Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (35 page)

And instantly all Radiation screamed at him through the woman’s conscious. He recognized the stentorian blare of silent sound as being identical to the stuff the monsters had hurled against the corridor walls. Only, now it was overpowering as it crashed against Leah’s eyes. He feared the woman would be driven insane.

With that single convulsive sensation he lurched out of the nightmare which he knew had been no nightmare at all.

What he had heard through Kind Survivoress’ eyes certainly could have been nothing but the Nuclear Fire of Radiation itself. It was as though he had crossed the boundary of material existence to share part of the torture the Atomic Demons were meting out to her beyond infinity.

Trembling, he lay motionless on the slumber ledge while the bitter aftertaste of his pseudo dream experience persisted like a fever.

Leah—gone.

Her world—empty.

The corridors—populated with monstrous humans who hurled derisive, screaming echoes that carried no sound at all. Fiendish creatures who struck their victims with paralysis before carrying them—where?

A Zivver came in, placed a shell of food on the dining surface and left without speaking. Jared went over and picked at the ration. But his interest in the meal was submerged in the remorseful realization that, during his foolhardy quest for Darkness and Light, his familiar worlds had crumbled all about him.

The pace of irrevocable change had been furious and relentless. And he grimly suspected that things would,
could
never be the same. Certainly, the malevolent beings in their outlandish attire of loosely fitting cloths had laid claim to all the worlds and passages and were now taking over with vehement determination. He was sure, too, that the design of hot spring failures and dwindling water level was but another phase of their scheme.

And while all these things had happened he had squandered his time searching for something trivial, nursing the belief that Light was desirable. He had let the solid things of material worth slip from his grasp as he chased a whimsical breeze down an endless corridor.

Things may have been different had he, instead, organized the Levels and led the fight for Survival. There might even have been hope of returning to a normal pattern of existence, with Della as his Unification partner. Perhaps he might not even have found out she was—Different.

But it was too late now. He was a virtual prisoner in the very world which he had expected would provide the key to his futile quest for Light. And both he and the Zivvers were themselves helpless captives of the monsters who ruled the corridors.

He pushed the food aside and ran a hand through his hair. Outside, the world was animate with the audible effects of an activity period in full swing—loud conversation, children at play and, more remotely, the sound of rocks being piled on rocks as workers continued sealing off the entrance. Listlessly, he made a note of the fact that the latter noises were an excellent echo source.

But, more directly, he concerned himself with the despair which came with his conviction that he would find nothing
different
here—nothing to justify having extended his search for Darkness and Light to this world.

Among the nearer audible effects he recognized Della’s voice coming from the next shack. It was a happy, excited voice that leaped from subject to subject with a bubbling rapidity and was at times obscured by the effusive words of several other women. From bits of the conversation he gathered that she had quickly located all her Zivver relatives.

The curtains parted and Mogan stood in the entrance. His bulky form, silhouetted only by back sounding, coarsely punctured the silence of the shack.

The Zivver leader beckoned with a distinctive twist of his head. “It’s about time we made sure you’re one of us.”

Jared feigned an indifferent shrug and followed him outside.

Mogan led the way alongside a row of dwelling units as many other Zivvers fell in behind them.

They reached a clearing and the leader drew to a halt. “We’re going to have a little rough-and-tumble—just you and me.”

Frowning obtusely, Jared listened up at the man.

“That’s the surest way to find out whether you’re really zivving, don’t you agree?” Mogan said, spreading his hands.

And Jared heard that they were huge hands, altogether commensurate with the size of the man. “I suppose it is,” he agreed, with just a tinge of futility.

A figure broke out of the crowd and he recognized Della as she started toward him, concern heavy in the shallowness of her breathing. But someone caught her arm and drew her back.

“Ready?” Mogan asked.

Jared braced himself, “Ready.”

But apparently the Zivver leader
wasn’t
ready—not just yet.

“All right, Owlson,” he shouted, facing the party that was still working at the entrance. “I want complete silence over there.”

Then he turned to those around him. “Nobody makes a sound—understand?”

Jared concealed his hopelessness and said sarcastically, “You’re forgetting I can still smell.” He realized gratefully that Mogan had also forgotten about the noise of the waterfall which, thank Light,
couldn’t
be silenced.

“Oh, we’re not finished with the preparations,” the other laughed.

Several Zivvers seized Jared’s arms while another caught his hair and twisted his head back. Then wads of coarse, moist substance were stuffed into his ears and forced up his nostrils—mud!

Released into an odorless, soundless void, he brought his hands up to his face. But before he could dig the clay from his ears, Mogan closed in and locked his neck in a rocklike grip. He was wrenched off his feet and hurled violently to the ground.

Disoriented because there was no sound or scent to guide him, he sprang up and delivered a blow that landed on nothing and succeeded only in throwing him off balance again.

Dimly, he heard the laughter that filtered through the mud in his ears. But the sound was too vague to bear any impressions of Mogan’s whereabouts. Fists swinging, Jared stumbled forward, circling—until the Zivver leader clouted him on the back of his neck and flattened him once more.

When he tried to rise this time, a fist pounded into his face, almost taking his head off. And he would have been convinced the following blow did accomplish that purpose if unconsciousness had not deprived him of the ability to be sure of anything.

Eventually, he responded to the stinging splash of water against his face and raised himself on an elbow. The mud had fallen from one of his ears and he could hear the circle of men who stood zivving menacingly down on him.

From within the crowd came the voices of Mogan and Della:

“Of course I knew he wasn’t a Zivver,” the girl was maintaining.

Irately, Mogan reminded, “And yet you brought him here.”

“He
brought
me.”
She laughed scornfully. “I couldn’t have made it by myself. My only chance was to let him think I believed he was a Zivver too.”

“Why didn’t you tell the truth before this?”

“And give him a chance to turn on me before you could stop him? Anyway, I knew you’d find out for yourself sooner or later.”

Jared shook his head dully, remembering Leah’s warning against the girl and his own doubts from time to time. If he had been able to listen beyond the lobe of his ear, he might have heard that she was using him all along merely as an escort in her search for the Zivver World.

He tried to rise, but someone planted a foot on his shoulder and pressed him back against the ground.

“What’s he doing here?” Mogan asked the girl.

“I don’t know exactly. He’s hunting for something and he thinks he might find it here.”

“What?”

“Darkness.”

Mogan made his way over and hauled Jared to his feet. “What did you come here for?”

Jared said nothing.

“Were you trying to find this world so you could lead a raid on it?”

When that drew no response, the leader added, “Or are you helping
the monsters
locate us?”

Still Jared offered no reply.

“We’ll let you think it over awhile. You might realize a frank tongue
could
make things easier for you.”

Jared, however, sensed there would be no leniency. For, as long as he was alive, they would always fear he might escape and carry out whatever purpose they suspected he was concealing.

Trussed with fiber rope, he was taken halfway across the world and shoved into a dwelling unit not far from the roaring cataract. It was a cramped shack whose wall openings were barred with stout manna stems.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Several times during his first period of confinement Jared entertained the idea of escape. Breaking out of the manna shack, he heard, would be relatively simple—if he could manage to free his hands. His wrists, however, were too securely bound.

But escape to—what? With the main entrance already blocked by the work party and the barrier it was erecting and with the savage currents of the underground river facing him in the other direction, freedom from the shack would be meaningless.

Under other circumstances, he might have eagerly listened forward to bolting captivity. But outside the Zivver domain were nothing but monster-filled corridors. Moreover, the other worlds must certainly have been laid desolate by the hateful creatures. And the only incentive that might have driven him on—the hope of finding a hidden, self-sufficient dwelling area for himself and Della—had been stripped away when the girl had turned against him.

During the second period he stood before the barred opening in the side of the shack and listened to the work crew as it finished blocking off the main entrance. Then, hopelessly, he leaned back against the wall and let the roar of the nearby cataract sweep his attention away from the other sounds.

In self-reproach he wondered what had made him think he might find Light in this miserable world. He had supposed that, since Zivvers could know what lay ahead without hearing, they must be exercising the same sort of power all men could presumably exercise in the presence of Light Almighty. And he had foolishly thought that the result of this activity would be a lessening of Darkness. But he had neglected one possibility: that lessness of Darkness might be something only the Zivvers themselves could recognize—something forever removed from his own perception as a result of sensory limitations.

Stymied in his speculations on the Light-Darkness-Zivver relationship, he went over and lay on the slumber surface. He tried to keep Della from entering his thoughts but couldn’t. Then, objectively, he conceded that what she had done—tricking him into bringing her here—merely reflected a treachery basic to the nature of all Zivvers. Now Leah, on the other hand, never would have...

Finding himself thinking of Kind Survivoress, he wondered what had happened to her. Perhaps she was even now trying to contact him from the depths of Radiation. Unless he were asleep, though, he would never know it.

For the rest of that period, except when they brought his food, he spent as much time in slumber as he could, hoping she would come again. But she didn’t.

Toward the end of his third period of confinement he detected a faint noise outside the shack—a scurrying that was close enough to be audible above the throbbing spatter of the cataract. Then he caught Della’s scent as she sprang forward and flattened herself against the outer wall.

“Jared!” she whispered anxiously.

“Go away.”

“But I want to help you!”

“You’ve helped enough already.”

“Use your head. Would I be free to come here now if I had acted
any other
way in front of Mogan?”

He listened to her fumbling with the solid curtain’s rope lock. “I suppose you waited for the
first
opportunity to let me loose,” he said disinterestedly.

“Of course. It didn’t come until just now—when the Zivvers started hearing noises out in the corridor.”

The last rope parted and Della entered as the rigid partition 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 flicked 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. Mogan 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.”