God of Tarot Read online

  The white sphinx turned its head to face him. "How nice to see you again," she said.

  "Light!" Brother Paul cried in recognition. "I mean, the apologist for the Tarot of the Brotherhood of Light! I thought this was the Waite deck."

  She wrinkled her pert nose. "I hoped you had given up on that discredited innovation."

  "Now you sound like Therion."

  She snorted delicately. "Why choose between evils, when truth is available? Be yourself, the Conqueror; use the Sword of Zain to break through all obstacles, crush your enemies, and achieve sovereignty of spirit."

  Brother Paul caught on. "You call Key Seven 'The Conqueror'!"

  "Arcanum Seven, yes. This is historically justified in the Bible."

  Oh-oh. Brother Paul did not want to get involved in another technical discussion, but his curiosity had been piqued. "The Bible?"

  "Joseph, sold into Egypt, overcame all obstacles and rose to great power, as indicated by the sword." Brother Paul discovered that he was holding a curved blade in his right hand, not a cup. He set the sword down, afraid he would inadvertently cut the starry canopy. He remembered that the Hebrew alphabet for the Light Tarot differed from what he was used to. In that deck, Key Seven was Zain, the Sword. So the lady was correct, by her definitions. "He was tempted by Potiphar's wife, in Arcanum Six, but he triumphed over the temptation. He interpreted the dream of Pharaoh about the seven fat kine and the seven lean kine, and the seven good ears and the seven bad ears. And Pharaoh told him: 'See I have set thee over all the land of Egypt,' and made him to ride in a chariot, and made him ruler over—"

  "Bullshit!" the black sphinx cried.

  The white sphinx froze, shocked.

  "Oh, Therion," Brother Paul said, trying to sound reasonable, although he too was upset by the interjection. "Now look, she didn't interfere in your presentation."

  "I never uttered such nonsense! Women are such brainless things; if they didn't have wombs they'd be entirely useless."

  The man was certainly contemptuous of the fair sex! What was the matter with him? In other respects he seemed to be quite intelligent and open-minded. "Still," Brother Paul admonished him, "you should not interrupt."

  The lady sphinx turned her head toward the black sphinx, and then her body. The chariot veered, for they were both still galloping forward at a dismaying velocity. "No, I want to hear his objections. Does he challenge the validity of the Bible?"

  "The Bible is hardly an objective account, and what there is is both incomplete and expurgated. Naturally the Hebrews and their intolerant, jealous God colored the record to suit themselves. How do you think the poor, civilized Egyptians felt about this barbaric conqueror?"

  "They welcomed the Hebrews! Pharaoh raised up Joseph, put his own ring on Joseph's hand, arrayed him in fine linen, put a gold chain about his neck—"

  "Bullshit!" Therion repeated. He seemed to enjoy uttering the scatological term in the presence of the lady. "Pharaoh gave away nothing! The Hebrew tribesmen and their cohorts came in, a ravening horde from the desert, overrunning the civilized cities, burning houses, pillaging temples and destroying monuments. They were the nefarious Hyksos, the so-called 'shepherd kings,' who ravaged cultured Egypt like pigs in a pastry shop for two hundred years before their own barbaric mismanagement and debauchery weakened them to the point where the Egyptians could reorganize and drive them out. That is why you call this Atu 'The Conqueror.' Joseph was a rabble-spawned tyrant, thief, and murderer. What little civilization rubbed off on his ilk was Egyptian, such as the Qabalah—"

  "Kabala?" Light inquired.

  "Qabalah. This was stolen from Egyptian lore, just as the golden ornaments were stolen from Egyptian households. The ones these thieves melted down to form the Golden Calf, a better deity than they deserved, before they settled, by the fiat of Moses, on a bloodthirsty, competitive, nouveau-riche God whose name they were ashamed to utter."

  "I don't have to listen to this!" Light exclaimed. The scene began to change.

  "Wait!" Brother Paul cried, suffering a separate revelation. This unrelenting attack on the roots of the Judeo-Christian religion—he recognized the theme, from somewhere.

  "Waite? That does it!" the white sphinx snapped. She veered away, making the chariot tilt alarmingly.

  Why had he chosen Therion as a guide, instead of Light? How much better he empathized with her! Now, when he had almost gotten her back into the scene, she was going again. The chariot was rocking perilously, about to overturn, a victim of this religious debate. The sphinxes phased into two great horses again, white and black, then these animals fragmented into the composite monsters of Therion's Thoth Atu. Again Brother Paul found himself clutching the huge cup, which somehow he knew he dare not drop.

  "Seven!" he cried. "I deal the Seven of Cups!"

  The cup he was holding, which had given him this emergency inspiration, expanded. It was made of pure amethyst, its center a radiant, blood red. It was the Holy Grail.

  The Cup expanded to encompass him, its radiance spreading out like the sunrise. Brother Paul felt himself falling into it...

  And he was splashing, swimming in a sea of blood. Thick, gooey, greenish ichor—the blood of some alien creature, perhaps from Sphere Antares, rather than of man. Great, cloying drops of it pelted down, forming slowly expanding ripples in the ocean. The drops fell from other cups: ornate blue vessels, six of them, set about a metallic support that rose from a larger cup resting on the surface of this awful sea. The green goo overflowed from each cup, and especially from the large one. Flowers lay inverted atop each cup, tiger lilies or lotuses; it was from them that the slime seemed to issue. The smell of corruption was awful.

  "Thus the Holy Grail is profaned by debauchery," the voice of Therion said. It seemed to come from the largest cup, the seventh one, as though the man himself were immersed in its septic fluid.

  "I have no interest in debauchery," Brother Paul protested, gasping. He was weighed down by his armor, trying to tread water, and the stench hardly helped his breathing. "I dealt the Seven of Cups."

  "Indeed you did! Note how the holiest mysteries of nature become the obscene and shameful secrets of a guilty conscience."

  Brother Paul opened his mouth to protest again, then abruptly realized the significance of the framework holding the cups. It was a convoluted, overlapping double triangle, shaped into the stylized outline of the female generative organs. Womb projecting into vagina, the largest cup being the vulva, overflowing with greenish lubrication from the sex organs of the plant Flowers were of course copulatory organs, made attractive so that other species, such as bees, would willingly aid the plants to reproduce. How many prudish women realized the full significance of what they were doing when they poked their noses into bright flowers to sniff the intoxicating perfume? Nature laughs at the pretensions of human foibles.

  Still, enough was enough. Brother Paul did not care to remain bathed in these thick juices. "The Waite Seven of Cups!" he cried.

  "Oh, very well," Therion said grouchily. "It is one of Arthwaite's better efforts, for all that he misses the proper meaning entirely."

  The sea boiled, releasing great clouds of steam. From a distance came Therion's voice: "You'll be sorry!" And it echoed, "Sor-ry! Sorr-rry!"

  The sea evaporated into clouds of greenish vapor, leaving Brother Paul standing on a gummy film of green that became a lawn. The cups retained their positions, however, turning golden yellow. The flowers above them dropped inside, mutating into assorted other objects that showed over the rims. At last he stood before this display of seven cups supported by a gray cloud bank.

  "There it is," Therion said, now standing beside him. "Confusing welter of images, isn't it?"

  "Are you still here? I thought Waite would—

  "You chose me as your guide, remember? Way back in Key Sex. I mean Six. You may view any cards you wish, but I shall do the interpretations."

  So that choice had been permanent, at least for the duration of this visio
n. Brother Paul feared he had chosen carelessly. Well, he would carry through, and be better prepared next time. This time, confronted with the choice between Virtue and Vice, it seemed he had chosen Vice. At least he had some familiarity with this particular image, although the Holy Order of Vision did not put much stress on the Minor Arcana.

  First, he had to orient himself. Why, exactly, was he here? He had wanted to get out of the careening chariot, of course, and out of the slime-soup of Therion's Seven of Cups, but what was his positive reason?

  Answer: he was here to discover the ultimate ramifications of these Animations. His short-range objective of getting out of this particular sequence was passé; no matter how he struggled, he only seemed to be getting in deeper, as a man mired in quicksand only worsens his situation by thrashing about. (Though he had always understood that, since sand was denser than water, a man should readily float in quicksand, and so was in no danger if he merely relaxed. Could he float, here in Animation, if he just went along with it?) So he might as well follow through now, on the theory that it was as easy to move forward as backward.

  When God manifested for him, as He had for others, whose God was it? Questioning the Hierophant had not helped; Brother Paul had first to comprehend the specific nature of the manifestations. Once again he reviewed it, hoping for some key insight. Were the visions purely products of his own mind, or was there some objective reality behind them? This remained a very difficult question to resolve, for how could he judge the validity of material drawn from his own experience? It was like trying to find a test for whether a person was awake or dreaming; he could pinch himself—and dream he was being pinched. If he knew what any given detail of an Animation was, that detail would be authentic; if he suffered from misinformation, how could he correct the image? Yet now it certainly seemed as though there were input from other minds, for Brother Paul had not before known all the details of the Tarot variants he had perceived in this Animation. Some of the concepts this Therion character had put forward were entirely foreign to Brother Paul's belief, yet again, these might be his own suppressed notions coming out, all the more shocking because he had always before denied their existence. The hardest thing for a man to do was to face the ugly aspects of himself.

  So maybe he should face those aspects. Maybe the thing to do was to plunge all the way into this vision and grasp his answer before it faded. Surely it was in one of these displayed cups. At any rate, he owed it to himself and to his mission to look.

  He inspected the cups more closely. One contained a tall miniature castle, another was overflowing with jewels, and others had a wreath, a dragon, a woman's head, a snake, and a veiled figure. All were symbols whose significance he had reviewed in the course of his studies at the Holy Order of Vision. But never before had they been presented as tangibly as this, and he knew now that these Animated symbols would not submit passively to conventional analysis.

  The castle was similar to the one he had seen on prior cards, probably the same edifice. Symbolism in the Tarot tended to be consistent; a river was always the stream of the unconscious, originating in the trailing, flowing gown of the High Priestess, and the cup was always a vessel of emotion or religion. The castle represented for him a rallying point, an initial answer. Suppose he entered it now?

  Well, why not try! He tended to spend too much time pondering instead of acting.

  And the castle expanded, bursting out of its cup, becoming a magnificent edifice with banners flying from its lofty turrets, situated atop a precipitous mountain. Beautiful.

  Brother Paul set out for it. Therion accompanied him, humming a tune as though indifferent to the proceedings.

  "I've heard that song," Brother Paul said, determined not to let the man escape involvement so easily. "Can't quite place it, though."

  "The 'Riddle Song,'" Therion answered promptly. "One of the truly fine, subtly sexual folk expressions."

  "Yes, that's it. 'I gave my love a cherry'—but how is that sexual? It's a straightforward love song."

  "Ha. The cherry was her maidenhead, that he ruptured. You have led too cloistered a life, and never learned proper vernacular."

  "Oh? He also gave her a chicken without a bone, and a ring without end, and a baby without crying."

  "The boneless chicken was his boneless but nevertheless rigid penis, thrusting through her ring-shaped orifice, producing in due course the baby—who naturally was not crying at the time."

  That was one way of looking at it. "I should have stayed with the stream of the unconscious," he murmured.

  "Oh, yes. That water Arthwaite says flows through the whole deck of the Tarot, starting with the gown of the harlot, yet. What crap!"

  Here it went again! "I always thought it was a beautiful concept. How do you manage to see, ah, crap in it?"

  "More ways than one, Brother! It is crap in that it is errant nonsense; water symbolizes many things besides the unconscious, and it is ridiculous to pretend that it can only stand for that one thing. But more directly, that euphemism he foists off on his fans—do you really think it is her gown that originates the fluid?"

  "Well, that may be artistic license, but—"

  "Her gown merely covers the real, unmentionable source, which is her body. A woman is a thing of flowing fluids, as I tried to make clear in my Seven of Cups. Milk from her tits, and blood from her—"

  "Milk and blood are chemically similar," Brother Paul said quickly. "In fact, chlorophyll, the key to plant metabolism, is also surprisingly close to—"

  "Flowing out from her orifices, bathing the whole Tarot in its hot, soupy—"

  "Let's change the subject," Brother Paul said, not eager to argue the case further. What a case of gynophobia!

  "Coming up."

  A dragon appeared. Brother Paul whirled, gripping the sword he discovered at his hip. "That's the Dragon of Temptation!" he exclaimed. "It belongs in a different cup; I did not invoke it!"

  "You must have invoked it, Paul," Therion said, without alarm. "For I did not do the dastardly deed."

  Ha! "I Animated the castle; that was the only cup I emptied!"

  Therion smirked. "You know that; I know that. But does it know that?"

  Unfunny cliché! But the great Red Dragon of Temptation was charging across the plain. No time now to debate who was responsible; he had to stop it "At least the Knights of the Round Table were mounted," Brother Paul muttered. "A lance and an armored charger—"

  "You have to battle Temptation by yourself," Therion reminded him. "It has been ever thus."

  So it seemed. Therion wore no armor and carried no weapon; obviously he could not oppose the dragon, and had no intention of trying. Brother Paul retained his chariot armor, although he had lost the chariot itself. So it was up to him.

  The dragon had a huge wedge-shaped head from which a small orange flame flickered. No, that was only its barbed tongue. Its two forelegs projected from immediately behind its head, almost like ears, and two small wings sprouted from its neck not far behind, like feathers or hair. It seemed an inefficient design, but so did the design for Tyrannosaurus Rex, on paper. The rest of the monster trailed away into wormlike coils. Only its foreparts possessed a menacing aspect; when this creature retreated, it would be harmless. Which was of course the nature of Temptation, or any other threat.

  The dragon was not retreating. It was galumphing directly at him, its serpentine body bouncing like a spring-coil after the awful head.

  Brother Paul went out to engage it, his sword shining like Excalibur. Yet he wondered: he considered himself to be a fairly peaceful man, not a warrior; why should he attack a living creature with a brute sword? This wasn't a living thing; it was an Animated symbol. Still, the matter disconcerted him.

  The Dragon of Temptation drew up about two meters away. It glanced contemptuously at him. It had big yellow eyes, and its glare was quite striking. Its red snout was covered with great, hairy green-and-blue warts, and gnarled gray horns projected from its forehead. Its tusks were
twisted and coated with slime. Brother Paul wondered idly if it had been mucking about in one of Therion's gooey cups before coming here.

  The barbed tongue flicked about, striking toward Brother Paul like an arrow but stopping short of the target. The small wings flapped slowly back and forth, the thin leathery skin crinkling between the feathered ribs. Brother Paul could not recall ever having seen anything uglier than this.

  "Whatsamatter?" the dragon demanded. "Chicken?"

  Brother Paul felt a tingle of anger. What right had this filthy thing to call him names? He gripped his sword firmly and stepped forward.

  And paused again. This was Temptation—the urge to violence for insufficient cause. So the monster had called him "chicken"; why should he react to the archaic gibe? This was the lowest level of social interaction, and violence was the refuge of incompetence. "I merely wish to visit that castle, for I suspect that the information I need is inside. If you will kindly stand aside, there need be no strife between us."

  "Temptation never stands aside!" the creature snorted. It was very good at speaking while snorting. "You must conquer me before you can complete your mission, chicken."

  "But I don't want to slay you. I shall be satisfied to pass you by."

  "You can't slay me; I am eternal. You can't pass me by. In fact, you can't even fight me; you're a natural coward. Why don't you get out of this scene and let the air clear?"

  As if he hadn't been trying to do just that! "I would, if I had no mission to perform. I will, after it is done. Now please stand aside." Brother Paul strode forward.

  The dragon held its ground. "Temptation cannot be bluffed," it said.

  Brother Paul refused to strike it with the sword without some more definite provocation. Though he knew it to be a mere symbol, its semblance of a living, intelligent (if ugly) entity was too strong.

  He sidled around it—and the dragon was before him again. It had jumped magically to block him. He changed direction again—and it blocked him again.