V

Like everything else in Atalantaya, the Creative Tower was beautiful with great pearlescent walls, and what seemed golden floors. When I came into this time in America and in the West, a lost pilgrim from Atalantaya, I read descriptions by Christians of their Heaven as a place of golden streets and sidewalks. Well, that is how the Creative Tower was, and indeed the entire Creative Gardens were—a realm of gleaming gold paths and sidewalks.

We were taken on a long journey by those who welcomed us through broad corridors of gold, filled with light, greenery, and abundant flowers, past the open doors of huge rooms in which people were diligently at work in the most complex of environments—and it was here that we saw what might have been computer technology for the first time. And by that I mean big computers on which people appeared to be working through touch keyboards in the surfaces of tables, but what they were doing I couldn’t tell. Assembling, organizing, recording information? There was no way to know.

We passed what were obviously immense laboratories, with fantastical luracastric apparatuses, and rooms of great airy cages filled with small animals from rodents to chattering monkeys and gloriously beautiful birds. There were even owls in these rooms, and the sight of these owls sent a thrill of misery through me because, of all birds on Earth, owls most resemble the people of Bravenna. I had to ask what these birds were in order to learn that they were owls. I had only glimpsed one or two in the Wilderness lands.

In the Creative Tower, there was very little evidence of metal anywhere. There was luracastria hard and soft, translucent or opaque. And there was music filling the air in different areas, streaming out of portals in the walls—with the sound of singing and instruments, and what might have been stringed instruments of great sophistication though I didn’t know it, of course, at the time.

As we walked on and on through these corridors, slowly, past door after door, I came to realize that those leading us were deliberately taking us on a tour. In fact, after we had covered more than one story of this interesting building, I came to see that we were being invited silently to observe many communities of workers in different capacities, and also areas where the workers ate and drank and welcomed us with cheerful waves and invitations to join them.

I will regret forever that I did not ask questions, that I did not ask to see libraries and archives, that I did not ask about those tapping on the tabletops before giant monitors, that I didn’t ask about everything. But at the time, I was too intrigued and too aware of my burden as the leader of our small band, the one who could actually give the signal to bring this entire world to an end.