Free The Glass of Dyskornis by Randall Garrett

can’t see how it would be, living off by yourself with no other Riders”.
    “Let’s just say I’m glad to be here now,” I said, and lifted my glass of barut. “Health.”
    “And wisdom,” they echoed. We drained the tiny glasses, then Bareff broke out the
mondeana
, the dice-like playing pieces of the game.
    There were six mondeana, cubes cut from some hard wood, with different shapes carved into each two-inch-square side. The carvings had been stained or dyed with different colors to emphasize their detail, and though the surfaces showed signs of wear, the colors were still bright. The figures were men, animals, birds, trees, an image of an oat-like grain, and a symbol I had seen on the map Thanasset had given me to guide me to Thagorn. The symbol represented a Refreshment House.
    The rules of the game were complex and challenging, and I understood why Markasset had been fascinated by it. Each of the thirty-six figures had a different rank, and the total score of a throw depended not only on which sides turned up, but where they were positioned. The object of the game was not to achieve the highest score, but an exact one. The player had many choices to make, and there was at least as much skill as luck involved in winning a game.
    I was surprised that Bareff and Liden didn’t insist on betting. They explained, with elaborate modesty, that they wouldn’t allow me to lose my money to a pair of pros.
    My first impulse was to let Markasset take over as we played, thinking his experience with the game would make for faster, surer playing. Then I recalled his record of losses in Worfit’s gaming houses, and decided I’d struggle through on my own. I had a good command of the rules, thanks to Markasset’s memory, but I tried to learn the game’s strategy from ground zero. By the end of the evening, I was winning an occasional round.
    I’ve said that I
tried
to get drunk. Along about the fifth round of barut, I was feeling pleasantly relaxed and detached from the world. I accepted another glass to keep the high going, but found that I couldn’t make myself drink it. Something inside was saying:
This is not good for you. Don’t do it.
    I realized, at once, that this was another manifestation of the Gandalaran “inner awareness.”
    Gandalarans are highly tuned to their own body needs and rhythms. I always
knew
, within minutes, what time of day it was, and when the sun or moon would rise or set. Hural, the four-fingered man Dharak and I had questioned, had
known
that he would die, shortly, of his consumptive cough.
    On the ride from Raithskar to Thagorn, I had begun to see a connection between inner awareness and the All-Mind. According to the explanation Thanasset had given me, all Gandalarans were linked, at least subconsciously, with all the experiences of thousands of years of other Gandalarans. It seemed to me that there might be an automatic search-and-report hookup. The body says to the All-Mind:
I feel this way
, or,
Light and temperature are like this.
The All-Mind then locates all identical feelings among its members and tabulates the events subsequent to the conditions described by the body. It comes up with:
You will hate yourself in the morning if you drink another glass of barut
, or,
In two hours and six minutes, it will be noon.
It’s naming probabilities based on similar experiences. Given a large enough sample, it’s most likely right, nearly all the time.
    The inner awareness seemed to be a pretty good deal, in general. But it was a handicap for me, whenever I returned to the unanswerable puzzle about where Gandalara was located. It assured a viewpoint that was incontrovertibly subjective.
    I knew that there was no place like Gandalara on the Earth as I had known it. I might have conceded the possibility of an undiscovered salt desert like the Kapiral, but you could never convince me that, even with the Earth’s extensive cloud cover, our satellite surveillance could have missed the Great