Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

Niall said: “That’s amazing!” Gerek smiled, obviously pleased. “But how can my thoughts change what is happening?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of the karvasid’s early inventions. I don’t understand the principle behind it.”

Niall stood aside and invited the captain to look. After a moment’s hesitation, the spider peered through the round hole. His body suddenly became rigid, and Niall knew that he had found himself standing on the moonlit road.

A few seconds later, the captain also reset the machine. This time, the eyes around the back of his head closed, obviously to enable him to concentrate better. Niall was curious about what had interested him. Then it came to him: the cat. The captain was looking at it as a potential meal. The thought made him smile.

Niall asked Gerek: “Could I make it do anything I wanted? Make the moon fall out of the sky or the trees walk along the road?”

“Certainly. It responds to your imagination.”

Something in the way Gerek said this made Niall realize that he found it all rather boring. He probably had looked into all these “reality machines” dozens of times.

When he looked into the machine in the next booth, Niall understood why, after their initial surprise, no one paid much attention to the spider. The label on the booth said “Korsh,” and inside the machine was an exact representation of the main avenue of the spider city — the one that ran south out of the square — with spider webs stretched overhead, and slaves and female overseers on the crowded pavements. Niall found himself standing on the curb, and had to admit that it all looked totally real. As he stood there, a spider dropped out of its web, seized a slave, and carried him aloft.

Niall said to Gerek: “This is out of date. Spiders are no longer allowed to eat human beings.”

Gerek looked surprised, but said nothing.

Entering again this panoramic scene, with the river in the background, Niall was struck by another inaccuracy. The female overseers had been coarsened and robbed of some of their femininity. These women were beautiful, but also looked ill-natured and stupid. They strutted around looking as if they might beat and trample on a slave out of sheer spite.

Niall thought he began to understand. The inhabitants of Shadowland were allowed to familiarize themselves with the spider city, but it was represented in such a way that they felt no envy for its inhabitants. It looked overcrowded and dangerous.

They strolled between rows of booths, and Niall paused frequently to read the labels. Warfare seemed very popular, and at least two dozen machines were dedicated to great battles of history including Salamis, Actium, Agincourt, Lepanto, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and many Niall had never heard of. As he passed these machines, Niall could hear the thunder of cannon, the shouts of charging armies, and rousing military music. The men who peered into them were obviously soldiers, and some wore blue and red military uniforms. It was apparent from their total stillness that each was physically present on the battlefield.

Many of the machines were twice as wide as the others and had two seats attached. These were clearly designed for couples, and without exception they were occupied. Gerek explained that they enabled couples to share adventures, and that many of the men and women who gazed into them were strangers to one another.

The sheer number and variety of the dream machines was overwhelming — it would have been possible to spend weeks in this vast hall. It also became clear that the machines presented the citizens of Shadowland with an outlet for every kind of impulse and daydream. By merely looking through a circular aperture, they could experience virtually anything: forests, rivers, mountains, strange cities, bizarre landscapes, mythical creatures, amazing love affairs, heroic battles, even voyages around the solar system.

Other machines were devoted to extraordinary surrealistic fantasies. Niall was particularly amused by a giant naked woman who seemed to be built of bricks, and who ate houses as if they were cream cakes. And the captain was obviously fascinated by a swamplike dreamscape with indeterminate creatures who changed continually from plants to reptiles to birds, animals, insects, and crustaceans, while never being wholly one or the other. Niall found its landscapes oddly repellent and oppressive, but the captain stood in front of it for a quarter of an hour without stirring. It made Niall realize how little he understood the spider mentality.

They had been inside the Hall of Entertainment for more than an hour, and Niall’s appetite for its amazing variety was beginning to flag out of mere fatigue. So when Gerek asked if he was ready to leave, he nodded.

Next to the exit there was a bright, silver-colored machine that was slightly larger than the others. As they approached, the man who was peering into it turned around, and Niall saw that this face was glistening with sweat. Niall asked Gerek: “What’s that?”

“That is a new exhibit. It is for testing the power of the will.”

“How does it do that?”

“Why not try it?”

Hesitantly, Niall peered into the machine, then sat down. He immediately felt himself drawn into its powerful ambience, as if by a kind of suction. This suction did not operate on his body, but somehow on his perceptions.

He found himself looking at two glittering railway tracks that extended about fifty feet toward a square red building, into which they disappeared.

The illusion took about a minute to build up, like a picture that was completed piece by piece. Niall then realized that he was standing on a platform, beside a red trolley whose metal wheels rested on the tracks. A small door stood open. After a moment of hesitation, Niall obeyed his impulse to climb in and sit down on a wooden seat. As soon as he pulled the door closed behind him, the trolley began to move toward the red building. Two doors swung inward to admit it, and he found himself inside a kind of hut whose brightly colored walls were covered in pictures of the planets. A soft and soothing music was playing out of small holes in the walls.

The wagon stopped, and a metal band passed around Niall’s waist, confining him to the seat. Then the trolley moved smoothly toward a blank red wall. But just before it was about to strike it, two more doors slid open, and Niall found himself perched on top of a slope that plunged downward toward a small blue lake that covered the tracks, and then steeply upward again, and around a curve. A moment later, the trolley was moving down the tracks at an increasing speed toward the water. Niall felt a surge of alarm, even though he knew this was an illusion, and that he was actually standing in front of a machine.

He closed his eyes as the trolley, now traveling faster than he had ever traveled in his life, swooped into the water. The was a tremendous splash, and a wall of water surged into the air; he could feel drops of icy-cold water on his face. When he opened his eyes, the trolley was hurtling up the slope, slowly losing speed. It swept round a curve, pulling him sideways in his seat and pressing him tight against the metal band. When he opened his eyes again, the trolley was at the top of another slope, at the bottom of which a cavern straddled the line. Again, they plunged down, and he ducked his head to avoid the low entrance. Then he was in a roaring darkness, deafened by the clamor of the iron wheels.

He was surrounded by a purple glow, and saw ahead of him a white giant wielding a scythe. He ducked frantically, and the scythe passed over his head, brushing his hair and causing bits of hair to fall down his cheeks. Then they were traveling along a curving track that followed a hilltop, in a tumultuous wind. Dim lights enabled him to see the steep sides of a slope that plunged down to the sea. Huge breakers were rolling in, surging up the slope, and turning into spray only a few feet below where Niall was sitting, so he could feel the spume. Again, he had to soothe his rising panic by telling himself that all this was an illusion. Yet when he tried to become conscious of his body standing in front of the dream machine, he failed. He was only aware of himself sitting in the trolley, held tightly in his seat by a metal band. It was like being trapped in a nightmare.

They were roaring around another bend and down a slope. A great breaker swept in, struck the slope, and surged up toward him. Cold water dashed against him, soaking his clothes and taking his breath away. Then they were plunging down again, this time toward a forest, in which two giants were swinging hatchets at a tree. The tree fell, and Niall closed his eyes in horror as it landed across the track. But long branches prevented it from touching the ground, and the trolley hurtled out of the other side of the branches.