God of Tarot Read Online Free Page B

touched her cross. He had never seen her so tense before. It was as if she were the one with the guilty imagination, not he! “We all go where needed,” he said.
    “Yet some needs are stronger than others,” the Reverend murmured, her eyes lifting to meet his again, her face dead serious. What could she mean by that? “It is Hell I am sending you to, Brother.”
    Brother Paul did not smile. He had never heard language like this from her! Of course she was not swearing; she would never do that. When she said Hell, the capitalization was audible, as it was for the Tarot; she meant the abode of the Devil. “Figurative, I trust?”
    “Literal, Paul. And the returning will be harder than the going.”
    “It would be. Especially if it is necessary to die first.” Was he being cute, implying that he might return to life, like Jesus? He had not meant to!
    She did not smile. “No. Like Dante, you will be a living visitor. Perhaps you will see Heaven too.”
    “I don’t think I’m ready for that.” This time he was completely serious. Heaven awed him more than Hell did. This had to be a really extraordinary thing she was describing!
    The Reverend shook her head nervously, so that for an instant the lobe of one ear showed, like a bit of forbidden anatomy. “I am caught between the pillars of right and wrong, and I cannot tell them apart.” She turned away from him; he had not realized that her chair could swivel. “Paul, I am required to present this to you as a prospective mission—but speaking as a Sister, as a friend, I must urge you to decline. It is not merely that it would sadden me never to see you again—though I do fear this, for no tangible reason—it is that this mission is a horror. A horror!”
    “Now I am intrigued,” Brother Paul said, his own apprehensions fading as hers increased. “May I learn more?”
    “As much as we know,” she said. “We have been asked to send our best qualified representative to Planet Tarot to ascertain the validity of its deity. A strong man, not too old, not too firmly committed to a single ideology, with a good mind and a fine sense of objectivity. You would seem to be that man.”
    Brother Paul ignored the compliment, knowing it was not intended as such. “Planet Tarot?”
    “As you know, Earth has colonized something like a thousand habitable worlds in the current matter transport program. One of these is named Tarot, and there is a problem there.”
    “Hell, you said. I understood they did not send colonists to inclement habitats. If this planet is so hellish—”
    “I did not say hellish, Paul. I said literal Hell. And the road to—”
    “Oh, I see. It looked habitable, in the preliminary survey.”
    “Their surveyors must be overextended. How they managed to approve this particular planet—!” The Reverend Mother made a gesture of bafflement. “Its very name—”
    “Yes, I am curious about that too. Most of the names are publicity-minded. ‘Conquest,’ ‘Meadowland,’ ‘Zephyr’—how did they hit upon a name like Tarot’?”
    “It seems a member of the survey party had a Tarot deck along. And while he waited at the base camp for his fellows to return, he dealt himself a divination hand. And—” She paused.
    “And something happened.”
    “It certainly did. He—the card—the illustration on one of his cards took form. In three-dimensional animation.”
    Brother Paul’s interest intensified. He had Had experience with both sleight-of-hand and hallucinatory phenomena. “Had he been drinking an intoxicant?”
    She shook her head. “They claim not. No alcohol, no drugs, no mushrooms or glue or extract of lettuce. That was why he happened to be entertaining himself with cards. And the other members of the party saw the animation.”
    “No hallucination, then. But possibly a practical joke?”
    “No. No joke.”
    “Which card was it?”
    “The Ten of Swords.”
    Brother Paul refrained from whistling, contenting himself with a grave