Dark Universe (15 page)

"When was the last time you were here?" she demanded.

"Oh, so many gestations ago that I--"

"Manna sauce!" She turned away and the Forever Man's tapping sounds blunted themselves against the cool stiffness of her back. "I must say, your Kind Survivoress is quite a surprise."

"Yes, she--" Then he understood what she was intimating.

"Kind Survivoress--I'll bet she was kind!"

"You don't think--"

"Why did you bring me along? Was it because you thought that awkward giant might be interested in a Unification partner?'

Then she relented. "Oh, Jared, have you forgotten about the Zivver World already?"

"Of course not."

"Then let's get on our way."

"You don't understand. I can't just run off. Leah saved our lives.

These are friends!"

"Friends!" She cleared her throat and made it sound like the lash of a swish-rope. "You and your friends!"

Her head insolently erect, she strode off.

Jared followed, but drew up sharply when the world was suddenly cast into silence.

The Forever Man had stopped tapping! He was ready for company!

Unaccountably hesitant, Jared advanced cautiously across the world.

Leah and Ethan had been credible. But the Forever Man loomed like a haunting creature from a fantastic past--someone whom he could never hope to understand.

Orienting himself by the asthmatic rasps that came from ahead, he approached the ledge.

"_This is Jared_," Leah's unspoken introduction rippled the psychic silence. "_He's finally come to hear us_."

"_Jared?_" The other's reply, carried weakly on the crest of the woman's thoughts, was burdened with the perplexity of forgetfulness.

"Of course, you remember."

The Forever Man tapped inquisitively. And Jared intercepted the impression of a thin, finger delving almost its entire length into a depression in the rock before producing each _tap_. Over untold generations his thumping had eroded the stone _that much!_

"I don't know you." The voice, a pained whisper, was coarse as a rock slide.

"Leah used to sort of--bring me here long ago."

"Oh, _Ethan's_ little friend!" A hand that was all bone set up an audible flutter as it trembled forward. It seized Jared's wrist in a grip as tenuous as air. The Forever Man tried to smile, but the composite was grossly confused by a disheveled beard, skeletal protuberances and a misshapen, toothless mouth.

"How old _are_ you?" Jared asked.

Even as he posed the question he knew it was unanswerable. Living by himself, before Leah and Ethan had come, the man would have had no life spans or gestations against which to measure time's passage.

"Too old, son. And it's been _so_ lonely." The straining voice was a murmur of despair against the stark silence of the world.

"Even with Leah and Ethan?"

"They don't know what it means to have listened to loved ones pass on countless ages ago, to be banished from the beauties of the Original World, to--"

Jared started. "You _lived_ in the Original World?"

"--to be cast out after hearing your grandchildren and their great-great-grandchildren grow into Survivorship."

"Did you live in the Original World?" Jared demanded.

"But you can't blame them for getting rid of a Different One who wouldn't grow old. What's that--did I live in the Original World? Yes. Up until a few generations after we lost Light."

"You mean you were there _when Light was still with man?_"

As though exhuming memories long laid to rest, the Forever Man finally replied, "Yes. I--what was it we used to say?--saw Light."

"You _saw_ Light?"

The other laughed--a thin, rasping outburst cut short by a wheeze and a cough. "Saw," he babbled. "Past tense of the verb to see. See, saw, seen. Seesaw. We used to have a seesaw in the Original World, you know."

_See!_ There was that word again--mysterious and challenging and as obscure as the legends from which it had come.

"Did you hear Light?" Jared enunciated each word.

"I saw Light. Seesaw. Up and down. Oh, what fun we had! Children scampering around with bright, shiny faces, their eyes all agleam and--"

"Did you feel Him?" Jared was shouting now. "Did you touch Him?

Did you hear Him?"

"Who?"

"Light!"

"No, no, son. I _saw_ it."

It? Then he, too, regarded Light as an impersonal thing! "What was it like? Tell me about it!"

The other fell silent, slumping on his ledge. Eventually he drew in a long, shuddering breath. "God! I don't know! It's been so long _I can't even remember what Light was like!_"

Jared shook him by the shoulders. "Try! Try!"

"I can't!" the old man sobbed.

"Did it have anything to do with the---eyes?"

_Tap-tap-tap_ . . .

He had returned to his thumping, burying bitter recollections and haunting thoughts under a rock pile of habit and mental detachment.

Leaving Kind Survivoress' world now was out of the question--not with the Forever Man's senile memory offering the hope of opening new passageways in Jared's search for Light. Yet, he couldn't tell Della why he had to extend their stay. So he simply pretended he was still physically unfit for immediate travel.

Apparently satisfied with this explanation for his postponement of their attempt to reach the Zivver World, Della grudgingly settled down to await his complete recovery.

That her original distrust of Leah had been an impulsive, passing thing was manifest in the subsequent lessening of tension between the two women. At one point, she even told Jared she might have been wrong in her first impression of Leah and Ethan. Why, it wasn't at all as she had initially assumed, she confessed. And Ethan, despite his handicap, wasn't the awkward, clumsy lout she had imagined him to be--not in the least.

Tactfully, Leah refrained from mind-to-mind contact with Jared and Ethan while they were in the girl's presence. To the effect that Della either forgot the woman's ability or gave it little thought.

Leah, too, had adjustments to make. Although she treated Della hospitably, Jared could always sense her misgiving over not being able to listen to the Zivver girl's mind.

These

developments

Jared traced with interest while he waited for

the Forever Man to abandon his solitude and seek company once more.

Light! What he might learn from that ageless one!

During the fifth period after their arrival, Della was splashing in the river with Ethan while Jared was sharpening his spear points on a coarse rock when Leah's thoughts came to him:

"__Please__ forget about the Zivver World, Jared_."

"_You know my mind's made up_."

"_Then you'll have to change it. The passages are full of monsters_."

"_How do you know? You told me you were afraid to listen to _their_

minds_."

"_But i've listened to other minds--in the two Levels_."

"_And what did you hear?_"

"_Terror and panic and queer impressions I can't understand. There are monsters all over. And the people are running and hiding and creeping back to their recesses, only to flee again later on_."

"_Are there monsters near this world?_"

"_I don't think so--not yet anyway_."

This posed another complication, Jared realized. Starting out for the Zivver World might not be a matter of leisure choice. It might well be that he should leave as quickly as possible.

"_No, Jared. Don't go--please!_"

And he detected more than selfless concern for his welfare. Lying at the base of Leah's thoughts were desperate pangs of loneliness, laced with the fear of having her simple, forlorn world cast back into the terrible solitude that had existed before he and Della arrived.

But he had made up his mind and he regretted only not having had the chance for a second talk with the Forever Man.

Just then, however, the latter's tapping came to an abrupt halt.

Jared raced across the world this time.

And, as he passed the river, Della quit splashing to ask: "Where are you running?"

"To hear the Forever Man. Afterward we'll be on our way."

Perching on the ledge, Jared asked anxiously, "Can we talk now?"

"Go away," the Forever Man groaned in protest. "You only make me remember. I don't want to remember."

"But compost! I'm hunting for Light!" You can help me!"

Only the rasps of the other's labored breathing ifiled the world.

"Try to remember about Light!" Jared pleaded. "Did it have anything to do with--the eyes?"

"I--don't know. It seems I can remember something about brightness and--I can't imagine what else."

"Brightness? What's that?"

"Something like--a loud noise, a sharp taste, a hard punch maybe."

Jared heard the uncertainty on the Forever Man's face. Here was someone who might even tell him what he was searching for. But the man spoke only in riddles which were no clearer than the obscure legends themselves.

He tried to pace off his frustration in front of the nodding skeleton.

Right before him might be the entire answer to how Light might benefit man, how it could touch all things at once and bring instant, inconceivably refined impressions of everything. If only the curtain of forgetfulness could be pierced!

He struck out in another direction: "What about Darkness? Do you know anything about that?"

And he heard the other shudder.

"Darkness?" the Forever Man repeated, hesitancy and sudden fear hanging on the word. "I--_oh, God!_"

"What's the matter?"

The man was trembling violently now. His wry face was a grotesque mask of terror.

Jared had never heard such fright before. The other's heartbeat had doubled and his pulse was like a wounded soubat's thrashing. Each shallow, erratic breath seemed as though it would be his last. He tried to rise, but fell bank onto the ledge, burying his face in his hands.

"Oh, God! The Darkness! _The awful Darkness!_ _Now_ I remember. It's _all around_ us!"

Confounded,

Jared backed off.

But the recluse grabbed his wrist and, with the strength of desperation, pulled him forward. Then his anguished cries shrilled through the world and spilled out into the passageway:

"Feel it pressing in? Horrible, black, evil Darkness! Oh, God, I didn't _want_ to remember! But you _made_ me!"

Jared listened alertly, fearfully about him. Was the Forever Man sensing Darkness--now? Or was he just remembering it? But no, he had said it was "all around us," hadn't he?

Uneasily, Jared retreated and left his host fighting terror and sobbing,

"Can't you feel it? Don't you see it? God, God, get me out of here!"

But Jared felt nothing except the cool touch of the air. Yet he was afraid. It was as though he had absorbed some of the Forever Man's strange fear.

Was Darkness something you felt or perhaps _seed_-- rather, _saw?_ But if you could _see_ it, that meant you could do the same thing to Darkness that the Guardian believed could be done to Light Almighty.

But--what?

For a moment Jared was desperately afraid of an indefinite menace he could neither hear, nor feel, nor smell. It was an evil, uncanny sensation--a smothering, a silence that wasn't soundlessness at all but something both alien and akin to it at the same time.

When he reached Della she was with Leah and Ethan. Nothing was said. It was as though a bit of the incomprehensible terror had spread to all of them.

Della had already packed some food in her carrying case and Leah, resigned to his decision, had gotten his spears for him.

The silence, uncomfortable and grave, persisted as they all walked to the exit. No good-bys were offered.

A few paces down the corridor Jared turned and promised, "I'll be bank." Casually letting his spears strike the wail, he sounded out the way and pushed on.

The somber world of Kind Survivoress and Little Listener and the unbelievable Forever Man slipped softly back into the immaterial depths of memory. And Jared felt a sense of poignant loss as he realized that recollections were fed by the same stuff of which dreams were made and that the only proof he would ever have of the existence of Leah's world would be in the echoes of his reflections.

Throughout most of the travel period Della tagged silently along.

That she was troubled with a restive hesitancy was evident in the worrisome expression Jared could hear on her face. Was she anxious over something he had said or done? Light knew he had already given plenty of cause for misgiving.

Since leaving Leah's world, though, he had devised an artful echo-producing system which he felt certain had escaped Della's suspicion. It consisted principally of filling the corridors with one whistled tune after another.

Eventually, the passageway pinched in on them and there was a stretch through which they had to crawl. On the other side, he rose and thudded his spear against the ground.

"Now we can breathe easier."

"Why?" she drew up beside him.

"Our rear's protected against soubats. They can't get through a tunnel that small."

She was silent momentarily. "Jared--"

Here came the question he knew she had been putting off. But he decided to forestall it. "There's a big passage up ahead."

"Yes, I ziv it. Jared, I--"

"And the air is heavy with the scent of Zivvers." He skirted a narrow chasm whose outline was carried on his reflected words.

"It is?" She pushed ahead eagerly. "Maybe we're close to their world!"

They reached the intersection and he stood there trying to determine whether they should go to the right or left. Then he tensed, instinctively gripping his spears. Mingled with the Zivver scent was a hidden, evil smell that fouled the air--an unmistakable fetor.

"Della," he whispered, "monsters have just been this way."

But she didn't hear him. Enthused, she had already strode off along the right-hand branch of the corridor. Even now he could hear her rounding the bend a short way off.

Abruptly there was the grating sound of a rock slide, punctuated by a scream.