Dark Universe (17 page)

"If we weren't hunting for the Zivver World," she offered, yawning,

"this would be a nice place to settle in, wouldn't it?"

"Maybe staying here is the best thing we could do."

He stretched out beside her and, even from the negligible echoes of his breathing, he could hear the attractive composite of the girl's face, the gentle, firm contours of her shoulders, hips, waist--all veiled in the whispering softness of near inaudibility.

"It might be a--good idea," she said drowsily, "if we-- decided--"

He waited. But from her direction came only the slight body murmurs of sl&p.

He turned over, crooked an arm under his head and banished the maudlin, wistful thought that had begun to obscure his purpose. He had to concede, though, that it _would_ be pleasant to remain here in this remote world with Della and put out of his mind forever the Zivvers, human monsters, soubats, Upper and Lower Levels, Survivorship, and all the chains of formality and restrictions of communal law. And, yes, even his hopeless quest for Light and Darkness.

But such an arrangement was not for him. Della was a Zivver--a superior Different One. And he would always have to listen up to her and her greater abilities. It would never do. What was it he had once overheard one Zivver tell another during a raid?--"A Zivver down here is the same as a oneeared man in a world of the deaf."

That was it. He would always be like an invalid, with Della to lead him around by the hand. And in her incomprehensible world of murmuring air currents and psychic awareness of things he could never hope to hear, he would be lost and frustrated.

Even from the depths of sleep he could tell that he had lain there beside the girl a long while--perhaps the equivalent of a slumber period or more. And he surely must have been close to wakefulness when he heard the screams.

Had they been Della's, they would have jolted him from sleep. That he continued to hear them without awakening was a measure of their psychic quality. They seemed to come from deep within his mind, spawned in a vortex of projected terror.

Then he recognized Leah behind the desperate, silent outcries. He tried to distill concrete meaning from the hodgepodge of frantic impressions. But the woman was in such a panic that she couldn't put her fright into words.

Digging into the emotions of terrible astonishment and dismay, he intercepted piecemeal impressions--shouting and screaming, rushing feet and roaring bursts of silent sound that played derisively across walls which had been such a warm and real part of his childhood fantasies, an occasional _zip-hiss_.

The composite was unmistakable: The human monsters had finally found Leah's world!

"Jared! Jared! Soubats--coming in from the passage!" Della shook him awake.

He grabbed his spear and sprang to his feet. The first of the three or four beasts that had winged into the world was almost upon them. There was scarely time to hurl Della to the ground and plant his spear in readines for the initial impact.

The lead creature screeched down in a vicious dive and took the point of the weapon full in its chest. The lance snapped in half and the beast struck the ground with jarring impact.

The second and third hateful furies began their plunge.

He hurled the girl into the river and leaped in after her. In less than a beat the current, immensely swifter than he had estimated, was sweeping her away--toward the side wall where the stream rushed into a subterranean channel.

He heard that he couldn't overtake her in time, but he swam ahead anyway. A soubat's wingtip thrashed the water in front of him, talons barely missing their mark in a swooping attack.

At the beginning of his next stroke, his hand touched Della's hair, frothing on the surface of the water, and he secured a grip on it. But too late. The current had already sucked them into the subsurface channel and had drawn boulders of water in behind them.

Savage undercurrents flung him to the right and left and finally sent him plunging into the depths. He caromed against the jagged bed of the stream, then swirled upward. Jared found no air for his bursting lungs as he crashed into the submerged ceiling. Yet, he managed to maintain his grip on Della's hair.

Again and again the girl was dashed against him while he choked down the terrifying realization that the stream might rush on eternally through an infinity of rock without ever again flowing up into an air-filled world.

When he could hold his breath no longer, his head grazed a final stretch of ceiling, slipped under a ledge and bobbed to the surface. He pulled the girl up beside him and gulped great draughts of air. Sensing the nearness of the bank, he grabbed a partially exposed rock and anchored himself against it while he shoved her ashore. When he heard that she was still breathing, he crawled out and collapsed beside her.

Gestations later, after his pounding heartbeat slowed to a tolerable pace, he became aware of the roaring spatter of a nearby cataract. The noise and its distant reflections traced out the broad expanse of a high-domed world. But he started as he detected a variety of other sounds that barely pierced the audible curtain of cascading water--the remote clatter of manna shells, the thumping of rock against rock, the bleat of a sheep, voices, many voices, far and indistinct.

Confounded, he sneezed more water out of his nose. He rose, dislodging a pebble and listening to it chatter down an incline that sloped off alongside the waterfall. Then he caught a powerful, unmistakable scent and sat up, alert and excited.

"Jared!" The girl stood up beside him. "_We're in the Zivver World!_

Just ziv it! It's exactly as I thought it would be!"

He listened sharply, but the composite, etched only by the dull sound of failing water, was fuzzy and confusing. Yet, he could hear the soft, fibrous tones of a manna orchard off on his left, a gaping exit to the corridor on the far right. And he picked up the impressions of many queer, evenly spaced forms in the center of the world. Arranged in rows, each was shaped like a cube with rectangular openings in its sides. And he recognized them for what they were--flying quarters fashioned after those in the Original World and possibly made out of manna stalks tied together.

Della started forward, her pulse accelerating in a surge of excitement. "Isn't it a wonderful world? And ziv the Zivvers--so many of them!"

Not at all sharing the girl's enthusiasm, he followed her down the incline, gaining his perception of the terrain from echoes of the waterfall.

It was indeed a strange world. He had managed by now to gamer the impressions of many Zivvers at work and play, others busy carrying soil and rocks and piling them up in the main entrance. But all that activity, without the reassuring tones of a central echocaster, gave an uncanny, forbidding cast to the world about him.

Morever, he was sorely disappointed. He had hoped that on stepping into the Zivver domain the difference he had been hunting all his life would fairly leap out at him. Oh, it was going to be so easy! Zivvers had eyes and, in using them, they materially affected the universal Darkness, eating holes in it, so to speak--just as hearing sound ate holes in silence. And, simply by recognizing what there was less of, he was going to identify Darkness.

But he could hear nothing unusual. Many persons were down there zivving. Yet, everything was exactly the same here as in any other world, except for the absence of an echo caster and the presence of the sharp Zivver scent.

Della quickened her pace but he restrained her. "We don't want to startle them."

"There's nothing to worry about. We're both Zivvers."

Near enough to the settled area to intercept impressions from the rebounding sounds of communal activities, he followed the girl around the orchard and past a row of animal pens. Discovery finally came as they approached a party working on the nearest geometrical dwelling place.

Jared heard an apprehensive silence fall upon the group and listened to heads twisting alertly in his direction.

"We're Zivvers," Della called out confidently. "We came here because we belong here."

The men advanced silently, spreading out to converge on them from several directions.

"Mogan!" one of them shouted. "Over here--quick!"

Several Zivvers lunged and caught Jared's arms, pinning them to his sides. Della too, he heard, was receiving the same treatment.

"We're not armed," he protested.

Others were gathering around now and he was grateful for the background of agitated voices that, in the absence of an echo caster, sounded out the more prominent details of his surroundings.

Two faces pushed close to his and he listened to eyes that were wide open and severe in their steadiness. He made certain his own lids were fully raised and unblinking.

"The _girl's_ zivving," vouched someone off to his left.

An open hand fanned the air abruptly in front of his face and he was unable to keep his eyelids from flicking.

"I suppose this one is too," the owner of the hand attested. "At least, his eyes _are_ open."

Jared and Della were hustled ahead between the rows of dwelling units while scores of Zivver Survivors collected from all over the world.

Concentrating on vocal sounds and their reflections, he caught the impression of an immense figure pushing through the crowd and instantly recognized the man as Mogan, the Zivver leader.

"Who let them in?" Mogan demanded.

"They didn't get by the entrance," someone assured.

"They say they're Zivvers," offered another.

"Are they?" Mogan asked.

"They're

both

open-eyed."

The leader's voice boomed down on Jared. "What are you doing here? How did you get in?"

Della answered first. "This is where we belong."

"We were attacked by soubats beyond that far wall," Jared explained.

"We jumped into the river and washed up in here."

Mogan's voice lost some of its severity. "You must have had a Radiation of a time. I'm the only one who's ever gotten in that way." Then, boastfully, "Made it through _against_ the current a couple of times, too.

What were you doing out there?"

"Looking for this world," Della replied. "We're both Zivvers."

"Like compost you are!" Mogan shot back. "There was only _one_

original Zivver. All of us are his descendants. You're not. _You_ came from one of the Levels."

"True," she admitted. "But my father was a Zivver-- Nathan Bradley."

Somewhere in the background a Survivor drew in a tense breath and started forward. It was the anxious, heavy gasp of an elderly man.

"Nathan!" he exclaimed. "My son!"

But someone held him off.

"Nathan Bradley?" the man on Jared's left repeated uncertainly.

"Sure," answered another. "You heard about hun. Used to spend all his time out in the passages--until he disappeared."

Then Jared felt the blast of Mogan's words directed down at him again. "What about you?"

"He's another original Zivver," Della said.

"And I'm a soubat's uncle!" the leader blurted.

Once more Jared's self-confidence slid off into doubt over the ability to carry off his disguise as a Zivver. Groping for something convincing to say, he offered, "Maybe I'm _not_ an original Zivver. You do have people who desert your world from time to time and who might be responsible for other spurs. There was Nathan and there was Estel--"

"Estel!" a woman exclaimed, pushing through the crowd. "What do you know about my daughter?"

"I was the one who sent her back here the first time I zivved her out near the Main Passage."

The woman seized his arms and he could almost feel the pressure of her eyes. "Where is she? What's happened to her?"

"She came to the Lower Level listening--zivving for me. That was how everybody found out I was a Zivver. After that I couldn't very well stay down there."

"Where is my child?" the woman demanded.

Reluctantly, he related what had happened to Estel. A condoling silence fell over the world while the Survivoress was led away sobbing.

"So you swam in under the rocks," Mogan mused. "Lucky you didn't get caught in the waterfall on this side."

"Then we can stay?" Jared asked hopefully, trying to keep his eyes steady just as Mogan was doing.

"For the moment, yes."

In the silence that followed, Jared sensed a subtle change in his perception of the Zivver leader. For some reason, Mogan was unconsciously holding his breath and his heartbeat had increased slightly.

Jared concentrated on the effects and detected, even more faintly, that particular physical tension which claims a person intent on some crafty purpose. Then he caught the almost inaudible impression of Mogan's hand rising slowly before him. He coughed casually and, in the reflections of the sound, discerned that the hand was slyly waiting to be clasped.

Without hesitation, his own hand shot forward and grasped the other.

"Did you think I wouldn't ziv that?" he asked, laughing.

"We've got to be careful," Mogan said. "I've zivved Levelers who could hear so well that they might easily be mistaken for one of us."

"What reason would we have for coming here if we _weren't_

Zivvers?"

"I don't know. But we're not taking any chances--not with those creatures stalking the passages. Even now we're sealing the entrance before they can find it. But what good would that do if they learned there was another way to get in--a way that can't be blocked?"

Mogan stepped between Jared and the girl and led them off. "We're going to keep an eye on you until we're sure we can trust you. Meanwhile, I know how you feel after swimming under those rocks. So we'll give you a chance to rest."

They were led to adjacent dwelling units--"shacks," Jared had heard one of the Zivvers call them--and were ushered in through rectangular openings. Guards were posted outside each structure.

Standing uncertainly within the enclosure, Jared cleared his throat rather loudly. Echoes of the sound brought details of a recess strikingly different from any of the residental grottoes he had known. Here, everything was an adaptation of the rectangle. There was a dining slab whose remarkably level surface was composed of husks woven tightly together and stretched across a framework of manna stalks. He laid his hand casually upon it and traced the weave. Four other stalks, he heard, served as legs to hold the leveF section off the floor.