The room inside the asteroid crawler was dark and full of incense. Morvanwin insisted that a reading be done each time a good prospect was discovered, before the start of each new dig. Somnal was sitting with her in respectful silence watching the asteroid surface glide by through the crawler window, the blast shield was half down to block out any bright ships engines which might suddenly appear above the close horizon and spoil the vibe so all that could be seen was endless amounts of impact crater covered rock scrolling by. The only other presence in the room was Fortan, the robot they had had most dealings with on this dig and who Somnal had begun to quite like.
Morvanwin or Van as she liked to be called was holding the cards directly in the flow of incense from the little smouldering pile in one of her very pretty ceramic dishes. She was smudging the cards allowing all the variables to be absorbed before the reading. Fortan had been surprisingly interested in this process and he and Somnal had had many conversations about this as an information input method. Somnal was pleased and surprised he hadn’t had a lot of experience with robots with such interest in spiritual matters but here Fortan was. He hadn’t missed a reading since he had been invited to attend by Morvanwin and had watched each with the sort of attention he would give one of his archaeological digs.
All three were sitting around a simple wooden table with a dark table cloth that Van had used to replace the bare plastic work surface embedded with data processors, input connectors and 3D presentation devices that every other room contained. Morvanwin was no longer smudging the cards but was holding them out in front of her with her eyes closed and Somnal’s attention was drawn away from the window back to the cards.
“You’re asking the question now, aren’t you?” he asked.
“What will we find?” she repeated aloud the question she had been silently asking the cards, and began to lay them on the table. She placed three cards face down and returned the others to their intricately carved wooden box.
She turned over the first, the card that represented the past, and whispered it’s name “the boatman.” A painting of a robot gondolier piloting two lovers in a sky barge away or towards a balcony in one of the giant luxurious apartment buildings that were the fashion many thousands of years ago at the time the cards had been designed. The robot was in a traditional subservient role, they had been used as slaves by the people of that long ago time, intelligent beings thought of as little more than property. This card had come up often in the previous readings and all now believed it represented the role of A.I. in the present excavations but had not been able to decide much beyond that.
She turned over the second, “The Avatar,” she whispered, “and it’s reversed. This is the present this is now.” The ancient civilisations that had populated the galaxy were being discovered at the time the cards were designed and this card showed a rather fanciful reconstruction of a member of one of the winged races in the role of an angel floating above a lunar surface and talking to a space suited figure. Fortan looked expectantly towards Van he had found that her interpretations of the cards often differed significantly from the interpretations he found in his data banks or online and this card had not come up before in our readings. “This will be the most important find of the whole asteroid belt exploration, the key. It will bring the clues we need to really understand this ancient outpost.”
She turned over the third, a card that needed no introduction, The Wreck.