Minotaur Maze by Robert Sheckley

Author:Robert Sheckley [Sheckley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 2014-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.