Dark Universe (19 page)

The last rope parted and Della entered as the rigid pathtion of manna stalks swung outward.

"Go on back to your Zivver friends," he grumbled.

"Light, but you're thickheaded!" She put a sawbone knife to work on his bonds. "Can you swim back through that river?"

"What difference does it make?"

"There's the Levels to return to."

His wrists fell free. "I doubt if there's enough of the Levels left to go back to, even if they _didn't_ think I'm a Zivver."

"One of the secluded worlds then." And she repeated obstinately,

"Can you swim the river?"

"I think so."

"All right, then--let's go." She started out of the shack.

But he held back. "You mean _you'd_ go too?"

"You didn't think I'd stay here without you?"

"But this is your world! It's where you belong! Anyway, I'm not even a Zivver."

She let out an exasperated breath. "Listen--at first I was carried away with the fact that I had found someone like me. Why, I never even stopped to wonder whether it would make any difference if you _weren't_

a Zivver. Then there you were lying on the ground with Mogan standing over you. And I knew it wouldn't matter if you couldn't even hear or smell or taste. _Now_ can we get on our way and start hunting for that hidden world?"

Before he could say anything else, she nudged him toward the incline that would take them above the waterfall. And Jared sensed the pall of fear that lay over the Zivver World. In the distance the settled area was enveloped in a thick, ominous silence. From the indistinct echoes of cascading water, he received a composite of Zivvers drawing apprehensively back from the barricaded entrance.

Halfway up the rise he drew up sharply and his nostrils flared around a disturbing scent drifting down from above. Desperately, he scooped up several pebbles and rattled them in the hollow of his hand. In full audible clarity, Mogan stood waiting at the top of the slope.

"I suppose you think you're going to escape and tell the monsters how to get in," he said threateningly.

Jared clicked his stones rapidly, precisely, and trapped impressions of the Zivver beginning his charge downhill.

But just then the noise of a thousand cataracts abruptly rocked the world. At the same time a great, angry burst of the monsters' roaring silence stabbed into the Zivver domain from the vicinity of the blocked entrance. And, in the next beat, everyone below was screaming and scurrying frantically about as the reopened tunnel belched a mercilessly steady cone of inaudible sound.

Jared scrambled to the top of the incline, tugging Della along.

Mogan, stunned, retreated with them.

"Light Almighty!" the Zivver leader swore. "What in Radiation's happening?"

"I've never zivved anything like this!" Della exclaimed, terrified.

Intense, painful sensations assaulted Jared's eyes, confusing but somehow complementing his auditory perception of the entire world.

Noise reflections fetched a more or less complete impression of the fissure-rent far wall. Yet, also associated with that wall somehow were areas of concentrated silent sound that etched every detail of its surface as clearly as though he were running his hand over all of it simultaneously.

Suddenly the wall faded into relative silence and he managed to link that development with the fact that the furious cone had shifted and was at the moment cutting across another segment of the auditory composite.

Now he seemed to be aware of the presence and size and shape of each shack in the center of the settlement. The fierce, screaming silence touched every object within hearing range and boiled into his conscious with agonizing ruthlessness.

He clamped his hands over his face and found immediate relief while he listened to monsters pouring in from the passageway. And with them came the familiar _zip-hisses_.

"Don't be afraid!" one of the creatures shouted.

"Throw some Light this way!" another cried.

The words reverberated in Jared's mind. What did they mean? Was Light actually associated with these evil beings? How could anyone _throw_ Light? Once before he had wildly assumed that the stuff these creatures hurled ahead of themselves in the passages might somehow be Light. And he had at once rejected that possibility, just as he was forced to discard it anew now.

His eyes ificked open involuntarily but he only stood there, confounded by a new bewilderment. For a moment he could almost detect a deficiency of something--just as he had imagined once before that he was on the verge of putting his finger on the lessness he was seeking.

Now the conviction was even firmer that there was not as much of something in the Zivver World as there had been before the evil beings came!

"The monsters!" Mogan shouted. "They're coming up here!"

Della screamed and the reflection of her voice brought back the impression of three of the creatures racing up the incline.

"Jared!" she tugged on his arm. "Let's get--"

_Zip-hiss_.

She collapsed and before he could seize her she went rolling down the incline. Frantically, Jared started after the girl. But Mogan held him back, saying, "We can't help her now."

"We can if we reach her before--"

But the Zivver leader swung him around, shoved him into the river and dived in after him.

Before Jared could shout out in protest, Mogan dragged him beneath the surface and began the desperate underwater swim against the current. He fought stubbornly against the other's grip, but the combination of giant strength and the threat of drowning swamped his struggles and there was nothing he could do but allow himself to be towed helplessly along.

At a point that he judged to be halfway through the underground stretch, the current hurled him against a boulder and whatever air he had managed to retain in his lungs escaped in an involuntary grunt. Morgan plunged for the bottom and Jared frenziedly staved off the compulsion to release his breath. His resistance snapped finally and a great mouthful of water boiled down his windpipe.

He revived to the rhythmic motion of the Zivver's broad hands as they pressed down on the small of his back and withdrew, pressed and withdrew. He retched and coughed up warm water.

Mogan stopped pumping air into his lungs and helped him to a sitting position. "Guess I was wrong about you plotting with those creatures," he said apologetically.

"Della!" Jared exclaimed between coughs. "I've got to get back in there!"

"It's too late. The place is filled with monsters."

Jared listened anxiously for the river. But he heard no water anywhere around them. "Where are we?" he demanded.

"Out in a lesser passage. After I dragged you ashore I had to haul you off before the soubats got us."

Listening to reflections of the words, Jared traced out the details of a tunnel that broadened ahead after issuing from the constriction of pinched walls behind them. And from back there came the infuriated sounds of the soubats that couldn't get through.

"We're not headed toward the main corridor, are we?" he asked disappointedly.

"The opposite direction. It beats fighting off soubats barehanded."

Jared rose and steadied himself against the wall. There might have been a chance of overtaking the monsters in the larger passageway, but the soubats had overruled that possibility, he conceded glumly. "Where does this tunnel lead?"

"Never been this way before."

Realizing he had no choice, Jared followed the reflections of their voices down the corridor.

Later, when he stumbled for a second time, he wondered why he was groping around in a noiseless passage without sounding stones. He felt along the ground until he found a pair of pebbles that almost matched, then filled the air with _clicks_ before continuing.

After a while Mogan said, "You hear pretty good with those things, don't you?"

"I manage." Then Jared heard he was being abrupt for no reason at all, unless it was because he resented the Zivver's having kept him from trying to reach Della--an attempt which certainly would have failed anyway.

"I've had practice with the things," he added more affably.

"I suppose they're all right for someone who can't ziv," Mogan ventured, "but I'm afraid the noise would drive me crazy."

They traveled in silence for some time. And, as Jared's steps took him farther from the Zivver domain, the possibility that he might never hear Della again burdened him with despair. He knew finally that he would have settled with her in a secluded world and that it would have made no difference whether she was his superior or not--as long as they could be together.

But now she was gone and another--the most vital--part of his universe had crumbled beneath him. He berated himself for having failed to recognize what she meant to him, for his distorted sense of values that prompted him to attach more importance to an insane quest for Light and Darkness. Finding her, he vowed, would be his single purpose, even if it carried him to the Thermonuclear Depths of Radiation. And if he couldn't snatch her back from the monsters, then Radiation would be his deserved punishment.

They passed a lesser chasm and the Zivver leader fell in alongside him. "Della said you were hunting for Light and Darkness."

"Forget it," Jared snapped, determined to forget it himself.

"But I'm interested. If you had been a Zivver, I was going to have a talk with you."

Somewhat curious, Jared asked, "About what?"

"I don't put any stock in the legends either. I always thought the Great Light Almighty was unnecessary glorification for something commonplace."

"You

did?"

"I've even decided what Light _is_."

Jared halted the march. "What is it?"

"Warmth."

"How do you figure that?"

"There's warmth all around us, isn't there? Greater warmth we call

'heat'; lesser warmth, 'cold.' The warmer a thing is, the more impressions it sends to a Zivver's eyes."

Jared nodded pensively. "And it lets you know about things without feeling, hearing, or smelling them."

Mogan shrugged. "Which is what the legends say Light does."

There was something inconsistent here, but Jared couldn't quite decide what. Perhaps it was just his reluctance to admit Light might be something as prosaic as heat. He resumed the march and stepped more briskly as he heard a larger corridor ahead.

At the same time Mogan said, "I ziv another passage up there, a big one."

Jared trotted forward, sounding his clickstones more rapidly to accommodate the greater speed. But he jolted to a stop as he broke into the larger tunnel.

"What's wrong?" Mogan paused beside him.

"This place reeks with the scent of monsters!" Jared flared his nostrils, sucking in samples of air. "That's not all. There's the smell of Upper and Lower Level people too-- almost as strong as the other odor."

From his clickstone echoes he received an impression of the Zivver leader running a hand over his brow.

"This corridor's Radiation on the eyes!" Mogan exclaimed. "Too much warmth. It's hard to ziv one thing from another."

Jared, too, had felt the heat. But he was concerned with a different consideration. There was something familiar about this stretch of passage, about its formations of tumbled rocks. Then it struck him, Of course--they were just outside the Original World! He clicked his stones again and detected the slab behind which he and Owen had hidden from his first encounter with a monster. Around the bend to his right would be the Original World entrance and, beyond that, the Barrier and the Levels.

"Which way should we go?" Mogan asked.

"To the left," Jared suggested impulsively, shoving off.

After a few paces, he said, "So you think heat is Light."

"I

do."

"And

Darkness?"

"Simple. Darkness is coolness."

Now Jared had his finger on the inconsistency. "You're wrong. Only Zivvers can sense heat and cold from a distance. Tell me one legend that holds Light will be the exclusive property of Zivvers. All the beliefs say _everybody_ will be Reunited with Light."

"I've got that figured out too. It's just that the Zivvers are the first step toward general Reunion."

Jared was going to protest that assumption also. But he had just negotiated a bend in the corridor and now he drew back reflexively. Riding the crest of his clickstone echoes were the details of another curve ahead.

And he was profoundly aware of a tremendous flow of silent sound pouring from around that bend. It was as though a thousand humaninhuman creatures were marching in his direction, all hurling screaming silence before them.

"I can't ziv a thing!" Mogan complained desperately.

Jared listened but heard no audible sounds of monsters around the bend. Cautiously, he pressed forward, determined this time to keep his eyes open. His face contorted in protest to volition and muscles grew taut as they tried unsuccessfully to close the lids they controlled. Squinting and trembling, he found himself going ahead and forgetting to use his stones.

Mogan came along, trailing by a considerable distance, though, and emitting an occasional distressed oath.

Jared reached the bend and plunged swiftly around it, afraid that if he hesitated he might turn and flee. Now the dreadful stuff was flowing into his eyes with the force of a hundred hot springs and he could no longer keep them open. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he stumbled forward, relying once more on his pebbles.

His steps, however, were mired in terror. For, from ahead came no echoes of his _clicks_--_none at all!_ But that was impossible! Never had anyone heard a noise that didn't reflect from _all_ directions. Yet, here was a great, incredible gap in a sound pattern!

His fear finally became an absolute barrier and he could go no farther. Standing as motionless as though he had been planted there like a manna tree, he shouted.

There were _no_ reflections of his voice from ahead, from above, from either side! From behind, the returning sound etched the presence of a great wall of rock that towered many times the height of even the Zivver World dome. And in this wall he detected the muffled hollowness of the corridor he had just left.