The Grand Wheel

ONE

There was a concave stripper in the game.

Cheyne Scarne, as he shuffled the deck preparatory to dealing, covertly sized up the player sitting opposite him. The stripper who faced him over the green baize table was not much over twenty-five years of age, and with his pale face and thin nose had an icy sort of self-assurance about him. Earlier he had introduced himself as Skode Loder, from off-planet, a newcomer to Io – one of the new breed of players who never stayed long in one spot.

Already Scarne had gauged Loder to be a card mechanic, but he hadn’t been sure just what the particular gimmick was. Now that he held the deck in his own hands, he knew that, too.

Several of the trump cards had been finely shaved on their short edges, so that the stripper – or, now that he knew the secret, Scarne himself – could on his deal drop them out of the pack and distribute them whichever way he wanted. The job had been artfully performed: the slight concavities made no perceptible dent. But Scarne had found the right touch, the slight difference in pressure, that made the trick work.

Loder, he noted, wore a slim gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. That was it, of course. There was a blade vibrator in the ring.

It was too obvious. In fact, almost blatant, as if the sharp were advertising his trade. Scarne had known of stripper blades that were totally invisible, being embedded in the flesh of the finger and anchored to the bone.

Loder was gazing back at him, a sardonic smile playing on his lips. Scarne was in a dilemma. In the past hour he had been nearly cleaned out by this mechanic. He could now expose him and get his money back. But he hesitated. In too many ways, it didn’t add up.

The sharp had walked into a game between professionals. For his victim he had chosen Cheyne Scarne who, as well as being an experienced gambler, was also a professor of randomatics – in other words he was one of the hardest men in the solar system to take for a ride. Everything else was wrong for this situation, too. The place: not some unfranchized shack but a Wheel house, where to be caught cheating could mean being banned from every Wheel establishment in a hundred light-year radius. The game: opus, a game for professionals, one of the only two card games to utilize all seventy-eight cards of the ancient Tarot pack (the other was Kabala, a game whose rules were so abstruse only a handful of people had succeeded in mastering it).

Who would try to pull off such a stunt? Nobody but a fool. And Skode Loder was too expert to be a fool.

Another of the players spoke, good-naturedly. ‘Eh, don’t give us any riffle stack, Cheyne. Come on, deal us a fair hand.’

Scarne had automatically been shuffling and re-shuffling while he thought the matter over. He glanced again at Loder. He could almost imagine that the man knew – and was laughing at him.

He came to a decision. Squaring up the deck, he laid it in the centre of the table, then pushed his remaining chips into the stakes circle. He took out his bank card and threw that in, too.

‘Time for me to leave,’ he said. ‘But first let’s cut for what’s left, Loder.’

Loder bent his head to read the amount printed on the bank card. He sad stock-still for a moment. Then he shrugged.

‘Why not?’

The others looked on with interest, making no comment, as Loder covered Scarne’s stake. He cut the deck, glancing at the card he drew before laying it face down.

Scarne in turn cut, showing the card to Loder. It was the queen of wands.

Loder smiled, and revealed his card. It was the card known as the universe: a trump, one of the major arcana, the elaborate picture symbolism that had been devised in antiquity to depict cosmic mysteries. It showed a naked female dancing within an oval wreath, a flaming wand in each hand.

The card was probably stripped, Scarne thought. That just about summed up everything. A stripped universe.

There was a time-honoured loser’s prerogative. Scarne reached out and picked up one small chip. ‘Okay?’

Loder nodded. Scarne stood up.

‘Another time, perhaps.’

The black-jacketed seneschal bowed to him as he emerged from the card-room.

Scarne had a reason for knuckling under to Loder’s depradations. There was one thrilling explanation that did make sense.

For some time he had been trying to find his way to the inside of that vast, circumspect organization known as the Grand Wheel, controllers of chance and probability, in the gaming sense, over the whole of man-inhabited space. He knew that in a less sophisticated phase of its history the Wheel had practised a rough-shod method of recruitment. It would engineer the ruin of the prospect, leaving him bankrupt, threatened with imprisonment or violence; thus he would be made to feel the Wheel’s power even while forced to accept its protection, caught in a closed system from which there was no escape.

These days the Wheel had no need to take such measures. But it had a well-known love of tradition. Scarne believed Loder was a Wheel operative, going through ancient motions. If Scarne had behaved like a hick, denouncing Loder and showing that he understood events only in a simplistic sense, then his opportunity would be gone; he would be deemed too inflexible. Only if he gave some sign that he recognized the hidden level in the game might there be a further contact.

It was conceivable, of course, that Loder had somehow learned of Scarne’s long-term object and was perpetrating a double-bluff.

He could only wait and see.

A walk along a blue and gold corridor brought him to a balustraded balcony which overlooked the main gaming area. The tables and fermat machines were busy, bringing in the Wheel its eternal percentages. On one wall a huge number display flashed out sequences of multi-coloured digits. Over the exit glittered the Grand Wheel’s emblem, a slowly revolving spoked gold wheel.

The background music mingled with the calling of bets and made a meaningless din in his ears. He descended the stairway and wandered among the gaming machines. Idly he stopped at a table with a surface of coloured squares. He put Loder’s chip on the pale green. The table-top flickered and surged. The chip went down.

‘Hello, Cheyne. Anything upstairs worth getting into?’

Scarne turned on hearing the voice of Gay Millman, an acquaintance. ‘No, nothing,’ he said, and walked on.

Centuries ago, he reflected, an establishment like this one would have been filled with simpler mechanical devices, of which the roulette wheel, he supposed, was the archetype.

But that was before the advent of randomatics, the modern science of chance and number, had rendered all such devices obsolete. They were now regarded as primitive, almost prehistoric. Scarne could have walked into any old-style casino or gambling arcade and, armed with the randomatic equations, would have been guaranteed to win, moderately but consistently, over the space of an hour or two.

Randomatics rested on certain unexpected discoveries that had been made in the essential mystery of number. It had been discovered that, below a certain very high number, permutating a set of independent elements did not produce a sequence that was strictly random. Preferred sub-structures appeared in any ‘chance’ run, and these could be predicted. Only when the number of independent elements entered the billions – the so-called ‘billion bracket’ – did predictability vanish. This was the realm of ‘second-order chance’, distinguished from first-order chance in that it was chance in the old sense: pure probability, unadulterated by calculable runs and groupings.

The mythical system once sought by cranks and eccentrics became, therefore, a scientific fact. To meet this challenge the fermat, a new class of machine able to operate beyond the billion bracket, arose. Early versions had been comparatively crude affairs, following, perhaps, the path of a single molecule in a heated gas or counting out exploding atoms. As the randomatic equations, refined and extended, pushed back the billion bracket still further these, too, became obsolete. These days all fermats worked on the subatomic level, by manipulating the weak nuclear interaction, intercepting neutrinos, processing exotic artificial particles, or even tapping the source of true randomness below the quantum level. The innards of some of them were Wheel secrets.

Making for the exit, Scarne paused in the foyer, where there stood a row of a small type of fermat called the mugger. Muggers held a special fascination for Scarne, perhaps because of their ubiquity. Wherever one turned there was a mugger. They existed in their billions, all treated by Wheel mathematicians as a single stochastic organism with terminals spread over a hundred star systems. Not bad, Scarne thought, for something that had evolved from the ancient fruit machines and one-armed bandits.

He fumbled in his pocket for a coin and pressed it into the mugger. He touched the go-bar: a cloud of coloured dots twinkled silently on the gridded screen. It was like watching a structureless proto-galaxy, speeded up. Number, he thought. Number was what it was all about. What everything was all about. Number, plucked out of some unfathomable sub-universal source.

The sparks settled. Scarne scanned the grid slots.

Gold. Gold. Gold. And gold all along the line.

Stupefied, he stared at the golden points. As he did so, a soft conspiratorial voice issued from the base of the mugger.

‘Jackpot. You have won the jackpot.’

Scarne glanced around him. The Legitimacy government had long outlawed Wheel jackpots, though rumours persisted that they were still operated illegally – rumours which, given the nature of the odds, were hard to confirm. Some said the jackpot was an enormous sum of money. Others that it granted a secret wish.

The soft voice spoke again, directing him. ‘Take hold of the silver handles below the pay-off groove. The jackpot will then be delivered.’

Scarne broke out in a sweat as he looked for the handles, which to the uninitiated were merely part of the mugger’s florid decoration. Nervously he closed his fingers round them, his head reeling to think of the odds against this happening. One jackpot, perhaps, per billions, trillions of throws? It seemed impossible. Impossible? No, he reminded himself, nothing was impossible in a world of random numbers. Only improbable.

And then the jackpot hit him and it was nothing he could have guessed at or expected. The Wheel house dwindled from his consciousness. He was standing on the edge of a precipice. Below him was a raucous, roaring, boiling sea. Then the ground vanished from under his feet. He was falling. Down, down, down.

He was sinking, drifting, swimming through a vast shifting foam-like sea out of which abstract entities formed and dissolved without rhyme or order. He came to understand that he had dropped out of the realm of solid reality. He was in the awful other reality, the one he had been contemplating, dimly and theoretically, instants earlier. The gulf of pure randomness that underlay all of existence. The Great Profundity: a sea of non-causation, on which the universe of cause-and-effect, of structure, order, space and materiality, floated like scum on turbulent water.

Number.

The universe was made of number. The ancient Greeks had been the first to guess at that fact. Modern science, aided and abetted by randomatics, had confirmed it. And here it was: the source from which number flowed in an endless, utterly irrational stream. Before there was the atom, before there was the elementary particle, before there was h, the quantum of action, there was number.

Scarne understood the randomatic equations now in a way he never had before. But even those equations were dissolving, breaking up. Everything dissolved in this foam sea. It was a universal solvent beyond the wildest alchemical dreams, breaking down substance, idea, being itself. Even Scarne’s own consciousness was dissolving, in ecstasy and terror, into the endless flux…

Then it all vanished and substance returned. The silver handles were cool in Scarne’s sweating hands. The fermats glittered and flashed, ranked silver and red.

Vastness.

His experience had fouled up his sense of orientation. The impression of vastness, in particular, lingered, attaching itself to everyday objects. The blue wall to his left was, at a guess, the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The fermat before him was a titanic constrction soaring thousands of miles into the air. Above, the roof… the roof… he glanced up, and quickly looked away again, seeing a titanic moving assemblage of folds and colour alongside one of the fermats. It was a woman in a tan robe, thumbing in a coin, touching the go-bar, thumbing in a coin, touching the go-bar, on and on.

The vast perspective was not all. Everything around him seemed to have been translated from the concrete to the abstract, as though every vestige of meaning had been sucked out of the world. His consciousness had become over-sensitized. Sounds were hard to recognize, floating in the air around him without any identifiable source. Even the formerly pleasant music coming from the softspeakers had lost its tunefulness; it skirled on, atonal, surrealist, arbitrary.

A voice boomed to him across great cavities.

‘YOU ALL RIIIGHT, CHEYNEEEE?’

He made an effort at recognition. It was Gay Millman, his face so huge as to make his expression unreadable.

‘YOU LOOK PAAAALE…’

Scarne spoke. ‘YES I’M ALL RIIIIGHT…’ Each vibration of his voice was like the beat of a drum. He turned away from Millman and headed for the street, forcing himself to overcome his fear that he would fall over and topple thousands of miles to the floor.

Walking to the exit was like crossing space to another planet. Each step was a stride that crossed a continent. But eventually he stood outside, where he tried to normalize his sense of size and distance. It had been raining and the street was wet. He tried to tone down the sound of the traffic in his mind, and looked up at the black sky of Io. The towers of the town were outlined sharply against the big soft globe of Jupiter. It was too much. He closed his eyes painfully.

‘A moment if you please, friend.’

Scarne opened his eyes again. A thousand-mile-across face ballooned into view. Thin nose, pale skin, jaunty eyebrows all smeared from horizon to horizon.

Then, like a telescope suddenly re-focusing, his vision became normal. The face was human size. ‘Skode Loder,’ Scarne muttered. ‘You want me?’

‘His twin, as a matter of fact. Skode is still upstairs.’ The other flicked his fingers and conjured a card into his hand, giving it to Scarne. It was an introduction card, of the type used to make formal contact. A spoked gold wheel revolved slowly, given perpetual motion by electrolytic molecular printing. ‘Will you be at home at ten tomorrow?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Be there.’ The tone of his voice, the ritualized summons from the Grand Wheel, all implied a certainty that Scarne would be on call. Loder turned abruptly and mounted the steps into the gaming house.

Scarne set off down the street, still too bewildered to form any definite feelings. The illusion of giantism might have disappeared – if it could be called an illusion, size being relative – but the jackpot, the vision of ultimate probabilities, was still vivid in his mind. He was trenchantly aware that behind the glistening street, behind the moving cars and the glittering signs fronting the buildings, lay the almost mystic gulf of non-causation, invisible to the senses, invisible to the unaided mind, on which the world floated without apparent support. Pacing the sidewalk like a stricken man, he came to a corner where there was a news-vendor stand. A flash-sign glowed above the delivery slot: BIG DEFEAT IN HOPULA CLUSTER. LEGITIMACY FORCES REEL BEFORE HADRANIC HAMMER-BLOWS. But even this horrifying war news failed to catch his attention, and he passed by, walking through a ghost world.