ATDTDA (19): Something I was planning to get around to anyway, 542-544

[Paul Nightingale]

Kit "[finds] himself in some perplexity" when Pleiade vanishes. Happens all
the time. She has been replaced, however, by the "pale dressing-gown" that
seems to be occupied, even though "its movements, disquietingly, [are] not
always matched by those of its tall image in the mirror". In the previous
section Piet asked Pleiade to keep him busy (although 'his' identity wasn't
at that time revealed); and now Eugenie (previously she thought Kit was "an
American gunslinger", 529) calmly tells him he is "now a nihilist outlaw"
(543).

The nihilists tell him all they can do is wait for the inevitable (Fanou's
"sorrow of anticipation", 544). Piet's complaint about mathematicians
concerned their refusal to choose: mathematics always leads to suffering,
but its targets cannot be determined readily (541). The logic of
mathematics, or mathematical inquiry, is to bring it to a conclusion, or
resolution, relentlessly so: hence "chess is war in miniature ..." etc
(543).

Within a game of chess there is, at any time, a finite number of (legal and
illegal) moves available. Cf. Root's system in the casino, an attempt to
make gambling the same kind of exercise (ie, to exclude "random luck", 538).