Simeon stared incredulously. “Are you sure of that?”
“Quite certain.”
“He didn’t touch you physically?”
“No.”
Simeon absorbed this in silence. He looked down at the body, shaking his head. “Then who the devil could he be?”
He dropped on his knees beside the body and searched the pockets. They yielded only a soiled handkerchief of coarse linen, and a wooden spoon and fork — slaves carried their own eating utensils.
Niall said: “Look around his neck.” There was, as he expected, a fine gold chain with a pendant.
Simeon removed it and held it out to Niall. “Do you want it?”
“No. I already have one.”
But this was not the real reason he refused to take it. He felt a curious intuitive revulsion, a feeling that the pendant was somehow unclean.
Before he was halfway down the avenue, Niall realized it had been a mistake to walk. Every muscle in his body ached, and his feet felt as if they were made of lead. In spite of the sunlight, the cold air made him shiver. He brushed the snow from a low wall and sat down.
A few hundred yards away, in the center of the square, the white tower sparkled in the sunlight; its purity made even the surrounding snow look gray. As he stared at it, framed against the pale blue sky, Niall felt again the sensation he had experienced the first time he saw it: the curious spark of pure joy. He and his family had been prisoners of the spiders, and they had looked down on this city from a hilltop to the south. Some intuition had told him that the white tower represented freedom and hope. Now, as he looked at it, the surge of delight caused the exhaustion to vanish, and he realized that his mind had been increasing the fatigue by paying attention to it.
The tower stood in the midst of a square space of green lawn, now invisible under the snow. Even in the days of slavery, the spiders had allowed their human captives to trim the grass and keep it free from weeds. They had detested the tower, as a symbol of past human supremacy; they had even attempted to destroy it. Yet they had respected it as a mystery beyond their understanding.
In fact, the tower was virtually indestructible. What looked like semitranslucent white crystal was, in fact, an atomic force field, made to look solid by causing it to reflect the light; it rejected solid matter in exactly the same way that the pole of a magnet rejects the like-pole of another magnet. In the course of about a million years, the force field would drain away and the tower would collapse. In the meantime, it would continue to serve as a time capsule, a giant electronic brain whose memory cells stored the accumulated knowledge of the men who had once been the sole masters of the earth.
Now that he had regained his breath, Niall stood up and walked on toward the tower. The men and women who passed him hardly gave him a second glance; in his long cloak, with the fur-lined hood, he was indistinguishable from most of them. It was a relief not to have to return their salutations. During his early days as the ruler of this city, they had prostrated themselves on the ground and remained in that position until he had gone past. He had tried issuing a proclamation that he wanted to be ignored, but it had made no difference; the idea of ignoring their king shocked them profoundly. So Niall had issued a second proclamation, declaring that he preferred to be saluted with a bow. This time the citizens had obeyed him, but sometimes they bowed so deeply that they fell over, and Niall felt obliged to go and help them up. On the whole, he greatly preferred to be ignored.
The snow that covered the lawn around the tower was free from footprints. Although there was no law forbidding citizens to walk on the grass, no one ever did so, even to take a shortcut; the tower seemed to inspire feelings approaching religious awe.
The white tower was thirty feet in diameter at its base, and about two hundred feet high. Yet as he looked up, it seemed to stretch as high as the clouds. This was an optical illusion, due to some quality in its milky surface, which seemed to shimmer like the air above a hot road; Niall had once compared it to liquid moonlight. As he approached within a few inches, he experienced the familiar tingling sensation throughout his body, the sensation a water diviner experiences as he stands above an underground stream. He felt as if he was being pulled forward by a magnet. The sensation became stronger as he made his way around to the north side of the tower, where he knew its vibrations were precisely attuned to those of his own body. There the pull became irresistible, and he moved forward. As his body encountered the surface, there was a sensation like walking into water. He experienced a momentary dizziness, a loss of orientation, as if he was on the point of fainting or falling asleep, and everything became dark. Then it grew light again and he stepped inside the tower.
Yet what faced him now was not the circular room he had anticipated, but a breathtaking panorama of snow-clad mountain peaks, ice-covered ridges, and misty blue valleys, stretching out in all directions for what seemed hundreds of miles. Clouds rested like feathery pillows in some of the glaciated valleys, but the clouds above his head looked as jagged and broken as the granite ridges and slopes far below. He was standing on a mountaintop on hard-packed snow, and the air was so clear that it seemed to sparkle. Less than six feet in front of him there was a sheer drop into a valley that must have been at least a mile deep; to his right, a sloping ridge like a snow-covered rocky spine ran down to another peak far below.
Niall was startled, but not deceived. He knew that the scene spread out before him was an illusion. The first time he had entered the white tower, he had found himself standing on a sandy beach, facing a line of steep cliffs; that had also been a panoramic hologram, a film projected into three-dimensional space to produce an illusion of solid reality. Even the cold wind that now blew against his face was an illusion created by electronic technology; a stream of charged particles bombarded his nerve ends, creating an illusion of moving air. Yet everything looked so completely real that it was impossible to detect the deception.
He rubbed his feet on the hard snow; it felt exactly like the snow he had left behind outside. But as soon as he closed his eyes he was aware that he was standing on a smooth wooden floor. He took three steps forward, so he was standing on the edge of the sheer drop. Intellectually, he knew he was still standing on the hard floor. Yet when he tried to force himself to take an additional step into the void, his feet refused to obey him, and he experienced a rush of fear that almost took his breath away. He could see the worn granite face of the great slope opposite, with its snow-filled crevasses and razorlike edges, in the most precise detail. Yet as soon as he closed his eyes it all vanished — even the cold wind — and he knew that he was on a solid floor.
He walked two steps forward, then opened his eyes. He was suspended in midair, looking down at the striated rock face a mile below, and on the cloud-filled valley floor. It was like floating on a magic carpet. He went on walking, now intellectually confident, while his emotions continued to sound frantic alarm bells and to flood his bloodstream with adrenaline. A few steps further, and they gradually became calm, leaving him suddenly relaxed and triumphant.
At that point the mountain landscape disappeared with the abruptness of a bursting bubble, and he found himself in the familiar room, with its curved white walls and luminous white ceiling. In its center there was a marble-colored column, more than three feet in diameter, stretching from floor to ceiling; it had the same texture as the outer walls of the tower, but seemed even more unstable, as if made of a kind of gray liquid smoke, which flowed as if it were alive. When Niall stepped forward into the surface, it admitted him, and he found himself surrounded by a white odorless fog. As if his body had suddenly become weightless, he was floating upward; it was such a pleasant sensation that he would have liked it to last for hours. But a few moments later he stopped with a slight jerk. A single step forward, and he was standing on a flat roof, with a pale blue sky overhead, and the panorama of the spider city stretched around him — the view with which he had become so familiar from the roof of his palace.