Lorq squatted to see. Suddenly he stopped the passing cards with his forefinger. “The Kosmos, it looks like.” He named the card his finger had fallen on. “In this race, the universe the prize is.” He looked up at the Mouse and Katin. “Do you think I should pick the Kosmos to start the reading?” Framed by the bulk of his shoulders, the “agony” grew subtle.

The Mouse answered with a twist of dark lips.

“Go ahead,” Katin said.

Lorq drew the card:

Morning fog wove birch and yew and holly trees; in the clearing a naked figure leaped and cavorted in the blue dawn.

“Ah,” said Katin, “the Dancing Hermaphrodite, the union of all male and female principles.” He rubbed his ear between two fingers. “You know, for about three hundred years or so, from about eighteen-ninety to after space travel began, there was a highly Christianized set of Tarot cards designed by a friend of William Butler Yeats that became so popular, they almost obliterated the true images.”

As Lorq tilted the card, diffraction images of animals flashed and disappeared in the mystic grove. The Mouse’s hand tightened on Katin’s arm. He raised his chin to question.

“The beasts of the apocalypse,” Katin answered. He pointed over the captain’s shoulder to the four corners of the grove: “Bull, Lion, Eagle, and that funny little ape-like creature back there is the dwarf god Bes, originally of Egypt and Anatolia, protector of women in labor, the scourge of the miserly, a generous and terrible god. There’s a statue of him that’s fairly famous: squat, grinning, fanged, copulating with a lioness.”

“Yeah,” the Mouse whispered. “I seen that statue.”

“You have? Where?”

“Some museum.” He shrugged. “In Istanbul, I think. A tourist took me there when I was a kid.”

“Alas,” mused Katin, “I have been content with three-dimensional holograms.”

“Only it’s no dwarf. It’s”—the Mouse’s rasp halted as he looked up at Katin—”maybe twice as tall as you.” His pupils, rolling in sudden recollection, showed veined whites.

“Captain Von Ray, you well the Tarot know?” Sebastian asked.

“I’ve had my cards read perhaps a half dozen times,” Lorq explained. “My mother didn’t like my stopping to listen to the readers who would have their little tables set up under the wind-shield junctions on the streets. Once, when I was five or six I managed to get lost. While I was wandering around a part of Ark I’d never seen before, I stopped and got my fortune read.” He laughed; the Mouse, who had not judged the gathering expression right, had expected anger. “When I did get home and told my mother, she grew very upset and told me I mustn’t do it again.

“She knew it was all stupid!” the Mouse whispered.

“What had the cards said?” Katin asked.

“Something about a death in my family.”

“Did anyone die?”

Lorq’s eyes narrowed. “About a month later my uncle was killed.”

Katin reflected on the sound of m’s. Captain Lorq Von Ray’s uncle?

“But well the cards you do not know?” Sebastian asked once more.

“Only the names of a few—the Sun, the Moon, the Hanged-man. But I on their meanings never studied.”

“Ah.” Sebastian nodded. “The first card picked always yourself is. But the Kosmos a card of the Major Arcana is. A human being it can’t represent. Can’t pick.”

Lorq frowned. Puzzlement looked like rage. Misinterpreting, Sebastian stopped.

“What it is,” Katin went on, “in the Tarot pack there are fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana—just like the fifty-two playing cards, only with pages, knights, queens, and kings for court cards. These deal with ordinary human affairs: love, death, taxes—things like that. There are twenty-two other cards: the Major Arcana, with cards like the Fool and the Hanged-man. They represent primal cosmic entities. You can’t very well pick one of them to represent yourself.”

Lorq looked at the card a few seconds. “Why not?” He looked up at Katin. All expression was gone now. “I like this card. Tyy said choose, and I chose.”

Sebastian’s hand rose. “But—”

Tyy’s slender fingers caught her companion’s hairy knuckles. “He chose,” she said. The metal of her eyes flashed from Sebastian to the captain, to the card. “There it place.” She gestured for him to lay the card down. “The captain which card he wants can choose.”

Lorq laid the card on the carpet, the dancer’s head toward himself, the feet toward Tyy.

“The Kosmos reversed,” muttered Katin.

Tyy glanced up. “Reversed for you, upright for me is. Her voice was sharp.

“Captain, the first card you pick doesn’t predict anything,” Katin said. “Actually, the first card you take removes all the possibilities it represents from your reading.”

“What does it represent?” Lorq asked.

“Here male and female unite,” Tyy said. “The sword and the chalice, the staff and the dish join. Completion and certain success it means; the cosmic state of divine awareness it signifies. Victory.”

“And that’s all been cut from my future?” Lorq’s face assumed agony again. “Fine! What sort of a race would it be if I knew I was going to win?”

“Reserved it means obsession with one thing, stubbornness,” Katin added. “Refusal to learn—”

Tyy suddenly closed the cards. She held out the deck. “You, Katin, the reading will complete?”

“Huh?… I… Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t… Anyway, I only know the meaning of about a dozen cards.” His ears blushed along the rims. “I’ll be quiet.”

A wing brushed the floor.

Sebastian stood and pulled his pets away. One flapped to his shoulder. A breeze, and the Mouse’s hair tickled his forehead.

All were standing now except Lorq and Tyy, who squatted with the Dancing Hermaphrodite between.

Once more Tyy shuffled and fanned the cards, this time face down. “Choose.”

Broad fingers with thickened nails clamped the card, drew:

A workman stood before a double vault of stone, a stone-cutter plugged into his wrists. The machine was carving its third five-pointed star into the transom. Sunlight lit the mason and the building face. Through the doorway, darkness sank away.

“The Three of Pentacles. This card you covers.”

The Mouse looked at the captain’s forearm. The oval socket was almost lost between the double tendon along his wrist.

The Mouse fingered the socket on his own arm. The plastic inset was a quarter the width of his wrist: both sockets were the same size.

The captain lay the Three of Pentacles on the Kosmos.

“Again choose.”

The card came out upside down:

A black-haired youngster in brocade vest, with boots of tooled leather, leaned on the hilt of a sword on which was a jeweled silver lizard. The figure stood in shadow under crags; the Mouse couldn’t tell if it were boy or girl.

“The Page of Swords reversed. This card you crosses.”

Lorq placed the card crosswise on the Three of Pentacles.

“Again choose.”

Above a seaside, in a clear sky with birds, a single hand, extending from coils of mist, held a five-pointed star-form in a circle.

“The Ace of Pentacles.” Tyy pointed below the crossed cards. Lorq placed the card there. “This card beneath you lies. Choose.”

A big blond fellow stood on the flag path within a garden. He looked up, his hand back. A red bird was about to light on his wrist. On the stones of the court, nine star-shapes were cut.

“The Nine of Pentacles.” She pointed beside the pattern on the rug. “This card behind you lies.”

Lorq placed the card.

“Choose.”

Upside down again:

Between storm clouds burned a violet sky. Lightning had ignited the top of a stone tower. Two men had leaped from the upper balcony. One wore rich clothing. You could even see his jeweled rings and the gold tassels on his sandals. The other wore a common work vest, was barefoot, bearded.

“The Tower, reversed!” Katin whispered. “Uh-oh. I know what—” and stopped because Tyy and Sebastian looked.