It was a suburban world, where wealthy administrators liked to retire. Toward the Fringe things became progressively more primitive, until a hundred parsecs from Star Mintaka the worlds were essentially rural. This was Spherical regression, that occurred in all Spheres, and could be abated only by the infusion of energy. But there was not enough energy; the Ethic of Energy had already spawned one intergalactic war and might some century spawn another.

So the Tarot Suit of Energy related to her general situation, though she herself associated with the Suit of Aura. Since every 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 the 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—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.