The Grand Wheel

THREE

The desert was bone-yellow. In the south a sun of a much brighter yellow, the colour of sulphur, hovered a third of the way between the horizon and the meridian, looking down on the temporary installations like a baleful eye.

A thin-faced youth, aged fifteen or sixteen, stared at the sun with sullen fear. Suddenly he shivered and tore his gaze away. ‘I’m cold!’ he yelped in a cracked voice. ‘Get me a cloak, you!’

The burly crewman he had addressed looked at him disdainfully. ‘Tell me, sonny, have you ever shaved?’

The youth flushed and rounded on Hakandra. ‘My price is doubled!’ he croaked. ‘I won’t take insults!’

Hakandra moved his hand placatingly. ‘Forget it, Shane. It was just a silly remark.’

‘Nevertheless it has doubled my price. Or do you think you can do without my services? All right then, do without them. I renounce my obligations as of now. Perhaps the sun is due to explode tomorrow, in the next hour, the next minute. Perhaps it has already begun to explode – I won’t tell you.’

‘Are you gonna let yourself burn up too?’ the crewman grunted. He walked away. Hakandra scowled after his retreating back, making a mental note to put in a disciplinary memo. He slipped off his own cloak and draped it round the shoulders of the shivering boy. In fact the air was not at all cold. The lad was suffering from nerves, as usual.

‘Let’s get back to the ship,’ he said. ‘No use our hanging around here.’

They set off up the slope towards the starship which rested on the crest of the hill. ‘Do you get any murmurs?’ Hakandra asked quietly.

‘No, it’s quiet.’

The youth walked in silence for a while, and then started whining. ‘Can’t we leave this Godforsaken hole? I don’t like it here… how much longer?’

‘No, Shane, we’re not leaving. We’ve a great deal of work to do yet. And please don’t let me hear any more talk about increasing your fee. That was all agreed back in Sol.’

‘You want my power to dry up, don’t you? You’re all of you going the right way about it to make my power dry up; it’s not absolutely reliable, you know. Where would you be then?’

‘Probably quite safe,’ Hakandra replied in a level voice. ‘But you’re not going to dry up, Shane – you’re not stupid. You know how important all this is.’ He stopped, looking around at the ochre sun and purple sky. ‘This is where the outcome of the war will be decided. Victory or defeat.’

They entered the big starship, riding an elevator up through its many decks. Hakandra sent Shane to rest in his quarters. Then he made his way to the com room.

Every day at about this time he spent a few minutes talking to other work-teams scattered about the Cave. As he entered the room the techs were accepting narrowbeams from here and there, holding them on-line. Hakandra sat down before a holo screen and had one put through to him. On the screen a lean face emerged, wearing a peaked uniform hat bearing Legitimacy markings. It was the leader of team D1.

The team leader’s face was bleak, wavering slightly, the narrowbeam vacillating over the vast distance. ‘There’s been a nova on the outward side,’ he told Hakandra. ‘Team K5 was there – without a cold-senser.’

‘No survivors, then?’ Hakandra responded after a moment, his heart sinking.

‘No time to do anything. It’s so sudden.’ The team leader sounded desperate. ‘It’s terrifying how fast these things can blow. A star burns steadily for billions of years and then, in the space of minutes—’ He broke off, sighing. ‘Perhaps they didn’t die in vain. The automatic stations carried on transmitting data right up to the instant they were vapourized. Perhaps we’ll learn something.’

Hakandra nodded. Knowledge of what made the stars in the Cave go nova at such a rate could be important in the impending struggle. As he had said to Shane, this was where the next stage of the war would be fought.

‘Any news from the front?’ he asked.

‘We’ve been routing whole streams of messages between there and High Command. There’s a big quarrel building up. The military people in the field are doing a good job of covering the evacuation, but Sol seems more concerned with getting out as many intact battleships as possible, and to hell with civilians.’

‘It’s a difficult decision,’ Hakandra said, aware that reserves were dangerously low.

After a few further desultory comments he left D1 and talked to some of the other teams working in the Cave. So far their surveys had uncovered several hundred usable planets and soon the Legitimacy was gomg to have to decide which to invest in and which to destroy.

Finally he killed the holo screen and sat brooding. The destruction of Team K5 had shaken him, despite himself.

What a hell of a place to have to make a stand, he thought: in the Cave, which to anyone brought up in Legitimacy philosophy was a region of horror, a bastion of the enemies chance and randomness.

The Cave of Caspar was so called not because it was empty, but because its thin scattering of stars made it comparatively empty. It had the form of a curved lozenge, bounded on its long sides by neighbouring spiral arms, and on the shorter ends by straggling limbs of stars that connected the spiral arms. It was now very nearly all that remained between the main bulk of human civilization and the advancing Hadranics; nearly all territory on the further side of the Cave had fallen, including the much-prized Hopula Cluster, and the thin margin of stars remaining were being hastily evacuated behind an improvised defensive screen.

To attack the central regions of man-inhabited space the Hadranics would have to cross this immensity, with its lack of cover and its dearth of worlds. A defensive strategy was slowly being worked out and soon fresh forces would move in to take up their positions. But there was a peculiar difficulty involved in any kind of activity in the Cave. All the stars there were unstable, liable to go nova at any time, without warning.

The reason for it was not understood – probably it had something to do with the unusual nucleonic resonance levels to be found in stellar material within the Cave. The problem was precisely identical to that of radioactive decay: one could calculate how many atoms would explode out of a given number in a given time, but it was impossible to say which particular atoms they would be. Yet it had been estimated that all stars in the Cave would have exploded in another hundred thousand years or less.

Grand Wheel operatives might feel more at home here, Hakandra thought sourly.

But the Legitimacy had found an answer – and that answer lay in people like Shane, a cold-senser. The term was a piece of jargon thought up by psychologists, mainly, Hakandra suspected, to cover up their own ignorance, but it meant that he was capable of perceptions that did not always have to be processed through the physical senses. More specifically, he had the ability to predict chance occurrences: how a pair of dice would fall, what number was due out of a sequence, even on a single throw.

He was an extreme example of what had once been known as a callidetic. For some years the Legitimacy had been nurturing people like him as part of its eternal struggle against the Grand Wheel. All cold-sensers were now, however, employed in the Cave: in some manner they were able to predict when a star was about to blow, even though normal scientific observation would detect no difference in its activity. They could give just enough warning for a getaway. Cold-sensers were not completely reliable and the protection they gave was not absolutely dependable; moreover they were hopelessly neurotic – over-stimulation of the thyroid gland was part of the treatment that heightened their talents – but it gave Hakandra a warm feeling to have one on his team.

After a while he left the com room and worked on some reports. Then he went up into the observation-room where he ate a sparse meal, afterwards sitting and watching the desert landscape through the glassite dome. The sun went down, its rim flickering and bubbling on the horizon in a way that made Hakandra nervous every night, even though it was only a trick of the atmosphere. Then the dark purple sky took over, filled with the misty swathe of the Milky Way and the great patches of darkness.

A sound came from behind him. Shane entered the room, picking his way through the semi-darkness to lean against the glassite and peer into the sky.

‘There was a nova over on the other side,’ Hakandra told him after a long silence.

Shane nodded calmly. ‘I’m not surprised. I had a… premonition. I thought there might be one going off somewhere…’

Hakandra glanced at the youth. All his former neurosis seemed to have vanished. Hakandra had seen this transformation before: when Shane lost the almost psychopathic aspects of his personality and became collected, almost angelically graceful. But now he seemed, at the same time, depressed and fatalistic.

‘The Cave is a terrible place,’ the boy murmured. ‘It’s cursed.’

Hakandra snorted. ‘Don’t be superstitious.’

‘I tell you it’s cursed. Lady has cursed it. How would you know? You have no sense for such things, but I can tell… It’s an accursed hole that the goddess has deserted. The very stars explode. Everything decays.’

Hakandra was disturbed to hear Shane talk in this religious way, smacking as it did of the mystique adopted by the Grand Wheel. ‘There is no goddess,’ he said curtly. ‘Put that nonsense out of your head.’

As the sky darkened there was a faint glow in the south. It came from some ruins Hakandra had visited. They were made of a light-retentive stone and glowed at night like phosphorescent bones. The race that had built them had died ages ago, when the planet dried up.

It was the same story all over the Cave, which was littered with the ruins of dead civilizations, as though the force that generated life was insufficient to enable that life to survive the hazards of existence. There was not one example, as far as was known, of a living intelligence still surviving in the Cave.

It almost persuaded Hakandra to believe in Shane’s pessimistic mysticism. But he shook off the mood. It was unfitting, in an officer of the Legitimacy.