Bestiary! Read online

  It was almost dark when Pringle and Larochelle appeared at the sawmill. They looked odd. Pringle was wearing, among other things, a catcher's mask and chest protector. Larochelle wore an old football helmet, several sweaters, and a lumber-yard worker's heavy leather apron. Pringle carried a flashlight; Larochelle, a five-gallon can of kerosene and a gasoline blowtorch.

  "What are you going to do, Mr. Pringle?" asked Aceria.

  She was sitting on No. 1040. Larochelle had gone off to start the water pump and uncoil the fire hose.

  "Going to have a little fire."

  "You are going to burn my home?"

  "Maybe."

  "Won't you burn up the whole yard?"

  "Not if we can help it. We're going to wet down the neighboring piles first. It's taking a chance, but what the hell?"

  "Why are you so determined to destroy my home?"

  "Because, damn it," Pringle's voice rose, "I've had all I can stand of this business! It's cost me a hundred times the value of those boards. But I won't give in to you, see? You won't let me load the boards. Okay, they're no good to me. So I might as well burn 'em up and end this nonsense for good. And you can't stop me. Your boards are tied down so you can't crawl inside 'em and animate 'em. Joe and I are protected, so it won't do you any good to get rough with us. And your sawdust monsters won't have a chance against this blowtorch."

  Aceria was silent for a while. The only sounds were the hum of insects, the slap of Pringle's hand as he hit a punkie on his cheek, the whir of an automobile on the state highway, and Joe Larochelle's distant footsteps.

  Then she said: "I do not think you will burn my home, Mr. Pringle."

  "Who's going to stop me?"

  "I am. You were very clever and very brave about facing my magics, no? And now you say, 'Ho-ho, I have beaten all Aceria's tricks.' "

  "Yep." Pringle had been making a heap of edgings and bark, well away from the pile. A loud swish in the dark showed that Joe had begun his wetting down. "Now, Joe," Pringle called, "you catch the other end of this rope. We want to tighten up on the pile as soon as we pull a couple of boards out, so the rest can't get loose."

  "Okay, Mr. Pringle. Here goes." There were sounds in the semidark as the two men moved around the pile, making sure that their enterprise would suffer neither from spreading of the flames nor unwonted activity on the part of the boards.

  "Very clever," continued Aceria, "but I should have remembered sooner that it is not always the most complicated magic that is most effective."

  "Uh," said Pringle. He splashed kerosene over his pile of kindling and lighted it. It flared up at once into a big, cheerful flame. "No wind," said Pringle, "so I guess she's safe enough. All right, Joe, let's haul the first board out."

  Aceria seemed not to mind being ignored so pointedly. As Pringle and Larochelle laid hands on the board, she said:

  "You were only so-so afraid of the boards when I went into them and made them alive, no? And you stood up to my monster. But there is something you are more afraid of than the boards or the monsters."

  Pringle just grinned. "Is there? All right, Joe, heave! Don't pay any attention if I seem to be talking to myself." "Yes. Union organizers," said Aceria.

  "Huh?" Pringle stopped pulling on the board.

  "Yes. You would like it, no, if I organized your men." Pringle's mouth dropped open.

  "I could do it. I have been listening to them talk, and I know something about unions. And you know me. I appear, I disappear. You could not keep me away, like you do those men from the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. Oh, I would have a nice revenge for the burning of my home."

  For the space of thirty seconds there was no sound but the breathing of the two men and the crackle of the flames. When Pringle made a noise, it was a ghastly strangling sound, like the death rattle of a man dying of thirst in the desert.

  "You—" he said. And again,"You—"

  "You sick, Mr. Pringle?" asked Larochelle.

  "No," said Pringle, "I'm dying."

  "Well?" spoke Aceria.

  Pringle sat down heavily in the muck, took off his wire mask, and buried his face in his hands. "Go away, Joe," he said, and would listen to no remonstrances from the alarmed Larochelle.

  Pringle said: "You win. What do you want me to do with the damn boards? We can't just leave 'em sit here until they rot."

  "I would like them put in some nice dry place. I do not mind having them sold, if they are kept together until I can find another tree of the right kind."

  "Let's see," said Pringle. "Earl Delacroix needs a new dance floor in his joint. But Earl's so tight he'll wait till somebody falls through the old one. Maybe if I offered him the boards at half price—or even a quarter—"

  So it came to pass that, three weeks later, Earl Delacroix surprised those who knew his penurious habits by installing a new dance floor in The Pines. He surprised them somewhat less by hiring a luscious, red-haired girl as hostess. He himself was not too pleased over that innovation. But Pringle had brought the girl in personally and given her the strongest recommendation. Delacroix's mental eyebrows had gone up a bit. Hadn't Pringle's wife left him a while before? Oh, well, it was none of his business. If Pringle, who owned most of the town, wanted a—friend—employed, it was a good idea to employ the friend, without asking too many questions.

  Delacroix had been particularly intrigued when the girl gave her name as Aceria; then, when he asked her full name, a whispered consultation between the girl and Pringle produced the surname of Jones. Jones, eh! Heh, heh.

  Since then, Aceria has worked at The Pines. For appearance's sake, she has a room in the boarding house next door. But its bed is never slept in. Her landlady does not know that, every night, Aceria returns to the restaurant. It is dark then, and nobody is there to see her do whatever she does to merge herself with the floor boards. Probably she just fades out of sight. On these nocturnal trips, she always wears her old green dress. Or rather, it was green, but with the coming of fall it gradually turned a rich orange-yellow.

  She dances divinely, and the local boys like her but find her a little odd. For instance, sooner or later she asks every acquaintance whether he knows of a place where a Norway maple grows. She is still asking, and if you know of one I am sure she would be grateful if you would inform her...

  THE MINOTAUR

  The Greek myth of the Minotaur centers around the mysterious island of Crete, where, indeed, enough bull-related imagery has been discovered in the Minoan ruins of the Great Palace at Knossos to suggest that there just may be a core of historical truth to this particular bit of mythology ... and that perhaps the myth itself is a distillation of even darker, more ancient legends. In the classical version, the Minotaur was a ferocious monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull (although it is occasionally described, as by Dante, as having a man's head and a bull's body), born of the unnatural coupling of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, with a white bull that Poseidon brought out of the sea. The Minotaur was imprisoned in the famous Labyrinth—built by Daedalus, master craftsman of Greek mythology, who had also built the apparatus used to enable the Queen to satisfy her passion for the white bull—and fed a steady diet of hapless human victims, including a levy of seven youths and seven maidens extorted annually from the Athenians. At last, Theseus, son of the King of Athens, who had volunteered to be part of the yearly levy, found his way to the heart of the Labyrinth, guided by a trail of thread left behind by his lover Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan King. Theseus is

  said to have killed the Minotaur with a sword also supplied by the helpful Ariadne ... but this supposed demise has not kept the Minotaur from popping up from time to time, shaggy and menacing as ever, in the pages of subsequent fantasy literature.

  In the following story, a flesh-and-blood Minotaur steps from the past into the bizarre world of the far future ... a genetically-created archetype, blinded and in pain, but with a mission he is programmed to fulfill .. .

  Michael Swanwick is a Nebula and World Fantas
y Award finalist, and one of the most respected new talents to emerge in the 1980s. His stories have appeared in Omni, Penthouse, Universe, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere, and his first novel, In the Drift, was published as an Ace Special earlier this year.

  The Blind Minotaur

  by

  Michael Swanwick

  IT WAS LATE afternoon when the blinded Minotaur was led through the waterfront. He cried openly, without shame, lost in his helplessness.

  The sun cast shadows as crisp and black as an obsidian knife. Fisherfolk looked up from their nets or down from the masts of their boats, mild sympathy in their eyes. But not pity; memory of the Wars was too fresh for that. They were mortals and not subject to his tragedy.

  Longshoremen stepped aside, fell silent at the passing of this shaggy, bull-headed man. Offworld tourists stared down from their restaurant balconies at the serenely grave little girl who led him by the hand.

  His sight stolen away, a new universe of sound, scent and touch crashed about the Minotaur. It threatened to swallow him up, to drown him in its complexity.

  There was the sea, always the sea, its endless crash and whisper on the beach, and quicker irregular slap at the docks. The sting of salt on his tongue. His calloused feet fell clumsily on slick cobblestones, and one staggered briefly into a shallow puddle, muddy at its bottom, heated piss-warm by the sun.

  He smelled creosoted pilings, exhaust fumes from the great shuttles bellowing skyward from the Starport, a horse sweating as it clipclopped by, pulling a groaning cart

  that reeked of the day's catch. From a nearby garage, there was the snap and ozone crackle of an arc-welding rig. Fishmongers' cries and the creaking of pitchstained tackle overlaid rattling silverware from the terrace cafés, and fan-vented air rich with stews and squid and grease. And, of course, the flowers the little girl—was she really his daughter?—held crushed to her body with one arm. And the feel of her small hand in his, now going slightly slippery with sweat, but still cool, yes, and innocent.

  This was not the replacement world spoken of and promised to the blind. It was chaotic and bewildering, rich and contradictory in detail. The universe had grown huge and infinitely complex with the dying of the light, and had made him small and helpless in the process.

  The girl led him away from the sea, to the shabby buildings near the city's hot center. They passed through an alleyway between crumbling sheetbrick walls—he felt their roughness graze lightly against his flanks—and through a small yard ripe with fermenting garbage. The Minotaur stumbled down three wooden steps and into a room that smelled of sad, ancient paint. The floor was slightly gritty underfoot.

  She walked him around the room. "This was built by expatriate Centaurimen," she explained. "So it's laid out around the kitchen in the center, my space to this side—" She let go of him briefly, rattled a vase, adding her flowers to those he could smell as already present, took his hand again. "—and yours to this side."

  He let himself be sat down on a pile of blankets, buried his head in his arms while she puttered about, raising a wall, laying out a mat for him under the window. "We'll get you some cleaner bedding in the morning, okay?" she said. He did not answer. She touched a cheek with her tiny hand, moved away.

  "Wait," he said. She turned, he could hear her. "What —what is your name?"

  "Yarrow," she said.

  He nodded, curled about himself.

  By the time evening had taken the edge off the day, the Minotaur was cried out. He stirred himself enough to strip off his loincloth and pull a sheet over himself, and tried to sleep.

  Through the open window the night city was coming to life. The Minotaur shifted as his sharp ears picked up drunken laughter, the calls of streetwalkers, the wail of jazz saxophone from a folk club, and music of a more contemporary nature, hot and sinful.

  His cock moved softly against one thigh, and he tossed and turned, kicking off the crisp sheet (it was linen, and it had to be white), agonized, remembering similar nights when he was whole.

  The city called to him to come out and prowl, to seek out women who were heavy and slatternly in the tavernas, cool and crisp in white, gazing out from the balconies of their husbands' casavillas. But the power was gone from him. He was no longer that creature that, strong and confident, had quested into the night. He twisted and turned in the warm summer air.

  One hand moved down his body, closed about his cock. The other joined it. Squeezing tight his useless eyes, he conjured up women who had opened to him, coral-pink and warm, as beautiful as orchids. Tears rolled down his shaggy cheeks.

  He came with great snorts and grunts.

  Later he dreamed of being in a cool white casavilla by the sea, salt breeze wafting in through open window-spaces. He knelt at the edge of a bed and wonderingly lifted the sheet—it billowed slightly as he did—from his sleeping lover. Crouching before her naked body, his face was gentle as he marveled at her beauty.

  It was strange to wake to darkness. For a time he was not even certain he was awake. And this was a problem, this unsureness, that would haunt him for all his life. Tbday, though, it was comforting to think it all a dream, and he wrapped the uncertainty around himself like a cloak.

  The Minotaur found a crank recessed into the floor, and lowered the wall. He groped his way to the kitchen, and sat by the cookfire.

  "You jerked off three times last night," Yarrrow said. "I could hear you." He imagined that her small eyes were staring at him accusingly. But apparently not, for she took something from the fire, set it before him, and innocently asked, "When are you going to get your eyes replaced?"

  The Minotaur felt around for the platedough, and broke

  off a bit from the edge. "Immortals don't heal," he mumbled. He dipped the fragment into the paste she ladled onto the dough's center, stirred it about, let the bread drop. "New eyes would be rejected, didn't your mother tell you that?"

  She chose not to answer. "While you were asleep, a newshawk came snooping around with that damned machine grafted to his shoulder. I told him he had the wrong place." Then, harshly, urgently, "Why won't they just leave you alone?"

  "I'm an immortal," he said. "I'm not supposed to be left alone." Her mother really should have explained all this, if she was really what she claimed to be. Perhaps she wasn't; he would have sworn he had never bedded another of his kind, had in fact scrupulously avoided doing so. It was part of the plan of evasion that had served him well for so many years, and yet ended with his best friend dying in the sand at his feet.

  Yarrow put some fragment of foodstuff in his hand, and he automatically placed it in his mouth. It was gummy and tasteless, and took forever to disappear. She was silent until he swallowed, and then asked, "Am I going to die?"

  "What kind of question is that?" he asked angrily.

  "Well, I just thought—my mother said that I was an immortal like her, and I thought ... Isn't an immortal supposed to be someone who never dies?"

  He opened his mouth to tell her that her mother should be hung up by her hair—and in that instant the day became inarguably, inalterably real. He wanted to cling to the possibility that it was all a dream for just a while longer, but it was gone. Wearily he said, "Yarrow, I want you to go get me a robe. And a stick—" he raised a hand above his head—"so high. Got that?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Go!"

  A glimmering of his old presence must have still clung to him, for the child obeyed. The Minotaur leaned back, and—involuntarily—was flooded with memories.

  He was young, less than a year released from the creche by gracious permission of the ministries of the Lords. Filled with controlling hormones and bioprogramming, he was sent out to stir up myth. The Wars were less than a year away, but the Lords had no way of knowing that—the cabarets were full, and the starlanes swollen with the fruits of a thousand remarkable harvests. There had never been such a rich or peaceful time.

  The Minotaur was drunk, and at the end of his nightly round o
f bars. He had wound up in a taverna where the patrons removed their shirts to dance and sweet-smelling sweat glistened on their chests. The music was fast and heavy and sensual. Women eyed him as he entered, but could not politely approach him, for he still wore his blouse.

  He bellied up to the bar, and ordered a jarful of the local beer. The barkeep frowned when he did not volunteer money, but that was his right as an immortal.

  Crouched on their ledge above the bar, the musicians were playing hot and furious. The Minotaur paid them no attention. Nor did he notice the Harlequin, limbs long and impossibly thin, among them, nor how the Harlequin's eyes followed his every move.

  The Minotaur was entranced by the variety of women in the crowd, the differences in their movements. He had been told that one could judge how well a woman made love by how well she danced, but it seemed to him, watching, that there must be a thousand styles of making love, and he would be hard put to choose among them, were the choice his.

  One woman with flashing brown feet, stared at him, ignoring her partner. She wore a bright red skirt that flew up to her knee when she whirled around, and her nipples were hard and black. He smiled in friendly cognizance of her glance, and her answering grin was a razor-crisp flash of teeth that took his breath away, a predatory look that said: You're mine tonight.

  Laughing, the Minotaur flung his shirt into the air. He plunged into the dancers and stooped at the woman's feet. In a rush he lifted her into the air, away from her partner, one hand closing about her ankles, the other supporting her by the small of her back. She gasped, and laughed, and balanced herself, so that he could remove one hand and lift her still higher, poised with one foot on the palm of his great hairy hand.

  "I am strong!" he shouted. The crowd—even the woman's abandoned partner—cheered and stamped their feet. The Harlequin stepped up the band. The woman lifted her skirts and kicked her free leg high, so that one toe grazed the ceiling beams. She threw her head back and laughed.