Dark Universe (14 page)

"Jared, it's beautiful!" the girl exclaimed, turning her head in all directions. "I've never zivved anything like _this_ before!"

"We can't lose any time reaching the other side," he said calmly.

"There should be another passage where the stream flows into the opposite wall."

"That soubat?" she asked, detecting the concern in his voice.

Without answering, he led her swiftly along a level course that had been eroded to smoothness during times past when the river had been fuller than it was now. Many breaths later they plunged through the passageway entrance in the opposite wall--just as the pursuing creatures emerged from the tunnel behind them and hurtled forward, filling the world with their malevolent stridency.

"We've got to hide!" he shouted. "They'll overtake us in a beat!"

They splashed through a bend in the river and echoes of the sound betrayed the presence of an opening in the left wall barely large enough to admit them. He followed Della through and found himself in a recess almost as small as a residential grotto. The girl dropped exhausted to the ground and Jared settled down beside her, listening to the enraged soubats congregating in the corridor outside.

Della rested her head on his shoulder. "Do you think we'll _ever_

find the Zivver World?"

"Why are you so anxious to get there?"

"I--well, maybe for the same reason you are."

Of course, she _couldn't_ know his real reason--or, could she? "It's where we belong, isn't it?"

"More than that, Jared. You sure you're not going there to--find some people too?"

"What

people?"

She hesitated. "Your relatives."

His brow knitted. "I have no relatives there."

"Then I suppose you must be an _original_ Zivver."

"Isn't that what you are?"

"Oh, no. You see, I'm a--spur." And she quickly added, "Does that make any difference--between us, I mean?"

"Why, no." But even that sounded too stuffy. "Radiation, no!"

"I'm glad, Jared." She brushed her cheek against his arm. "Of course, nobody knew I was a spur except my mother."

"She was a Zivver too?"

"No. My father was."

He listened outside the recess. Frustrated, the shrieking soubats were beginning to withdraw to the world they had just left.

"But I don't understand," he told the girl.

"It's simple." She shrugged. "After my mother found out I was going to be born, she Unified with an Upper Level Survivor. Everybody thought I just came early."

"You mean," he asked delicately, "your mother and--a Zivver--"

"Oh, it wasn't like that. They wanted to be Unified. They met accidentally in a passageway once--and many times after that. They finally decided to run off together, find a small world of their own. On the way, though, she fell part way down a pit and he got killed saving her. There was nothing else she could do except return to the Upper Level."

Jared felt a keen compassion for the girl. And he could understand how fervently she must have longed for the Zivver World. He had placed his arm around her and drawn her comfortably close. But now he released her, acutely aware of the distinction between them. It was more than the mere physical difference between a Zivver and a nonZivver. It was a great chasm of divergent thought and philosophy that encompassed contrary values and standards. And he could almost grasp the disdain a Zivver would feel for anyone to whom zivving was only an incomprehensible function.

There were no more soubats in the corridor, so he said, "We'd better get on our way."

But she only sat there, rigid and not breathing. And, momentarily, he imagined he heard some faint, scurrying sounds that he hadn't noticed before. To make certain, he rattled his pebbles. Immediately he received the impression of many small, furry forms. Now he could hear the feather-soft touch of insect feet against stone.

Della screamed and sprang up. "Jared, this is a _spider_ world! I've just been bitten on the arm!"

Even as they ran for the exit he heard her falter in stride. As she collapsed, he caught her in his arms and shoved her into the corridor, crawling through after her. But too late. One of the tiny, hairy things had already dropped onto his shoulder. And before he could brush it off he felt the sharp, boiling sting of lethal venom.

Clinging to his lances, he slung Della over his shoulder and stumbled on down the passage. The poison was coursing through his arm now and reaching torturously across his chest, into his head.

But he pushed on for more than one impelling reason: he couldn't lose consciousness here--the soubats would be back at any moment; nor could there be any stopping until he reached a hot spring where he might fashion steaming poultices and tend their wounds.

He struck a rock, bounced off, stood swaying for a while, then staggered on. Around the next bend he waded through an arm of the river and collapsed when he reached dry land again.

The stream flowed off through the wall and before them stretched a broad, dry passage. Pulling himself forward with the hand that still clutched the spears, he dragged Della along with him. Then he paused, listenihg to a _drip-drip_ that came with a melodious monotony. His spear point touched rock and the _thunk_ provided him with a composite of the passageway.

It was a strangely familiar corridor, with its slender hanging stone dripping cold water into the puddle below, not too far away from a single, well-defined pit. He felt sure he had been here many times before; had stood beside that moist needle of rock and run his hands over its cool, slick contours.

And, in his last impression before he lapsed into unconsciousness, he recognized all the details of the passageway outside the imaginary world of Kind Survivoress.

Jared flinched from the absurd impressions, from the contradictory composites of physical orientation. He was certain he still lay in the corridor near the dripping needle of rock. Yet, he was equally sure he was somewhere else.

The _drip-drip_ of the water changed to a weary _taptap-tap_ and back to a _drip-drip_ again. The coarse hardness of stone under his feverish body was, alternately, the soft fibers of manna husks piled upon a sleeping ledge.

In the next phase of the here-there alternation, the distant _tap-tap-tap_ commanded his attention. And its sharp echoes conveyed the impression of someone seated on a ledge absently drumming his finger on stone.

Light, but the man was old! Had it not been for the movement of his hand, he might easily have been mistaken for a skeleton. The head, trembling with an affliction ot senility, was like a skull. And the beard, unkempt and sparse, trailed to the ground, losing itself in the inaudibility of its thinness.

_Tap-tap-tap. . . drip-drip_ . . .

Jared was back in the corridor. And, like commingling sounds, the straggly beard had metamorphosed into the moist hanging stone.

"Relax, Jared. Everything's under control now."

He almost lurched out of the dream. "Kind Survivoress!"

"It'll be less awkward if you just call me Leah."

He puzzled over the name, then thought flatly, "I'm dreaming again."

"For

the

moment--yes."

Another anxious, soundless voice intruded, "Leah! How's he doing?"

"Coming around," she said.

"So I can hear." Then, "Jared?"

Jared, however, had returned to the corridor--but only for a moment.

Soon he was back on the manna fiber mattress in a minor world where the vague outline of a woman bent over him and an inconceivably ancient man sat against the far wall tapping his finger.

"Jared," the woman offered, "that other voice was Ethan's."

"Ethan?"

"You knew him as Little Listener before we changed his name. He's been out after game, but he's coming back now."

Jared was even more confused.

More to soothe him than for any other reason, he felt sure, the woman said, "I can't believe you found your way here after all these gestations."

He started to say something, but she interrupted, "Don't explain. I heard everything from your mind--what you were doing in the passages, how you were bitten by--"

_______________

"Della!" he shouted, remembering.

"She'll be all right. I reached you in time."

Abruptly, he realized he was awake now and that Kind Survivoress'

last words had been spoken.

"Not Kind Survivoress, Jared--Leah."

And he was astonished by his audible impression of the woman. He sent his hands groping over her face, across her shoulders, along her arms. Why--she wasn't the least bit old!

"_What did you expect--someone like the Forever Man?_" She sent her thoughts to him. "_After all, I was really practically a child when I used to go to you_."

He listened more closely at her. Hadn't she once told him she could reach his mind only when he was asleep?

"Only when you're asleep if you're far away," she clarified. "When you're this close you don't have to be asleep."

He studied her auditory reflections. She was perhaps a bit talller than Della. But her proportions, despite her nine or ten gestations'

seniority over the girl, suffered none in comparison. She was closed-eyed and kept her hair clipped shoulder-length on the sides, reaching to her eyebrows in front.

Turning his ears on his surroundings, he listened to a small, dismal world with a scattering of hot springs, each surrounded by its usual clump of manna plants; an arm of a river flowing out of and right back into the wall; another slumber ledge nearby--Della there, asleep. All these impressions he sifted from the echoes provided by the finger tapping of--the Forever Man?

"That's right," Leah confirmed.

He rose, feeling not as weak as he thought he would, and started across the world.

Leah cautioned, "We don't disturb him until he stops tapping."

He came back and stood in front of the woman, still rejecting the fact that he was actually here, in his preposterous dream setting. "How did you know I was out in the corridor?"

"I listened to you coming." And he heard the unspoken explanation that _listen_, in this case, didn't mean hearing _sound_.

She placed a solicitous hand on his shoulder. "And I also hear from your thoughts that this Della is a Zivver."

"She thinks I'm one too."

"Yes, I know. And I'm afraid. I don't understand what you're trying to do."

"I--"

"Oh, I know what you have in mind. But I still don't understand it. I realize you want to get to the Zivver World so you can hunt for Darkness."

"For Light too. And using Della is the only way I can get in."

"So I hear. But how do you know what _her_ plans are? I don't trust the girl, Jared."

"It's just because you can't listen to what she's thinking."

"Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm so used to hearing feelings, intentions, that I'm lost when outer impressions are all I have to go by."

"You won't tell Della I'm not like her?"

"If that's the way you want it. We'll just let her go on believing you're the only Zivver whose mind I can reach. But I hope you know what you're doing."

Little Listener came storming into the world and it was remarkable that his exuberant shouts failed to rouse Della and were ignored by the Forever Man, who merely continued his tapping.

"Jared! Where are you?"

"Over here!" Jared was suddenly swept up in the excitement of renewing an acquaintance he hadn't even known was real.

"He can't hear you--remember?" Leah reminded.

"But he's running straight toward us!" Then he puzzled over the scent of---crickets?--that was coming from Little Listener.

"Ethan," Leah corrected. "And those _are_ crickets. He keeps a pouch filled with them. Unhearable cricket noises make just as good echoes for him as clickstones do for you."

Then the other was upon him and, in a bone-crushing embrace, swung him around and around as easily as he would a bundle of manna stalks.

Jared's gratification over the reunion was dulled by his awed appreciation of Ethan's tremendous proportions. It was just as well that Little Listener had been banished from the Upper Level because of his uncanny hearing. Otherwise, he most certainly would have been expelled later for his almost inhuman size.

"You old son of a soubat!" Ethan chortled. "I knew you'd come some period!"

"Light, but it's good to--" Jared broke off in midsentence as blunt, trembling fingers came to rest lightly against his lips.

"Let him," Leah urged. "That's the only way he can find out what you're saying."

They spent the better part of a period talking about their childhood meetings. And Jared had to tell them about the worlds of man, how it felt to live with many people, what the Zivvers' latest tricks were, whether there had been any more Different Ones recently.

They interrupted their session once to haul food from a boiling pit and bring a portion to the Forever Man. But the latter, still not talkatively disposed, ignored their presence.

Later, Jared said in answer to Leah's question, "Why do I want to go to the Zivver World? Because I've got a hunch that's the right place to hunt for Darkness and Light."

Ethan shook his head. "Forget it. You're here; stay here."

"No. This is something I've _got_ to do."

"Great flying soubats!" the other exclaimed. "You never had ideas like that before!"

At this point Jared, from the edge of his hearing, caught the impression of Della stirring on her ledge.

He hurtied over and knelt beside her. He felt her face and it was cool and dry, signifying that she had slept off the fever.

"Where are we?" she asked weakly.

He started to tell her, but before he got halfway through he heard that she had drifted into normal sleep.

During the next period Della more than made up for her inactivity of the previous one. That she had been pensively silent on hearing Jared explain about the world they were in and on meeting Leah and Ethan was a prelude to something or other.

When they were alone later, kneeling beside a hot spring and applying fresh poultices to their spider bites, he learned the reason for her reticence.