Chaining the Lady Read Free Page B

sapient entity in the universe was similarly affected by the availability of energy, this was unlikely to have individual meaning. It had to be more specific.
    Very well. The manner in which energy affected civilization was primarily in transport and communications. There were three modes of travel between stars. The cheapest was physical travel by spaceship. Fleets traveling at half light speed had colonized the various spheres long ago. But it took almost a full year—how many Sol years? Oh, yes, eight—to cover a single parsec, and no single lifetime was long enough to traverse even the smallest sphere. Ships were sufficient to colonize worlds, but not to build an interstellar civilization.
    For more direct communication, mattermission was used. This was instant transmission of the entity, whether person or thing. But this required a horrendous amount of energy, and though it had been much employed in the past, today it was limited largely to microscopic message capsules.
    So in practice, the really civilizing mode was transfer: the transmission of the Kirlian aura of a sapient (i.e., intelligent entity, as opposed to sentient or merely conscious entity) to the body of another sapient. The aura reflected the complete mental being, but required relatively little energy for transmission. Even so, there were crucial limitations, such as the availability of suitable hosts. The transfer across galactic distances did require significant energy.
    So energy controlled civilization, and the Suit of Energy reflected that. Some even called that suit “Civilization” but Melody considered that to be too narrow a view. Energy was more than civilization, and more than the quiescent Andromedan menace; it was a complex multi-relating phenomenon in its own right. She still didn't know how it pertained to her , today.
    In fact, no one knew the answer to the problem of energy, and no one ever had, except perhaps the Ancients. The Ancients had spanned two galaxies in a unified, high level culture. Yet they had passed from the scene three million years ago, and most of their works were defunct. They were identified with the Suit of Aura, because they had to have been a super-high Kirlian species, and they had evidently possessed Kirlian science beyond anything known to modern galactics. Melody had studied what little was known about the Ancients, fascinated by them, and she identified with them so strongly that she considered her own Significator, her particular card in the Cluster Tarot deck, to be the Queen of Aura. She would give anything to solve the riddle of the Ancients!
    But her card of the day was not in the Suit of Aura, though it was a Queen. It seemed to have aimed for her but missed, although the Tarot never really missed. It had a will of its own that did not cater much to the foibles of its adherents. The Queen of Energy, a chained human lady—what could it mean? This was becoming a frustrating meditation.
    She moved her sonicscope and listened to the great panoply of the stars. Each had its own faint tune within the magnificent symphony of the galaxy. Mintaka, home star of her sphere, loud and bright and beautiful. Alnilam and Alnitac, twin brights. Rigel, blue-white beacon in the visual spectrum, hardly audible to her senses but still impressive. Red giant Betelgeuse. Oh, the marvel of her segment, her galaxy! And the foreign galaxy Andromeda, focus of Energy.
    Suddenly it clicked into place. Suit of Energy—Andromeda–chained human lady—there was a connection! In the old myth-fabric of the Solarian originators of Tarot was the story of the female entity Andromeda, and it was relevant.
    Andromeda was the child of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia was a beautiful woman Solarian who, in the manner of her species, tended to be arrogant and troublesome. She proclaimed that she was more lovely than the Nereids, golden-maned nymphs of the sea. This was not necessarily true, and the vanity of one