“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technology, and at the same time your head full of a whole handful of petrified ideas a thousand years out of date.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 was 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?”