“There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?” he asked.
She nodded. “I still don’t understand about Leah and you. I can hear now that she did visit you in your dreams. Yet, you yourself said she couldn’t reach the mind of a Zivver.”
Now he was certain she didn’t know he couldn’t ziv. For if she were out here for some treacherous reason, the last thing she’d do would be to let him find out she suspected him.
“I’ve already told you I think I’m a little different from other Zivvers,” he reminded. “Right now I’m zivving a halfdozen fish in the river. You can’t ziv a single one.”
She lay back on the ground and, out of crossed arms, made a cushion for her head. “I hope you’re not too different. I wouldn’t want to feel — inferior.”
Her words struck home with unintended mockery. And he knew that being inferior to her was what he had resented all along.
“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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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.