With this guidance, it took only moments to thread the network of ramps and locate the sanctuary.
At its portal he paused, for suddenly the taste gave warning. It was the flavor of a foolish young creature, ambitious and intelligent but about to roll off a precipice. Associated with it were the burning of fire, the fluidity of water, the rarefaction of air, and the solidity of ground. The overall suggestion of the taste was not merely haven, but knowledge—more than the average intellect might crave.
But no danger per se. Flint did not fear knowledge; on the contrary, he craved it He rolled across the threshold.
And the ramp collapsed. He dropped sickeningly into darkness—Polarians being every bit as vulnerable to a fall as Solarians—and flung out his trunk to catch any available support. But there was none.
Then his wheel touched something. It was a wall, or a steeply inclined plane. Too steep to travel on. But to prevent himself from scraping, he spun his wheel against it, letting it guide him down. This might not make much sense if he were about to crash, but it was a largely automatic reflex. Polarians preferred to die with their wheels turning.
The slant changed; the wall was angling into a surface he could almost grip. It was tasteless; no one could have passed this way recently. Now it was a steep channel, actually enabling him to slow his fall somewhat.
Gradually the channel leveled, though it remained uncomfortably barren of taste. He came to a smooth stop at the base. He had fallen a considerable distance, but was after all unharmed. Good enough; the threshold warning had been accurate. No one else was likely to follow precipitously—unless there were an alternate entrance. No—his host-memory, keyed by the dramatic fall, indicated that visitors always used this aperture. They left by another, equally single-directional, completing the circuit forcefully. It was common knowledge, available to him had he but known where in his mind to look. Which was why he did not want to act before exploring that mind. The next pitfall might not be as safe.
Sometime he’d have to find a way around that initial informational block. It was like learning all the rules of a complex new game at once, or trying to chew too big a nut so that his mouth wouldn’t close or gain purchase. Though he now had no mouth. If there were a shorthand, an instant keying system—but if there were, Llyana the Undulant surely would have used it to avoid the romantic trap he had sprung on her. Maybe this problem had helped him more than it hindered him.
But now he had arrived—somewhere. His host-memory could not help him, for the host had never actually been inside a Tarotist temple. Not that it was any great secret; it was just one of those experiences, like dropping into a deep hole, or sleeping in a haunted cave, that hadn’t seemed necessary.
Tarotism—there, inadvertently delivered, was the name. It was the cult, a system of beliefs he had heard mentioned in passing back on Earth. Its prime tenet was supposed to be that all concepts of divinity were legitimate. The concept translated into taste—yet unmistakable because of the symbol at the door. The first key of the pack, the Fool. He should have made the connection before, for that had been a human memory. What use to delve into the confused recesses of his host’s brain, when he was neglecting his own?
And what in the galaxy was Tarotism doing here? A human religion among the Polarians? There had hardly been that much contact, not between the Sphere centers. Humans and Polarians merged amicably on Etamin’s planet Outworld, Flint’s home at the fringe of each of their Spheres—but Tarotism had not yet reached that world. So how—?
A dark Polarian stood before him. Flint had not been aware of the entity’s approach. More likely he had been there from the start, and only now showed himself in the brightening light. That was a thing Flint missed: the acute, direct binocular vision of the human eyes, eyes difficult to fool. The Polarian light awareness was serviceable in most instances, but useless for fine definition in a crisis. This body was taste-oriented; sight, touch, and hearing were secondary.
“I am the Hierophant,” the entity said. “What is your Significator?”
Flint applied his ball to his own skin. His host-memory was blank; no help there. “I do not understand.”
“This is the Temple of Comprehension,” the Hierophant replied. “Do you wish your nuclear identity to be open or hidden?”
“Hidden,” Flint said. He was not about to betray his origin and mission to this priest.
“Then we shall ask the Arcana to select your Significator—that symbol of yourself. Actually it is you who make the selection, random though it seems; your Kirlian aura will not be comfortable with any but the appropriate representation.”
Kirlian aura! How much did the Hierophant know?
“I know little; the sacred books know much,” the Hierophant answered. “Do not be alarmed; we mean you no ill, and shall not detain or importune you. We seek only to provide the aid you came for.”
“I came for solitude, a chance to explore my mind,” Flint said. That much was safe enough to say.
“Precisely. Now if you will shuffle the Tarot symbols…”
How did a no-handed creature shuffle anything? But now Flint’s host-memory provided the answer, for this related to an everyday problem of manipulation. He used his trunk to work the control of the mechanical shuffler on a pedestal beside him. This was no random effort; by expert twitches of his ball he made the printed cards in the lighted chamber riff through each other again and again, until they were hopelessly mixed. Then he picked one randomly by touching another surface; the card flipped out of the pack to present itself for identification.
He ran his ball over it. It portrayed a lone Polarian whose trunk reached out to hold a lamp, whose source of light was a bright star. A simple figure, on the surface—yet as a parallel symbol there was a single swimming sperm cell.
Flint’s mission was to bring secret information to foreign Spheres—news that would transform them, enabling them to expand their influence enormously, and to merge into a single galactic coalition. He was a tiny sperm cell coming to the huge egg of each Sphere to fertilize it in unique fashion. His knowledge was the illumination of a star—faint in the distance, yet of tremendous significance. How well the Tarot had chosen!
“You are the Hermit—the ninth key,” the Hierophant said. “Alone, concealed, not what you seem, bringer of light. You say, ‘Where I am, you may also be.’ Though you walk in seeming isolation, your light shows the way for the multitude.”
How much did this bastard know? (Though there was no concept of bastardy in the Polarian intellect; that was a purely human derogation.)
“Please do not insult the Temple by your suspicion,” the Hierophant said. “We respect your privacy, and we are politically and socially neutral. The Temple of Tarot transcends matters of mundane import. If the key seems apt, it is because you have chosen it so, not we.”
“Sorry,” Flint said. “It is apt.”
“Hermit, we shall now accede to your will,” the Hierophant continued. “You may have a private cell for meditation, or a reading of the Arcana to facilitate your thought.”
A private cell was what he had come for, but now Flint changed his mind. This Tarotism was strange, and it had some connection to Sphere Sol. It was possible that it could be of aid to him, if he could learn more about it. “I choose the reading.”
“I deal the keys as you have arranged them,” the Hierophant said. “Stand at the animation plate, and do not be afraid. No harm will come to you; it is only your own mind made manifest. No news of what the Tarot reveals will pass beyond these premises except as you make it known yourself.”