God of Tarot (6 page)

Brother Paul was taken aback. “I had understood that this was to be a personal investigation and report. After all, a machine can’t be expected to fathom God.”

“Ha ha,” the supply man said without humor. “Just put it on.”

Reluctantly Brother Paul held up his left arm. The man clasped the bracelet on it, snapping it in place. He should have realized that the secular powers who controlled mattermission would not cooperate unless they had their secular assurances. They did not care whether God had manifested on Planet Tarot; their God was the Machine. The Machine embraced both Time and Power, ruling all. Yet perhaps it was only fair; who could say in advance that the God of Tarot was not a machine deity? Therefore it was proper that the Machine send its representative, too.

“And this,” the supply man said, holding out a set of small rods, “is a short-range transceiver. Hold it up, speak, this other unit receives. And vice versa. Required equipment for all our operatives.”

“I am not your operative,” Brother Paul said as gently as he could. He was, he reminded himself, supposed to be a peaceful man.

“Who’s paying your fare, round trip?” the man asked.

Brother Paul sighed. He who paid the piper, called the tune. Render unto Caesar, et cetera. He took the transceivers and tucked them into a pocket. He could carry them; he didn’t have to use them.

“Mind,” the supply man said, his brows furrowing, “we expect this equipment back in good order.”

“You can have it back now,” Brother Paul said.

No one answered him. He was whisked into another building and subjected to assorted indignities of examination and preparation. In their savage velocity and callousness, these procedures reminded him vaguely of the strip mining he had seen. Then he was hurried into the thermos bottle-like capsule and sealed in. All he had to do now was wait.

He examined the chamber. It was fairly large, but packed with unboxed equipment. Crates would have been wasteful, of course; every gram counted. Most of it was readily identifiable: hand-powered adding machines, spinning wheels, looms, treadle-powered sewing machines, mechanical typewriters, axes, handsaws, wood stoves, and the like. A sensible shipment for a colony that might be as backward as the hinterlands of Earth itself.

Those adding machines bothered him. How could he justify his fuss about the electronic calculator? He was out of tune with the technology of his mission. Perhaps he had been shortsighted. Was it rationalization to suggest that the adding machines could not readily multiply or divide numbers, do specialized conversions, or figure the cube root of pi? A slide rule could do those things, and it had no battery to run down. Why hadn’t he brought along a slide rule? That would have been far more in keeping with the philosophy of the Holy Order of Vision. The lay powers of Earth were using calculators whose usefulness would cease when their power sources expired. He, as a Brother, should be showing his fellow man how to use slide rules that would function as long as mind and hands remained.

“I am a hypocrite,” he murmured aloud. “May God correct and forgive me.”

He looked at his watch—he was finally getting into that habit!—and set the elapsed-time counter. Of course mattermission was supposed to be instantaneous, the Theory of Relativity to the contrary, but there was this waiting time, and he might as well measure that. He liked to count things anyway. It was better than admitting that he was nervous.

His eye caught the silver-colored band on his wrist. It had an elaborate decoration, like a modernistic painting done in relief. No doubt that was to conceal the lenses and mechanisms within it. When it was necessary to hide something, fit it into a complex container. As the crown-maker had done to conceal the amount of base metal diluting the value of the supposedly pure gold crown of Hieron, ruler of the ancient city of Syracuse. Except that Archimedes had cried “Eureka!” and found it, utilizing the principle of water displacement.

Probably the band was recording things now. How fortunate it could not record his thoughts! But what would happen when he wished to perform a natural function? Maybe he could hold that wrist up over his head so the device couldn’t see anything. Yet suppose he did so, and suddenly heard it cry “Eureka!”?

He smiled at himself. Ridiculous mortal vanity! What did it matter what portion of his anatomy this device might perceive? When the lay experts played back the molecules, they would quickly be bored by the minutiae of human water displacements. Let the machine capture and contain all the information it could hold, until its cup brimmethed over.

Abruptly it struck him: a cup! This bracelet was like the Cup of the Tarot, containing not fluid but information. And the little transceivers—they were Wands. His watch was the emblem of a third suit, Disks, for it was essentially a disk with markings, and hands pointing to the time of day that in Nature was shown by the original golden disk of the sun. Three suits. What might be the fourth, that of Swords?

That stymied him for a moment. Swords were representative of trouble, violence; he had no such weapon on him. Swords were also the suit of air, and while he had air about him, this didn’t seem to apply. The sword was also a scalpel, signifying surgery or medicine, and of course there was the cutting edge of thought— That was it! The sharpest, most tangible thought was the symbolism of numbers, of mathematics. The calculator! Thus he had a full roster of Tarot symbolism. Too bad he hadn’t brought along a Tarot deck; that could have distracted him very nicely.

Brother Paul sat on a stove, waiting for the shipment to ship. After all that rush, they might at least have gotten on with it promptly once he was inside the capsule! But perhaps there were technical things to do, like switching coaches onto other sidings or whatever, lining everything up for the big jump. It was difficult to imagine how, in this nineteenth-century setting, he could be jolted to a world perhaps fifty light-years distant. He should have thought to inquire exactly where Planet Tarot was; that seemed much more important now that he was on the verge of jumping there. Was a jump of seventy light-years more hazardous than a jump of twenty light-years? The concept of instantaneous travel bothered him in a vague way, like the discomfort of an incipient stomach disorder that might or might not lead to retching. He would never understand how mattermission worked. Didn’t old Albert Einstein know his math? Yet obviously it did exist—or did it?

His watch claimed that only another minute had passed since his last look, or a total of two and a half minutes since he had set the counter. That didn’t help; subjectively he had aged far more than that!

There were chronic whispers about that objection of Relativity, rumors always denied by MT, yet persistent. Twentieth-century science had accomplished many things supposed to have been impossible in the nineteenth century; why shouldn’t twenty-first century science supersede the beliefs of the twentieth? Yet he found that he now had the same difficulty disbelieving in Relativity as he had initially had believing in it. Suddenly, in the close confines of this capsule, those whispers were easy to believe. There was no doubt that Earth was being depopulated, and that such tremendous amounts of energy were being consumed that the whole society was regressing, the victim of energy starvation. But there was also no question that the emigration mechanism, MT, had been deemed impossible by the best human minds of the past. The obvious reconciliation: people
were
departing Earth—but they
weren’t
arriving at other planets. The whole vast MT program could be a ruse to—

Suddenly his queasiness gave way to acute claustrophobia. He looked about nervously for nozzles that might admit poisonous gas. The Jews in Nazi Germany, half a century or so ago: they had been promised relief—

No, that didn’t make sense! Why go to the trouble of summoning a single novice of a semireligious Order to this elaborate setup? Anyone who wanted him out of the way could find much less cumbersome means to eliminate him! And the Order would not suffer itself to be deceived like this. The Right Reverend Father Crowder would never countenance such a thing; of this Brother Paul was absolutely sure. And the Reverend Mother Mary, angelic in her concern for the good of all men…

The Reverend Mother Mary. Why fool himself? He had agreed to undertake this mission because she had asked him to. Oh, she had pleaded the opposite, most charmingly. But he would have been diminished in her eyes if he had heeded that plea.

This was no more profitable a line of thought than the other had been. He was here neither for death nor for love. He was supposed to ascertain the validity of the God of Tarot, and the project fascinated him. Why distract himself with superficially unreasonable or impossible things, when his actual assignment surpassed the unreason or impossibility of either? How could a mere man pass judgment on God?

Brother Paul drew out his calculator, his symbol for thought, his figurative Sword of Tarot. It was an early model, perhaps twenty-five years old. An antique, but it still operated. The Holy Order of Vision took good care of those devices it preserved, perhaps fearing that one year there would be no reservoir of technology but this. The calculator had a number of square white buttons, and a number of square black ones. By depressing these buttons in the proper order he could set up any simple mathematical problem and obtain an immediate solution. Instantaneous—like the travel between worlds! This was travel between the worlds of concepts, not of space.

Idly he turned it on, watching the green zero appear in the readout window. “Two,” he murmured, touching the appropriate button, and the zero was transformed miraculously into 2. “Plus three—equals five.” And the green 5 was there ahead of him.

Brother Paul smiled. He liked this little machine; it might not rival the Colony computer, but it did its limited job well. “Let’s remember that,” he said, punching the MEMORY button, then the PLUS button. That should file the number in the memory as a positive integer. Now he touched the CLEAR ENTRY button, and the cheerful zero reappeared, as green as ever. He punched MEMORY and RECALL and the 5 returned. Good; the memory was functioning properly.

“Let’s convert it from kilograms to pounds,” he continued, for this was an old conversions calculator complete with the archaic measurements, as befitted the date of its origin. He touched the CONVERSIONS button, then the MINUS button, which was now understood to represent kilograms. Then the DIVIDE button, which was now pounds. These double designations were initially confusing, but necessary to make twenty buttons do the work of fifty. The answer: 11.023113.

“File that useless information in Memory Two,” he said, punching MEMORY again, followed by 2, followed by PLUS, followed by CLEAR ENTRY. The readout returned to zero. Oh, he had forgotten what fun this was! “Now the number 99999999 multiplied by the number in Memory One.” He punched a row of eight nines, then TIMES, then MEMORY, 1, RECALL, then EQUALS. He frowned.

A red dot had appeared in the left-hand corner of the readout. “Overload,” he said. “No room for a nine-digit number! Clear it out.” He struck the CLEAR button several times, then turned off the calculator so as not to waste battery power while he thought.

“Very well, he said after a moment. “Let’s keep it within bounds. Multiply Memory One by Memory Two.” He turned it on again and punched the necessary sequence rapidly. All he got were zeroes. “Oh, I forgot! Turning it off erases the memory! I’ll have to start over.” He punched in a new 5, put it in Memory One, converted it from kilos to pounds, put that into Memory Two, cleared the readout, forgot what he was doing, and punched for Memory Two Recall. The result was zero.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. He went through the sequence again, watching his fingers move fleetingly over the keys—and saw his error. He had missed the 2 button for Memory Two and hit the TIMES button instead. “Can’t put it in TIMES MEMORY!” he said. “That would mean I’d have to punch MEMORY TIMES RECALL to get it out, and the poor machine would think I’d gone crazy and have to flash overload lights at me to jog me out of it.” As he spoke, he punched the foolish sequence he had named. The readout showed 11.023113.

Brother Paul stared at that. Then he erased the sequence and went through it all again, carefully punching the erroneous TIMES MEMORY, which was not supposed to exist. The same thing happened: he got the number back. “But that means this thing has a third memory—and it’s only built for two,” he said.

So he tested it methodically, for there was nothing so intriguing to him as a good mystery or paradox. He punched the number 111 into Memory One, 222 into Memory Two, and 333 into MEMORY TIMES. Then he punched out each in turn. Up they came, like the chosen cards of a sleight-of-hand magician: 111— 222—0.

“Zero!” he exclaimed. “So it
isn’t
true!” But just to be certain, he repeated the process, this time checking TIMES MEMORY first—and the 333 appeared. He checked for the 222 and found it, and then the 111—and it was there too. No doubt about it; he now had three memories. But the third one was intermittent, following some law of its own, as though it were half wild.

“Half wild…” he repeated aloud, thinking of something else. But if he got off on that, he would not solve the present mystery. He glanced at his watch. He had really gobbled up time with his calculations! Ten minutes, forty-two seconds, give or take a second, since he had set the counter. How long would they dawdle about mattermitting this capsule?

He cleared the readout and punched MEMORY TIMES again. The 333 reappeared. “A ghost in the machine,” he said. “A secret memory, unknown to—”

“So you found me,” a voice responded. “Yet I was always here, to be evoked.”

Brother Paul’s eyes flicked from the calculator to his watch—ten minutes, forty-nine seconds—then lifted slowly. A man stood before him, on the far side of the sewing machine. He was young, but with receding hair and chin, as though he had been subjected to early stress. No, that was a false characterization; physical appearance had little to do with personality. “Sorry. I did not see you arrive,” Brother Paul said. “Are you traveling to Planet Tarot too?”