“When Rome is dust Again shall wail in the endless Night of his rank palace”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Minotaur”
We clambered onto the white deck of a Blue Gryphon 56 sea-to-air and sat on deck chairs disposed in two rows. There were fourteen of us, jet-lagged tourists from pan America and the guide who’d show us the manufactured wonders of Mythos.
Sunlight showed as no more than a hint of silver on the deep blue waves of the Mediterranean.
The man across from me reclined on his chair, stretched his long legs, threw his head back and half-closed his eyes. He wore only a scrap of shorts and looked no more than twenty. Tanned and sporting fashionably long black curls, he showed better defined muscles that any one man should have been born with.
Instinctively, I glanced at the middle-finger of his right hand.
In the place where an artifact had to display the red ring of his slavery or the black ring of his freedom either permanently embedded in the flesh this man wore a thin gold band. Matching ones adorned every finger of his right hand, even his thumb.
So, this exquisite creature had been naturally born, not test-tube assembled. Would wonders never cease?
He looked at me from beneath his artfully lowered eyelids. The corners of his lips lifted in a tentative smile.
“Living, breathing things to see at last.” The fidgety older blonde who sat next to him dug a skinny elbow into his supple muscles. She wore a long yellow silk party dress, singularly out of place. “It will be a relief, after all those dried-up stones at Knossos and all the dreadful bits of pottery in museums.”
He opened startling green-blue eyes and looked at her with the bewilderment of an innocent.
“But Nary, if you wanted an amusement park peopled with fantastic characters, why didn’t we stay in Sea York? They do have those, you know?” His voice would serve a university professor better than a gigolo.
Which proved nothing, except that natural humans seldom lived up to their archetypes. I wasn’t about to believe the demigod had paired with this woman out of love.
His girlfriend blushed and primmed thin accordion-creased lips. She glanced at me, lifted her eyebrows at my too-regular features. Her gaze found the black ring of a freed artifact on my right hand and she relaxed.
I was not really human. Didn’t count. Not to people like her, I didn’t. After all, freed artifacts, though nominal citizens, could neither marry nor vote.
“Don’t be tart, Pol,” she said. “Mythos is not an amusement park. It recreates scenes from mythology. It is… cultural.”
Pol’s perfect lips curled disdainfully. “Ah,” he said. “I see. Amusement park for adults.”
“Pol, you are not irreplaceable.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to empathize with his reluctantly subservient position. True, I’d been subservient most of my life, but I hadn’t chosen it as the quickest course to an easy life. I’d been born an artifact. I’d been born owned, one of a few thousand people worldwide who had been created because the unique attributes they could be given outweighed the cost of making and training them.
Willfully abstracting my mind and gaze from the couple and stared ahead where the dark shape of an island rose out of the glimmering sea ahead of the boat.
“Ladies and gentleman, if you please,” the guide said. “Could I have your attention?”
We swiveled our chairs to face him.
Dapper and cool in a white linen suit, the guide graced us with a practiced smile. In Pan-America, his position would have been filled by an artifact. But not here. Though he looked just like any of the figures on a thousand classical vases, he lacked the artifact ring. “Welcome,” he said.
The self-piloted ship thumped against the shore, mooring on the white sands of the artificial isle.
The guide gestured towards land. “Welcome to the fabulous island of Mythos, where you will see marvels to dazzle your eyes.” His perfect, white teeth flashed briefly between red lips. “Our first stop is the palace of the Minotaur… the fabled labyrinth. For those of you not familiar with the legend, let me tell you how Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, gave birth to a monster, half-man, half-bull. This monster was confined in a labyrinth built by Daedalus. Because he ate human flesh, the city of Athens was forced to send a yearly tribute of seven maidens and seven youths. The Minotaur devoured them all, year after year, until Theseus was chosen. Theseus killed the monster with the help of Ariadne, daughter of king Minos. She gave him a sword to slay the Minotaur and a skein of magic thread with which to find his way out of the labyrinth, once he’d killed the beast. Ariadne and Theseus left together, but later Dionysus fell in love with her and compelled Theseus to abandon her while she slept.”
He cleared his throat. “Our engineers have recreated the labyrinth and the Minotaur in all particulars,” he went on. “Of course, the Minotaur does not eat meat and has the mind and manners of a well-behaved seven-year-old. As for the labyrinth, do not be afraid of getting lost. If you become disoriented, just remain still. Sensors on the walls will allow rescuers to find you anywhere. Now, follow me to the country of myth.”
We rose. Pol helped his companion stand, offered her his arm. She gave no sign of being charmed. Perhaps familiarity truly bred contempt.
His muscled chest glimmered with suntan lotion. I wouldn’t mind getting familiar with him. But I would have no chance. He was the wages of fortune and no doubt of natural birth.
Reserved for nats only. No artifacts need apply.
The guide led us down the automatically-lowered gangplank to the shore.
If I hadn’t known Mythos had been built by an international conglomerate less than twenty years ago, I would have thought it was just another Greek isle. It looked ancient and weathered another volcanic islet. The only difference was that this one didn’t show any signs of ever having been inhabited, much less of the creeping overpopulation that crowded every other isle with massed houses and unsightly high rises.
In Mythos, the white shore rose slowly to a plateau where no building glimmered. Up the white shore, we tourists went scrambling.
The first to reach the summit, I removed my light wrap and stowed it in my ever-present belt-pouch while I waited for the others. Under it I wore a sleeveless short dress, adequate after walking. Even the guide had been left behind by my trot , not surprising, considering what I’d been created to do.
The sun showed itself now, pale but warm. A heated breeze blew. The day would be a scorcher.
On the other side of the beach, at my back, green countryside stretched inland, cut here and there by groves of gnarled, twisted olive trees.
Another party of tourists walked through the middle of a field, stopping to take their tiny cameras to their eyes and snap holos of the view.
The rest of our group finally joined me, one by one and two by two. The guide came first, and accosted me with a buoyant, “You’re a fast walker.”
Then he looked at the ring on my finger and looked away, towards the approaching party. It took some people that way. As the other tourists arrived, he talked to them, instead, discussing the sea and the heat, the sand and recreated myths. But I’d ceased existing.
Pol brought up the rear, supporting his less decorative companion.
She leaned heavily on him, and no wonder, since she wore five inch stiletto heels in shiny, rock-hard dimatough. Not the most adequate shoes for walking on sand, and what could have possessed her to wear them?
I wondered how money, or even social prestige, could keep a thinking man in thrall to such a fool. Then, of course, I was assuming that Pol was a thinking manna stretch of the imagination.