The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  Banished, Daedalus finds work as architect for King Minos of Crete. To hide the shame of Minos’s queen, her monstrous Minotaur offspring, Daedalus builds the great Labyrinth at Knossos. But his sympathy for the loves of women leads him back through his own maze to full humanity. Young men from Athens are being sacrificed to the Minotaur; it is Daedalus who shows Princess Ariadne the secret of the maze, to save them.

  The Minotaur is killed by Ariadne’s lover Theseus, and Daedalus is imprisoned. He has his own son now, Icarus, and they escape from Crete on wings of wax and feathers—but the boy flies too high—Of course! But we warned Harry, it wasn’t our fault, or his, or the builders’, just bad luck—and falls to his death, like Talos.

  Daedalus, chastened and enlightened, lives out his life in Sicily, as tutor to its royal family. He teaches his arts instead of hoarding them, achieving greater wonders than ever before.

  Minos still searches for him. Minos offers a golden reward for anyone who can draw a linen thread through the secret inner windings of a triton shell. Daedalus rises to the challenge because he cannot do otherwise; he must be his best.

  Why hadn’t I recognized this picture before, in bas-relief at the entrance to Slugland?—the ant emerging from the gastropod shell with a thread tied to one leg, lured through the maze by the honey on Daedalus’s fingers⁠…

  The reward is claimed, and Daedalus’s location is revealed. But the last scene is not of his death. For when wrathful Minos arrives, the rising generation of Sicily acts to protect the tutor they love, and it is the great king of the Mediterranean who is cast down. He becomes the chief magistrate of hell, for he is the personification of the state, while Daedalus…There is no final view of Daedalus. Perhaps he never dies.

  ◆◆◆

  Then a golden thread appeared in the carpet, and the way became straight.

  We followed it past unadorned panels. In the distance the destination shone, the mirrored wall, the sacrificial emblem balanced against its own reflection there, the graven words I was remembering before I was quite close enough to see them—You have found the right passage, So ends the Shining Fare—but I held myself in the moment with my own lines from ten or a hundred years before, the Chorus of Parents:

  The Maze is ending. You know where you are headed.

  The unwound way, no longer recondite,

  Will wend until the higher axe is threaded,

  But the axis that you tread has turned to light.

  The Masque has ended. We pass the world to you,

  Complete with costumes, props, and cardboard throne.

  Have fun. Play all its gaudy parts, but when you’re through,

  Perform these lines for children of your own.

  The Mirror never ends, a wall that fades

  Away, our past your future, all of Time

  Balanced between these two unblooded blades.

  Your lives are now your own. Echoes, a rhyme,

  A memory—We are no more, mere air.

  But look into the mirror. Aren’t we there?

  We stand before the mirrored wall, Foyle and I, two tough and cynical people in their thirties, with the wondering faces of children. Nearby, a fountain, whose two copies I remember from Nexus University, sings quietly; its name was the Pierian Spring.

  YOU HAVE CHOSEN THE RIGHT KANAL

  “It’s German for ‘channel.’ As simple as that.”

  “Of course,” Foyle says.

  SO ENDS THE HELLER WEG

  “The ‘Heller’ Way?”

  “ ‘Bright,’ ” I say. “Shining. Of course.”

  The fasces? Gone, for it is not the sign of “overmastery to come,” it is the sign of “mastery to overcome”—the stage of absolute authority that children and criminals might have needed over them, but adults and citizens must outgrow. The once-bundled birch rods lie scattered, each broken in the middle like Prospero’s staff. And the short, cruel chopper has grown into a long-handled thing of art, a ritual weapon only, its Cretan double blade rising from the burst bundle like a butterfly from the cocoon.

  It props up its reflection in the infinite mirror, past and future, one blade whetting the other.

  ◆◆◆

  “It was all very obvious, wasn’t it? Were we just too close to see it?”

  “Can you see the workings of your own heart?”

  She shakes her head, tries to say something else, and fails.

  “Look at this,” I say.

  In a corner opposite the mirrored wall, a hand-painted map depicts a hemisphere of Old Earth, featuring Southern Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia as far as China. A transparent glass case overlies the map, and the jewels inside the case—the scarfpins, badges, and whistles of the Questioner and other ritual attendants—serve to mark the sites of the earliest Earth civilizations. Although there was never anything like this at Nexus, I know where I will find the most important piece, precisely where Summerisle told me to look, Near the Labyrinth, in a mountain cave, on the isle of Crete, on Earth… It glitters back at me from the painted Mediterranean: the Master’s ring.

  THESE ARE THE ORIGINALS.

  So says the golden plaque. Some of the words are German, but I translate them without thinking; this part I have never seen but I can guess the essence of what it will say:

  WE WILL TAKE COPIES WHEREVER WE GO,

  MAKING MORE AS NEEDED,

  AND MAZES FOR THE DANCE.

  YOU MAY WISH TO DO THE SAME,

  IF YOU FIND YOURSELVES HERE.

  JUST REMEMBER,

  IT IS NOT THE RITUAL,

  IT IS NOT ONE HOLY PLACE,

  OR A CHOSEN PEOPLE⁠—

  IT IS THE WILL TO KNIT TOGETHER

  THAT FINDS THE GOLDEN THREAD.

  WE HAVE FOUND THE WHOLENESS

  THAT CAME APART

  IN DISTRIBUTORS AND

  MERITOCRATS.

  IT IS ALL WE WILL TAKE BACK

  TO THE WORLDS OF MEN.

  IT IS ALL WE LEAVE BEHIND

  FOR YOU:

  STRANGERS, FRIENDS.

  IT IS ALL THERE IS.

  FAREWELL.

  “They’ve adopted us,” Foyle says. “Even us. The way the Kanalist elite was always adopting the brightest people they met, wherever they came from. That’s why the ‘desirable mix of classes’ in the Hellway teams: so that poor kids could make a name for themselves, and rich families adopt them. That’s what their tombstones were trying to tell me—not that children were lost and sacrificed, that they were adopted and lifted up.”

  “Up?” I say. “Up. There’s more.”

  I find the velvet tassel, like a bellpull, and the staircase comes down at my tug. We ascend.

  ◆◆◆

  The stars.

  Arctic air, of course, so near the north pole, and high. A husk of natural wall holds back the wind in three directions, but this is still the top of the mountain, on a world without smog, and even in twilight there are millions of stars, so bright they burn. And one bright enough to stand out from the rest, at their hub. The polestar, the closest. The one the Elitists must have stared at most longingly, decade after decade, knowing that the folk in orbit around it were their kin. The one they finally left for.

  “At Nexus U.,” I said, but breathlessly, heart pounding, “we just wound up on the roof; went down by a fire escape to come in through the side door. There was a final mosaic there, the marriage of Earth and Heaven, but it was wrong, we knew it, an anticlimax; something important to the meaning had been lost⁠…⁠”

  “Catharensis.” Foyle gazed at the star. “Catharensis Five. So they got there after all.”

  “But even on a new world, they had the sense to stay underground,” I said. “It was a century or more before something called ‘Kanalism’ seeped into the mainstream. It looked freshly made up then.

  “Because they’d kept it fresh. They’d kept their priorities. It would be, what?…two or three centuries more before the Federal Alignment was founded, but the creed lasted long
enough to make that happen. And longer, for centuries of freedom after that. Not the usual quick decay, Foyle—a thousand years since Avalon! The Elitists didn’t die, and they never sold out.”

  There were tears of something like joy on Foyle’s face, but what she said was—“Until our century, you mean.”

  “No, you don’t believe that. You and I can never be sure of that again.” I held her cold hand in the dark. “A thousand years makes them different from any who’ve passed before. They’ve just gone underground again, that’s all. To them—to us—only individuals matter; those Column Kanalists can call themselves anything they like so long as there are individuals out there, somewhere, who live the true creed. The members of the underground Old Rite lodges you told me about. You yourself.

  “Our time can always come again, because even in the worst of times, not everyone sells out. Your husband never sold out. I never sold out.”

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” she whispered, staring back at me. “Evan Larkspur never sold out.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “You can’t even deny it, can you?” she said, laughing raggedly. “My God, it’s true.”

  It took me by surprise.

  And I found I could not deny my name. Not so soon after being rebaptized, not under these stars. “You can’t⁠—⁠”

  “Know? But I can. You don’t even bother to hide it—the old-fashioned accent, the way you talked about flitter controls, your knowledge of the verses, a hundred giveaways—even the magic tricks! And yet you’re safe. Everyone always says that Larkspur could still come back, but no one really believes⁠—⁠”

  “You can’t⁠—⁠”

  “One mistake, but you couldn’t have known. You see, the Kanalist maze at Nexus University was burned to the ground during the Ratification Riots. Ninety years ago…But you were initiated there, all right. It’s true, isn’t it? Admit it.”

  I found myself nodding my head. I took a deep breath of the frigid air, and found I’d lost none of the previous moment’s exaltation. I could not fear the future in this timeless place.

  She cocked her head. “You don’t look much like Schaelus’s bust of you, though.”

  “I’ve been taking hormones.”

  She laughed again, almost giddily, hugging herself against the cold.

  “It’s crazy. I always knew you were a ringer, but…It’s like catching a burglar, and finding out he’s also the Archangel Michael.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This, and the Shining Fare, it’s too much to take in, it’s like a dream. What are you doing here? What…what happened to you?”

  At long last a chance to tell someone about it, to get it off my chest.

  I told her as much as I could in a few words, and only up to the point where I’d returned to the human sphere. All the bumming around I’d done since, my sordid arrangement with Condé, and so forth…Dramatically, it was better to end with the Barbarossa.

  “⁠…⁠The worst thing is that I’ll never know everything. The memories aren’t missing, they’re distorted, all jumbled up now with the dreams and the wishes and the fears.”

  “And you felt you couldn’t announce your return?” she asked.

  “It would be suicide. People would kill me for the Barbarossa’s data record—which is in fact worthless, so I’d have no fortune to protect myself with. Meanwhile, the rulers of the Column are my worst enemies. They couldn’t let an Old Rite Kanalist with millions of admirers come back to life now. They might even remember that I was Summerisle’s best friend and think that I had his Vice Book, full of potent material to blackmail them with. I’d have to fight every minute just to stay alive.

  “Nor would I have anything to gain by the name. The boy who wrote Larkspur’s plays died in the suspend-sleep tank. I can’t summon up anything like his talent. I can’t even be sure I am Evan Larkspur. Maybe that’s just a fantasy an amnesia victim pieced together after a flitter crash on a remote planet. Maybe there was a bust of Larkspur in my hospital room, and that’s all.”

  “That’s crap. You know things only he could know.”

  “So you say. But there’s another possibility. I could be the real Larkspur, but you could be a fantasy. Suppose they never did get me out of that suspend-sleep tank. Suppose this is just a dream that goes on and on.”

  “That’s crap, too, and you know it.”

  “No, I don’t know it. This is not philosophical bullshit. It’s a real possibility I have to live with every day—the most believable hypothesis.

  “You see, with no role to play, no place to fit, I’ve done nothing for eight years but test the limits of experience. I’ve taken risks I would never take if I really believed this was my life—and I’ve always lucked out, like the hero of a cheap thriller. Look, just on this planet! Think about it. It’s as if the whole place had been designed, authored, to bring me to this revelation under the stars, a Kanalist reborn. I love it, it moves me, but can I believe in it?”

  “Oh, and I’m a part of your dream, too, I suppose.”

  “You and Ariel are just the sort of women I dream of, as a matter of fact.”

  “Don’t you know that everybody has that feeling sometimes?”

  “Does everybody have my reasons?”

  She looked into my eyes, shivering. “No, I suppose not. Then again⁠…

  “Ten years ago, my husband started a guerrilla war to keep Vesper from being colonized. When it was all over, when he and most of the rest were dead, I negotiated the peace. I always felt like a sellout for that. Roger would have told me to shrug those feelings off. He was a Larkspurian, of course, and an Old Rite Kanalist, and he’d have said, ‘This is the only real moment, you are born into a new world to start over, again and again, anything is possible.’ I’d closed my heart to that voice.

  “But now I’ve been led through the mysteries he told me about—shriven and initiated—by Evan Larkspur himself! And you think this world was tailor-made for you? No. It’s just that it’s true, that’s all. Anything is possible. It’s true.”

  I think I laughed.

  “To think that you ever criticized me for taking too dark a view,” she went on. “What evidence do you have that you willfully abandoned your mates? Why assume the worst of yourself, when what you actually remember is fighting a hijacker for them?”

  I shook my head. “What I ‘remember’ is a childish fantasy. The agent of a dire conspiracy steals a whole ship by taking it into praeterspace without a target star—magically stranding it outside space-time, see, in a sort of⁠—⁠”

  “Bubble universe in praeterspace?” she said.

  I stopped, thunderstruck. She eagerly repeated the phrase.

  “There is no such thing,” I said. “I searched the literature again and again. In the hundred years since I left, no shred of evidence that such a thing⁠—⁠”

  “Can be,” she told me, gently but firmly. “The Titans knew of it. It’s one of the few big secrets of their physics that the Elitists were able to figure out. ‘The way in and out of bubble universes in praeterspace.’ It was the most tantalizing hint in their data bank’s description of the White Codex, the treasure they took with them when they went to Catharensis Five. I wish I could tell you that they left the details behind. They didn’t. But I can show you the reference, at least. P-space bubble universes are real, you didn’t make them up. Anything…is…possible!”

  I just gaped at her, thinking, thinking⁠…

  “Anything!” she went on. “Look at what you’ve already done. A Shadow Tribune of the Column! How many years, how many risks has it taken you to establish that identity? Seeming to work for them, just so that sometimes you can slip in something against them, like keeping a reformist senator alive. All the time maintaining this false front of a charming, self-centered lightweight. Where do you find the dedication? Where do you find the courage?”

  Her eyes were shining. Her lips were parted. I could scent the vapor of her breath. There was nothing els
e I could say:

  “Somebody has to do it.”

  She nodded, smiling, and reached for the collar of her jumpsuit. “So let’s do it.”

  “What, right here?”

  “Let’s signal the senator’s people.” She had removed that pendant again, and was reading something from it.

  “Oh.”

  “Early Sunday morning,” she said. “Has so little time really passed?”

  The calculation brought us back to reality with a wrench. It had been a late Sunday afternoon when I’d spied on Pro and Contra, the mercs, and overheard them planning to attack the construction camp before the senator arrived. Pro had said he’d take a week to set it up.

  “Sunday night, we were in the mirror maze,” Foyle said. “The next night we camped out on the plain of moths.”

  I counted by nights. “Tuesday night, I slept in the eel-balloon. Wednesday, on vines in Slugland. Thursday, oh, between clean sheets in the lighthouse. Friday—God, if the Valley Backstage was just yesterday, then Friday I slept, uh⁠—⁠”

  “In good company,” Foyle said. “But spare me the details. So Saturday night just ended, and it’s not quite a week yet.”

  “The pendant is a comm-link to your freighter, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Why so secretive about it?”

  “Most places, port authority doesn’t allow you remote control once you’ve parked. Besides…Well, I know all your secrets; I guess I can tell you. It’s a computer, too, and much more than that. I could never afford to buy a device as powerful as this one, if humans even make such a thing. It’s an alien artifact.”

  “And you’ve never reported it.”

  A sidelong glance. “I’d have to turn it in. And it’s my personal guarantee of freedom. It’s scannerproof—same reason the EMP in the elevator shaft didn’t affect it—and Customs officials take it for a junk jewel, but I can run my whole ship with it, at a distance. That’s saved my neck plenty of times.”