Read Online God of Tarot by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online Page B

thought his own mission special; now he saw that it was ordinary in comparison to that of Antares.
    “I faded down to sapient norm,” Antares agreed. “There is no fading below that, except in illness or physical death. But my native identity was gone then, as the host-body dominated. Once the first mattermission unit was ready, the Solarians shipped my Solarian host to my home Sphere, together with a nuclear fusion expert, honoring the bargain I had made. But I was dead.”
    “Except that you aren’t dead!”
    “My aura was enhanced by the mattermission machine, and that returned my identity to me,” Antares agreed. “But my host was gone; I could not exist outside this unit. The machine is now my host, and I am now its constant, as in your calculator. I cannot manifest at all unless evoked by someone like you with the interest and aura to make it possible. When you arrive at your destination—”
    Brother Paul looked at his watch again. Still ten minutes, forty-nine seconds. He was certain now; no time at all had passed since Antares had appeared. He was in the process of suffering a potent hallucination. Maybe. “But if I can see you and hear you, others can too; we can open the capsule before it mattermits—”
    “We are in mattermission now. Did you not comprehend?”
    “Now? But I thought the process was instantaneous!”
    “That it is, Solarian Brother.”
    Brother Paul mulled that over. An extended dialogue in zero time? Well, why not one more impossibility! “Who are these ‘Ancients’ you mentioned? Why don’t they get you out of this fix?”
    “They are extinct, as far as we know. They perished three million Solarian years ago, leaving only their phenomenal ruins.”
    “Ruins? But you said the mattermission equipment derived from—”
    “Some few of their ruins have functioning components. Most of the advanced technology has been reconstituted from the far more advanced science of the Ancients by those contemporary species capable of recognizing the potential of what they discovered. There may be Ancient ruins in your own Sphere, but if your individuals did not recognize them for what they were, they may have been destroyed. Chief among these technological reconstitutions in other Spheres is Transfer—the means by which I came to Sphere Sol. That secret we will not share with you, for its value is measureless, and your species—please do not take umbrage—may not be mature enough to handle this knowledge safely.”
    Brother Paul suddenly realized that he liked this alien ghost, even if Antares were merely a figment of his own imagination. “I take no umbrage; I regard my own species with similar misgivings, at times. I suppose you may be considered a figment of my mind, or as you put it, of my aura. Yet you have provided me comfort and interest during a nervous period.”
    “Do not underestimate the capacities of aura, friend Solarian,” Antares replied equably. “In my brief tenure in Solarian form I came to know some of the nature of your kind, alien as it is to my prior experience. Many of your mysteries are explicable in terms of aura, as you will know when you achieve aural science. Your water-divining merely reflects the aural interaction with hidden water or metals. Your ‘faith healing’ constitutes a limited exchange of auras, the well one augmenting the failing one. What you call telepathy is another aural phenomenon: the momentary overlapping of aural currents such as we experience at this moment. When an entity dies, his aura may dissipate explosively, like a supernova, flooding the environment for an instant, forcing sudden awareness upon those who are naturally attuned. Close friends, or entities with very similar aural types. Thus a sleeping person may suffer a vision at the instant of his friend’s demise.”
    Antares vanished. Brother Paul jumped up, alarmed. “Antares!” he cried. But there was nothing except the treadle sewing machine.
    Then he realized that the