We descended from the cloud-covered area as if we were going down a mountain slope. But still there was no real sense of motion. I simply sat on my invisible sedan chair and watched the world flow past me. Down a long trail we went and out onto the grassy floor of a broad valley. Tall spreading shade trees followed the meandering course of a river. The water gleamed in the light of the high sun, shining warmly yellow in the blissfully blue sky. A few chubby clumps of cumulus cloud floated serenely overhead, throwing dappled shadows across the tranquil green valley.
I searched that peaceful blue sky for a dark red point of light, the color of dried blood. Sheol. I could not find it. Did it exist in this time? Or was it merely below the horizon?
In the distance I saw a shimmering golden dome, and as we neared it I realized that it was gauzily transparent, like looking through a fine mesh screen of gold. Under its beautifully elegant curve there was a city, but a city such as I had never seen before. Tall slender spires stretching heavenward, magnificent colonnaded temples, steep ziggurats with stairs carved into their stone sides, wide plazas flanked by gracefully curved arcades, broad avenues decorated by statuary and triumphal arches.
My breath caught in my throat as I recognized one of the magnificent buildings: the Taj Mahal, set in its splendid garden. And a giant statue that had to be the Colossus of Rhodes. Facing it, the green-patinaed Liberty. Further on, the main temple of Angkor Wat gleaming in the sunlight as if newly built.
All empty. Unpopulated. As I rode my invisible chair of energy through the immaculate city with the Golden One striding unceremoniously ahead of me, I could not see a single person. Not a bird or cat or any sign of habitation whatever. Not a scrap of paper or even a leaf drifting across the streets on the gently wafting breeze.
At the farther end of the city stood towers of gleaming chrome and glass, straight-edged blocks and slabs that rose tall enough to look down on all the other buildings.
Into the tallest of these the Golden One led me, through a wide atrium of polished marble and onto a gleaming steel disk that began ascending slowly the instant he stepped onto it. Faster and faster it rose, whistling through the open atrium toward the glassed-in roof. The atrium was ringed with balconies whizzing past us at dizzying speed until all of a sudden we stopped, without a jerk or bump, without any feeling of deceleration at all.
The disk drifted to a semicircular niche in the balcony that girdled this level and nestled up to it. The Golden One stepped onto the balcony without a word, and I followed as if carried by invisible slaves.
He led me to a door, opened it, and stepped inside. As I followed him through the doorway a tingle of memory flickered through me. The room looked like a laboratory. It was crowded with vaguely familiar machines, bulky shapes of metal and plastic that I half remembered. In its center was a surgical table. The invisible hands that held me lifted me to its surface and laid me out upon it.
Whether I was too weak to move or held down by those invisible hands of energy, I could not tell.
“Sleep, Orion,” commanded the Golden One in an annoyed tone.
My eyes closed immediately. My breathing slowed to the deep regular rhythm of slumber. But I did not fall asleep. I resisted his command and remained alert, wondering if I was doing this of my own volition or if Set was controlling me.
It seemed like hours that I lay there unmoving, unseeing. I heard the faint hum of electrical equipment now and then, little more. No footsteps. No sounds of breathing except my own. Was the Golden One still in human guise, or had he reverted to his true form while his machines examined me?
I felt nothing during all that time except the solidity of the table beneath me. Whatever probes were being put to my body were not physical. The Golden One was scanning me, examining me remotely atom by atom, the way an orbiting spacecraft might examine the planet turning beneath it.