Barrington Bayley - The Grand Wheel

Dom was indeed familiar with the scars. He had them himself, at shoulders and hips. Everyone of their age group had. ‘In that case science triumphed,’ Mheert continued. ‘Thanks to Legitimacy planning we were able to grow culture limbs from each victim’s body cells and graft them on. Chance was overcome. But another time—’

Dom laughed sourly. ‘Planning had nothing to do with it. It was luck . What if it had happened centuries earlier, when it wasn’t known how to switch off repressor genes in individual body cells? Then no limbs could have been grown. We would have had a generation with neither arms nor legs.’

‘We could still have managed with prosthetics. But granted, the disaster could have been worse. By the law of averages some such worse disaster awaits mankind at an unspecified date in the future – unless we learn how to eliminate these accidents . The war with the Hadranics is itself an accident, an interruption of our plans. Let’s see you try to gamble your way out of that one.’

Dom’s sour smile had not left his face. ‘Let’s see you plan your way out of it,’ he said.

The meeting proceeded little further. Men of diametrically opposed minds cannot discourse for long. Dom sat musing for a while after Premier Mheert departed. In one sense, he reflected, both of them worshipped the same thing: power. Unfettered, broad and absolute power.

Not for one moment had he expected Mheert to accede to his demand, even though the covenant, by its nature, would have been virtually unenforceable.

But it had been worth a try.

A few days later Dom was obliged to travel several thousand miles to the partly abandoned town of Voridnov, where he entered a large building so decrepit it was hard to believe it was still air-tight.

Within, he paused at the head of a flight of iron stairs, recovering his breath. It was a long climb, but tradition had to be respected; all who entered the room to which the staircase gave access had to get there on their own two feet – hence, there could be no elevator.

The armed vigils standing guard outside the steel door snapped to attention. He put them at ease with a wave of his hand.

‘Are all present?’

‘Yes, Chairman. All are here.’

He stepped forward. The door, responding to secret factors about his person, moved ponderously aside. He walked through a bare ante-room, and then into the dusty sacrosanct council chamber.

The eyes of the eleven men seated at the large circular table turned to meet him. He, Dom, made the twelfth. He took his place, his eyebrows lifted in private amusement. Twelve men of disparate character, he was thinking to himself, bound together in close brotherhood. Hadn’t that been so of another crucial time in history? But no, that would have to be thirteen if he, Dom, was to regard himself as the leader. And somehow he couldn’t think of himself as a Christ.

The chair grimed his clothes as he sat down. Everything in the council chamber was filthy. It was never cleaned: nobody was allowed in except for council members, and that was the way it had been for centuries here in this gutted building on the nether, unfashionable side of the Moon (Dom, like many fond lunarites, liked to refer to his adopted planet by its affectionate archaism, the Moon).

To call a full meeting a consensus of four voices was necessary. In this case the number had been six, which meant that Dom’s policy was being challenged. He was, however, sure of his five assenters.

His eyes glittered as they roved over his co-members. ‘Well, gentlemen, you have called this meeting, as is your right – or some of you have. Now, put your business.’

The first to speak was the tall, smooth, engaging Holt. ‘The business of the meeting is already known to you, Chairman. Some of us are doubtful about the coming project.’

‘So. And why?’

‘Think what we stand to lose!’

‘What has the Wheel come to?’ Dom said suavely. ‘I find it difficult to take you seriously. Are you afraid now of a little gamble? In my view, the odds are favourable.’

Pawarce, a thick-set man with hard, brutal eyes, took up the argument. ‘There’s another angle to this caper. Supposing this Pendragon animal is smarter than he seems? It could be that we are still being hustled – railroaded into playing a game where we’re out of our depth.’

This point had not escaped Dom. Essentially, he could only answer it in a pragmatic sense. ‘That is something we have to assess for ourselves as we proceed,’ he said. ‘If we feel suspicious, we can always withdraw. So far, I see nothing to indicate that we are being tricked. Safeguards can be arranged – are being arranged. I believe our opponents are as interested in testing our performance as we are in testing theirs.’

‘Then why don’t we play for smaller stakes, to begin with?’ Pawarce demanded harshly.

‘They are not interested in playing for pennies,’ Dom said mildly. ‘Come, gentlemen! Life was a gamble since the first amoeba crawled up out of the slime. Besides, if you want a better reason for abandoning your caution, consider this: the stakes we are putting into the game may shortly be valueless. I have recently received information from the Legitimacy which makes clear the imminent possibility of total defeat at the hands of the Hadranics. Think of that, when you tremble to risk what we have.’

But when the argument was over, minds remained unchanged. Attitudes had already been firmed up before the meeting took place. They took a vote. It was six to six.

Dom felt a sudden impatience with the dissenters. ‘Go and join the Legitimacy, you creeping tortoises,’ he thought. ‘Build a shell round yourselves, like them’. He rose from his place and stepped to the other side of the chamber, laying his hand on the dust-encrusted casing of a machine standing there.

‘The matter must move forward,’ he said stonily.

Everyone gazed at the machine in fascination. ‘Velikosk’s roulette?’ Pawarce rasped in a hushed tone. ‘But that thing hasn’t been used for fifty years.’

‘What matter? It is still in good order, and there is precedence. Unless someone wishes to change his vote.’

They all sat as if paralysed. With a nervous smile Dom lifted a flap of metal and slapped a switch. When he returned to his wrought-iron chair, to which the machine was connected as it was to all the others, he was calm. Gracefully, he sat down.

The Velikosk roulette machine hummed as it went into action. A flicker of light ran round the edge of the table, momentarily pausing at each man in turn. Hands gripped the table in unbearable nervous tension. Dom, however, was relaxed, facing whatever the future might bring with practised imperturbability.

Faster and faster ran the ghostly nimbus. Then, abruptly, it ceased to be. And the chair over which it had last flickered was empty. Its occupant had disappeared, sucked into the gulf of pure randomness that underpinned the universe.

This was the fifth time, Dom believed, that the Velikosk machine had been put to the purpose of resolving differences of opinion among the council of the Grand Wheel. Until recently no one had even remotely understood how it worked – Velikosk had never been able to explain it to anybody. Even now it was doubtful if it could be repaired should it break down, in which case a tradition would die.

The empty chair had been Pawarce’s.

‘I believe the vote will now prove to be six to five, gentlemen,’ Dom intoned calmly. ‘Shall we formalize it, or would you prefer to leave it at that?’

At the end of its descent from the orbiting team ship the planetary lander, a long gondola with a lifter engine at each end, settled on to the crumbling terraces amid a skirl of dust. When the air had settled, the door opened. Hakandra, followed by his constant companion, Shane the cold-senser, stepped out.