The story made Niall shudder, and that night he woke from a nightmare in which he heard a noise outside the burrow and went out to confront a vast tarantula, tall as an organ-pipe cactus, with a double row of glittering yellow eyes and mandibles big enough to tear up a tree. Yet as soon as he was fully awake, the fear vanished. Ever since he was a child, Niall had been terrified of the idea of the spiders, rather as he might have been terrified of ghosts if he had ever heard of such things. But the knowledge that the spiders were not invincible, that Ivar the Strong and Skapta the Cunning had won spectacular victories against them, endowed them with a reality that was more complex and therefore less frightening. He was intrigued, for example, by the notion that Hallat had to teach the Spider Lord to understand the minds of human beings. Niall had never had to be taught to understand the minds of Ulf or Jomar, or even of the ants. There were moments when he knew what they were thinking or feeling just as if he was inside their heads. So if the spiders found it dificult to understand human beings, that suggested that their minds were totally different, as if they spoke another mental language. And — this was what filled him with a mixture of excitement and terror — if understanding the minds of men had made the spiders the masters of the human race, then would not the reverse also be possible? If men could understand the minds of spiders, could they not one day conquer the spiders?
The next day he set about trying to find the answer. Half a mile away there was a grove of huge pistacia trees, the home of grey desert spiders. When Niall arrived there not long after sunrise he saw that the lower branches of the trees were festooned with tiny webs; above them hung a white egg-sac, from which the babies had recently emerged. The larger web of the mother spider was scarcely visible among the higher branches.
As Niall took up his position in the shadow of a desert shrub, he was aware that the female spider had noticed his approach and was watching him carefully, hoping that he would walk under the tree and give her a chance to drop on his back. He sat there and tried to calm his mind into a state of relaxation, but it was difficult; the knowledge that he was being observed caused a persistent alarm bell to ring in his subconscious mind.
Then a large bluebottle buzzed past, pursued by a robber fly. The robber fly, a large, yellow creature not unlike a wasp, attacked its prey on the wing, pouncing like a hawk; but its first attack had evidently been a failure. The panic-stricken bluebottle swerved upward to avoid the tiny webs spun by the newly-hatched spiders and blundered straight into the web of the mother; the robber fly, too late to change direction, also flew into the sticky silk. A moment later, the grey mother spider, hardly able to believe her luck at this double catch, scuttled swiftly down the web to truss the prey with threads of silk. Then she became aware that the nearest of the two victims was the dangerous robber fly, with his long, pointed snout that could inject a powerful nerve poison. She paused, clinging to the vibrating web as the two insects struggled to tear themselves free by sheer force. The bluebottle almost succeeded, but as five of its six legs freed themselves from the sticky fibres, it keeled sideways and its wing was caught.
Watching all this with total absorption, Niall experienced the sense of deep relaxation that had escaped him a few minutes earlier. He concentrated; the spark glowed inside his head, and suddenly he was picking up the vibrations of terror from the bluebottle and the anger of the robber fly. The robber fly was a far more courageous creature than the bluebottle, and its reaction to its situation was a determination to make someone pay dearly for this indignity. Aware of the watchful gaze of the mother spider, it was saying, in effect: Come near me and I’ll pierce a hole right through you. . . And the mother, accustomed to inspire panic, was disconcerted by this blast of defiance.
Niall could sense her uncertainty; but when he tried to place his mind behind her eyes, he found it puzzling. It was almost as if there was nothing there. He tried again — this time so persistently that the spider might have sensed his presence if she had not been so totally occupied by her more immediate problem.
Now he became aware that, in the branches of the next pistacia tree, another female spider was watching the conflict with interest. Niall tried to place himself on her wavelength, to see the world through her eyes. Again, there was the same puzzling sense of emptiness. At this point, the furious struggles of the robber fly distracted his attention, and his concentration broke. It was several minutes before he felt able to renew the mental effort. And this time, his clumsy attempt to place himself behind the eyes of the watching spider made her suddenly aware of what was happening. He felt her attention sweep around in a probing beam, trying to detect the intruder. Unable to see Niall — who was concealed by the shrub — her watchfulness gave way to alarm. And then, for the first time, Niall began to understand why he found it so hard to pick up the mental vibration of the spider. Its mind was almost as passive as a vegetable. It seemed to exist in a twilight world of pure watchfulness. By comparison, the bluebottle and the robber fly seemed whirlpools of noisy, aggressive energy. And because her mind was so passive, the spider was also aware of the turbulent life energies of her victims.
Suddenly, he understood. The spider spent its whole life in the corner of a web, waiting for passing insects. For her, the vibrations of the web were almost a form of speech; each one was like a word. She had nothing to do but wait passively, studying the thousands of vibrations that surrounded her -. the living vibrations of the tree, the vibrations of insects tunnelling in the roots, the impersonal vibration of the wind in the leaves, the strange, throbbing vibration of the sunlight beating down through the atmosphere like a great engine. The spider had been aware of his presence long before he came within sight of the trees, for the vibrations of a human being are as loud as the hum of a bee.
At the same time, Niall understood how the death spiders could control other creatures by the will alone. Merely to look at something is to send out a beam of will. Niall could recall many times when he thought he was alone but had an uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched — and turned round to find that someone was looking at him. This was why the grey spider felt uncomfortable when he tried to probe her mind — his will had reached out to touch her like a hand.
Spider consciousness was almost pure perception. The spider is the only living creature that spends its life lying in wait, hoping that victims will walk into its trap. All other creatures have to go out and seek their food. So spiders have developed the ability to turn perception into a beam of pure will. As a fly buzzed through the air, the watching spider tried to will it into its web. . .
Then why were these grey desert spiders relatively harmless? His intuition told him the answer. Because they were quite unaware that they used will-power to lure flies into the web. When they willed a fly to change direction and blunder into the trap, they believed it was an accident. The death-spiders had become masters of the earth when they learned that the will-force can be used as a weapon.
What happened next was an object lesson in the power of the unconscious will. The spider returned to the corner of its web and moved round to the other side, so that the robber fly was no longer between itself and the bluebottle. As the spider advanced onto the web, the bluebottle hurled itself into a frenzy of activity, so that it almost tore itself free: but in its panic, its other wing became glued to the web. Now, as the spider came closer, its eyes fixed on its prey, the fly suddenly collapsed into momentary exhaustion. Swiftly, the spider threw a strand of silk across its body, then another, binding it to the web. A few minutes later, the fly was little more than a cocoon. And, as it struggled in the web, the robber fly experienced an increasing conviction that it was also doomed — a conviction that was almost entirely due to the gentle but demoralising pressure of the spider’s will. In fact, the robber fly was still dangerous; it had enough freedom of movement to defend itself from almost any angle; one thrust of that poisonous snout would have paralysed the spider in the centre of its own web. Yet when the spider had finished trussing the bluebottle, and moved towards the robber fly with a sinister air of deliberation, the fly merely watched its approach and, after one more desperate attempt to tear itself free, allowed itself to be trussed into a bundle. For a moment, Niall’s mind entered the stream of its consciousness, and he was appalled by its exhaustion and defeat. As he withdrew his mind, it was like waking from a nightmare.