The Minotaur has decided to take the big step and get the hornectomy that will transform him from a Minotaur into a unicorn. He will go to Asclepius, the master surgeon of the maze, and have one horn surgically removed. The remaining horn will be off center, but he will still be able to pass himself off as an Asymmetrical or Lopsided Unicorn.
But there’s a difficulty. The Minotaur doesn’t have the sizable fee that Asclepius charges for cosmetic surgery. Where will he get the money? None of his friends have any. And there are no jobs in the maze, only roles, which pay only in non-negotiable units of fame or in the small change of notoriety.
18. The Midas Touch.
Most of the money that exists in the maze tends to accumulate around a few individuals who need it for archetypal reasons. King Midas, for example, is extremely wealthy, since he can produce his own gold objects. But there’s nothing frivolous about Midas; he is aware of his importance as a symbol of eternally unsatisfied greed and he takes his work seriously.
It is well known that Midas possessed the ability to turn anything into gold by his touch alone. But this was not an instantaneous process as the old legends would have you believe. Small pebbles, twigs, acorns, could be held in the hand or under the armpit and transformed overnight. They provided Midas with plenty of small change and an endless supply of knickknacks useful for birthday presents and bar mitzvahs. Larger objects took months, sometimes years, of Midas’ unique and unremitting tactility, his crysomatic touch. It was a great gift, but Midas had to spend almost all his time holding onto or leaning against the objects he wanted to aurefy, and this was boring, even though he could read or watch television at the same time.
Midas did make loans from time to time. Although he hated to decrease his treasure trove, even temporarily, he was unable, by virtue of his archetypal drive, to forgo any opportunity to increase it. That is how he came to be known as the Loan Shark of the Gods, and was recognized, even in his own lifetime, as the embodiment of the profit motive.
One small bonus that Midas gets from his knack: he is able to have all the fillings in his teeth made of wax. Within a day or so they turn into gold of their own accord. It is not a really large economy, but every bit helps when you’re trying to compile a really impressive treasure horde.
Some people ask why money is needed in the maze at all, since the necessities of life and adventure are supplied free. This is a naive question. You might as well ask why love is needed in the maze, or fame. Money, love, and fame are alike in their ability to provide pleasure on a low level, and motivation for great deeds on a high level.
Midas was a son of the Great Goddess of Ida by one of those anonymous satyrs who spring up all over the ancient world. A lot of stories have sprung up around Midas. The fact is, he managed the gold thing very nicely.
19. The Profit Motive.
Dædalus had never considered the profit motive when he set up the maze as the world’s first welfare state. He thought it wasn’t important. He provided everyone with food, shelter, clothing, weapons, everything you’d need to conduct your life and kill your enemies. He thought that would be enough. More than enough, in fact. He saw no need for commerce. Shopping bored him. The pleasures of consumption were beyond his understanding. He had built his maze back in the old days before commerce first became respectable, then habitual, and finally, indispensable.
Back when Dædalus was a boy, if someone wanted a fur coat they went out into the woods and shot one, rather than the more humane modem method of going to a store and buying one.
But times change, and since the maze is contemporaneous with all space and time, it is susceptible to new ideas. Buying things began as a novelty, but soon replaced making things as the standard way of getting a hold of things.
There’s no stopping an idea whose time has come.
Dædalus passed a law forbidding most categories of buying and selling, but this was about as effective as a proclamation against measles.
People acquired money by selling to Midas and other middlemen who were legally entitled, demanded of, in fact, by archetypal force, to acquire the statues, golden cups, ivory combs, amber amulets, embroidered tapestries, and so forth, with which the maze was furnished. Midas paid for them in gold and silver coins and resold them at a great profit to museums and private collectors in the 20th century.
It wasn’t perfect but at least it provided everyone with a source of income.
Soon everyone had money. But for a long time there was nothing to buy with it. Back then there were no bookstores, no movies, no boutiques or supermarkets. Of more concern, there was no entertainment.
Dædalus had tried to do something about the entertainment gap. He provided classical dramas in open-air theaters. They were free for everyone and about as interesting as government sponsored art usually is.
The people of Dædalus’ maze weren’t content with classical stuff. It was Dædalus’ fault. He had provided everyone with spherical television sets so that they could communicate with each other electronically, instantaneously and at no cost, since, Dædalus proclaimed, it was the duty of the state to provide freedom of communication. Fine, said the Maze dwellers, how soon can we get cable? How soon can we tune in on the past and the future, which you say is all around us?
In vain Dædalus preached the old-fashioned pleasures, everyone gathering around the lyre on a Friday night singing the old songs. No use, pirate cable stations sprang up and set themselves to recording and presenting segments of the future which Dædalus had tried to forbid to his people, arguing that such knowledge was Anomalous and sure to bring on Catastrophe. And he decreed stem penalties for those caught sullying the philosophical purity of the maze with commercialism.
And of course it did no good at all. Dædalus was active in policing his maze, but he couldn’t be everywhere at the same time. Clandestine enterprises sprang up here and there, usually run by furtive men with black mustaches selling from the backs of station wagons which of course shouldn’t be in ancient Greece at all, brought there god knows how by the quick-witted exploiters of official government secrets, like Prometheus stealing fire from heaven. These unlicensed and illegal enterprises could be moved quickly if Dædalus was reported in the vicinity.
Prediction of where Dædalus would turn up next became an important industry in itself, a meta-industry, since the survival of all other commercial pursuits was ultimately based upon it. Predicting the times and locations of Dædalus became a career in itself, Dædalology, the science of knowing at all times where Dædulus was. There were quite a few systems of prognostication, most of them based upon data bases of the Master Builder’s previous visits and, of course, Dædalus’ psychological profile. But no heuristic could be established, it was all haphazard, unscientific, unreliable, and the resultant anxiety had potentially serious social consequences, especially since, given the unsettled conditions and the uncertainty of land tenure due to Dædalus’ wiping out of industry wherever he found it, mankind could not take the next great step forward and build shopping malls.
The great breakthrough came when Pythagoras published his Locative Proposition, stating that, whereas it was impossible to predict where Dædalus was likely to show up next, due to the general condition of commercial indeterminacy, one could predict with a high degree of correlation where he was least likely to appear, and for how long.
The equations of Pythagoras’ method of Negative Inference are very elegant, but we cannot go into them now. Suffice it to say that this powerful reasoning tool enabled men to build shopping malls at last, thus ending the Age of Commercial Furtiveness.
20. The Attack of the Self Pity Plant.
“Ah, no you don’t!” Theseus cried, for he had recognized just in time the telltale trefoil leaves marked with dark spatulate blotches that characterized the Flowering Mood Dump, popularly known as the Self Pity Plant, a small, squat ambulatory shrub with a talent for indiscernability.
The self pity plant grasps passersby with its hooked leaf-ends, implanting tendrils
of self-deprecating irony into the victim. This preliminary stage frequently goes unnoticed. The poison goes to work at once in the bloodstream, where it creeps along the artery walls holding as it were a cloak in front of its face and trying to pass as a member of the family. In this way it deceives the antibodies, who go on playing cards as if nothing had happened.
Reaching the central nervous system, the poison begins propagating dolons, tiny herring-shaped creatures that generate the enzyme of metaphysical doubt. Once it has reached this stage, you’ve got a pounding headache and you can consider your day is shot.
Although not usually fatal, the poison of the self pity bush has been known, in some cases, to infect people with the belief that they are Søren Kierkegaard.
Theseus had avoided the bush’s first mad rush, but he was by no means safe. The plant had him backed up against a sheer granite cliff which seemed to ascend endlessly into the azure of the uncaring sky. There were shallow steps cut into the granite, and Theseus hastily began to climb, the plant in pursuit.
He managed to gain a few steps on the plant, but was brought to a stop when he encountered a three car garage blocking his path. The Flowering Mood Dump moved toward him with its strange cry, “Look, did I choose this situation?” It was a cry that has been known to unnerve even strong men, sending into fibrillation the delicate organ whereby humans monitor whining.
It looked like the end for Theseus’ good mood. But then suddenly there appeared, just to his right, a small vehicle which rested upon a monorail which plunged downward through a steepening catenary of fear into a mysterious place that lay beneath impenetrable cloud cover. He wondered, was it a good bet to take this way? But it was too late to think about all that, even had there been time.
Theseus got into the vehicle and released the brake, which was the old-fashioned kind with a geared toe-in device to prevent accidental overruns. As it plunged into the previously described landscape, Theseus wondered, characteristically, if he had really made the right decision.
The Flowering Mood Dump was momentarily baffled. But then, with a resolution quite unexpected in so sketchy a creation, it leaped onto the back of a passing skateboarder, wrapped its short nuzzling limbs around his neck, hypnotized him, and sent him off in pursuit of Theseus.
Looking back, Theseus saw that the paths of the skateboarder and the monorail would converge at a point well short of infinity. It was coming right up, in fact. He would have to do something quickly, for the enraged plant was now capable of inflicting him with the most annoying and virulent form of critical self-analysis.
Theseus reached into his knapsack hoping to find something useful. He discarded a shoehorn as inapropos, set aside a pass to Dreamland for two as premature, and pulled out the homing device.
“Do something, please,” Theseus said.
The homing device looked at him with irritation. It had its own problems.
It had crept into Theseus’ pack because it had thought that was a cute thing to do, and it had its scholarly interests as well. But it found that Theseus had failed to provide it with mouse food, or any food at all, since heroes are well known as poor providers; for others, that is, since they usually do all right for themselves.
So the mouse was in a delicate situation. It had to eat immediately, or turn into an upright piano. It was ridiculous, but those were the rules.
One last desperate resource remained. The mouse took out the single Speedo capsule he always kept taped to his left armpit, and ingested it in the usual way. The drug, potent albeit proscribed, came on at once. Waves of power broke over the mouse. He rode the psychic shock wave to its peak, then changed himself into a cat.
Artificially boosted by the Speedo, the cat he was was able to catch the mouse he had been and devour it and thus save himself from upright pianoization before anyone had a chance to make a rule that it couldn’t be done.
“Your problem is clear enough,” the cat said. “But it has nothing to do with me. I’m along to help you find the Minotaur, nobody said anything about self pity plants. Theseus, I suggest that you apply to the gamemaster or whoever’s in charge around here.”
“No time for that,” Theseus said, as the roller coaster car approached the end of the track where the self pity plant waited, having previously infected the hapless skateboarder with a rare form of Manichæism, then discarded him like the useless hulk he had become.
There was no gainsaying the inherent nastiness of the spot. But Theseus’ cool did not desert him. Even in this extremity he was able to notice the small deviant aperture that had opened to one side of the track. Unhesitatingly he threw himself over the side of the car and plunged into the aperture.
There was an indescribable moment of transition. Then Theseus found himself in the center of a large sticky net made of some tarry black substance. It was a spider’s web, but a very large one, the sort you used to encounter in old movies, and Theseus was stuck fast. Now he noticed the self pity plant nearby, wearing its spider’s hat, and creeping rapidly across the integuments of the web toward the hapless hero.
“How come he gets to run along the web and I can’t move a finger?” Theseus asked the homing device cat.
“I think it has something to do with Ohm’s Law,” the homing device said. “Try not to get any of that sticky stuff on me.” Catlike, it had climbed onto Theseus’ chest.
The self pity plant, smiling in an unpleasant manner, spider hat cocked rakishly over one eye, continued to advance.
“What do I do now?” Theseus asked — a rhetorical question for which Dædalus, in his wisdom had provided an answer; or at least the possibility of an answer. For there appeared in the air above Theseus, in the midst of a rosy glow of magical shimmerings, the figure of a beautiful young woman clad in the finest descriptive materials.
“Ariadne!” Theseus cried.
“You have been very careless,” Ariadne said, “and I ought to leave you to your fate, especially after the way you’re going to leave me on Naxos without even a valid credit card.”
Theseus was momentarily taken aback, then remembered that in the Maze, chronology was merely a suggestion, like a stoplight to a Roman, certainly not a directive, and so you were liable to encounter the results of your future misdeeds before you had the pleasure of performing them.
“But if I don’t rescue you,” Ariadne said, “I stand to lose a torrid love scene with Dionysus later. So here is what you need, Theseus.”
She put into his fingers a small flask of a glassine substance, which Theseus immediately recognized as of Olympian manufacture, the veritable Soma, colored green and with runes inscribed on its sides.
“It is the Soma!” Theseus cried, recognizing the runic label, “the blessed Soma of the gods, without which a man, even a hero, can’t expect to do much except fall prey to a self pity plant while his homing device sits on his chest trying to keep its paws clean.”
Prying out the wax stopper with a small tool he always kept handy for this purpose, and which was the ancient world’s equivalent of the Swiss Army knife, Theseus drained the flask to the dregs, and then chewed and swallowed them, too.
And there it was, the power! A harsh laugh of exultation rose in his throat, but he choked it back as the homing device cat said to him in a testy voice, “Oh get on with it, do please get on with it!”
By the power conferred on him by the Soma of the gods, Theseus made an effort of will more intense than any recorded since the beginning of the universe. Through sheer crazed stubbornness of the human kind he forced a Chinese restaurant into existence.
It wavered uncertainly for a moment, its red and orange pagoda superimposed ghostily upon the spider web and the advancing self pity plant in its black spider hat. Then the catastrophe occurred, the new thing happened, and the self pity plant, the spider web, the discarded skateboarder, and the spider hat all vanished back into the misty realm of the unrealized, the unrationalized, the unactualized.
Theseus approached the restaurant cautiously,
because creations of this kind are apt to vanish suddenly, leaving you with a sore throat and a feeling of having slept in the wrong bed.
This Chinese restaurant passed the test of banality, however, by being there when he walked through the door and was shown a table by an impassive Chinese waiter.
Theseus ordered an assortment of dim sum. “Oh, and a bowl of soup for my homing device,” he added, in response to a small sharp claw digging into his shoulder.
21. Minotaur & Midas.
The Minotaur came to see Midas, hoping to get a loan to finance his hornectomy. Midas’ palace was splendid. The Minotaur passed through landscaped lawns and artificial lakes, past heroic sculptures, belvederes, ruined abbeys, and arrived at the main building. A uniformed major domo led him inside, down endless corridors, dimly lit and hung with indifferent oil paintings of classical subjects, through leaf-choked interior courtyards, to an audience chamber deep in the building’s interior.
Midas, the richest man in antiquity, was a small plump monarch with a gray goatee. He was seated at a long table covered with parchment scrolls and wax tablets. He had a typewriter capable of cutting cuneiform strokes into clay tablets. A ticker tape machine chattered in one comer. Beside it was a computer terminal. Despite his love of tradition, Midas found it impossible to get along without these things.
King Midas was a good host. He offered the Minotaur a plate of straw ice cream, and then, a thoughtful specialty, a bowl of lightly poached maiden’s hearts with bread sauce on the side.
He listens to the Minotaur’s request and begins shaking his head almost at once. The Minotaur has come at a bad time, the money market is down, interest rates are up, or perhaps it’s the other way around, in any case, money is tight and loans to individuals are out of the question at the moment. Midas regrets this, he would like to accommodate the Minotaur. The king is a great respecter of mythology and is aware of the Minotaur’s contributions to the Hellenic scheme of things, his secure place in the history of the fabulous. Midas’ very deep respect for the Minotaur and what he stands for made it all the more painful for him to have to refuse him, for he would really have liked to grant this loan, and would do so at once if it were only up to him — he is notorious for his soft heart — but he was accountable to his board of directors, who kept him on a tight rein; he has no discretion in these matters, alas.
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