The Grand Wheel

FIVE

The cards in Scarne’s hand each carried two symbols: a number and a geometrical figure, either a triangle, a square, a pentagon or a six-pointed star. It was the combination of the two that gave the card its value – in fact, each card had three values, according to the situation it found itself in. There were no such things as suits: neither numbers nor figures could be grouped together. They had to be set off one against the other by a process of rapid mental arithmetic.

Scarne had come across a deck similar to this one before, but the game he was playing was entirely new, and superbly difficult. It was a game within a game, a game whose rules were themselves subject to the game. Any player could, if he held the right cards, change the rules of the game, his own cards, his opponents’ cards, the other players. Nothing could be known with certainty. The rules were hierarchical, each subject to others in an ascending series, producing dizzying problems of strategy.

Scarne was sweating, his powers of calculation stretched to the limit. The cards he was holding had just had their relative values suddenly inverted by a switch in the method of counting. The past hour’s hard playing had been for nothing.

And now worse disasters were piling up. The cards were mutating in his hand, taking on even lower values. He reached out to pick up another card from the pile, but as he did so he saw that the faces of the other players were changing, too, becoming different personalities.

They laid their cards face up on the table, left their chairs and walked away. Then Scarne noticed that his own hand, frozen over the deck, was unfamiliar, dark brown in colour. Without realizing it he, too, had become someone else.

At that moment the small room faded. Scarne was sitting in a bucket seat in the Make-Out, gripping two silvery rods in his hands. Cadence was lifting the inductor cap from his skull. She rolled away the games machine.

‘I lost,’ Scarne gasped hoarsely.

Sitting behind him in the corner, Soma grunted. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t win them all.’

‘Who the hell was I playing?’

‘Nobody. You were playing a computer. You did pretty well, for a first game.’

Scarne took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Is that game actually played here in the club? Played that well?’

‘We’re all being hard on you to begin with.’ Jerry Soma stood up and stretched, his lank form stepping across the room. ‘We have to get your measure, Cheyne. We have to see how far you can stretch your mind.’ He gestured to Cadence. She opened a wall panel and wheeled out another identity machine.

The machines were something new to Scarne. Soma had told him they were used for playing games whose elements transcended physical reality, like the one Scarne had just played. In other words they blotted out the physical perception of the world and replaced it with fictional, constructed environments induced into the brain electrically. The principle was similar to that used in dispensing mugger jackpots. But Soma had been circumspect when Scarne had asked to what extent the machines were used in the club.

‘This machine is probably the nearest we can get to that experience of yours with the jackpot,’ Soma told him. ‘The nearest I know about, anyway.’ He frowned. ‘You’ll lose your identity entirely, so keep a cool head.’

‘Who will I become?’ Scarne asked apprehensively.

‘Not who. What.’

Before Scarne could open his mouth to speak again Cadence had jammed another skull-cap on his head and guided his hands to the silver bars, completing the circuit.

For an instant Scarne lost consciousness. When he awoke it was with only a vague recollection of his previous existence.

He was a number.

He was number 1413721. As a number, he was like an amoeba, able to arrange himself in any pattern of which that number was capable: all its factors, arrays and subsets. When these were arranged in columns they were like his limbs, which he could put out and withdraw at will.

Consciousness of being 1413721 was really all the consciousness he had. He knew that he even had a degree of rarity: he was one of the few numbers to be both a square and a triangular number. But he could sense, in a kind of void or nullity all around him, countless other numbers, many of them more powerful than he, with all kinds of extraordinary properties.

The numbers were jostling for position.

The game was about to begin.

But while number 1413721 waited to discover the nature of this game, he became aware of a massive presence which circled them all like a cosmic snake, and he shrank back. The presence was of a creature of second-order chance; as such, it was infinitely superior to the merely rational numbers gathering to begin play. It was capable of swallowing them all, and there was no escape from it.

This great serpent, this incalculable dragon, was pi, a transcendental number, yielding, when expressed in decimal notation, an infinite table of random numbers. As awareness of this transcendental entity overwhelmed his own awareness, 1413721 experienced terror. He began to disintegrate, to decay like an unstable particle…

Babbling and shaking, Scarne felt the skull-cap snatched from his head. His hands were unable to let go the silver bars and gripped them compulsively as if in electric shock.

Cadence prised them loose. Scarne swung round in his bucket seat. Soma, wearing the monitor cap, looked stunned.

Tearing the monitor cap from his head, the Wheel man stood up and towered over Scarne. His voice was harsh. ‘What did you think you were doing, Scarne? What happened to you in there, for Lady’s sake?’

‘I don’t know. I got scared.’

‘Scared? Scared of what?’ Soma seemed angry and impatient.

‘Pi. I got swallowed up by pi.’ Scarne tried to stop shaking. ‘I was a number. Just an ordinary little rational number, and then I met up with pi.’

Soma calmed down and became thoughtful. He paced the training-room.

‘Have you ever experienced anything like this before?’

‘Like being a number?’

‘Yes.’

Scarne hesitated. ‘Well, as a mathematician I’m used to contemplating mathematical concepts like numbers. Trying to get inside the essence of some particular number, for instance. I suppose that’s what the numbers identity machine does for you.’

Soma nodded. ‘It identifies your attention with a particular number – any number – but at the same time it removes your own identity. You’re just left with the number.’ He paused. ‘Pi. Fermats use it, don’t they? As a basis for randomness.’

‘Most of them. In fact many fermats spend their time calculating pi indefinitely.’ Scarne was alarmed by the puzzlement on Soma’s face. ‘What’s wrong? Wasn’t I supposed to meet pi?’

‘No.’

‘Does the machine use that number, itself?’

‘I believe pi plays some role in the mechanism. But not in the games arena – the part your mind had access to.’

‘Maybe there’s a fault in the machine.’

‘More likely your imagination’s overworked.’ Soma shrugged. ‘I’ll have it checked over. Meantime we’ll call it a day. You look overwrought.’

He glanced back as he strode from the room. ‘See he gets some rest, Cadence.’

Scarne rose shakily from his chair and followed Cadence to a cubicle which took them back to his apartment. She looked at him sympathetically as she switched on lights for him.

‘You do look bushed at that.’

‘It’s been a harder day than I realized,’ Scarne admitted. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night, either.’

‘You’d better hit the sack. And don’t worry; you did all right.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You did marvellously, in fact.’ She smiled, glancing up and down at him, and left.

Exhausted, he undressed and dropped into bed, falling instantly asleep.

He was awakened hours later by the sound of someone moving near him. The coverlet was lifted. A girl’s naked body slipped in beside him.

‘How are you feeling now?’ Cadence’s voice said softly.

‘Better,’ he said sleepily. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘My room’s right next to yours. Didn’t I tell you? I’m supposed to keep you happy. All part of the service.’

‘I thought you were Soma’s girl.’

‘Jerry? No.’ She chuckled, a trifle bitterly. ‘He has other girls, not like me at all.’

Her hand stroked his chest. ‘Look,’ Scarne said, half-turning to her, ‘you don’t have to. If you don’t want.’

‘Suppose I do want?’ she said impishly, her hand straying lower. ‘Never let it be said my heart’s not in my job.’

He reached out and ran his hand over her body. She was not bad, quite cute; a little bit flabby, not too much.

They pressed themselves into one another’s arms.

During the next few days Scarne continued his training at the Make-Out Club. Soma kept him off the numbers machine; but he practised on the other identity machines, gradually improving his performance.

He was not always sure if he was engaged in pure practice runs or in actual games with outside players. Sometimes, though, Soma used him on club business, holding the bank in in-the-flesh games or entering as an additional player. Scarne slowly learned how the Grand Wheel operated from the inside.

None of the club’s real business, however, seemed to warrant the process Soma was putting him through. It was as if Scarne was being tested against some other more advanced standard.

Soma’s own remarks came seldom, but as far as they went he seemed satisfied with Scarne’s progress. ‘You’re more of a technician than a pure gambler,’ he said to him once.

‘Is that bad?’ Scarne asked.

‘Not at all. It means maybe we can use you. There are two kinds of players, the technician and the instinctive player, the guy that takes all the risks, who has flair. Take a partnership game, like bridge. A technician won’t give away anything, but he won’t bring in much, either. He’s the main defence. But he has to be complemented by an offensive player, a real gambler who takes the initiative. They need each other.’

‘Why does that mean, you can use me? Use me for what?’ He makes it sound as if they’re trying to get into something, he thought. But the Wheel already is everything.

The nearest Soma came to giving an answer was two days later, when he called Scarne to his office. ‘I put in a report about what you told me happened on the jackpot,’ Scarne said. ‘Also about the incident on the numbers machine. You’re to go to Luna. There are people there want to talk to you.’

‘The mathematical cadre?’

‘I guess so.’ Soma paused, then looked at Scarne with burning black eyes. ‘All I know is I’m to send you to the demesne of Marguerite Dom. You’re going right to the top.’