God of Tarot Read Online Free PDF Page A

nod. “Signifying ruin! Was it a literal image?”
    “It was. Ten tall swords piercing a corpse. All quite solid.”
    “That should have shaken up the party!”
    “It certainly did. They pulled out the swords and turned over the body. It was a man, but none they recognized. No one was missing from their crew. They buried him, saved the swords, and wrote up a report”
    “Tangible evidence. That was smart.”
    “Not so smart. When they arrived on Earth, the objects they claimed were swords were merely so many slivers of stone, like stalactites from a cave. A second party, sent to verify the situation, dug up the body— and found only the carcass of a native animal.”
    “Mass hallucination?” Brother Paul suggested. “They killed an animal and thought it was a man? Because of fatigue and guilt—or because its configuration resembled that particular card? Stalactites are a bit like swords.”
    “That was the official conclusion.” She paused, then girded herself to continue. “The second party brought Tarot cards and played many games, this time in the line of business, but there was no duplication of the effect. Apparently the first crew had been overworked and short on sleep, while the second was fresh. So they named the planet Tarot and approved it for colonization.”
    “Just like that?” Brother Paul inquired, raising an eyebrow.
    “Just like that,” the Reverend Mother said wryly, forgetting herself so far as to raise her own eyebrow in response. “They had a quota of planets to survey, and could not afford to waste time, as they put it, ‘wild ghost chasing.’”
    “How much is lost through haste!” Brother Paul remarked. But he felt a growing excitement and gratitude that this mystery had come to pass. Wild ghosts? He certainly would like to see one!
    “Colonization proceeded in normal fashion,” she continued. “One million human beings were shipped in the course of forty days, assigned to initial campsites with wilderness reduction equipment, and left to fend for themselves. Only the monthly coordination shuttle maintained contact. Colonization is,” she commented with a disapproving frown, “somewhat of a sink-or-swim situation.”
    “Without doubt,” Brother Paul agreed. “Yet the great majority of emigrants have been happy to risk it—and most seem to be swimming.”
    “Yes.” She shrugged. “It is not the way I would have chosen—but the decision was hardly mine to make. At any rate, the colonists settled—and then the fun began.”
    “More Tarot animations?”
    “No, not specifically. These animations were of Heaven—and of Hell. I mean the storybook Pearly Gates, with angels flying by, and harpists sitting on clouds. Or the other extreme—fiery caves with red, fork-tailed devils with pitchforks.”
    “Evidently literal renditions of religious notions,” Brother Paul said. “Many believers have very material views of the immaterial.”
    “They do. There seems to be an unusual concentration of schismatic religions in this colony world. But these were rather substantial projections.” She pulled out a drawer in her desk and brought forth several photographs. “Skeptics arranged to take pictures— and we have them here.” She spread them out.
    He studied the pictures with amazement. “There was no, ah, trick photography? They certainly look authentic!”
    “No trick photography. There is more: the colonists organized a planetary orchestra—in any random sampling of a million people, you’ll find many skills—and they practiced many semiclassical pieces. One day they were doing the tone poem by Saint-Saëns, ‘Danse macabre ,’ and—”
    “Oh, no! Not the dancing skeletons!”
    “The same. The entire orchestra panicked, and two musicians died in the stampede. In fact, I believe the orchestra was disbanded after that, and never reorganized. But when cooler heads investigated, they found no trace of the walking skeletons.”
    “I begin to see,” Brother Paul