Bestiary! by Gardner Dozois & Jack Dann

Author:Gardner Dozois & Jack Dann [Dozois, Gardner & Dann, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 Fantasy 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.

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