Minotaur: A Mechanical Myth by Alex T. Singer

Author:Alex T. Singer [Singer, Alex T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61475-619-4
Publisher: WordFire Press

Chapter Fourteen

It was a very simple story. It didn’t take Tor much time to tell it.

He had been raised in a house all alone. He had had a gift for machines. He had been very bored. In his boredom, he’d done something he was not allowed to do. It had been such a brilliant, terrible thing to do that it got the King’s notice.

Every so often, a woman called Dael the Architect came to teach him things. They were very interesting, but when she was not there it was him alone in the house. He wasn’t allowed to leave. He wasn’t allowed to open any windows. For a while, he’d rewired the Herms in the house to show him things outside. He managed to get them to tell him all sorts of things. Sometimes he thought it was his own ingenuity that made it so easy to get them to do what he wanted. Sometimes he suspected they let him do this. It was always said that Hermes was one of the more easily amused of the gods, if programs and systems could be amused.

“You want to go back to that?” Ikki asked. Tor hadn’t pushed her off the tower. Instead, he’d pulled her back inside and out of the wind. They walked through the tunnels together. This time, Ikki didn’t try to climb the cables.

“No, I hated living like that,” said Tor.

It was more complicated than that. When the Architect didn’t come, sometimes Pacifica came instead. Pacifica ran the House where Tor lived. Tor suspected she was his mother, although she never admitted as much. Pacifica was very important to the city. She was one of the Priestesses of Hera, and had a strong say in anything that happened in the city. Pacifica was by all accounts a cold, formidable woman. She made him call her “Lady,” and she demanded he wear nice clothes whenever she came.

“That’s awful,” said Ikki. Her mother had never demanded she wear anything more than practical clothes when she saw her. “Why would she bother?”

And then she would sit with him and let him tell her about everything he’d done that day, even the part about altering the Herms. She never turned the Herms back, or changed the keywords on them. She would just listen, and the next day a group of servants would bring a bunch of new texts for him to read and learn how to do it better. Pacifica sent him books about the gods. All of them. They told him about the gentle and firm Hestia, who managed overall administration of the life systems of the city. They told him about the viciously protective Hera, who managed the population and the gene-banks. They told him about the powerful Poseidon, who controlled the water vanes and the Aegean level, and who had once been the preeminent god in the temple. They told him about Apollo, the power system in the Labyrinth who sent light to Helios. They also told him about

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