“A man!” Tiala exclaimed. “It is the figure of a human male man, carrying his light. See, there is his hand! And the dog is beside him.”
“You found it!” Melody said. “You win! That is the figure of the Hermit. The one who walks alone. This is the card of the Hermit, in the ancient Thoth face of Solarian Tarot, said to date from a century pre-Sphere. A picture hidden behind a picture.”
“How clever. This is fun, though you evidently know more about it than I do. Perhaps you should handicap yourself. May we examine another card?”
“Why certainly. Choose any you wish from the deck. There are thirty Major Arcana or Important Secret cards, and—”
She was interrupted by a shudder that ran through the ship. Tiala jumped up to scan her dials. “Hull punctured; atmospheric leakage,” she snapped into her bodyphone. “Section sealed.”
Dash’s voice came back. “Pressure the section! There’s crew in that region.”
Tiala’s hands played over beam-controls, breaking the electronic synapses in a rapid pattern. This would come naturally to a /, Melody realized; she could do her job. “Pressurized. But seal off that leak; we can’t expend our gas indefinitely.”
The lights blinked and changed. Tiala relaxed. “They got it sealed; the leak’s stopped. I wonder what happened?”
“Felt like an explosion,” Melody said. “Is the ship under attack?”
“No attack,” Dash’s voice answered, reminding her that she could never be assured of real privacy aboard this ship. The whole vessel was geared for instant intercommunication. “Detonation in the entry aperture. I suspect someone sabotaged equipment there.”
The entry aperture! That was where her shuttle rested —and its retransfer unit. This meant almost certain delay of her mission and return to Mintaka. But Melody could not express her alarm. Not in the presence of the hostage, not to the myriad ears of the ship. “Maybe I’d better take that cabin after all,” she said. “I’m only in the way at the moment.”
“Yes,” Dash agreed with ungracious readiness. “I shall detail someone to guide you.”
5. Llume the Undulant
*occasion for preparatory briefing*
—is it necessary, ast?—
*only by schedule, dash investigations remain inconclusive there is nothing of new significance to report*
—then let’s fly over it this time wait for something serious not be bound by rote—
*it is a time of great stress*
—yes at times I wish I were back on my £, hauling scentwood, carefree—
*I had understood your species was airborne*
—once, ast, once with increasing brain, we lost our powers of flight now our three wings are employed only for balance and communication transport is provided by the £—
*with victory we shall afford more technology for the home front*
—yes that is our dream ironic that we the most civilized advanced cultures in the galactic cluster, should be confined to the resources of our ancestors in domestic cases, reserving all our technology for spherical matters so readily could we extend that technology throughout andromeda, benefiting all our species, had we but the energy we were thwarted once, but not this time milky way galaxy shall succumb, and its energy shall be ours—
*I still have bad vibrations of another enemy agent like flint of outworld foiling us*
—so do I, ast, so do I segment etamin makes me nervous, though I know that prior interruption was a fluke that is why I assigned one of our best operatives there—
In moments that entity arrived. It was a Polarian, a huge teardrop on a spherical wheel. Melody had assumed that the ship’s complement was entirely human, since this was a Solarian vessel, but of course Polarians were integral to segment government and should be represented in at least token capacity here. There were probably other creatures scattered about, below the top officer level.
“I came to escort Yael of Dragon to her cabin,” the Polarian said, its ball vibrating against the wall. “I am Llume the Undulant, Orderly of the Day.”
Once again Melody concealed her surprise. This was no Polarian manner, despite the form. “I am Yael.”
Llume led the way down the hall, and Melody followed. She really had no choice. But she found herself wrinkling her nose again, conscious of the little tubes inside. She still did not intend to use the secret weapon, but what would she do in an emergency? She did, after all, want to live.
“I’m nervous,” Yael said. “Isn’t it fun!”
“You like being in possible danger?” Melody asked her. “In a ship under fire in space?”
“Oh, yes! This is adventure! Of course it isn’t really danger; it’s just some accident in the hold. No enemy could get through those rings of attackships, especially when they’re protected by your Tarot magic. But what fun pretending!”
Tarot magic? The girl hadn’t grasped the distinction between symbolism and the supernatural. Well, not worth debating. “I wish I had your attitude,” Melody told her. “I have lived a settled life; I don’t like danger or violence.”
“You’re teasing me,” Yael said. “A mind like yours— you’re so much I could never be. It’s like riding a super-coaster in the funpark. All I can do is hang on and enjoy it, knowing that no matter how scary it seems you really do know what you’re doing. You have such terrific competence—”
“Untrue,” Melody said. “I don’t know how—”
“I can’t even imagine the things you can do. Like that card-picture game. All I saw was the three-headed dog. But I could feel your smartness flowing through a hundred channels of my brain, making it work, making me feel like the genius you are…”
The awful thing was that in this girl’s terms, this was true. What to Melody was routine thinking, based on a lifetime’s study and experience, was genius to Yael. And the human girl could never do it on her own; it simply was not in her genetic makeup. She really was, in this respect, inferior.
“But one thing you have that I don’t,” Melody said, trying to come up with a genuinely positive aspect of the situation. “I’m not handsome, in my own form. I’m old, physically infirm, and even in my prime I was no beauty. I never believed it mattered. But now I comprehend what I was missing. You have a physical luster and emotional innocence that—that has me riding the supercoaster [quick flash-concept from the host-mind: tremendous velocity past painted frameworks, sensations of falling, sudden darkness, noise, screams of terrified pleasure, loss of equilibrium, glimpse of a handsome youth Sol male in the next capsule, idle fancies of romance, shocking intimacies, brief freefall like five-second love, abrupt triple gravity, struggle for breath, racing heartbeat] of your body. You are one of the most beautiful entities—”
Three men appeared in the hall. They carried blasters, antipersonnel projectors that could scorch living tissue without damaging the equipment of the ship. “Hands up!” the leader bawled.
The Polarian rolled to a stop. “I have no hands.”
The men ignored that. “What are you doing here?”
“I am conducting our guest, the offspring of a Solarian Minister, to her compartment,” Llume said.