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The Grand Wheel

He never felt as if he had been there long, not even when someone plucked at his sleeve and he turned to come face to face with an old colleague.

‘We’re not really here, you know,’ Pawarce told him, looking round himself shiftily. ‘Nobody exists here – except ghosts, like us.’

‘How long have you been here?’ Dom asked.

‘There isn’t any time here. A million years, maybe.’ His face was ugly as he looked at Dom. ‘I’m glad you ended up here too. It serves you damned well right.’

Dom moved away but Pawarce followed him, hanging on to his arm and leaning close. He pointed. ‘See that, Marguerite? Over there?’

Dom followed his finger. In the mist, so faint he wasn’t sure if he saw it or not, was an arch, like a faded rainbow.

‘What is it?’

‘Up there, where real things exist, people play games. Well, not people, exactly. Beings, cleverer than us. Sometimes when they play, new worlds and universes are formed. Sometimes you can walk into them. I’ve been waiting a long time to see if that one would form. Now it’s ready. But we have to go now or it will separate. Do you see it, Marguerite? A new world, a chance to start over somewhere else! To exist again!’

Dom hung back. ‘What will it be like?’

Pawarce pulled a face. ‘Who knows, till we get there?’

‘That’s right, who knows?’

Together they walked towards the dimly shining arch.

EIGHTEEN

It was only a small mugger in a cheap bar. Cheyne Scarne was thumbing in coins and winning, winning, winning.

His luck was draining away by weeks, days, hours, but still it was fun. He smiled wryly as the sparks came up and the tokens came tinkling out of the play slot.

A small, dapper man came up to him. ‘Say, how do you do that?’ ‘Luck.’

He turned away from the machine, unwilling to get into conversation, and sat down at a table near the bar. Curiously, he never won jackpots. Jackpots weren’t really good luck; they changed the recipient’s life, not always for the better.

It amused him, too, to think that his winnings were paid out by the Galactic Wheel now; were the subject, probably, of accounts at the centre of the galaxy. So far, though, there had been no outward sign of the galactics’ take-over. And he had been unable to prise anything out of the Wheel men he knew.

What would happen, he asked himself, if the Hadranics should break through the Legitimacy’s newly constituted defence line? Would the Galactic Wheel move to prevent the invasion so as to protect its pitch? He suspected not. They were more subtle, more practical. They would simply make sure that their property remained profitable in the new set-up. They might even encourage an invasion, if it meant more business.

Contemplating the possibility brought Scarne a sense of unreality. Sometimes he had the feeling that the whole sequence of events he had suffered, beginning with his first being picked up by the SIS, was the result of a game being played elsewhere in the universe. It was better not to think about it.

Every so often Scarne glanced at the door, in expectation of yet one more piece of luck.

Why not? It should happen, he told himself. At first he had been expecting, and now he was only hoping, that his luck would rub off enough so that Cadence Mellors would somehow find her way out of that work camp and back to him. According to his luck, he should see her walking through a door somewhere, some day. That was why he spent so much of his time in bars.

He took a swallow of his drink, and then looked up again. A girl had just entered the bar; for a moment he thought it was Cadence. At a glance the resemblance was remarkable, and it was not just a matter of physiognomy. Like Cadence, she was no longer very young; a little faded, more than a little jaded by life. But it was not Cadence.

She smiled. He smiled.

He continued staring at her, feeling familiar pangs.

His luck was running out. But it was still working for him. Within limits.

She was not Cadence.

But she would do.

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