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flickered over my lap, the backs of my hands. “Now, of course, had we met before you entered, I could have waved out a piece of computer tape and you would have taken the end and I would have unwound it after you as you made your way into the heart to face your fate. But instead, you have arrived here and found me waiting. What do you desire, hero?”
    “I want to go home,” I said.
    The computer went tsk-tsk-tsk . “Other than that.”
    “You really want to know?’
    “I’m nodding sympathetically,” it said.
    “I want Friza. But she’s dead.”    “Who was Friza?”
    I thought. I tried to say something. With the exhaustion, all that came was a catch in my throat that might have sounded like a sob.
    “Oh.” After a moment, gently: “You’ve come into the wrong maze, you know.”
    “I have ? Then what are you doing here?”
    “I was set here a long time ago by people who never dreamed that you would come. Psychic Harmony and Entangled Deranged Response Associations, that was my department. And you’ve come down here hunting through my memories for your lost girl.”
    Yes, I may have just been talking to myself. I was very tired.
    “How do you like it up there?” PHAEDRA asked.
    “Where?”
    “Up there on the surface. I can remember back when there were humans. They made me. Then they all went away, leaving us alone down here. And now you’ve come to take their place. It must be rather difficult, walking through their hills, their jungles, battling the mutated shadows of their flora and fauna, haunted by their million year old fantasies.”
    “We try,” I said.
    “You’re basically not equipped for it,” PHAEDRA went on. “But I suppose you have to exhaust the old mazes before you can move into the new ones. It’s hard.”
    “If it means fighting off those things- “ I jutted my chin towards the carcass on the stone. “Yeah, it is.”
    “Well, it’s been fun. I miss the revueltas , the maidens leaping over the horns and spinning in the air to land on the sweating back, then vaulting to the sands! Mankind had style, baby! You may get it yet, but right now your charm is a very young thing.”
    “Where did they go, PHAEDRA?”
    “Where your Friza went, I suppose.” Something musical was happening behind my head within the metal. “But you aren’t human and you don’t appreciate their rules. You shouldn’t try. Down here we try to follow what you’re doing for a few generations, and questions get answered we would never have even thought of asking. On the other hand, we sit waiting out centuries for what would seem like the most obvious and basic bits of information about you, like who you are, where you’re from and what you’re doing here. Has it occurred to you that you might get her back?”
    “Friza?” I sat up. “Where? How?” La Dire’s cryptic statements came back.
    “You’re in the wrong maze,” PHAEDRA repeated. “And I’m the wrong girl to get you into the right one. Kid Death along for a little while and maybe you can get around him enough to put your foot in the door, finger in the pie, your two cents in, as it were.”
    I leaned forward on my knees. “PHAEDRA,” you baffle me.”
    “Scoot,” PHAEDRA said.
    “Which way?”
    “Again. You’ve asked the wrong girl. Wish I could help. But I don’t know. But you’d better get started. When the sun goes down and the tide goes out, this place gets dark, and the gillies and ghosties gather ‘round, shouting.”
    I heaved to my feet and looked at the various doorways. Maybe a little logic? The bull-beast had come from the doorway over there. So that’s the one I went in.
    The long, long dark echoed with my breath and falling water. I tripped over the first stairway. Got up and started climbing. Bruised my shoulder on the landing, groped around and finally realized I had gotten off into a much smaller passage that didn’t seem like it was going anywhere.
    I took up my machete and blew out the last, of the