Chaining the Lady Read Online Free Page B

machine deliver? If the Solarians were smart, they would have Tarot on the proscribed list. But this was not Sphere Sol, but Planet Outworld, where Tarot was not so well known. Few entities not conversant with the tool had any significant grasp of its potential. The average sapient thought it a mere game or harmless superstition, and the average Tarot adept was careful to cultivate this impression. It was the major protection afforded contemporary inter-sphere magick—was that the proper spelling for this concept? Yes, with the ck : the fact was that authoritative entities did not take it seriously, so felt no threat.
    The wall-slot opened, and an object thunked down. Victory!
    She reached in and picked it up. It was a sealed physical pack of cards, Solarian-style; she recognized it from her researches. She opened it and spread the cards in her two hands. It was a tri-channel, hundred-face collection. Not merely a good deck, but one of the best, will illustrated with correctly aspected symbols. It would do.
    â€œAppreciation, Machine,” she said.
    â€œNoted,” the computer voice replied. That struck her as funny, for reasons she could not immediately define, and she laughed. That struck her as funnier yet. What appalling sounds the human body made to express its mirth. What unholy quaking of flesh!
    She sat at a table she drew out of the wall, already getting acclimatized to this body and habitat. Her Mintakan body, of course, was unable to sit. She laid the cards face-up in even rows of ten. There were thirty Major Arcana or Trumps, twenty Courts, and fifty Minor Arcana or Pips. The last group consisted of five suits: Energy, Gas, Liquid, Solid, and Aura. The cards of each were numbered one through ten, with illustrations of their characteristic symbols: Wands, Swords, Cups, Disks, and Broken Atoms. Each card of the complete deck could be flexed into two alternate faces, and the Ghost Trump had fifteen flexes plus a Table of Equivalences enabling the reader to adapt the deck to spheres not directly represented, such as her own Mintaka. Yes, excellent.
    One face of the Queen of energy was the same chained lady that had started this off. It was different in that this one was purely visual, rather than primarily sonic, but there was no question about the kinship. She picked it up and took it to the mirror, comparing her naked host-body to the figure on the card. The similarity was amazing. Had this host been specially selected to match? Or had the Tarot been aware of this host, and somehow—no, there was the route to insanity.
    She returned slowly to the table. One thing was sure: the model for the picture was sexually appealing, so as to create the necessary urge in the mind of Perseus. That suggested that her present host was an extraordinary beauty—which just might be useful.
    For perhaps an hour, Solarian time, Melody contemplated her hundred-face spread. She also flexed the Ghost through all fifteen alternates, dwelling about one minute on each. Apart from the necessary activity of her fingers, she did not move; in fact she had entered a light trance.
    At last she gathered up the cards, shuffled them until her host-fingers were proficient at this, then cut the deck several times and turned up one card randomly.
    It was a picture of another lovely young human female, with a long, light head-mane and slender firm body, nude. But this one was not chained. She half-kneeled on a green bank beside a pool, one foot resting forward on , not in , the water. She held two pitchers from which water poured: one into the pool, the other onto the ground, where it split into five blue rivulets. There were eight stars in the blue sky above her—seven white, one yellow, and a red bird perched in a tree.
    â€œThe Star,” she murmured, “in one of the pre-sphere renditions. Key of great hope—or great loss—its five rivulets flowing into the five suits, its smaller stars signifying the seven