With a clarity amounting to a perception, Niall’s mind conjured up an image of an exhausted wolf spider lying sprawled in the sunlight, a trickle of pale blood running from its maimed foreleg on to the deck of the ship, and he suddenly knew beyond all doubt that his intuition had found the answer. Pleasure and gratitude rose in him like a bubble. The perception that luck was on his side produced a curious inner calm. He mounted the steps unhurriedly, looked to right and left to make sure that the road was empty, then crossed the street like a man going about his legitimate business.
The houses facing the river had been impressive structures, now crumbling into disrepair; the cracked pavements were covered with a debris of broken glass and decaying concrete. Here also he saw for the first time the disintegrating shells of rusty automobiles, many with helicopter attachments that gave them the appearance of dead winged insects. In the southern part of the city, most windows and doors were still intact; here the window apertures were empty and the doors that remained hung off their hinges. The slave quarter looked as if it had been vandalised by an army of destructive children.
The main avenue, which ran down from the bridge, was overhung with cobwebs, which in places were so thick that they seemed to form a canopy; an instinct warned Niall not to venture beneath them. Instead, he entered a building whose worn façade still carried an inscription: Global Assurance Corporation, and picked his way across a grimy marble floor littered with lath and plaster, and down a series of corridors that led into a narrow street. He peered out cautiously and withdrew his head immediately; about thirty feet above his head, a death spider was repairing its web. He blocked the flash of alarm before it began and retreated into the corridor.
The nearest room contained some broken furniture and its door had been propped against a cupboard next to the empty window aperture. By moving into the space between the door and the cupboard, Niall was able to command a good view of the street and to watch the spider in its patient work of repair. Half an hour later, he heard the first sounds of life: voices, the sound of footsteps and the banging of doors. Across the street, he could see people moving about behind the first-floor window aperture. A woman with large breasts and grotesquely thick legs strolled down the street, making soft crooning noises. He noticed that she walked under the spider web with no sign of nervousness.
The noise increased and as the sun rose high enough to penetrate the narrow street, children appeared on the pavements, many of them chewing lumps of grey-coloured bread. Some of them shouted, or ran about, laughing; most seemed to be quiet and apathetic. Niall observed the prevalence of low foreheads, flat cheekbones and narrow, slit-like eyes. One heavily-built boy with a club foot approached a small fat girl and tore her food out of her hand. She began to wail loudly, but no one paid any attention; the boy leaned against the wall a few feet away, and ate the bread. Then he approached another child who had just walked into the street, and once again snatched the food from her hands. This child tried to snatch it back; whereupon the boy pushed her in the chest with such force that she staggered across the road. Yet other children sat in doorways or on the edge of the pavement and went on eating stolidly, making no attempt to hide their food.
One small boy ran down the middle of the street, flapping his arms as if he were a bird, and making chirping noises. As he ran under the newly-repaired cobweb, he paused and looked up at it. Then, to Niall’s astonishment, he bent down, picked up a piece of wood, and hurled it into the air. It curved downward again long before it struck the web. The child threw it again; this time it went slightly higher. Then the boy with the club foot, who had finished eating, picked up the wood and hurled it with all his force into the air. This time it struck the cobweb, and stuck there. Then, so quickly that it made Niall start, the spider fell from the sky on its length of thread and pounced on the small child. Niall expected to see the fangs sink into the bare flesh. Instead, the child shrieked with laughter as the spider rolled him on the ground; many other children joined in. And a few moments later, the spider rose into the air on its lifeline of web, while the child jumped up and ran away. Niall found it all totally baffling. The spider had obviously been playing with the child.
Niall’s damp clothes were becoming uncomfortable, and when a child peered in through the window and stared at him with curiosity, he decided there was no point in further concealment and walked out into the street. No one paid him the slightest attention. The spider overhead had now started to build another web, apparently oblivious to what was happening below. Only the boy with the club foot gave him a glance that made him feel uneasy — a look that was at once hostile and mocking.
The thought mirror sharpened his senses, making his observation preternaturally keen. He noticed that the slave quarter was full of smells, both pleasant and unpleasant; the smells of cooking mingled with the odour of rotten fruit and sewage. The gutters were full of abandoned scraps of food as well as all kinds of domestic rubbish. There were also, he soon discovered, non-human inhabitants of the slave quarter. As a child threw down a large piece of bread, a bird swooped past his head and snatched it up. And in a shadowy, deserted alleyway, he saw a large grey rat feeding on a smashed watermelon. It glanced at him with its sharp little eyes, decided he could be ignored, and went on eating. A fraction of a second later, a spider plunged from the sky and landed squarely on the rat; the animal had time only for a pathetic squeak before the fangs plunged home. A few seconds later, spider and rat had vanished. It had all happened so swiftly that Niall had no time for fear, or even astonishment. He glanced up nervously at the overhanging web, into which the spider had vanished, and hurried on.
Passing an open doorway a few moments later, his nostrils detected a more sinister smell — rotting meat. He paused, hesitated, then stepped into the shadowy interior, treading with caution on broken floorboards. The source of the stench was immediately apparent — a decaying corpse lying in one corner of the room. It was little more than a skeleton, a few disintegrating fragments of grey slave garments covering the rib cage; maggots crawled out of the empty eye sockets. The cause of death — a great block of masonry that had fallen through the ceiling — lay close to the cracked skull. Niall repressed a desire to be sick and hastened back into the street.
The slave quarter was dirty, overcrowded and apparently totally disorganised. Many buildings were burnt-out shells; others looked as if a vigorous push would bring their walls tumbling down. Inhabited buildings were easy to distinguish because they were in a less dangerous state of disrepair than the others. He strolled into one of these, pushing his way among squabbling children, and was ignored. A doorless room to the right was obviously a bedroom; the floor was covered completely with greasy mattresses. In another room, people sat on the bare floorboards, or on broken furniture, and drank soup out of chipped crockery or gnawed rabbit legs or chunks of grey bread. It was easy to locate the kitchen simply by tracing to its source the pervading smell of burning fat, woodsmoke, garlic and overripe fruit and vegetables. An enormous saucepan of soup steamed on the wood stove; the cook, a grotesquely fat woman whose forearms were thicker than most men’s thighs, was chopping up a mixture of fruit, vegetables and rabbit meat on a large board; as Niall entered, she poured these into the saucepan, scraping them off with a carving knife. Two late risers came in, yawning and rubbing their eyes. They helped themselves to unwashed dishes piled up in a metal sink and, without the preliminary of washing them, dipped them straight into the cooking pot; neither seemed concerned that their bowls contained a proportion of raw meat and vegetables. They hacked themselves bread from a loaf that was more than four feet long, and dipped this into a wooden bowl of half-melted butter that stood on the windowsill catching the full force of the morning sun. Niall observed that there was a large metal bunker containing various kinds of fruit: apples, oranges, pomegranates, watermelons and prickly pears. The slaves were obviously kept well fed.