Colin Wilson - Spider World 05 - The Magician by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-26T21:32:09.843000+00:00

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Hischarioteers were waiting for him when he came out of the hospital. He was grateful to them for their foresight; the events of the past half-hour had filled him with a dreamy but not unpleasant tiredness. He told them to take him to the slave quarter, then, with a sigh of gratitude, relaxed into the cushions, wishing the journey ahead was longer.

In spite of the tiredness, he was in a curious state of inner excitement. The world around him seemed marvelously fresh and real. This, he realized, was because he had made a voyage outside his own body and into the mind of the unconscious girl; now his own identity seemed new and strange, like a suit of new clothes.

This excursion into the mind of a stranger had also made him aware once again of the odd mental vacuity of these citizens of the spider city. The spiders had gone to a great deal of trouble to breed all the imagination out of their human servants. Yet what had intrigued him about the girl was that, in spite of her lack of imagination, she was obviously happy -- like the crowds of people who were now enjoying the sunlight in the main square, or strolling down the tree-lined avenue that led to the river, mingling freely with wolf spiders and a few bombardier beetles. She had never been outside the spider city, yet she was contented with her lot in life. And was he, in spite of his imagination, so much better off? He had freed his fellow humans from their slavery, and he was the ruler of this spider city. Yet in spite of this, he continued to experience an obscure feeling of discontentment, almost of anticlimax.

Oddly enough, these thoughts caused him no distress. On the contrary, as the cart crossed the bridge that led to the slave quarter, he experienced a curious feeling of satisfaction, as if he was at last coming to grips with the problem. If he was not to surrender to the mindless contentment of the spider servants, then he had to learn to develop his own deeper sense of purpose. And what had just happened seemed to offer him a clue: to leave his own body behind, to be able to float freely in the open space that exists around all human beings. . .

The charioteers paused on the far side of the bridge. "Which way, highness?"

Broadus had not given precise instructions, but he had said that the house faced the river. Niall said: "Turn right here."

Half a mile to the east, the explosion of a vast underground ammunition store had destroyed a large area of the slave quarter, and the river flowed into the crater, forming a lake. Bloated bodies still occasionally floated to its surface, to be fought over by the razor-bill gulls who had now come to nest around its edges. These gulls, whose wingspan was more than two feet, occasionally attacked children, and had stolen at least one

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