Katin frowned.
Tyy’s hand hung over the deck.
The Mouse dared half the distance of the rug. “You’re really going to try and tell the future with cards? That’s silly. That’s superstitious!”
“No it’s not, Mouse,” Katin countered. “One would think that you of all people-“
The Mouse waved his hand and barked hoarse laughter. “You, Katin, and them cards. That’s something!”
“Mouse, the cards don’t actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations—“
“Cards aren’t educated! They’re metal and plastic. They don’t know—“
“Mouse, the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There’s nothing superstitious about it. The Book of Changes, even Chaldean Astrology only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than guide and suggest.”
The Mouse made that sound again.
“Really, Mouse! It’s perfectly logical; you talk like somebody living a thousand years ago.”
“Hey, Captain?” The Mouse closed the rest of the distance and, peering around Lorq’s elbow, squinted at the deck in Tyy’s lap. “You believe in those things?” His hand fell on Katin’s forearm, as though holding it, he might keep it still.
Tiger eyes beneath rusted brows showed agony; Lorq was grinning. “Tyy, me the cards read.”
She turned the deck over and passed the pictures—“Captain, you one choose”—from hand to hand.
Lorq squatted to see. Suddenly he stopped the passing cards with his forefinger. “The Kosmos, it looks like.” He named the card his finger had fallen on. “In this race, the universe the prize is.” He looked up at the Mouse and Katin. “Do you think I should pick the Kosmos to start the reading?” Framed by the bulk of his shoulders, the “agony” grew subtle.
The Mouse answered with a twist of dark lips.
“Go ahead,” Katin said.
Lorq drew the card:
Morning fog wove birch and yew and holly trees; in the clearing a naked figure leaped and cavorted in the blue dawn.
“Ah,” said Katin, “the Dancing Hermaphrodite, the union of all male and female principles.” He rubbed his ear between two fingers. “You know, for about three hundred years or so, from about eighteen-ninety to after space travel began, there was a highly Christianized set of Tarot cards designed by a friend of William Butler Yeats that became so popular, they almost obliterated the true images.”
As Lorq tilted the card, diffraction images of animals flashed and disappeared in the mystic grove. The Mouse’s hand tightened on Katin’s arm. He raised his chin to question.
“The beasts of the apocalypse,” Katin answered. He pointed over the captain’s shoulder to the four corners of the grove: “Bull, Lion, Eagle, and that funny little ape-like creature back there is the dwarf god Bes, originally of Egypt and Anatolia, protector of women in labor, the scourge of the miserly, a generous and terrible god. There’s a statue of him that’s fairly famous: squat, grinning, fanged, copulating with a lioness.”
“Yeah,” the Mouse whispered. “I seen that statue.”
“You have? Where?”
“Some museum.” He shrugged. “In Istanbul, I think. A tourist took me there when I was a kid.”
“Alas,” mused Katin, “I have been content with three-dimensional holograms.”
“Only it’s no dwarf. It’s”—the Mouse’s rasp halted as he looked up at Katin—“maybe twice as tall as you.” His pupils, rolling in sudden recollection, showed veined whites.
“Captain Von Ray, you well the Tarot know?” Sebastian asked.
“I’ve had my cards read perhaps a half dozen times,” Lorq explained. “My mother didn’t like my stopping to listen to the readers who would have their little tables set up under the wind-shield junctions on the streets. Once, when I was five or six I managed to get lost. While I was wandering around a part of Ark I’d never seen before, I stopped and got my fortune read.” He laughed; the Mouse, who had not judged the gathering expression right, had expected anger. “When I did get home and told my mother, she grew very upset and told me I mustn’t do it again.
“She knew it was all stupid!” the Mouse whispered.
“What had the cards said?” Katin asked.
“Something about a death in my family.”
“Did anyone die?”
Lorq’s eyes narrowed. “About a month later my uncle was killed.”
Katin reflected on the sound of m’s. Captain Lorq Von Ray’s uncle?
“But well the cards you do not know?” Sebastian asked once more.
“Only the names of a few—the Sun, the Moon, the Hanged-man. But I on their meanings never studied.”
“Ah.” Sebastian nodded. “The first card picked always yourself is. But the Kosmos a card of the Major Arcana is. A human being it can’t represent. Can’t pick.”
Lorq frowned. Puzzlement looked like rage. Misinterpreting, Sebastian stopped.
“What it is,” Katin went on, “in the Tarot pack there are fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana—just like the fifty-two playing cards, only with pages, knights, queens, and kings for court cards. These deal with ordinary human affairs: love, death, taxes—things like that. There are twenty-two other cards: the Major Arcana, with cards like the Fool and the Hanged-man. They represent primal cosmic entities. You can’t very well pick one of them to represent yourself.”
Lorq looked at the card a few seconds. “Why not?” He looked up at Katin. All expression was gone now. “I like this card. Tyy said choose, and I chose.”
Sebastian’s hand rose. “But—“
Tyy’s slender fingers caught her companion’s hairy knuckles. “He chose,” she said. The metal of her eyes flashed from Sebastian to the captain, to the card. “There it place.” She gestured for him to lay the card down. “The captain which card he wants can choose.”
Lorq laid the card on the carpet, the dancer’s head toward himself, the feet toward Tyy.
“The Kosmos reversed,” muttered Katin.
Tyy glanced up. “Reversed for you, upright for me is. Her voice was sharp.
“Captain, the first card you pick doesn’t predict anything,” Katin said. “Actually, the first card you take removes all the possibilities it represents from your reading.”
“What does it represent?” Lorq asked.
“Here male and female unite,” Tyy said. “The sword and the chalice, the staff and the dish join. Completion and certain success it means; the cosmic state of divine awareness it signifies. Victory.”
“And that’s all been cut from my future?” Lorq’s face assumed agony again. “Fine! What sort of a race would it be if I knew I was going to win?”
“Reserved it means obsession with one thing, stubbornness,” Katin added. “Refusal to learn—“
Tyy suddenly closed the cards. She held out the deck. “You, Katin, the reading will complete?”
“Huh? … I … Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t … Anyway, I only know the meaning of about a dozen cards.” His ears blushed along the rims. “I’ll be quiet.”
A wing brushed the floor.
Sebastian stood and pulled his pets away. One flapped to his shoulder. A breeze, and the Mouse’s hair tickled his forehead.
All were standing now except Lorq and Tyy, who squatted with the Dancing Hermaphrodite between.
Once more Tyy shuffled and fanned the cards, this time face down. “Choose.”
Broad fingers with thickened nails clamped the card, drew:
A workman stood before a double vault of stone, a stone-cutter plugged into his wrists. The machine was carving its third five-pointed star into the transom. Sunlight lit the mason and the building face. Through the doorway, darkness sank away.