“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.
“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.