The Grand Wheel

by Barrington J. Bayley

  The voice was Dom’s, though he could not say whether he heard it physically or only in his mind. ‘Cheyne, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen carefully, Cheyne. The symbols in this deck are extremely powerful – even more so than those of the Tarot. The game has unlocked our minds. The galactics are using it to create alternate realities.’

  ‘Is all this an illusion?’

  ‘Yes. A resultant level that they, once again, have realized ahead of us. The cards as physical entities are redundant. We are playing mind to mind.’

  ‘Is this part of the game?’

  ‘Probably. But – perhaps not entirely. It would be foolish to be dogmatic.’

  Briefly, Scarne seemed to see Dom’s face in front of him, struggling to emerge from the fog. ‘How do I get out of here?’ he asked.

  ‘We can’t – not directly. We have to play …’

  Dom’s voice faded, then came back again. ‘They probably don’t know we’re adept at this kind of thing, too. Use the doorway technique, Cheyne. Play a card – counter their realities with ours.’

  Scarne noticed that the chairs on which the galactics sat were gliding slowly nearer to him. He sensed menace. ‘I don’t know if I can – not with these cards.’

  ‘Then use the Tarot. The correspondence is close enough – it ought to work. If we can’t do it they’ve got us beaten; we won’t be able to withstand their mental bombardment. We’ll be changed, and they’ll win.’

  There was silence, and Scarne realized that Dom was no longer in communication with him. He was on his own.

  Scarne had been taught the doorway technique, as Dom called it, after his mind had been made more pliable by experience on the identity machine. It was in fact a meditative practice employed by ancient Kabalists, by which one projected oneself into each card in turn, identifying with it so completely that it came to life, as if one had stepped through a door into the realm it represented. By projecting into the cards of the major arcana one could explore various facets of the Kabalistic system; by projecting into the court cards, one felt oneself to be glimpsing one of the four worlds of that system – the archetypal world, the creative world, the formative world and the physical world. By concentrating on the numbered cards of the minor arcana, one gained access to worlds dominated by one or other of the four elements as understood by the ancients – fire, water, air and earth.

  It was presumably some such method as this that the galactics were now using, the difference being that others besides the practitioner were projected into the realities evoked. Scarne looked down at his hand, and after a few moments was able to see the cards he had held at the table. Some were unique to the deck created for the game, and had no correspondence in the Tarot. Others, however, could easily be cross-identified. He concentrated, and these cards underwent mutation, changing into their Tarot counterparts.

  He chose one: the Ace of Wands, Root of the Powers of Fire. He raised it before his eyes, summoning up all his attention in the manner Dom had taught him, driving his full consciousness into the simple illustration of an upright baton round which were twined a pair of snakes.

  Something snapped in his mind. The scene erected by the card Apparatus vanished, together with the galactic players who had invoked it.

  He stood in the midst of a baking desert that stretched in all directions to a far horizon. The air scorched his throat as he breathed. Overhead was a sun that sent wave after wave of heat pounding mercilessly down, turning the sand into a blazing carpet.

  He turned his head. A small salamander-like creature sat on a sun-bleached stone, regarding him with tiny glittering eyes. As he moved towards it the animal skittered away and disappeared into the sand.

  If this was a product of imagination then the illusion was well-maintained. Scarne wondered how long it would take the galactic player to answer his move. After that it would be Dom’s turn.

  Idly he took a few steps into the desert, feeling the energy draining from him. This was a world dominated by the element fire, arid, inexorable, very nearly lifeless. If something did not happen soon he would have to take steps to leave it.

  Suddenly a slab of sand rose up from the floor of the desert on invisible hinges, creating minor cascades of shining grains. From out of the relative darkness stepped a scaly-skinned man-sized creature which stood on its hind legs and appraised Scarne with no sign of fear.

  The native’s head was lizard-like, which gave it an air of tough, but wearied, desperation. But its intelligence was unmistakable. Scarne recognized its species straight away: he had seen drawings of it in the Legitimacy archaeological camp site.

  He had gone back in time, to the planet where the randomness machine had been found. Either the climate was to become more temperate in the intervening period, or else he was nearer the equator. In any case, despite the inhospitable environment he was seeing the planet before intelligent life had quite become extinct.

  The lizard-creature’s unclothed hide shimmered like metal, reflecting the glare of the brassy sky. It beckoned to Scarne, turning and retreating back beneath the raised slab into the cavity below. After hesitation Scarne followed. The slab swung down behind him; he was in a murky tunnel of rock and iron.

  After a few yards they emerged into a chamber, only slightly larger than the tunnel itself, in which stood the very same machine Scarne had last seen in the tent of the Legitimacy scientist, Wishom. Now, however, the machine was in its original condition. Its metal casing gleamed, and the crystalline surface sparkled even more vividly than when he had first seen it.

  Three lizard-creatures, including Scarne’s guide, were gathered round it. Scarne glanced, in the dimness, at the other equipment which crammed the chamber, and to which the randomness machine was attached. Thick cables led through the walls to elsewhere in the underground warren.

  Why did the aliens seem so incurious about his presence? He moved closer to the big drum, gazing down into its scintillating depths. It was hard to say just where its surface began – or if it had a surface. He began to feel dizzy, and drew away.

  The native who had led him hither spoke in a voice which, though hoarse and full of superfluous clicks, was nevertheless intelligible.

  ‘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.

  It became clear to Scarne that this was nearly always how life originated. Without it, the universe would be very nearly biologically sterile – the randomness of nature gave the necessary chemical combinations a prohibitively low probability. In almost every case it was a mathematical game, played between groups of opposing intelligences, that supplied the missing key – providing not only the initial impetus but also influencing the type of life that eventually would develop.

  Surprising though this was, the revelation quickly paled into insignificance for Scarne. Because the Wheel card contained even more knowledge. Vaster and vaster became the vista. He saw that there were games and players as far surpassing the Galactic Wheel as it in turn surpassed the Grand Wheel. The game he was engaged on could create an entire biota; yet there were other, bigger games. There were games that could trigger the formation of whole clusters of galaxies. On a fundamental level, there were games that constructed matter and universes out of the gulf of pure randomness.

  There was no end to it. On level after level were found the hierarchies of power, merging in an indefinable series into the sea of non-causation. Dom was right – the gods were real. They were the conscious forces that gamed and gambled in the deeper randomatic levels. Scarne could only wonder if he was really meant to see all this: if it was a legitimate part of the game. By projecting into the card he had effectively played the card; but he could not avoid the feeling that something had gone wrong and his perceptions had been carried too far.

  Then he felt himself falling. There was roaring all around him.

  He was there again.

  He had dropped out of structured existence and back into the sea of chaos. It roared all around him, generating numbers and again dissolving them.

  But he remained there only moments, because the strain was by this time too great, and his consciousness failed altogether.

  When Scarne passed out, the big alien who had set up the game reappeared. He stepped round the table to look down at Scarne, who had first slumped on to the table then slid to the floor, scattering his cards as he went.

  ‘Your friend has been interfered with,’ he said to Dom. ‘I detect foreign agencies in his blood.’

  Dom rose from the table and walked round to frown down at Scarne. ‘His enemies injected him with an addictive drug,’ he said by way of possible explanation. ‘But I got my biochemists to cure him.’

  ‘They did not entirely succeed, it seems. The rigours of the game have caused a recurrence of its effects. However, I think they will prove to be temporary.’

  ‘In view of his condition, it was unwise of him to play so powerful a card,’ one of the galactic players observed, glancing at the Wheel, now lying face up on the table.

  Scarne heard these latter words as he regained consciousness. Assisted by Dom, he got unsteadily to his feet.

  His first impressions were the same as those he had experienced after receiving the mugger jackpot on Io. Everything seemed unnaturally vast. The domed room was as big as a solar system. The untranslated alien’s face, bent to regard him from its superior height, seemed impossibly foreign and gigantic.

  But this time the illusion wore off fairly quickly. Scarne stumbled to his chair and sat down, resting his head on his hand.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he muttered.

  ‘This game, at any rate, would appear to be null and void,’ the alien remarked. ‘The cards have been revealed.’ He turned to Dom. ‘Since your friend would not be advised to continue, perhaps you would care to select another partner. You have the option of calling quits now, of course – though half your holdings would remain in our hands.’

  ‘No – we play to the limit,’ Dom shot back, a degree of passion in his voice. ‘But a different game.’

  He looked down at the disarrayed table, then turned back to the bulking alien. ‘I want to stake the whole of my remaining holdings on one more game – double or quits. If I win, we can continue. If not …’ He shrugged.

  The alien paused, reflecting. ‘And the game?’

  ‘One without any skill in it.’ Dom seemed agitated. He swallowed. ‘Let’s do some real gambling. With stakes as high as they’ll go. Any random fifty-fifty game will do it. The toss of a coin –’

  Scarne twisted round in his chair and regarded Dom with horror.

  No, he was about to shout, let’s carry on playing. At least we might have a chance! But then he saw that Dom, by his own lights at any rate, was once again right. A fifty-fifty game was their best chance of coming out of this intact. They were being out-played by the galactics.

  The two alien players were poker-faced as the untranslated galactic considered.

  ‘Are you agreed?’ Dom demanded.

  ‘It would be unlike us to refuse a challenge,’ the galactic murmured. ‘Even though, on present showing, it removes our current advantage.’

  ‘Any limit on the bank?’ Dom queried.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Okay.’ Dom relaxed, his shoulders slumping. He was, Scarne realized, tired. ‘I want to break off first and return to my camp, to freshen up, to – to freshen my luck. If that’s all right by you.’

  ‘Ah, luck,’
the alien said, as if amused. ‘It is astonishing how many gamblers pay homage to the god of luck.’

  ‘In our mythology, she’s a lady,’ Dom told him. ‘A goddess, not a god.’

  ‘That is because your species has maternal fixations. We see the gods as more disinterested. Will you return alone?’

  ‘I’d like to bring one other with me. For company.’

  ‘You are our guest,’ the alien said courteously. He turned his head, surveying the scene as if checking for final details. ‘Then I will bid you goodbye for the present. Before leaving, why not visit our Avenue of Chance? There are many small games there that might entertain you.’ He held out his arm, elegantly indicating the exit.

  The Grand Wheel team made a subdued group as they left the domed building and emerged on to the dusty street. Walking with Dom, Scarne paused. To one side, the interstellar travel globe could be seen just over the close horizon. The concourse which he had noticed earlier, and which presumably was the avenue referred to by the galactic, lay a few yards away.

  Dom gazed towards it. ‘What do you think, Scarne?’

  ‘It might be interesting,’ Scarne said, his voice still none too steady.

  ‘No harm in taking a look,’ Dom agreed.

  As they walked towards the entrance to the avenue, Scarne found that his mind was still preoccupied with the Wheel card. He wondered if the glimpses he had received reflected real facts. Or whether they were only the work of the imagination, invoked by the rare combination of an addictive drug, his randomatic training, and the too-evocative symbols of the cards. He had been handling a Tarot pack, he recalled, minutes before he played the mugger on Io.

  Probably he would never know the truth of it.

  ‘Games theory,’ he said aloud.

  Dom shot him a mystified look. ‘What, Cheyne?’

  ‘It’s a problem biochemists have never solved. How life manages to emerge from inanimate matter. The odds are all against it, in chemical terms, yet it happens. The biochemists – they should study games theory.’

  ‘Is that what you learned while you were out cold on us?’