The Grand Wheel

‘The hopes your people place in our machine will be disappointed.’

Scarne looked at him, deciding there was no point in being surprised that the creature spoke Sol Amalgam, the business language of man-inhabited space that would not be developed for millennia yet.

‘It is not a randomness control?’

‘Only in a negative sense. We had hoped to delay the nova process with it, as you do. But all it can achieve is an increase in destructiveness. It can provoke novae, but not prevent them. Come, I will show you how it works …’

He nudged Scarne forward. Scarne smelled the raw, leathery odour of the alien as they leaned together over the flashing drum. Then his senses were caught and trapped. He was falling, falling amid the brilliantly shining motes, and he knew that he had already left the desert planet, left the dominion of fire.

Events he could not see were taking place. Forces were pulling and tugging at him, this way and that. He was being sped through realms he could no more than glimpse.

The bulbous, full globe of a richly endowed planet swam past him, cities shining and sparkling on its surface like immense jewels. They were gambling cities, entirely given over to the pleasures of the game, inhabited by people who had long ago abandoned any interest in stability.

The planet fell astern of him into the darkness. He hung over a stupendous plane light years in extent, covered with the marks and signs of some gigantic pattern.

Then that, too, vanished. He heard Marguerite Dom’s voice again, sounding fuzzy as if fighting to overcome whatever it was separated them.

The outlines of the domed games-room began to impinge on his vision. ‘Where in Lady’s name have you been, Cheyne! Take a hold of yourself! Play or draw, Cheyne! Play or draw!’

Scarne reached over to the dispenser and drew a card, holding it close to his chest.

It was the Wheel. The Wheel of Fortune.

It was no coincidence that the wheel symbol was as much a feature of the galactics’ game, Constructions, as it was of the Tarot. This version showed a realistic picture – probably a photograph – of a perfectly wheel-shaped galaxy, a freak of nature that no doubt really existed somewhere. The rim of the wheel was well-formed, joined by eight only slightly curved arms to a glowing central hub. Surrounding the galaxy were wave-like symbols to indicate the formless nature of space – which in this case served the same symbolic function as water in the Tarot version.

Almost as soon as he looked at the card the room faded again; by this time his propensity for entering into a card was automatic and irresistible. The forces and scenes he had experienced after leaving the desert planet were, he realized, the result of cards played by the other players sitting at the table. But now, as when he had played the Ace of Wands, he felt that he was temporarily transcending the game altogether, leaving it because of some force innate to himself.

And yet it was not due simply to himself. It was the game that had brought him to this point, the point where he could no longer control either himself or his perceptions. The galactic wheel was rotating, sparkling, flashing, throwing off probabilities in all directions. Then it faded, forming an all-embracing background.

And at the same time Scarne’s mind cleared. He could see it now: the game, in all its details, comprising a mathematical exercise of the highest order. But it was a game in which the players were as much tools of the overall scheme as the cards were.

He seemed to be hovering above the card table, looking down on the four players, two of them genuine men and two who seemed so by virtue of visual translation, frozen in attitudes of secrecy and silence.

But the scene, microcosmic though it was, remained localized only briefly. Because the game was larger. Larger than the games-room, larger than the pre-formed asteroid. Larger than the Grand Wheel, larger than its superior counterpart, the Galactic Wheel.

Larger than the chilling stakes that, ostensibly, were its raison d’être.

Scarne was still beyond the doorway of the card known as the Wheel. Through the ever-expanding field of his vision there floated billions of blazing suns, billions of planets, circling and wheeling in the dark. He saw primeval planets, newly condensed out of gas and dust, building up their long geological ages, spewing forth turbulent atmospheres of volcanic fire, sulphur, methane and lightning.

The game was not abstract. In some manner that even Scarne, as a trained randomatician, could not fathom, it was bringing forth wholly practical consequences though at an immense remove from here. Out of its strategies, its moves and countermoves, life was being evolved on a distant planet.