Part 1
We come now to our fifth card, the Queen of Cups, a wise and beautiful but troubled lady. This card shows our Queen as a mature woman, fair of skin with red-gold hair, her face downturned to contemplate the ornate chalice she holds two-handed as though searching for insight. Her cup, her robe and her crown are all of silver, the moon-metal, and we see the crescent moon itself reflected in the still surface of the water in her cup, although the sky above is clear and blue. Unlike our other cards, who face out of the frame, she faces to the left.
She sits on the shore, upon a throne of shell, and at her feet gently lapping waves disturb the sand where turtles dig to bury their moon-like eggs. In the distance behind her can be seen a cliff, the cliff upon which we first saw the King of Swords.
The suit of cups is linked to the element of Water, and to love and compassion. We have put behind us, literally, the violence of the King to come to a place of contemplation.
Our Queen should be a model of virtue, pure in heart, clear of sight. So why then does she gaze down at her silver glass and brood so?
The Queen's supporters are four very different facets of woman.
First, at bottom left is Pygmalion with his pale-skinned Galatea: a woman as object, a thing made for the appetites of her maker. Pygmalion reviled the sins of woman and so made his own from ivory so that she would be pure white flesh, smooth and unsullied like the Virgin; none of that disgusting, animal hair at armpit and crotch.
Second, to bottom right is flame-haired Pandora and her box: the woman who, like Eve in the Garden, is to blame. Pandora, many gifted, was in Greek legend the first woman, made, they tell, by the Olympic gods as mankind's punishment for the Sin of Prometheus. Capricious Zeus cursed her with an insatiable curiosity and then gave her an urn, later called a box, that was never to be opened.
Third, we come to the top left and find, crowned with the horned-moon headdress of Hathor, Isis with dead Osiris: the woman defined by marriage and motherhood. When Osiris was slain by jealous Set, his body cut apart and scattered, Isis, sister-wife of Osiris, gathered the parts of the dead body and made of them the first Mummy, then by her magic brought him alive again that she might conceive avenging Horus.
Finally, we reach top right where we see triumphant Ishtar with drunken Ea: the woman as mother of empowerment. In the myths of Babylon and ancient Sumer, the gods inscribe on sacred tablets all the secrets of civilisation – the working of leather and metal and stone, the shepherding of sheep, the planting of crops, the art of music, the art of writing the art of war and peace, lamentation and rejoicing, judgement, lordship, and divinity, as well as the secret paths down to and back from the netherworld. All these they inscribed on the sacred tablets and give them to Ea, maker of crafts and mischief, to guard and protect. But Ishtar, lion lady of the evening star, visits Ea and plies him with strong wine, and then, when Ea is in his cups, steals the tablets and gives them to the people to begin the founding of the first cities.
This card is telling me a story of life from lifelessness and secrets stolen from heaven; of fate and free will; and of conflict between creature and creator.
The card is edged in silver.
This is a story about immortality.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?"
There was a woman called Emily Guard and the d'Toyz gave her a mirror. It can only be called a magic mirror. Emily needed only to look at someone in her mirror and she was able to read their soul.
The Argai have a religion… in fact they have many, as humans everywhere are wont to do, regardless of, often in face of all evidence… the Argai religions and widespread beliefs, though, belong to a family of Manichean Gnosticism, with a common set of principles concerning the existence of the soul caught between a higher, purer realm formed by a benign creator god and a fallen material world built by the malignant enemy.
Souls are pure objects made by god, existing in the higher dimensions, and visible to us only where they intersect with the material plane and become entangled with the base matter of our Worlds. Thus, we are linked across time and space, one soul occupying many bodies; or rather, we have one true, higher self, existing across many places with what we call bodies merely the gross matter caught in the angles of our soul.
Emily Guard used her mirror to become a doctor of psychiatry, and she was good at it, and famous. She made a name for herself for unswerving insight and curing – let us not think she did no good with this gift – curing the troubled, the disturbed, the downright insane.
With her reputation established, she bought an expensive apartment in New York and set up her mirror in the salon there. The rich and the infamous were discreetly brought to her door and left again via the private elevator to the concealed parking lot, and left happier and wiser people, for which she was seriously recompensed.
The first time that she met Adam Franks was a day around the turn of the Millennium.
A young man, pale and gothic like a drab ghost, called on her with a question: should he follow the dictates of his father or pursue his own desires?
He explained that he was troubled in mind. His name was Adam Franks. His father, the billionaire Feynman Franks, was a distant and hermetic man, who had wrapped himself in the study of science and the pursuit of his business interests and left his son mostly to himself. He had no memories of his mother.
Now, however, Adam had reached his majority and Feynman demanded that he pursue a career: a tour of duty with the military was called for, and then a place on the board of one of his father's companies.
"The Commandment says: 'honour thy father'. And I'm sure that he has the best of intentions for me. How can we know what all of our parent's plans are? Especially if they won't tell us."
But Adam wanted a different destiny, something creative: art or music or poetry. He had read, he told Dr Guard, the works of Milton – Paradise Lost – and been so moved…
Emily invited Adam to take his place on her couch and made sympathetic noises as she listened to his story.
And then she looked up at him, looked up into his reflection in her magic mirror. And she recoiled.
What she saw was this: the man could not remember his mother because he had no mother. He was a thing, a made thing, made up of parts of dead things stitched together by the crazed maniac he thought of as his father. Not body parts, not some literal inspiration from the Shelley woman's Modern Prometheus; that would be ridiculous. Adam Franks was made of left-over probabilities.
In quantum mechanics they call the difference between what might be and what was the "collapse of the wavefunction". A particle, or a wave, can exist in a number of states, levels of energy or 'quanta' as they are called. There is a function, called the wavefunction, that measures the chance of finding any given particle in any given state. But it can behave as though it is in all of those states at once. Only observation decides which state is fixed.
What, then, happens to all of the other states? All of those might-have-beens left behind when someone looked and struck the wavefunction down?
You might as well ask what happens when men are killed by ill-chance or recklessness: what happens to the man who might have survived if he had been a little faster or stronger or luckier?
Feynman Franks had made a machine, a device for gathering that lost energy. Like a ghoul he would haunt the scenes of accidents, tragedies, murders and with his machine harvest the ghosts that he found there. He had wanted to create a superman, the man who would have survived. Instead, he had created something that belonged to the dead.
The universe had looked aside from those possibilities. They belong among the dead now.
And yet here in her mirror Emily could see that this walking dead man had a gentle soul.
The mirror showed Dr Guard what could happen.
If he disobeyed his father's wishes, the old man would react with a terrible wrath, seek to ruin him, disinherit him, cut him off, close down clubs where he might play, buy out publishers who might print his works, until few if any would consider doing so.
But if he took up a commission as his father wanted, a war was coming, a terrible, bloody, pointless war in a faraway desert. Adam could walk unharmed across a battlefield, bullets would ignore him along with the rest of the world, but not without taking hurt: comrades, friends, hope could die around him. And the music and poems within him would wither on the vine; unnurtured his creativity would die within him and turn to poison. His words would slip between the cracks in the world, and he would follow them. He would see folly and futility turn to tyranny and torture. He would resent the world and come to hate it.
Emily's mirror showed her a day five years later when Adam would come to her door again.
She saw herself, lying on the floor and Adam standing over her.
She knew that she was afraid. From her habitual state of cold detachment, she observed and recognised this frozen sensation, this icy stillness in her heart: she'd seen it reflected in many of her clients. Her body wanted to panic, to react. Her mind would not have it. This fate must be averted.
"You need to resolve your differences with your… with your father," she told him. "He's offering you a life of order and structure: that can be a great support. A life without support can be lost in chaos."
"And you think he would take that support away?"
"Order and structure are good but they can also be a prison. You have a creativity in you, in your soul, and that needs freedom to express itself. Without freedom you won't be the person you're capable of being."
"So, what you're saying is that if I defy him, he will destroy me; but if I accept his control I'll end up destroying myself."
"No. Not at all. I'm saying you need to find another choice. You need to express your creative side. So you have to tell him that you can accept his advice and help without letting him control your life."
Adam said no more. And the mirror behind him had turned black.
***
Within a week, another visitor had called at Dr Guard's apartment. At first, he appeared so similar to Adam that she thought it was him returned, but then she recognised that this man was older, perhaps in his thirties and somehow more… solid. With a start, she realised that this must be Feynman Franks. And yet… how could he be? He seemed no more than ten years older than his "son", fifteen at the outside. How prodigal had he been in forging his monstrous offspring?
"Damn fool, woman," he was already snarling before she could even invite him over the threshold. "What gives you the right to go putting ideas in Adam’s head? And what ideas you’ve given him!"
"Mr Franks," she said, "why don't you come in. Or do you prefer to shout in the hall?"
"Is he in there?"
"Who? Adam? No, there's no one here but me." This was true; a secretary receptionist greeted her patients at the lobby, but once they took the elevator to her floor they were undisturbed.
"Then it's as good a place to hide as any," he declared and pushed past her into the hall.
"Hide?" she pondered, closing the door.
Franks was pacing the floor of her studio in a state of high agitation.
"You gave him some damned silly ideas! Now he thinks I'm out to destroy him!" Feynman raged.
"That was his exaggeration. I told him he needed to reconcile with you."
"Reconcile? Hah! He says he's out to destroy me first! You bloody witch doctors, you're all the same. Think you have the god-given right to meddle. Don't you realise he's dangerous, you stupid shrink!"
Ill chance lent him fortune and he struck the nerve of her unassuaged fear. And she became angry, beneath her practiced veneer.
"I know what he is, Mr Franks. I know what you did."
Franks stopped his pacing and stared at her. He stopped in the middle of the floor, his back to her mirror. She twitched her glance over his shoulder and saw…
Feynman Franks wanted to be immortal. With all his wealth he was virtually omnipotent, and all his scientific knowledge led him to believe he was omniscient. He was almost a god already; all he needed was eternal life. And why shouldn't he have it? He'd been given such gifts already; how could it be fair that they would wither and fail him. At the height of his powers, he looked forwards and saw only increasing pain and incapacity. And death. Death was a crime; and he would have an end of it.
And so he built a better body, undifferentiated biomass cloned from his own tissue and charged with eldritch life by the weird energies of his probability machine. He called it his "labour of love", though it was a strange sort of love; more of a… a yearning for potency: if he himself was doomed to die, he could bequeath a better future on humankind. A new "Adam", first of a new race of humans who would never have to fear death.
Except… the homunculus had awakened. Adam had opened his eyes and Feynman had felt… revulsion.
Emily gasped.
It was true. Just as she had, Feynman Franks had recoiled from his created son.
"What are you gawping at, woman?" he demanded, turning to look but seeing only the mirror behind him. "Are you simple? I thought you were a doctor. Damn near same thing in my book."
"Adam needs love," she told him. "And you've treated him with rejection."
"Love? You a hippy? Love? Nonsense. I tried getting him a companion. A cute li'l puppy dog. He… interfered with it. Did things. Killed it in the end."
She was trying to see into the mirror again, but Franks was backing away from her warily, and no longer visible in its reflection.
"Adam needs love," she repeated, "to develop a proper human morality. He doesn't understand death; you took that away from him. He needs to learn love."
"No! You've seen him. Could you love him? He needs discipline. He needs people who'll control him, teach him to obey orders."
"You think teaching him to kill is a good idea?"
"It'll make a man of him."
"I thought you wanted to make a god of him."
That was definitely the wrong thing to say.
"You're the one playing god, doctor!" he raged. "Interfering! You think I'll leave Adam's care to you, then, is that what you want? Teach him love! How dare you!"
And with that he stormed out.
For an instant, as he passed the mirror, she caught a glimpse of his face, awash with scarlet blood, and recognised the worm of madness that consumed him from within. He did not want immortality for a legacy, or the grateful remembrance of a new race; he wanted it for himself. With a second glance she might be able to see how to cure him… but too late. He passed on, pausing only at the door to say:
"Adam is mine to deal with!"
And he was gone.
