was, and will not be again.
The people in the maze, despite Dædalus, despite the rule of uncertainty, have set up some rules for themselves, just to avoid the chaos, and in order that a few things could be planned.
This matter of the Minotaur, for example. Many Theseuses came through these parts looking for the fabulous beast. A regular industry had sprung up to supply all of them. You could stop at any newsstand and buy a Standard Guide to Minotauronics, with thumb index and handy chart. You could try Hermes’ adaptation of Pythagoras’ Negative Inference System. There were many other methods and all of them worked to some extent, not through their intrinsic merit but because, for reasons not yet fully understood, the maze shaped its interminable topology to the intentions of the players within it, so that, although you cannot plan to find what you are looking for, you also cannot hope to escape it.
10. The Spool of Thread.
It is not often that a spool of thread becomes a central character in a drama. But so it is. The main components of our story are Theseus, the maze, the Minotaur, Dædalus, Ariadne, and the thread, the all-important link with the outer world that Dædalus gave to Ariadne, who gave it to Theseus.
By following the twists and turns of a magical spool of thread, Theseus was able to find his way to the depths of the maze where the Minotaur slept, kill him, and find his way out again. Or so the received version of the legend has it.
Actually, this was a simplified explanation which was given out to the barbaric Dorians of the post-Atlantean civilization after Dædalus’ sophisticated technologies were lost in the holocaust that engulfed the ancient world.
The spool of thread was actually a homing device, a mechanical “hound” programmed to pursue the Minotaur through visual, audio, and olfactory modalities.
A quasi-living entity, the thread was susceptible to transformation, just like everything else in Dædalus’ maze. In its thread form it was a kind of fly-by-wire missile, whose speed could be adjusted by the thought impulses of its operator. But it was also liable to change form without warning, in response to the rigorous but little-understood laws of Magical Engineering.
So it was that as Theseus sat there, relaxing in his chair at the restaurant, and with a comfortable flirtation going on with the waitress, he heard a squeaking sound from his knapsack. Theseus opened a flap and out crept a mouse, a rather pretty mouse, on the small side but daintily proportioned, and colored chartreuse.
“Why, hello, little mouse,” Theseus said. “Have you been riding long in my knapsack?”
“Spare me the baby talk,” said the mouse. “You knew me last as a spool of thread.”
“Why have you changed into a mouse?” Theseus inquired.
“It was required by the exigencies of the situation,” the mouse replied.
“I see,” Theseus said, and asked no more, for he could tell by the reply that the mouse, like so many magical creations, was a master, or mistress, of the dialectics of evasion. But Theseus thought to himself that the mouse might be a symbolic solidification of the mouse that does the questing across the screens of computers.
“It’s time for us to go,” the mouse said.
“Right now?” Theseus asked. “It’s really quite comfortable in this restaurant, and there’s no real urgency about this quest, is there? I mean, we have forever, or at least quite a long time, in which to find each other, the Minotaur and I. How about I get you a bowl of milk and a nice bit of cheese and we plan to get started in about a week?”
“That won’t do at all,” the mouse said. “It’s not that I’m in any rush, personally. When I finish this quest, I’ll just be sent out on another. Finding a Minotaur or finding a hypotenuse is all the same to me. That’s life for a homing device. But things tend to happen rather suddenly around here, when they happen at all. The Minotaur is on the move, and unless we make a simultaneous move, I’m apt to lose his location-trace. Then you really would have forever in which to search, and perhaps a bit longer.”
“Oh, very well,” Theseus said, getting to his feet. “Landlord, my bill! You take Visa card, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes,” the landlord said. “All major credit cards are honored in the maze.”
Theseus signed and looked around for the waitress to say goodbye, but the mouse told him, “Never mind that, you’ll meet her again.”
“How can you know that?” Theseus asked.
“Because you have no luck at all,” the mouse said, snickering. “And now, my fine hero, let us be off.”
The mouse climbed into his knapsack, then popped her head out again. “My name, by the way, is Miss Mouse. But you may call me Missy.” She crept into the knapsack and made herself comfortable in a pair of his hiking socks.
Theseus left the restaurant and set off down the main road. It was a fine day. The sun — not the real sun but a substitute that Dædalus had found that looked just like the real thing, only with nicer colors — was climbing toward the zenith. Midday already! Theseus felt the first pangs of a familiar sensation. Theseus was able to id
entify it without difficulty: yes, Theseus was getting hungry again already. That’s the trouble with meals in imaginary restaurants: they never satisfy for long.
11. Theobombus, leading cybernetician
at the Mount Parnassus computer works, looked up, an expression of disquiet passing over his handsome, aquiline, middle-aged features like the wings of a bat trembling just above the surface of a newly discovered painting by Manet, or like the way certain sounds seem to rebound in the caverns of the ear with an appeal so insidious, and so overwhelming, that we may be glad that music does not bear a moral imperative. Yes, there could be no doubting it. He had the biggest and best array of computing equipment the world had ever seen. He had to hand it to Dædalus; he was a man who got his men what they needed. What made it all the more neat was the way Dædalus had bypassed technology, letting intuition bear the point it so often seems to tend to, despite the cryptic tergivserations from our so-called reason. Dædalus’ machines were damned good, his programs were brilliant, and the result of it all, the fruits of so much intellectual toil, the crowning achievement of what science can bring you, was the knowledge that the world had approximately ten and a half years of normaltime left to continue in, after which it would be annihilated.
A bummer, right? Nobody wants to hear they’re going to be wiped out in about a decade. Four and a half years left and still counting. Dædalus could see he was going to have a crazed electorate on his hands unless he did something.
Dædalus swung into action. He created the self-enclosed Maze of the Minotaur, the Maze larger than that which contains it, the Maze that contains the rest of the universe that observes the Maze.
It was a neat solution. As any advanced mathematician could see, Atlantean civilization couldn’t be saved in realtime, but in mazetime®, Dædalus’ own invention. Minos, the nobles of his court, his civilization, could go on forever.
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