The Grand Wheel

THE GRAND WHEEL

Barrington J. Bayley

www.sf-gateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Website

Also by Barrington J. Bayley

Author Bio

Copyright

ONE

There was a concave stripper in the game.

Cheyne Scarne, as he shuffled the deck preparatory to dealing, covertly sized up the player sitting opposite him. The stripper who faced him over the green baize table was not much over twenty-five years of age, and with his pale face and thin nose had an icy sort of self-assurance about him. Earlier he had introduced himself as Skode Loder, from off-planet, a newcomer to Io – one of the new breed of players who never stayed long in one spot.

Already Scarne had gauged Loder to be a card mechanic, but he hadn’t been sure just what the particular gimmick was. Now that he held the deck in his own hands, he knew that, too.

Several of the trump cards had been finely shaved on their short edges, so that the stripper – or, now that he knew the secret, Scarne himself – could on his deal drop them out of the pack and distribute them whichever way he wanted. The job had been artfully performed: the slight concavities made no perceptible dent. But Scarne had found the right touch, the slight difference in pressure, that made the trick work.

Loder, he noted, wore a slim gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. That was it, of course. There was a blade vibrator in the ring.

It was too obvious. In fact, almost blatant, as if the sharp were advertising his trade. Scarne had known of stripper blades that were totally invisible, being embedded in the flesh of the finger and anchored to the bone.

Loder was gazing back at him, a sardonic smile playing on his lips. Scarne was in a dilemma. In the past hour he had been nearly cleaned out by this mechanic. He could now expose him and get his money back. But he hesitated. In too many ways, it didn’t add up.

The sharp had walked into a game between professionals. For his victim he had chosen Cheyne Scarne who, as well as being an experienced gambler, was also a professor of randomatics – in other words he was one of the hardest men in the solar system to take for a ride. Everything else was wrong for this situation, too. The place: not some unfranchized shack but a Wheel house, where to be caught cheating could mean being banned from every Wheel establishment in a hundred light-year radius. The game: opus, a game for professionals, one of the only two card games to utilize all seventy-eight cards of the ancient Tarot pack (the other was Kabala, a game whose rules were so abstruse only a handful of people had succeeded in mastering it).

Who would try to pull off such a stunt? Nobody but a fool. And Skode Loder was too expert to be a fool.

Another of the players spoke, good-naturedly. ‘Eh, don’t give us any riffle stack, Cheyne. Come on, deal us a fair hand.’

Scarne had automatically been shuffling and re-shuffling while he thought the matter over. He glanced again at Loder. He could almost imagine that the man knew – and was laughing at him.