The Grand Wheel

‘It won’t be so bad,’ Dom said blandly. The basic ideology of you people is that you can build a civilization so solid that it will always be able to resist the shocks of chance. That’s a rigid concept; and anyway it can’t be done. In the long run you can’t go against nature, any more than King Canute could stop the tides. We all come under the law of accident. The gambler learns to live with it, but the Legitimacy thinks it can build a kind of siege civilization, a rigidly controlled shell isolated from accident.’ He shook his head sadly. In a way he admired the Legitimacy for its obstinacy; but he was sure that, come what may, the Grand Wheel would outlive it – just as it had preceded it.

‘The law of accident!’ Mheert muttered. ‘I’ll tell you what the law of accident means. It means that every plan, every effort, is endangered. Years of preparation go into some vital endeavour, and then something unforeseen happens to wreck everything. Only if chance eventualities can be eradicated can mankind be assured of a continued existence. Otherwise, something like this –’ He slipped his jacket over one shoulder and pulled aside the shirt beneath, displaying the surgery scars at the shoulder where the arm was grafted on. ‘You know well what these scars mean, Chairman Dom. A medicinal drug added to the water supply, harmless as it was thought. Yet it caused an entire generation to give birth to limbless children. It was years before the source of the deformities was isolated.’

Dom was indeed familiar with the scars. He had them himself, at shoulders and hips. Everyone of their age group had. ‘In that case science triumphed,’ Mheert continued. ‘Thanks to Legitimacy planning we were able to grow culture limbs from each victim’s body cells and graft them on. Chance was overcome. But another time –’

Dom laughed sourly. ‘Planning had nothing to do with it. It was luck. What if it had happened centuries earlier, when it wasn’t known how to switch off repressor genes in individual body cells? Then no limbs could have been grown. We would have had a generation with neither arms nor legs.’

‘We could still have managed with prosthetics. But granted, the disaster could have been worse. By the law of averages some such worse disaster awaits mankind at an unspecified date in the future – unless we learn how to eliminate these accidents. The war with the Hadranics is itself an accident, an interruption of our plans. Let’s see you try to gamble your way out of that one.’

Dom’s sour smile had not left his face. ‘Let’s see you plan your way out of it,’ he said.

The meeting proceeded little further. Men of diametrically opposed minds cannot discourse for long. Dom sat musing for a while after Premier Mheert departed. In one sense, he reflected, both of them worshipped the same thing: power. Unfettered, broad and absolute power.

Not for one moment had he expected Mheert to accede to his demand, even though the covenant, by its nature, would have been virtually unenforceable.

But it had been worth a try.

A few days later Dom was obliged to travel several thousand miles to the partly abandoned town of Voridnov, where he entered a large building so decrepit it was hard to believe it was still air-tight.

Within, he paused at the head of a flight of iron stairs, recovering his breath. It was a long climb, but tradition had to be respected; all who entered the room to which the staircase gave access had to get there on their own two feet – hence, there could be no elevator.

The armed vigils standing guard outside the steel door snapped to attention. He put them at ease with a wave of his hand.

‘Are all present?’

‘Yes, Chairman. All are here.’

He stepped forward. The door, responding to secret factors about his person, moved ponderously aside. He walked through a bare ante-room, and then into the dusty sacrosanct council chamber.

The eyes of the eleven men seated at the large circular table turned to meet him. He, Dom, made the twelfth. He took his place, his eyebrows lifted in private amusement. Twelve men of disparate character, he was thinking to himself, bound together in close brotherhood. Hadn’t that been so of another crucial time in history? But no, that would have to be thirteen if he, Dom, was to regard himself as the leader. And somehow he couldn’t think of himself as a Christ.

The chair grimed his clothes as he sat down. Everything in the council chamber was filthy. It was never cleaned: nobody was allowed in except for council members, and that was the way it had been for centuries here in this gutted building on the nether, unfashionable side of the Moon (Dom, like many fond lunarites, liked to refer to his adopted planet by its affectionate archaism, the Moon).

To call a full meeting a consensus of four voices was necessary. In this case the number had been six, which meant that Dom’s policy was being challenged. He was, however, sure of his five assenters.