God of Tarot by Piers Anthony Page B

historically, our experts believed it was theoretically impossible to accomplish such a process artificially. Our Theory of Absolutivity—”
    This was a strange joke! “Antares, I would like to see you in your alien form. Would you mind materializing in that?” If this were a prank, that would expose it!
    The person before him faded. In his place appeared a large amoebalike mass. On its top, it erected a pattern of spongy knobs that flexed up and down like the keys of a player piano. Then it flung out a pseudopod, a glob of gelatinous substance that landed a meter to the side connected to the main mass by a dwindling tendril. Fluid pulsed along this tendril, distending it, collecting at the end, swelling the glob until it approached the size of the main body. The process continued, making the glob even larger until at last it was the original body that was a glob, while the glob had expanded to the size of the original mass. Then the trailing tendril was sucked in. The creature now stood one meter to the side of where it had stood before. It had taken one step.
    It faded, and the man reappeared. “We Antareans may be slow, but there are few places we cannot go,” he said. “I have returned to the form of my human host so that I may converse with you; I doubt that you are facile in my native language.”
    “Uh, thank you,” Brother Paul said. “That was an impressive demonstration. May I touch you?”
    “I regret you cannot,” the alien said. “Both my forms are insubstantial. You perceive only an animation shaped by my aura, and this is possible only while we endure in the process of transmission. You may pass your appendage through the image, but you will feel nothing.”
    “So you are a ghost,” Brother Paul said. “An apparition without substance. Nevertheless, I am inclined to make the attempt.” He reached forward slowly, over the sewing machine.
    Antares did not retreat the way a joker might. He stood still, waiting for the touch.
    There was no touch. Brother Paul felt a slight tingling, as of an electrical charge that gave him an odd thrill but no physical contact. This was, indeed, a ghost.
    “Your aura! Amazing!” Antares exclaimed. “Never have I felt the like!”
    This was strange, and far beyond the parameters of a practical joke. “My aura?”
    “Solarian Brother Paul, now I know I have never touched you before, for there can be no other aura in your Sphere like yours. Or in my own Sphere. Perhaps not in the Spheres of Spica, Canopus, Polaris. or even huge Sador. I suspect there is none of greater intensity in all the galaxy, for only once in a thousand of your years is there a statistical probability of—why did you not come to me sooner?”
    Brother Paul withdrew his hand, perplexed. “I do not know what you mean by ‘aura.’ I have never met you before—or any other ghost—and had no notion that you were to accompany me on this mission. Are you really a creature from another region of space?”
    “I really am,” Antares said. “More correctly, was . I faded out some time ago, and remain only as the captive aura of this process. As you so aptly put it, the ghost in the machine.”
    “I was speaking of the ghostly third memory in this little calculator,” Brother Paul said. “It was designed to have only two memories, yet—”
    “Allow me to examine it,” Antares said.
    Brother Paul held it out, and the alien passed his immaterial hand through it “Ah, yes. That is a memory, but not precisely of the other type. It is what you call the constant: the figure retained for multiple operations. Because every element of this keyboard is dual-function, in certain cases that duality permits a direct readout of the normally hidden constant.”
    “The constant!” Brother Paul exclaimed. “Of course! No ghost at all, merely a misunderstood function. Like an autonomic function of the body, not ordinarily evoked consciously.”
    “Such comprehension comes naturally to our species,”