A thousand Solarian years, since those were pitifully brief. The Suit of Energy, symbolized by the sprouting, flaming Wand, was generally identified with the massed species of Galaxy Andromeda, because of their attempted theft of the binding energies of the Milky Way galaxy that had precipitated the first crisis of civilization. Yet no Andromedan species was represented in this card of Tarot. More locally, Sphere Canopus was a Scepter culture, but this card was not that, either. There was a humanoid species in that Sphere, but it was slave. The chains of the lady—indicative of slavery? Doubtful; normally this Queen was not chained. Rather she was arrogantly free, imperious, fiery. And this one was not humanoid, but human, definitely Solarian, itself a pretty arrogant species, by no means slave. A chained Solarian was doubly significant, surely.

The Solarians were the reputed originators of the Tarot. Versions of the Tarot had been extant on their home planet for several Solarian centuries before the human colonization of space and formation of Sphere Sol. The Cluster deck itself was thought to be the creation of one of their males, the scholar called Companion Paul, or Sibling Paul, or Brother Paul. There was obscurity about his status, rooted in the human mode of reproduction. Some said there could be several offspring of a single human reproductive unit, called siblings, while others said humans sometimes called each other “Brother” when in fact they were not closely related. Only the Solarians knew for sure! At any rate, the attribution of this deck to this Paul of Earth had to be a fond exaggeration; many of the significant aspects of that deck were unknown to Solarians at the time he had lived. The entire matter of the Energy War dated fifty Mintakan years after Paul, for example—that was four hundred Solarian years—she really ought to get used to thinking in those trifling units, because they had become the standard for Segment Etamin, but the habits of an old neuter changed slowly—still, the nucleus of Tarot concept had certainly been Solarian, and the Temple of Tarot had spread rapidly from Sol to the other Spheres.