THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

The greatest wedge was that he had kept to himself The Secret.

The trouble with leaving Richard at once was that she had no place to go. All the cabins were taken. Some were occupied by single men, but she did not intend to move in with a man she didn’t love.

Richard would have scoffed at that. He claimed that all he wanted in a woman was beauty and affection. He also preferred blondes, but in her case he had waived this requirement. He would tell her to find some good-looking man with at least passable manners and live with him. No, he wouldn’t. He would threaten to kill her if she left him. Or would he? Surely, he must be getting as tired of her as she was of him.

She sat down and smoked a cigarette, something she wouldn’t have dreamed of doing on Earth, and she considered what to do. After a while, finding no answer, she left the cabin and went to the grand salon. There was always something pleasant or exciting there.

In the salon she walked around for a few minutes admiring the paintings and statuettes and listening to a piece by Liszt being played on the piano.

While she was feeling very lonely and hoping that someone would come up and break her mood, a woman approached her. She was about five feet tall, slim, long-legged, and had medium-sized conical breasts with up-tilted nipples thinly covered with a wispy cloth. Her features were beautiful despite her somewhat too long nose.

Exposing very white and even teeth, the blonde said, in Esperanto, “Hello, I’m Aphra Behn, one of His Majesty’s pistoleers and ex-mistresses, though he still likes an occasional rerun. You’re Alice Liddel, right? The woman of the fierce-looking ugly-handsome Welshman, Gwalchgwynn.”

Alice acknowledged that she was right and asked immediately, “Are you the authoress of OroonokoT

Aphra smiled again. “Yes, and of several plays. It’s nice to know that I was not unknown in the twentieth century. Do you play bridge? We’re looking for a fourth.”

“I haven’t played for thirty-four years,” Alice said. “But I loved it. If you don’t mind some clumsiness at first…”

“Oh, we’ll sharpen you up, though it may hurt some,” Aphra said. She laughed and led Alice by her hand toward a table near a wall and below a huge painting. This depicted Theseus entering the heart of Minos’ labyrinth where the Minotaur awaited him. Ariadne’s thread was tied to the hero’s enormous erection.

Aphra, seeing Alice’s expression, grinned.

“Does give you a start when you first see it, doesn’t it? Don’t know if Theseus is going to kill the bullman with his sword or bugger him to death, what?”

“If he does the latter,” Alice said, “he’ll break the thread and won’t be able to find his way back out to Ariadne.”

“Lucky woman,” Aphra said. “She can die still thinking he loves her, not knowing he plans to desert her at the first opportunity.”

So this was Aphra Amis Behn, the novelist, poet, and dramatist whom London called the Incomparable Astrea, after the divine star maiden of classical Greek religion. Before she died in 1689 at the age of forty-nine, she had written a novel, Oroonoko, which was a sensation in her time and was reprinted in 1930, giving Alice a chance to read it before she died. The book had been very influential in the development of the novel, and Aphra’s contemporaries rated her with Defoe when she was at her best. Her plays were bawdy and coarse but witty and had delighted the theatergoers. She was the first English woman to support herself entirely by writing, and she had also been a spy for Charles II during the war against the Dutch. Her behavior was scandalous, even for the Restoration period, but she was buried in Westminster Abbey, an honor denied the equally scandalous and far more famous Lord Byron.

Two men were waiting impatiently at the table. Aphra made the introductions, giving a slight biography of each.

The man at the west end of the table was Lazzaro Spallan-zani, born A.D. 1729, died 1799. He had been one of the more well-known natural scientists of his time and was chiefly noted for his experiments with bats to determine how they could fly through total darkness. He’d discovered that they did so by use of a form of sonar, though that term wasn’t known in his day. He was short, slim, dark, and obviously Italian though he spoke Esperanto.