Minotaur Maze

by Robert Sheckley

  But in fact, Theseus had a soft spot in his heart for monsters. It was inevitable, heroes and monsters share a special understanding since they are in the same line of work. Heroes and monsters also have this in common, that they are constitutionally unable to live on their income.

  “Oh, yeah,” Theseus said, “Minotaurs, nasty customers them critters; I’ve never tackled one before; chimæras are more in my line, but what the hell, a monster’s a monster and I reckon I can cut it. I recollect this chimæra I was tracking out in Apache country near the Pæonian Gulf—”

  “We’d love to hear about that some other time,” the woman said. “But right now we need an answer.”

  “Oh, I’ll do it all right,” Theseus said.

  “How soon can you start?”

  “Well, now,” Theseus said, sitting back in the batwing chair and putting one of his high-heeled Josiah Starke handtooled cordovan boots on the barrail nearby. “I reckon we ought to have a drink on it before I go out and start reading sign.”

  “Reading sign?” the man inquired. He turned to the redheaded woman. “My dear, do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

  “Why shucks,” Theseus said, “it ain’t no special thing, reading sign, but when you deal with Indians, especially them Minotoor Indians, you got to have some savvy or import some right quick.”

  “Theseus,” the woman said, “I think you’re slipping out of context.”

  “Them Minotoor Indians,” Theseus said, blowing the head off his mug of beer, “can move across bare rock without making a sound except a scuffle from their moccasins. When they’re on the warpath they can equip their moccasins with silencers.”

  “Hey, snap out of it,” the man said.

  Theseus looked up, dazed. Heroes frequently dream of being allowed to change some of the basic rules of the hero and monster game, like changing the context, sending the spectators away, combining forces and assaulting the castle of love, heroes and monsters together, we’d be unbeatable. But it could never happen, the hard wiring of the universe wouldn’t allow it, so if you can’t love a monster, the next best thing is to kill a monster.

  “Sorry,” Theseus said, “just a momentary lapse.”

  “You’re not by any chance mentally disaffected, are you?” the redheaded woman asked.

  “I’m normal for a hero,” Theseus said. “You have to be a little weird to do this job.”

  Theseus signed a provisional contract, to be read, approved, and finalized by his agent, and received the customary monster-hunt advance check. With the preliminaries completed, everyone was hungry and it was time to go to lunch. Lunch with the impresario after signing the contract is usually the best part of the monster hunt.

  2. Mann. T. goes forth after the Minotaur.

  After lunch they went straight to the command post. The redheaded woman did not go with them. Between chapters, she received a telegram telling her that she had won the Miss Abilene beauty contest and that oil had been discovered on the family estate in Sulk City, Florida. So departs a sulky and uncooperative character. Let it stand as a warning to others.

  The Command Post was filled with that air of tension and imminent disaster that accompanies so many bestsellers. Updates on the location and predilections of the Minotaur were flashed on television screens. Technicians hurried back and forth with equation-laden clipboards, making science fiction possible. There was a low hum of electricity, and the odd stuttering sound of the Phase Two Synthesizer, sending forth its mood forecasts. In spite of all this, Theseus did not fail to notice the dark-haired girl carrying a small stack of computer printouts, which were created for the sole purpose of giving her something to dp with her hands. She was adorable, the short skirt, the high heels, the pertness, and a look passed between them, not even an entire look, more of a looklet, or even a glancelet, and yet what future spells of sexual discombobulation were revealed in that stomach-twisting glance that tells you that she has noticed you and is considering thinking about you.

  Theseus didn’t know that now. He had just noticed that the green and red indicators on the Minotaur sweep search indicator had crossed and locked. The Minotaur had been located!

  The high priest of the Technical Scribes, in his green and orange uniform, with the flared gloves and pleated cape, wrote the numbers on a piece of paper and gave it to him.

  “Coordinates these the,” he said, his odd construction and sibilant delivery marking him as an Asper Futile from Gnagi Prime.

  Theseus studied the numbers, committing them to memory. Theseus didn’t really have a very good memory. Things never stayed in it for long. Theseus shouldered his knapsack, filled with Minotaur finding and killing equipment, and headed for the outskirts of town where the trail of the Minotaur began, stopping only at a grocery store on his way out of town to cash his Monster Advance. It was a Greek grocery store, as you might imagine.

  3. I hate to blame Dædalus for everything,

  but a lot of the present complication was his fault. Before he introduced uncertainty and gave us a maze contemporaneous with all space and time, we’d been doing all right, we Hellenes. Our history was a little complicated, but straightforward, even though people have made a lot of work over it. After Dædalus broadened our horizons there was high confusion. Before Dædalus there was just the normal confusion.

  Nowadays I’m anyone who happens to pick up the Theseus archetype. I’ve been universalized, and I don’t much like it. But in the old days, before Dædalus decided that Hume was right, Sequence did not imply Causality.

  Theseus’ history, which is also mine: My father was named Ægeus, and he was a son of Pandion, whose father was Erectheus, King of Athens. Erectheus was killed by Poseidon and his sons fell out over the succession. Cecrops was chosen, but was forced to flee to Megara, and then to Euboea, where he was joined by Pandarus, another brother. Grandfather Pandion came to the throne, but could not hold it against his brother Metion, and, after Metion’s death, against his sons.

  Grandpa had to flee from Athens, and he went to Megara, where he married Pyla, daughter of Pylus, the king. He eventually took on the kingship when Pylus had to go away for some years.

  After Grandpa Pandion’s death, his four sons marched against Athens and drove out the sons of Grandpa’s other son Metion. These four cast lots for the country and my father won the main portion, Athens itself. The others inherited outlying regions.

  Of course, I didn’t know this as a child. I was raised without knowledge of who my father was.

  Dramatists usually portray my childhood and the famous incident of the sword and the stone. But for the purposes of brevity I’m going to tell the other part of the tale, the part you usually don’t hear, why and how my father, Ægeus, was put into a position in which he could not acknowledge me.

  Dad had tried marriage twice, but had been unsuccessful in having a son. His first wife, Melite, was cute, but barren, and his second, Chalciope, despite her husky voice and winning manner, proved no more fertile.

  This was worrisome, and Dad consulted the oracle at Delphi. He learned that he was not to untie the mouth of his wineskin until he had reached the highest point in Athens, lest he die one day of grief. Ægeus couldn’t figure out what this meant.

  He stopped at Corinth on his way back from Delphi. There ensued the famous scenes with Medea.

  But to go on, next he stopped at Troezen, where his old friend Pitheus was king. His brother Troezen was there, too. They were both sons of Pelops and had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Ætius.

  There was a problem with Pitheus, and that was his daughter, Æthra. My mother. If Æthra had married Bellerophon, as had originally been planned, mine would have been a very different story. But Bellerophon got into trouble and had to be sent away. And that left Mother in a spot. She had to have a child in order to fulfill her destiny, which was a divine one, but there was no suitable consort in sight. My father’s coming was a godsend. Not that my father could be expected to look a
t it that way.

  Pitheus succeeded in getting Dad drunk, and got him into Æthra’s bed. After that, according to the story, the god Poseidon had intercourse with my mother. Which raises the interesting point that if I really were Poseidon’s son, I would be semi-divine, which, in ancient Hellas, was a very good thing to be.

  In any event, Poseidon waived any claim on me, or on my mother. I mention the incident only because it’s part of the record.

  Dad told Mom that if she were to have a child, she was to keep quiet about whose it was. He was trying to protect her from the fifty children of Pallas. Pallas himself was a brother of Dad’s old enemy Metion. He would try to kill Mom if he suspected her of carrying Ægeus’ child, with his inherent claim to the kingship of Athens.

  And so it was that I grew up in Troezen, and did not know my parentage, but suspected that I was one for whom a great future was expected. And this is how I began in the days before Dædalus constructed his maze and introduced Indeterminacy and made it possible for me to undertake my life in many different ways.

  4. Dædalus.

  Many complications came to pass when Dædalus built his great maze for King Minos of Atlantean Crete.

  For a long time, there had been the classical period. Golden Age of Athens. Gods, Homer, Plato, all that stuff.

  Only one man, in the short sweep of antiquity, knew that his way of life was passing. Dædalus was able to do something about it. He can well claim to be the first modern man.

  Dædalus had learned through computer studies that Knossos, Crete, the entire Atlantean civilization, was due to go down the tubes shortly due to unavoidable natural catastrophe. Knowledge of this leaked out and there was unrest throughout the kingdom. People felt that this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue.

  Minos agreed and set up a think tank with the Seven Wise Men of Hellas.

  They came up with the idea of the maze and recommended Dædalus for the job.

  5. Theseus. About the Maze.

  So here is Theseus searching for the Minotaur in the labyrinth which Dædalus constructed for King Minos back in the great days of Atlantean civilization.

  It is a day, a featureless day, a day like so many others in the labyrinth.

  The labyrinth, or maze, is a magical creation, a testing ground for heroes, a place of simultaneous realities and repetitions. The maze is the highest achievement of Atlantean scientific alchemy, the supreme monument to a civilization already in decline and soon to be destroyed by natural cataclysm, but destined to live forever through Dædalus’ art.

  The basic situation is simple enough: Theseus has to find the Minotaur, a monstrous creature part human, part beast. Theseus must kill the Minotaur and then find his way back to the everyday world.

  The situation has been played out many times, with many different outcomes, and with different people in the leading roles. I’m not the only Theseus there’s been or the only one there’ll be. I’m just the current one; the one in the narrator position, though not, actually, the narrator of the entire story. I’ll explain that a little later. Just now I’m Theseus, a professional Minotaur-killer, or rather, one of a long line of Theseuses, who have been recurring with almost sickening regularity ever since Dædalus introduced Recurrence into his scheme for the maze more complicated than the world it was modeled upon.

  6. The Maze: Dædalus’ Achievement.

  Theseus wasn’t at all sure he could bring off this minotauricide. The old legends made it seem quite simple and straightforward, but they were just popular tales for public consumption. The reality was something else again. Even leaving aside the nature and attributes of the Minotaur for the moment, and ignoring his considerable record of victories, and considering only the vastness of the maze and its endless interconnections and ramifications, one might think that Theseus’ task was hopeless. How could he find the Minotaur within the maze?

  It was Dædalus’ achievement to build a maze more complex than the world upon which it was modeled. Past and present were simultaneously present in Dædalus’ maze, and all times and places could be found within its twists and turns. You can find anything within the maze, but it’s best not to expect anything specific; you can never tell who or what will turn up, because there are so many people and things in the maze. In fact, in the maze you encounter a greater variety of creatures than is found in nature itself, chimæras and harpies, Titans, Lapiths and Centaurs, Nemean lions, Stymphagian birds, and so forth. The fabulous was always just around the corner, but the chance of encountering something you were actually looking for was very slight indeed. A man might wander forever through the interlocking complications of Dædalus’ maze without finding anyone who has even seen a Minotaur, let alone finding the monster himself.

  Right now Theseus was hungry. He had a knapsack filled with items that might prove useful in the quest, but none of them was edible, at least not at the moment. Nor was there any food in sight. There was nothing in sight. Theseus was standing in the middle of a gray characterless limbo. This part of the maze is incomplete, although Dædalus planned to finish it as soon as he found the time.

  Rummaging through his knapsack Theseus found a roadmap, a miraculous roadmap with the property of generating whatever it represents. The map shows a sector of Knossos, Minos’ city, itself a part of the maze.

  Here it is, the magical moment, the transformation, and no one can tell you how it happened. He opened the roadmap, and when he looked up, he found that the limbo had disappeared, perhaps into some other limbo, and he was standing on a narrow cobblestoned street. On either side of him were tall narrow houses with steep roofs and bay windows. He was in front of a hotel with a restaurant downstairs, marked in red on the map with two stars. The cheerful owner was standing outside in his shirt sleeves in the mild spring weather, smiling, obviously a man who knows how to take care of hungry heroes.

  That’s how it goes. That’s how life or Dædalus or whatever it is puts us, the Theseuses and Minotaurs, into play. There’s no way of finding exactly what you’re looking for, nothing can be planned, but sometimes things just work out, and so Theseus was not surprised to find himself here. In the maze the description can become the described and the map is sometimes the territory. Theseus entered the restaurant.

  The owner guided him to a sunny table near a window. Theseus folded the map and put it back in his knapsack, leaned the knapsack against the wall, unbuttoned his denim jacket, lighted a cigarette, made himself at ease.

  The menu was written in an incomprehensible local dialect, but Theseus was an intuitive menu reader, like all heroes who journey to distant places, and he made a selection and asked for a beer right away. It was brought by a pretty blonde waitress in an embroidered white blouse and black skirt. He took a sip of beer and watched with appreciation as she moved away. She brought his food soon after, and he ate his fill, loosened his belt, settled back in comfort with coffee and a cigarette.

  The maze afforded some pleasant moments like this, when danger seemed far away, when the Minotaur was forgotten, when the troubles of the past with Ariadne were forgotten, when the troubles of the future with Phædra were forgotten, when he could even forget that he was in the maze for professional reasons, on a dubious adventure which he performed for the amusement of others, the people of Minos’ court, who watched his movements and the movements of other heroes in their spherical television sets, and whose interest provided the real motivation for his efforts.

  Not for the first time he considerd kicking back, giving up the quest for the Minotaur which had led him so far from Athens, so far from the repetitive comforts of the Maze, so far from Ariadne and the children. He wouldn’t mind staying right here in this pleasant hotel, living in one of the rooms upstairs, getting to know the blonde waitress, visiting the local museums, the art galleries, the rock clubs, and other places of interest in the vicinity.

  It is true that he didn’t speak the local language, but that was not a serious obstacle. Theseus has found in his trave
ls that he got along nicely with just a few words of the local lingo, plus his menu-reading ability, which is essential for survival in any world. He found advantages in his ignorance of the local tongue; it saved him from having to engage in political discussions with foreigners, or cultural disputes, which are worse. And lack of a common language had never prevented him from having charming little foreign girlfriends who indicated their pleasure by smiles and gestures rather than words, endless words.

  Theseus loved foreign women, their look, their smell, their exotic clothing and unfamiliar mannerisms. But he also loved the pert and lively women of his native Hellas. In fact he had a hero’s appetite for women, and a poet’s appreciation of them. But his relationships never seemed to last, something always went wrong, and unpleasant guilt and unbearable complication followed. He knew this, knew he’d be wise to stay out of trouble, get on with the job, fulfill his contract, find and kill the Minotaur. But wisdom has never been the virtue of a hero and there was something about this blonde waitress…

  He watched her. How demurely she moved between the tables with her trays of food and drink, in her little waitress’s costume with the black stockings, eyes downcast, a vision of sweet innocence and childlike sexuality! And she was aware of him as something more than a mere customer, something to be used “in the context of equipment,” in Heidegger’s immortal phrase, a phrase which he shouldn’t know but through Dædalus’ machinations has come to know all too well, along with a lot of other knowledge more appropriate to a time-traveler than to the hero of an ancient quest. Anyhow, she seemed interested in him. He was sure of it, a hero could tell these things.

  She came over to his table and addressed him in broken Hellenic. He loved the way her light clear voice mangled his native language. She was only asking if he wanted more coffee, but he was half in love with her already.