His eyebrow lifted. “I have to do the work?”
“You have to do the work. You may not be conscious of it, but as you shuffle the cards you are arranging them in an order that satisfies you. You determine their final order. I only lay them out and help interpret. There is nothing supernatural about it; the cards merely reflect your will.”
“I know you have to say that,” he said, his eyes straying at last from her décolletage to her legs, which she had disposed artistically to the side of the table. “There are laws, aren’t there? You can’t claim anything about spiritual influences, but they’re there all the same, right?” He shuffled the cards.
A born sucker; she had known the type in Sphere Mintaka. They wanted to believe in fantastic agencies, not in mundane reality. The truth was that modern space science had far more effect on most entities’ lives than any possible spiritual agency.
“I only help you interpret the cards,” she insisted, knowing he would take this as confirmation of his conjecture. “No spirits exist except as you have conjured them.”
He returned the deck. Melody dealt the first card of the reading. It was the Five of Serpents of the New Tarot, with the five snakes radiating out from the points of a five-pointed star. Too bad; these Minor Arcana were not complex enough to evoke the reactions she needed. What would she do if the whole layout turned out to be like this?
But she tried. “What does this suggest to you, Hath?”
He hardly glanced at it. “The patina of reproduction, of course.”
Melody forced her mouth to work. “Of course.” Was he teasing her or was this a completely alien reaction?
She dealt another card: Unity, equivalent to The Lovers in the more conventional decks. It could be considered as representing the commencement of a new way, though of course it was far more complex than that.
“There is the first shoot entering the nutrient globe,” Hath said. “Ready to fission in that egg into the five sexes that will consume the body of the female entity laid out as food, before emerging as shown in the prior card,” he said. He looked up. “I’m surprised they are permitted to print such graphic material.”
“Sometimes they do have trouble with local censors,” Melody said somewhat feebly. For she had abruptly identified the applicable culture, the only one she knew of that had five sexes. Sphere * of Andromeda.
By the time she completed the reading, she was certain. Hath was another hostage. She gave him a nice “fortune” and let him go. But her human heart was pounding.
Her first Tarot testing had been a success. But she was not precisely satisfied with its verdict. If a random sampling of personnel had so easily turned up another agent of Andromeda, how many more were aboard this ship?
Melody was tired, and so was her host. She had been awake and active for some time, and had experienced more new and unsettling things than ever before in her life. She had to relax.
“Let’s take us a subsonic dense and estivation,” she told Yael.
“What?” Bewilderment.
“Oh—sorry, I forget. I mean a hot shower and sleep.”
“It must be some life, on Mintaka,” Yael remarked.
“It is some life here, girl!”
Yael laughed, pleased. “It’s my dream come true. I hope we’re stuck here forever.”
Incurable lust for adventure! “Very well. Why don’t you strip us down and take us our shower, and I’ll tag along for the ride.”
Incredulous thrill. “You’ll let me run the whole body? Even though I’m only the host?”
“The Lord God of Hosts is with you yet,” Melody agreed. Then, feeling the instant reaction: “I’m not ridiculing your religion! It is possible to love and laugh at the same time, you know.” She was afraid that would not be enough, but Yael’s mind brightened. Another advantage of lesser intelligence: it was easily satisfied. Melody’s actual attitude toward Solarian religion was more complex and skeptical than the human girl could appreciate.
Yael took over the body, hesitantly at first, then with greater sureness. Melody had to school herself to let go, becoming completely limp in intent, so that it was possible. They/she began to shrug out of her blouse, letting the fabric tear down the front and back. As it was recyclable, it would be conveyed to the ship’s clothing unit and merged with similar refuse. The oven would melt it down, and the centrifuge would spin out the dirt, and the jet-molds would squirt new clothes on order into the system. Little was wasted in space—apart from the fact that the whole space effort was a waste. Monstrous fleets that could never do battle…
Yael stopped, her bosom half-bared. “The magnet!” she said.
Melody looked where the girl was gazing—the easiest of things to do, in the circumstance, since the eyes were under host-control. “Slammer’s all right; he’s just hovering.”
“That’s just it. He’s watching.”
Now Melody laughed. “Of course. He’s protecting us. With these hostages around, that’s just as well.”
“But he’ll see—you know.”
Melody had to work this out before responding. Solarians wore clothes, lest the males be sexually stimulated by the sight of the female torso, and impregnate… but she hardly needed to rehearse that fact again. “He’s not human. He’s a magnet. Breasts mean nothing to him— not even so fine a pair as yours.”
“How do we know?”
That stopped her. “Well, it does seem unlikely. Anyway, he has no eyes.”
Yael was reassured. “That’s right! He can’t see!” And she stripped away the rest of the blouse and skirt and stuffed them in the recycle chute.
Actually, Melody realized, the magnet could see. He merely used a different system. The human body’s presence and density distorted its magnetic environment slightly, so that Slammer could locate it precisely. Clothing made little difference. Yael would be shocked if she realized that the magnet could probably perceive her most intimate internal functions.
“We’d better use the john,” Yael said, heading for the refuse cubicle. Then halted again. “This is an open slot. And the magnet’s right here.”
So the action of elimination possessed different scruples from the mere exposure of flesh! “All creatures have natural functions,” Melody pointed out.
“That means it understands. It’s male, and its watching. Or listening. Or something.”
“That last covers the situation best,” Melody said. Odd that a function that both male and female Solarians practiced similarly should have greater social restrictions than one that involved sexual differentiation. Mintakans were not that way: they were quite open about intake and elimination. Sexuality seemed to extend well beyond the mechanisms of sex, here. She had no idea. “We can tie a curtain to conceal the seat.”
“Yes!” That solved the problem. The Solarian girl was locked on vision; the curtain made no difference to Slammer, but relieved her problem of propriety.
After the toilet, the shower. This already had a curtain, to prevent the fine spray of water from splashing out wastefully. Slammer hovered close, but did not intrude within the shower itself. The magnet seemed to be satisfied to maintain a distance of about one human body-length. It hovered closer when potential enemies were about, hung farther away when things seemed secure, as now. He was an excellent bodyguard.