The old man said: “Have you succeeded?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Now I want you to try something rather more difficult. I want you to change this scene completely.”
Niall said: “How?” The idea seemed absurd. He was there, in the cave, listening to his mother and grandfather, and waiting for his father and his uncle Thorg to return from a hunting trip.
“Imagine some other scene, and try to see it.”
Niall tried to envisage the outside of the burrow, with its gray-looking shrubs and creosote bushes, and the treelike euphorbia cactus; but it made no difference. Then, suddenly, everything became dark. A moment later, his mother was saying: “It has to be grated and pounded, then cooked for at least two hours. Otherwise it is a deadly poison.”
His grandfather’s voice replied: “It can also be ground into flour for making bread. . .”
The old man asked: “What is happening?”
“It’s gone back to the beginning.”
“Good. Now try again.”
Niall tried concentrating. This made the voices fade; but when he stopped concentrating, they came back again. In some strange sense, his efforts seemed to be counterproductive.
The old man said: “Try imagining something that gave you great pleasure.”
Niall tried to conjure up the first time he had seen Princess Merlew. She had been standing beside her father, King Kazak, in the throne room of the underground city, and her red-gold hair had been held in place by a circlet of gold. He could still remember the way his heart had lurched when she smiled at him, showing the white, even teeth that were unstained by the juice of berries. He could feel the softness of her skin as they clasped forearms in greeting. . .
Then, with a suddenness that startled him, he was holding her in his arms, and she was saying: “I’ve come to take you back with me.” Her mouth was warm against his ear, and he could feel the curves of her body through the red spider silk of the dress. His own voice replied: “You know I can’t do that.” At that moment, Niall recalled that they were no longer in the underground city, but in the city of the bombardier beetles, and that he was waiting for an audience with the Master. And now Merlew was checking the door, to make sure the latch was secure, before she lay down on the couch, and drew him down beside her. His whole body was responding to the softness of her mouth as she pressed against him. His surge of desire was so powerful that he opened his eyes, embarrassed by the presence of the old man. Like a light being extinguished, the scene disappeared.
But this time he was aware of what he had done to make it disappear. He had switched his attention elsewhere, like turning his head to look at something else.
The old man had also disappeared. Niall felt relieved, and at the same time amused with his own stupidity. The old man was a machine, yet his reflexes continued to treat him as a living reality. And all this training was designed to teach him to control his reflexes.
He readjusted the metal bands, pressing the contacts against his forehead, then closed his eyes and made his mind a blank. Once again he was surprised by the total darkness that supervened, as if he was suspended in empty space. This time he turned his thoughts to his cousin Dona, whom he had seen for the first time in Kazak’s underground city. He was trying to conjure up the living quarters of the house where she lived with her mother Sefna. Instead, he found himself sitting beside her on a bench in the garden of the nursery in the spider city. The sunlight was warm, and there was a hissing sound as a fountain threw a spray of water into the air. A few feet away, his brother Veig was sitting on the lawn with Runa and Mara, telling them a story. And he and Dona were looking into one another’s eyes, while cautiously allowing their fingers to touch. . .
As he now looked at her — and she seemed as real as a living person — he found himself wishing that Merlew had some of Dona’s gentleness and kindness, and that Dona had a little of Merlew’s jaunty vitality and seductiveness. Because the image of Merlew had so recently been present to his senses, he found it easy to conjure up her presence, as if he was still holding her in his arms. For a moment, Dona receded and gave way to Merlew. By a mental effort, he caused Merlew to recede, so that he was once again sitting beside Dona. It was as if he were in two places at once, and as if the two women were both trying to occupy his consciousness. Yet his consciousness was not a room in which Dona and Merlew jostled for space; it was a unified awareness in which both women were equally present. With a sudden flash of insight, he realized that this awareness was his awareness, and that it depended entirely upon his own power to sustain it. With a spontaneous and instantaneous mental gesture, he blended Merlew and Dona, so they ceased to be two persons. Merlew took on the gentleness of Dona, while Dona suddenly glowed with a new seductiveness.
This result astonished him. He had become so accustomed to the vagaries of the imagination, to his mind’s inability to sustain a mental image for more than a few moments, that he found it hard to believe what had happened. It was true that this new Dona-Merlew was not as real as either of the two women; he was aware that if he reached out and tried to hold her hand, she would dissolve back into her constituents. Yet he could look at her, could study the amazing way that Merlew’s pale skin blended into Dona’s golden-brown complexion, and the way that Merlew’s blue eyes and Dona’s brown eyes united in an intermediate shade of green. Even their clothes had blended, and the new Dona-Merlew was wearing a nursemaid’s blue tunic made of a clinging spider silk that emphasized the curves of her body. But what surprised Niall most of all was that the new girl, although less real than either Dona or Merlew, was undoubtedly a separate individual, a human being with her own unique reality. It seemed impossible to believe that she was merely a fantasy, a creation of his own mind.
The old man’s voice said: “You may find it simpler to use this.” When he opened his eyes, no one was there, but on the pillow, a few inches from his face, there was a small black box, about three inches square, whose upper face contained four rows of black numbered buttons. By now, Niall knew enough of electronics to guess that it was a control unit. And since the voice issued no further instructions, he cautiously pushed the first button. This was clearly the on/off switch. The curious sense of excitement and vitality disappeared immediately, and the world around him seemed to become solid and normal. It was a sensation not unlike waking up. When he pressed it again, he experienced a slight distortion of his senses that made him screw up his eyes; this passed, and he felt once again the electrical tingling that produced such an odd sense of expectancy and interest. The effect was not unlike that of the thought mirror with which the old man had presented him on his first visit to the tower; but the thought mirror amplified the powers of concentration, as if looking at the world through a magnifying glass, while this device seemed to induce a sense of relaxation and delight, as if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud.
This feeling disappeared as soon as he pressed the second button. This time the distortion of his senses made him feel sick and giddy; when it vanished, his body felt heavy and languorous, and he was overwhelmed by a dreamy sensation that made the world seem unreal; it was like being awake and asleep at the same time. He pressed the button again, but this only had the effect of increasing the dreamlike sensation until his senses blurred, and he felt as if he were hopelessly drunk. But as soon as he pressed the on/off switch, his senses cleared. It was an immense relief to be restored to everyday reality, and for the first time in his life, Niall realized that the sense of normality deserves to be regarded as a luxury.
The pleasure of exploration soon induced him to press the “on” switch. Then he pressed the button labeled “3.” Nothing happened. He switched off and tried again. Still nothing happened. He knew that he merely had to speak aloud, and the voice of the Steegmaster would explain what was wrong. But he preferred to work it out for himself. He stared at the device in his hand, and wrinkled his nose. The first button switched it on and off. Without that, the second button would not work. Perhaps the second button had to be pressed before the third would work? He tried it, touching the second button quickly and lightly — he had already worked out that the intensity of the effect depended on how long he held it down — and then pressed the third button. The darkness that supervened told him that his guess was correct. A moment later, he was startled by the sound of birdsong, and a noise of running water. At the same time, he could smell the indefinable yet distinct odor of wet grass and leaves. But since he was still in darkness, he had no idea where he was. Then, suddenly, he was in motion, and could hear the sound of wheels on the hard road, and of the feet of charioteers. He lay flat, and tried to imagine that he was opening his eyes. This time it worked immediately, and he found himself sitting between his mother and his brother in a cart pulled by four runners. They were passing through a stretch of woodland, and the branches overarched the road and formed a green tunnel. Between the branches overhead, the sky was a deep blue, but he could see storm clouds hanging over the distant hills; as they passed between two steep banks, he could reach out and touch the wet grass. They had just landed in the country of the spiders, and were being taken to the city of the white tower. On the sea voyage from North Khaybad, Niall had saved the life of a wolf spider who had been swept overboard; this is why they were being treated as guests instead of prisoners. And now, for the first time since his birth in the desert, Niall was looking at rain-soaked woodland and hearing the song of the thrush and the blackbird. It had been one of the most memorable sensations of his life, and now, as he experienced it again, he was bathed in a sense of delight and nostalgia. Although it had been less than a year ago, it seemed to be in another lifetime, like a memory of childhood.