Ace of Pentacles

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, a hand comes out of a cloud holding a single golden coin over a garden, and beyond the garden there's an arch of roses opening onto the mountains. It's the card of the new job, the windfall, the seed money. Franky's own introduction picks it as the example of good news with a catch: "What dangers lurk behind the auspicious job indicated by say the Ace of Pentacles?". This card is the answer.

In the early nineteenth century, the silk farms of Lombardy were being wiped out by a disease the Italians called calcinaccio or moscardino. The silkworms died, stiffened, and then bloomed white, as if they'd been rolled in chalk. Agostino Bassi, a law graduate and provincial official whose failing eyesight drove him out of public office, spent decades on the problem. In 1834 he demonstrated, and in 1835 published, that the white powder was alive. It was a fungus, and touching a sick worm to a healthy one passed the disease on. This was one of the first experimental demonstrations that a microorganism causes a disease in an animal, decades before Pasteur and Koch became famous for the idea. The fungus now carries his name.

Here is how Beauveria works. A spore lands on an insect's cuticle, sticks, germinates, and pushes its way through the armor with enzymes and pressure. Inside, it grows through the body, and when the host is dead it grows back out, covering the corpse in a white bloom that makes millions more spores. The same fungus that ruined Lombardy's silk is now sold in bags as a biological insecticide. It has also been found living quietly inside the tissues of many plants.

So look at what the Ace hands you. A coin is a promise stamped onto a blank. The white spore is the blankest possible beginning, a dot of powder that could become an entire economy. Your new job, new money, new lover, new idea: it lands on you the way a spore lands, and it's very small at first. The opportunity is real. Bassi's lost career became a new science. The risk is that every beginning is also an infection. It only succeeds by getting inside something and turning that something into more of itself. Ask what you'll be turned into, and whether you'd mind.