Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  "In your immediate past," Tyy went on, "the Ace of Pentacles lies. Again, much money, but toward a purpose pointed."

  "Setting up this expedition must have cost an arm and a leg," Katin commented.

  "And an eye and an ear?" Sebastian's knuckles rippled on the head of one of his pets.

  "In the far past, the Nine of Pentacles lies. Again a card of wealth it is. You success are used to. The best things you have enjoyed. But in your immediate future the Tower reversed is. In general this signifies— "

  "— go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not"— Katin's ears glowed again as Tyy narrowed her eyes at him— "collect two hundred pounds @sg." He coughed.

  "Imprisonment this card signifies; a great house topples."

  "The Von Rays have had it?"

  "Whose house I did not say."

  At that Lorq laughed.

  "Beyond it, the Two of Swords reversed lies. Of unnatural passion, Captain, beware."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" the Mouse whispered.

  But Tyy had moved from the cross of seven cards to the row of four.

  "At the head of your endeavors the King of Swords sits."

  "That's my friend Prince?"

  "It is. Your life he can affect. He a strong man is, and easily to wisdom he you may lead; also your death." Then she looked up, her face sharply distraught. "As well, all our lives ... He— "

  When she did not go on, Lorq asked, "What, Tyy?" Her voice calmed already, became a deeper, solider thing.

  "Below him— "

  "What was it, Tyy?"

  "— the Three of Wands reversed lies. Of offered his beware. The best defense against disappointment expectation is. The foundation of this the Devil is. But reversed. You the spiritual understanding of which I spoke will receive in the— "

  "Hey." The Mouse looked up at Katin. "What'd she see?"

  "Shhh."

  "— coming struggle, the surface of things away will fall. The workings beneath strange and stranger will seem. And though the King of Swords the walls of reality back will pull, behind them the Queen of Swords you will discover."

  "That's ... Ruby? Tell me, Tyy: do you see the sun?"

  "No sun. Only the woman, dark and powerful as her brother, her shadow casts— "

  "From the light of what star?"

  "Her shadow across both you and Prince falls— "

  Lorq waved his hands over the cards. "And the sun?"

  "Your shadow in the night is cast. Stars in the sky I see. But still no single sun— "

  "No!" Only it was the Mouse. "It's all stupid! Nonsense! Nothing, Captain!" His nail dug, and Katin jerked his arm away. "She can't tell you anything with them!" Suddenly he lurched to the side. His booted foot kicked among Sebastian's creatures. They rose and beat at the end of their chains.

  "Hey, Mouse! What are you— "

  He swept his bare foot across the patterned cards.

  "Hey!"

  Sebastian pulled flapping shadows back. "Come, still now be!" His hand moved from head to head, knuckle and thumb working quiet behind dark ears and jaws.

  But the Mouse had already stalked up the ramp across the pool. His sack banged his hip at each step till he disappeared.

  "I'll go after him, Captain." Katin ran up the ramp.

  As wings settled by Sebastian's sandals, Lorq stood.

  On her knees Tyy picked up her scattered cards.

  "You two back on vanes I put. Lynceos and Idas I'll relieve." As humor translated to agony, so concern appeared a grin. "You to your chambers, go."

  Lorq took Tyy's arm as she stood. Three expressions struck her face, one after the other: surprise, fear, and the third was when she recognized his.

  "For what you in the cards have read, Tyy, I you thank."

  Sebastian moved to take her hand from the captain's.

  "Again, I you thank."

  In the corridor to the Roc's bridge, projected stars drifted on the black wall. Against the blue one, the Mouse sat cross-legged on the floor, sack in lap. His hand molded shapes in the leather. He stared at the circling lights.

  Katin strolled up the hall, hands behind his back. "What the hell's wrong with you?" he inquired amicably.

  The Mouse looked up, and let his eyes catch a star emerging from Katin's ear.

  "You certainly like to make things complicated for yourself."

  The star drifted down, disappeared at the floor.

  "And by the way, what was the card you stuck in your sack?"

  The Mouse's eyes came back to Katin's fast. He blinked.

  "I'm very good at picking up on that sort of thing." Katin leaned back on the star-flecked wall. The ceiling projector that duplicated the outside night flashed dots of light across his short face, his long, flat belly. "This isn't the best way to get on the captain's good side. You've got some odd ideas, Mouse - admitted, they're fascinating. If somebody had told me I'd be working in the same crew, today in the thirty-first century, with somebody who could honestly be skeptical about the Tarot, I don't think I would have believed it. You're really from Earth?"

  "Yeah, I'm from Earth."

  Katin bit at a knuckle. "Come to think of it, I doubt if such fossilized ideas could have come from anywhere else but Earth. As soon as you have people from the times of the great stellar migrations, you're dealing with cultures sophisticated enough to comprehend things like the Tarot.

  I wouldn't be surprised if in some upper Mongolian desert town there isn't someone who still thinks Earth floats in a dish on the back of an elephant who stands on a serpent coiled on a turtle swimming in the sea of forever. In a way I'm glad I wasn't born there, fascinating place that it is. It produces some spectacular neurotics. There was one character at Harvard— " He paused and looked back at the Mouse. "You're a funny kid. Here you are, flying this star-freighter, a product of thirty-first-century technology, and at the same time your head full of a whole handful of petrified ideas a thousand years out of date. Let me see what you swiped?"

  The Mouse jammed his forearm into the sack, pulled out the card. He looked at it, back and front, till Katin reached down and took it.

  "Do you remember who told you not to believe in the Tarot?" Katin examined the card.

  "It was my ..." The Mouse took the sack rim in his hands and squeezed. "This woman. Back when I was a real little kid, five or six."

  "Was she a gypsy too?"

  "Yeah. She took care of me. She had cards, like Tyy's. Only they weren't three-D. And they were old. When we were going around in France and Italy, she gave readings for people. She knew all about them, what the pictures meant and all. And she told me. She said no matter what anybody said, it was all phony. It was all just fake and didn't mean anything. She said gypsies had given the Tarot cards to everybody else."

  "That's right. Gypsies probably brought them from the East to the West in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And they certainly helped distribute them about Europe for the next five hundred years."

  "That's what she told me, that the cards belonged to the gypsies first, and the gypsies knew: they're just fake. And never to believe them."

  Katin smiled. "A very romantic notion. I cotton to it myself: the idea that all those symbols, filtered down through five thousand years of mythology, are basically meaningless and have no bearing on man's mind and actions, strikes a little bell of nihilism ringing. Unfortunately I know too much about these symbols to go along with it. Still, I'm interested in what you have to say. So this woman you lived with when you were a child, she read Tarot cards, but she still insisted they were false?"

  "Yeah." He let go of the sack. "Only ..."

  "Only what?" Katin asked when the Mouse did not go on.

  "Only, there was one night— just before the end. There was no one there but gypsies. We were waiting in a cave, at night. We were all afraid, because something was going to happen. They whispered about it, and if any of the kids came around, they shut up. And that night, she read the cards— only not like it wa
s phony. And they all sat around the fire in the dark, listening to her tell the cards. And the next morning somebody woke me up early, while the sun was still coming up over the city between the mountains. Everybody was leaving. I didn't go with Mama— the woman who read the cards. I never saw any of them. Again. The ones I went with, they disappeared soon. I ended up getting to Turkey all by myself." The Mouse thumbed a form beneath the leather. "But that night, when she was reading the cards in the firelight, I remember I was awful scared. They were scared too, see. And they wouldn't tell us about what. But it made them scared enough to ask the cards— even though they knew it was all phony."

  "I guess when the situation gets serious, people will use their common sense and give up their superstitions long enough to save their necks." Katin was frowning. "What do you think it was?"

  The Mouse shrugged. "Perhaps people were after us. You know with gypsies. Everybody thinks that gypsies steal things. We did, too. Maybe they were going to come after us from the town. Nobody likes gypsies, on Earth. That's cause we don't work."

  "You work hard enough, Mouse. That's why I wonder that you get involved in all this other mess back with Tyy. You'll spoil your good name."

  "I haven't been with gypsies steady since I was seven or eight. Besides, I got my sockets. Though I didn't get them till I was at Cooper Astronautics in Melbourne."

  "Really? Then you must have been at least fifteen or sixteen. That certainly is late. On Luna we got ours when we were three or four so we could operate teaching computers at school." Katin's expression suddenly concentrated. "You mean there was a whole group of grown men and women, with children, wandering around from town to town, country to country, on Earth without sockets?"

  "Yeah. I guess there was."

  "Without sockets there's not much in the line of work you can do."

  "Sure isn't."

  "No wonder your gypsies were being hounded. A group of adults traveling around without plug facilities!" He shook his head. "But why didn't you get them?"

  "That's just gypsies. We never had them. We never wanted them. I took them because I was by myself, and— well, I guess it was easier." The Mouse hung his forearms over his knees. "But that was still no reason for them to come and run us out of town whenever we got settled. Once, I remember, they got two gypsies, and killed them. They beat them up till they were half dead, and then cut their arms off and hung them head down from trees to bleed to death— "

  "Mouse!" Katin's face twisted.

  "I was only a kid, but I remember. Maybe that's what made Momma finally decide to ask the cards what to do even though she didn't believe. Maybe that's what made us break up."

  "Only in Draco," Katin said. "Only on Earth."

  The dark face turned up at him. "Why, Katin? Go on, you tell me, why did they do that to us." No question mark at the end of his sentence. Hoarse outrage instead.

  "Because people are stupid, and narrow, and afraid of anything different." Katin closed his eyes. "That's why I prefer moons. Even on a big one, it's hard to get so many people together that that sort of thing happens." His eyes opened. "Mouse, consider this. Captain Von Ray has sockets. He's one of the richest men in the universe. And so does any miner, or street cleaner, or bartender, or file clerk, or you. In the Pleiades Federation or in the Outer Colonies, it's a totally cross-cultural phenomenon— part of a way of considering all machines as a direct extension of man that has been accepted by all social levels since Ashton Clark. Up until this conversation, I would have said it was a totally cross-cultural phenomenon on Earth as well. Until you reminded me that on our strange ancestral home world, some incredible cultural anachronisms have managed to dodder on until today. But the fact that a group of non-socketed gypsies, impoverished, trying to work where there's no work to do, telling fortunes by a method that they have totally ceased to understand while the rest of the universe has managed to achieve the understanding these same gypsies' ancestors had fifteen hundred years back— lawless eunuchs moving into a town couldn't have been more upsetting to the ordinary socketed workingman or woman. Eunuchs? When you plug into a big machine, you call that studding; you wouldn't believe where that expression came from. No, I don't understand why it happened. But I do understand a little of the how." He shook his head. "Earth is a funny place. I was there in school four years, and I had just begun to learn how much of it I didn't understand. Those of us who weren't born there probably will never be able to figure it completely. Even in the rest of Draco, we lead much simpler lives, I think." Katin looked at the card in his hand. "You know the name of this card you swiped?"

  The Mouse nodded. "The Sun."

  "You know if you go around pinching cards, they can't very well show up in the reading. Captain was rather anxious to see this one."

  "I know." He ran his fingers along the strap of his sack, "The cards were already talking about me coming between Captain and his sun; and I'd just pinched the card from the deck." The Mouse shook his head.

  Katin held the card out. "Why don't you give it back? While you're at it, you might apologize for kicking up that fuss."

  The Mouse looked down for half a minute. Then he stood, took the card, and started up the hall.

  Katin watched him turn the corner. Then he crossed his arms and dropped his head to think. And his mind drifted to the pale dusts of remembered moons.

  Katin mulled in the quiet hall; finally he closed his eyes. Something tugged at his hip.

  He opened them. "Hey— "

  Lynceos (with Idas a shadow at his shoulder) had come up to him and pulled the recorder out of his pocket by the chain. He had held up the jeweled box. "What's this— "

  "— thing do?" Idas finished.

  "You mind giving that back?" The foundations for Katin's annoyance were laid at their interruption of his thoughts. It was built on their presumption.

  "We saw you fooling with it back at the port." Idas took it from his brother's white fingers— "Look— " Katin began.

  — and handed it back to Katin. "Thanks!" He started to put it back into his pocket. "Show us how it works— "

  "— and what you use it for?"

  Katin paused, then turned the recorder in his hand. "It's just a matrix recorder where I can dictate notes and file them. I'm using it to write a novel."

  Idas said, "Hey, I know what that— "

  "— me too. Why do you want to— "

  "— have to make one of— "

  "— why don't you just make a psychorama— "

  "— is so much easier. Are we— "

  "— in it?"

  Katin found himself starting to say four things. Then he laughed. "Look, you glorified salt and pepper shakers, I can't think like that!" He pondered a moment. "I don't know why I want to write one. I'm sure it would be easier to make a psychorama if I had the equipment, the money, and the connections in a psychorama studio. But that's not what I want. And I have no idea whether you'll be 'in it' or not. I haven't begun to think about the subject. I'm still making notes on the form." They frowned. "On structure, the aesthetics of the whole business. You can't just sit down and write, you know. You have to think. The novel was an art form. I have to invent it all over again before I can write one. The one I want to write, anyway."

  "Oh," Lynceos said.

  "You sure you know what a novel— "

  "— of course I do. Did you experience War— "

  "— and Peace. Yeah. But that was a psychorama— "

  "— with Che-ong as Natasha. But it was— "

  "— taken from a novel? That's right, I— "

  "— you remember now?"

  "Um-hm," Idas nodded darkly behind his brother. "Only"— He was talking to Katin now— "how come you don't know what you want to write about?"

  Katin shrugged.

  "Then maybe you'll write something about us if you don't know yet what— "

  "— can we sue him if he says something that isn't— "

  "Hey," Katin interrupted. "I have to find a subject th
at can support a novel. I told you, I can't tell you if you're going to be in it or— "

  "— what sort of things you got in there anyway?" Ides was saying around Lynceos' shoulder.

  "Huh? Like I said, notes. For the book."

  "Let's hear."

  "Look, you guys don't ..." Then he shrugged. He dialed the ruby pivots on the recorder's top, then flicked it to seven. Bear in mind that the novel— no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective— is always a historical projection of its own time." The voice played too high, and too fast. But it facilitated review. "To make my book, I must have an awareness of my time's conception of history."

  Idas' hand was a black epaulet on his brother's shoulder. With eyes of bark and coral, they frowned, flexed their attention.

  "History? Thirty-five hundred years ago Herodotus and Thucydides invented it. They defined it as the study of whatever had happened during their own lives. And for the next thousand years it was nothing else. Fifteen hundred years after the Greeks, in Constantinople, Anna Comnena, in her legalistic brilliance (and in essentially the same language as Herodotus) wrote history as the study of those events of man's actions that had been documented. I doubt if this charming Byzantine believed things only happened when they were written about. But incidents unchronicled were simply not considered the province of history in Byzantium. The whole concept had transformed. In another thousand years we had reached that century which began with the first global conflict and ended with the first conflict between globes brewing. Somehow the theory had arisen that history was a series of cyclic rises and falls as one civilization overtook another. Events that did not fit on the cycle were defined as historically unimportant. It's difficult for us today to appreciate the differences between Spengler and Toynbee, though from all accounts their approaches were considered polar in their day. To us they seem merely to be quibbling over when or where a given cycle began. Now that another thousand years has passed, we must wrestle with De Biling and Broblin, 34-Alvin and the Crespburg Survey. Simply because they are contemporary, I know they must inhabit the same historic view. But how many dawns did I see flickering beyond the docks of the Charles while I stalked and pondered whether I held with Saunder's theory of Integral Historical Convection or was I still with Broblin after all. Yet I have enough— prospective to know that in another thousand years these differences will seem as minute as the controversy of two medieval theologians disputing whether twelve or twenty-four angels can dance on the head of a pin.