Elemental

short fiction about science and Tarot cards

ELEMENTAL

by Mark Neumayer

"223,229...227,233...233,239..." It was no good. Jake Gardick was in a rut, and nothing was breaking him out of it. He'd slipped on his headphones, scrolled up some Alban Berg, and wandered the university campus reciting pairs of sexy primes. The power trio of atonal music, exercise, and brute recall usually shoved his conscious mind far enough out of the way to kickstart a breakthrough. Tonight...nothing.

That's when he noticed the gypsy wagon. It sat in the middle of the quad, the last of the day's sunlight adding a technicolor gleam to its bright paint job. A spry-looking horse harnessed to the wagon lifted its head to look at Jake. It snorted quietly and went back to nibbling at the manicured lawn.

A prickling of curiosity drew Jake closer to the wagon, where he noticed a sign reading 'Fortunes told - $10.' He guessed it must be tied to some campus festival or theater production. He stepped closer still. The wagon was covered in elaborate carvings - flowers and vines wove in and out of each other in complex geometric patterns. "Nice work," he said.

"Thank you. Step inside and I'll do a reading for you," said a soft voice. There was a click, and the door to the wagon opened. Warm, inviting light flowed out. Jake found himself halfway up the tiny set of stairs without even thinking. He stopped as he caught sight of the wagon's lone occupant. Dark eyes swam up through the depths of her thick glasses. Her crow-black hair was pinned back into a dark bun that posed a vivid contrast to the starched white lab coat she wore.

"Oh, sorry,” said Jake, confused at finding what he assumed to be a fellow scientist. “I was looking for the, for the, uh, fortune teller."

The woman smiled from behind a tiny, cloth-covered table. "It is the clothes," she asked, running a hand heavy with gold rings along the crisp seam of her coat, “they confuse you, no?"

"No, they do. Um. I mean yes… " Jake stepped into the small room as she gestured for him to sit down. He looked around. The ornate woodwork and frilly curtains gave him a strange sense of satisfaction. They felt right. It was certainly what he'd expected to find inside a gypsy wagon - the woman… not so much. "Did the gypsy step out or something?"

"I am Raven, the parter of veils. I am dressed like this to make things easier for you. To demonstrate my scientific rigor." She laid a deck of cards on the table and fanned them out face down with a casual flourish.

"You mean you were..."

"Expecting you? Yes."

"But I was just..."

"Going for a walk, seeking a breakthrough."

"Are you going to..."

"Finish all of your sentences?" Her smile was a magnitude brighter this time. "No. It is time to find answers. The breakthrough you seek is elemental."

Jake hadn't thought it was possible to be any more confused. "Elemental? Don't you mean elementary?"

"Not at all." Raven used one of her fingers to turn over the first card, the movement causing the whole deck to rise and fall like a sine wave.

"The cards, they're all elements!" Jake looked up. "You're using the periodic table as a tarot?"

"All tarot decks are fractal at heart. Seemingly random patterns indicating large truths writ small. How did you think they work - magic?" Raven's laugh was one of the three most musical sounds Jake had ever heard.

She gathered the cards, placed them in Jake's hands, and asked him to shuffle the deck. Taking the cards back, she swiftly dealt twelve of them in a hexagonal pattern on the tabletop.

"Potassium is in your 6th house."

"Is that good?"

"No. It is the house of health. You need to start taking supplements, or eat more bananas." She gave him a teasing look. "If you can remember all those prime numbers, you can remember to eat a healthy diet."

Jake stared blankly for a moment. Then he shook his head, reached out, and tapped one of the cards. "Here, this one is gold. What does that mean?"

"Silence is golden, you know. You must silence the doubting part of your mind." Raven moved her hands along the cards with a flowing grace. "Ah, here we go! Technetium. Tell me what you know of it."

"It's the lightest radioactive element...the first predominantly artificial element to be produced. Its name is derived from the Greek. It means artificial."

Raven nodded, "Interesting that it is in the house of Aquarius, no? Your house of friends? It is no wonder you bury yourself in the work."

"I didn't come here for a social critique."

"You came because you are attempting to create a quantum device, specifically a resonant interband tunneling diode, a RITD." She rolled the R languorously.

"That's classified!" Jake automatically looked around, although it was patently absurd that anyone else could be inside the cramped wagon.

"This is the first house," Raven tapped the antimony card, "the house of beginnings... potential. The Egyptians used antimony in their cosmetics thousands of years ago. Pliny described its use as medicine..."

"Yes, and Biringuccio wrote about it in the 1500s. He called it 'a monstrosity among metals.'"

"It is certainly giving you a monstrous problem, is it not?"

Jake slumped back in his chair. "The atoms are too big compared to silicon. I can't get past the clumping issues."

"We have hydrogen in Libra, here. That house is all about relationships..."

Jake leaned forward again, gripping the edges of the table. "Hydrogen, a gas… chemical vapor deposition! It would carry the antimony to the surface of the wafer. Yes!" He sprang to his feet. He had one foot on the first step when he jerked to a sudden stop before turning back to look at Raven again. "Is this…" he waved his hand vaguely, encompassing the woman, the cards, the wagon, all of it. "Is this real? Would you be here if I came back?"

A smile spread across Raven's face. "Like the physicist's cat, I am here and not here until you open the door." She held her hand out to him. "But if you leave without paying me, you will certainly bend the probabilities towards finding an empty room."

I am not sure when I first wrote this story. It was created years ago for a 1,000-word flash fiction contest. I’ve pulled it out at different points, reworked it, and stowed it away again. The other day I stumbled across it on a backup disk and decided to polish it up and share it here.

The core of this story came from me idly wondering if there was a scientific way to justify tarot cards. That led to a sort of quantum fractal theory of connection. The idea of a fortune teller and a scientist coming together over a Tarot spread caught my interest. And here we are.