The Grand Wheel

But if Cadence knew anything about the new discovery she was keeping that knowledge well hidden. Scarne believed her scornful disclaimers. Belief in Lady was not deeply ingrained in Wheel people on the whole. Oddly enough, Legitimacy people were more inclined to believe in her. She offered the hope of certainty, a quality they craved.

It was depressing to realize how little he knew about the Wheel, in whose shadow he had lived for so long. Much of what Cadence had said was new to him.

‘The Wheel never took much interest in me before,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m not really their type. More a randomatician than a pure gambler, perhaps. But why do they suddenly want me now?’

‘It isn’t just you. They’re pulling in a lot of people like you, people with your kind of talent.’ She spoke in a low, guarded tone. ‘I think it’s something to do with the war.’

‘The war? What does the Wheel want with the war?’

He recalled Caiman’s bitterness and contempt when they had seen the military officers on the Earth shuttle. But Cadence said nothing further and Scarne sat brooding. Perhaps things weren’t going his way after all.

FIVE

The cards in Scarne’s hand each carried two symbols: a number and a geometrical figure, either a triangle, a square, a pentagon or a six-pointed star. It was the combination of the two that gave the card its value – in fact, each card had three values, according to the situation it found itself in. There were no such things as suits: neither numbers nor figures could be grouped together. They had to be set off one against the other by a process of rapid mental arithmetic.

Scarne had come across a deck similar to this one before, but the game he was playing was entirely new, and superbly difficult. It was a game within a game, a game whose rules were themselves subject to the game. Any player could, if he held the right cards, change the rules of the game, his own cards, his opponents’ cards, the other players. Nothing could be known with certainty. The rules were hierarchical, each subject to others in an ascending series, producing dizzying problems of strategy.

Scarne was sweating, his powers of calculation stretched to the limit. The cards he was holding had just had their relative values suddenly inverted by a switch in the method of counting. The past hour’s hard playing had been for nothing.

And now worse disasters were piling up. The cards were mutating in his hand, taking on even lower values. He reached out to pick up another card from the pile, but as he did so he saw that the faces of the other players were changing, too, becoming different personalities.

They laid their cards face up on the table, left their chairs and walked away. Then Scarne noticed that his own hand, frozen over the deck, was unfamiliar, dark brown in colour. Without realizing it he, too, had become someone else.

At that moment the small room faded. Scarne was sitting in a bucket seat in the Make-Out, gripping two silvery rods in his hands. Cadence was lifting the inductor cap from his skull. She rolled away the games machine.

‘I lost,’ Scarne gasped hoarsely.

Sitting behind him in the corner, Soma grunted. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t win them all.’

‘Who the hell was I playing?’

‘Nobody. You were playing a computer. You did pretty well, for a first game.’

Scarne took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Is that game actually played here in the club? Played that well?’

‘We’re all being hard on you to begin with.’ Jerry Soma stood up and stretched, his lank form stepping across the room. ‘We have to get your measure, Cheyne. We have to see how far you can stretch your mind.’ He gestured to Cadence. She opened a wall panel and wheeled out another identity machine.

The machines were something new to Scarne. Soma had told him they were used for playing games whose elements transcended physical reality, like the one Scarne had just played. In other words they blotted out the physical perception of the world and replaced it with fictional, constructed environments induced into the brain electrically. The principle was similar to that used in dispensing mugger jackpots. But Soma had been circumspect when Scarne had asked to what extent the machines were used in the club.

‘This machine is probably the nearest we can get to that experience of yours with the jackpot,’ Soma told him. ‘The nearest I know about, anyway.’ He frowned. ‘You’ll lose your identity entirely, so keep a cool head.’

‘Who will I become?’ Scarne asked apprehensively.

‘Not who. What.’

Before Scarne could open his mouth to speak again Cadence had jammed another skull-cap on his head and guided his hands to the silver bars, completing the circuit.

For an instant Scarne lost consciousness. When he awoke it was with only a vague recollection of his previous existence.

He was a number.