The Grand Wheel

by Barrington J. Bayley

  He must have been unconscious for only moments, because when he came round Dom and the alien were both helping him back on to his chair. He realized he had suffered a minor heart attack. He sat breathing in gasps, the pain subsiding.

  The two players returned to their places. Dom had already drawn a trump card: the Wheel, one of the most powerful in the pack. Now the galactic cut: the Six of Planets.

  Blearily gazing at Marguerite Dom in the first moments of his triumph, Scarne was reminded of the Wheel Chairman as he had first met him. There was the same insouciance, the same charm, the over-powering presence, the fastidiousness as to dress; but within it all, hidden from the casual eye, there was the reptilian coldness. Dom was a predator on a large scale, a suave intellectual giant empty of shame or any sense of guilt.

  Deftly the galactic inserted the deck in the shuffling-machine again. Scarne became aware of tingling pains in various parts of his body. He put his hand to his neck, the site of one of these pains. A large nodule had suddenly formed there.

  He was sprouting instant cancers.

  The air of the hut was suffocating him. He sensed that he was dying, rapidly and inexplicably. He forced himself to his feet. ‘Excuse me,’ he mumbled. ‘I … need some fresh air.’

  Dom glanced up to him. ‘I wouldn’t go outside if I were you. There’s a lot of interstellar debris in the Cave.’

  ‘What … do you mean by that?’

  Dom shrugged. Scarne staggered to the door, pushed it open, and stepped outside.

  He walked a few steps away from the hut, feeling giddy, and looked towards the horizon which was so close that this might have been a toy planet. Then he looked up at the sky; if he had not done so at that moment he might never have seen it.

  In fact he was never quite sure afterwards that he had. It was no more than a glimmer, a faint flash as the meteor whizzed through the planetoid’s shallow atmosphere.

  The odds against it must have been billions to one. The meteor fell down from space and sheared off Scarne’s left arm.

  He stood staring stupidly at the blood-spouting stump. Then, as he felt his knees buckling, he turned to the door and fell back into the hut. The alien rose calmly and came over to him, reaching out to him with his long arms and lifting him into his chair. The creature inspected the stump; Scarne felt him tie something on the flesh.

  ‘The bleeding has stopped,’ the galactic announced. In a thoughtful tone he added: ‘You are very unlucky.’

  ‘Yes,’ said a dazed Scarne.

  In his shock, his thoughts were calm, piecing it all together. He could see clearly exactly how – and why – Dom was using him.

  Luck was not probability, but it acted through probability. It was, so to speak, quantities of probability, a quantitative average throughout the universe. And, like any other fixed quantity, it could only be concentrated or increased at the cost of a diminution elsewhere.

  For someone to be made lucky, someone else had to be made unlucky. Dom was using him as the ‘negative pole’ of the process of attracting luck.

  So I end up as a dupe, Scarne thought dismally. And Dom, charming, ambitious Dom, wins.

  It was the second round: the galactic cut first. The Star Blaze, a reasonably good card, a member of the Minor Superior Set.

  Dom cut. The Neutron Ring, a lower card in the same set. Dom frowned, clearly taken aback.

  And Scarne suddenly began to feel physically better. He looked at his severed stump. The blood was coagulating with unusual rapidity, sealing off the stump. Soon he would be able, if he wished, to remove the alien’s tourniquet.

  ‘We cut once more,’ the galactic said to the nonplussed Dom.

  The alien shuffled the cards in the machine. Scarne noticed that his cancers had undergone spontaneous remission: the lumps had disappeared. A sense of well-being was flowing through him. He looked at Dom, and saw that the Wheel master had become unnaturally pale.

  Dom’s gaze flickered around the hut, resting ferally for a moment on Scarne. Hastily he cut, but did not show or look at the card, motioning instead for the alien to cut for his card.

  The galactic cut, and with no outward reaction displayed his card. It was the Dissolver, a card whose surface was made up of a close-grained tracery, or hatchwork, in which images formed according to how it was held. And it was the highest card in the entire deck.

  Dom’s face became rigid as he saw the card. He bent to look at his own, then let it drop to the table from limp fingers. It was a card called the Trivia, showing a single drooping flower. It belonged to no set, no suit or grouping, and was the lowest card of the deck, being assigned no positive value.

  Something bad was happening to Dom. He tried to rise from his chair but could not; it was as if his abdomen had congested and seized up. His flesh was almost bubbling as the rogue cells of cancer attacked his body at ferocious speed. His skin began to rot. He was falling apart before their eyes.

  Rising, Scarne stared down at him, feeling pity but also indignation. ‘You tricked me,’ he accused the dying man. ‘Tried to sacrifice my life for your own ends.’

  From his doubled-up position Dom peered up at him. ‘But your life is mine, Cheyne,’ he groaned. ‘You owe it to me. Don’t you remember? A gambling debt. I told you I would remind you of it.’

  Remembering the duel, Scarne stepped back. Was Dom trying cynically to justify his treachery, or did he really believe in such a system of morality?

  His inner debate was cut short. Dom gave a great groan of agony and fell from his chair. Neither Scarne nor the alien went to his assistance, and while they watched his body began to disintegrate, to dissolve.

  In a few seconds not a trace of it remained.

  ‘He has been drawn into pure randomness,’ the galactic told Scarne. ‘It is sometimes a consequence of the process he was using.’

  ‘You knew about it?’

  The alien rose, put away the cards, and moved the table to one side. ‘It quickly became evident. Were we generous, we might have warned him of the dangers of trying to force luck. If it is manipulated, then it is no longer luck in the proper sense; it becomes a physical force, involving, like all physical forces, action and reaction. The swing of the pendulum can come swiftly.’

  ‘His good luck turned to bad, in like proportion,’ Scarne observed.

  ‘That is why we never use any luck-manipulating process.’ While he spoke, the alien seemed to be tidying up the hut, as if preparing to leave. ‘Luck is perhaps the most powerful force that exists, and for that reason the most dangerous. It is in fact the basic force, or glue, that forms entities out of the preternatural randomness. Probability came later.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Scarne asked.

  ‘Your master lost; therefore all holdings known as the Grand Wheel become ours. We shall use them, naturally, for our own benefit.’

  ‘Will people be aware of it?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  The galactic opened the door and went outside. Scarne followed him.

  His arm should be hurting more, he thought. He was scarcely aware of the ache. But then he saw his severed arm, lying on the ground, and turned aside in nausea.

  The galactic spoke again. ‘You seem to have come out of all this rather well,’ he said. ‘When the process reversed itself the good luck which Marguerite Dom concentrated on himself passed to you. Luck is magic; practically anything can be achieved with it, simply by wishing.’

  Scarne gestured back to the hut. ‘Is that going to happen to me, too?’

  ‘I would think not. You didn’t initiate the sequence; the charge will simply seep from you gradually. Goodbye, then. Use your good fortune well.’

  With a loping gait the galactic left him and set off towards the horizon. Scarne closed his eyes.

  Simply by wishing.

  SIXTEEN

  There had been changes made at the camp site when the travel globe set him down on the desert again. The Disk of Hyke had returned, accompanied by a Legitimacy
battle-cruiser. Legitimacy troops patrolled both camps; all Wheel personnel were under armed guard.

  As soon as he made his appearance Scarne was picked up. He found himself facing Hakandra, Shane’s stern-faced guardian.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’ the official asked, glancing at the stump which now had solidified as efficiently as if it had been cauterized. Scarne still felt no more than a dull ache from it.

  ‘I had an accident. I’ll get a new one grafted on as soon as there’s time.’

  Hakandra nodded. ‘I’ll get someone to attend to it. Where’s Dom?’

  ‘He’s dead. Probably.’

  ‘Probably? What do you mean by that?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Scarne said with finality.

  ‘I see … well, we’ll take a full statement from you later. We already know something of why the Wheel came to the Cave. Illicit contacts with an alien race. Were you a party to that?’

  ‘Not really. Dom kept it to himself. It’s over now, anyway.’ Scarne wanted, if possible, to extricate himself from the whole question of galactic involvement. Otherwise he would never be free of the Legitimacy.

  The SIS would want a report out of him, too. He would have to try to convince them that the luck equations didn’t work. Dom’s demise was probably a chilling enough lesson.

  Hakandra was speaking again. ‘You’ve heard the latest news? We’re going to have to leave here. There have been major losses in the big battle at the far end of the Cave. The positions we’ve set up won’t hold the Hadranics back now. They’ll sweep through the Cave and into our star arm.’ He looked grave and distraught. Pityingly he looked at Shane, who sat in the corner of the tent; the two were hardly ever separated. ‘All our work here has been for nothing.’

  ‘What about the randomness machine?’

  ‘We’ll take it with us. But it can’t be of any use to us now.’

  ‘It can help you. Make another test run with it.’

  The Legitimacy official looked at him closely. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘I know something. You haven’t discovered the right settings for it, that’s all. How to control it.’ He hesitated. ‘I met the people who built it when I was up on – where we went.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

  Scarne shrugged.

  Hakandra turned to Shane. ‘What are they doing with the machine now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  On a sudden decision Hakandra marched over to the laboratory tent. Within, there was the desultory air of a project that has failed but is still officially operational. Scarne saw Haskand, the Wheel scientist, talking to Wishom, his Legitimacy counterpart.

  ‘What are these settings?’ Wishom asked him when Hakandra had made representations for him.

  But Scarne didn’t know. In a technical sense, he understood nothing of the machine and the equipment the research team was using on it.

  He walked up to the control rig, and beckoned Shane to him. ‘Put the power through,’ he told the technicians. ‘I’ll make the adjustments.’

  ‘It’s not safe!’ Hakandra snapped.

  Wishom waved his hand. ‘Why not? We’ve been working in the dark. He can’t do anything more risky than we did. If he does something silly, I’ll simply cut off the power.’ He nodded to Scarne. ‘I expect you’re a lunatic, but … what do you think, Haskand?’

  ‘Where is the Chairman?’ Haskand demanded sharply of Scarne.

  Scarne gave him a hard look. ‘I have what you gave him,’ he said quietly.

  It took a moment for Haskand to absorb that. Then he nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s his field, in a sense … let’s see what happens.’

  Scarne drew Shane close to him. ‘I want you to help me,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me when it feels right … you know what I mean.’

  ‘No I don’t. Why are you so vague? You have to use hard data.’

  Scarne ignored the Legitimacy jargon. As the generator began to hum he held his intended image clearly in mind and manipulated the controls at random: power-level, waveform … a web of energy flowed into the alien machine.

  Shane neither moaned, screamed or doubled up, as was his wont during these experiments. ‘That feels different from before,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Sort of … smooth. It’s flowing.’

  ‘Flowing where, Shane?’

  ‘Flowing out – out there.’ Shane waved his hands over his head, unsure of what he meant.

  Scarne sent his fingers over the switches again. Shane frowned, then gave a grimace of pain. ‘No, that’s all wrong, that won’t work,’ he complained.

  ‘Well, let’s see –’ Scarne once more amended the controls, with a glimmering of an idea what to aim for this time.

  And then it struck home to him, too. He knew he had hit it, and Lady was hovering over him, smiling down on him, her hand on his shoulder.

  He closed his eyes. ‘Thank you, Lady,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s there,’ Shane murmured. His eyes were withdrawn, concentrating on the feeling inside him. ‘That’s it. It’s beautiful. It works.’

  ‘It works?’ Wishom queried in a cracked voice, rushing up to them. ‘What works? What’s happening?’

  ‘You’ll find out in a few hours,’ Scarne said. He saw no point in explaining it; it sounded too fantastic.

  Even he would eagerly await the reports, to make sure he hadn’t simply imagined the picture that had blazed in his mind when the machine hit its resonant level. Suns exploding, thousands of suns.

  Every single sun at the far end of the Cave had gone nova. With luck, a good part of the assembled Hadranic forces would be caught in the holocaust. At any rate, the Hadranics would now regard the Cave as too dangerous to operate in, and therefore it was effectively impassable.

  Eventually they would overcome their caution, or else find another attack route, but the Legitimacy now had a valuable breathing space. Later, perhaps he would explode more suns, perhaps all the suns in the Cave.

  If, that was, he had not already used up all his luck in such a titanic act. He exulted. It was like being a god oneself! Then he checked himself, remembering the hubris that had brought about the downfall of Marguerite Dom, Chairman of the Grand Wheel which was now under new management.

  Lady had dealt mankind a new hand, he reflected. He wondered what difference it was going to make to civilization now that the Galactic Wheel held all its gambling concessions.

  And it came into his mind that the people who really knew about the luck deity did not see her as a smiling woman, but as a male figure, stern and retributive. That could make a difference, too.

  He turned to Hakandra. ‘There’s another kind of machine in one of the Wheel tents,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll take any notice, but if I were you I’d have it destroyed.’

  ‘Oh? Why is that?’

  Scarne smiled. ‘There’s too much luck attached to it.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Marguerite Dom’s sojourn in the gulf of randomness was not an eternity of chaos, as it turned out.

  Like everything else, he kept bubbling to the surface of it, re-forming, melting and dissolving again; finding himself in little regions of stability, finding himself to be a wandering ghost in the fog-like limbo, a mote in the foaming sea of nullity, or something incomprehensible in some other of its aspects.

  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?’

&nbs
p; 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.