Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (38 page)

“In my dreams it was. He couldn’t hear anything except the soundless noises some of the crickets made.”

“If they were soundless, how did you know the crickets were making any noise at all?” She led him over a minor chasm.

“As I remember, the woman used to tell me such noises existed but only the boy could hear them. She heard them too whenever she listened into his mind, however.”

“She could do
that
?”

“Without strain.” His chuckle made it clear that he was merely poking fun at the absurdity of his imagination. “That’s how she was able to reach me. I remember how she used to say she could listen in on almost anybody’s mind anywhere—except a Zivver’s.”

Della paused beside a rock column. “
You’re
a Zivver. She reached
your
mind. How do you account for that?”

There! He’d stumbled over his tongue again. And at a time when he was merely making conversation so he could hear the way. But he recovered instantly. “Oh, I was also the only
Zivver
whose mind she could hear. Don’t take this too seriously. Dreams don’t have to follow logical patterns.”

She led the way into a broader stretch of passage. “Parts of yours did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose I told you I knew of a baby who never listened in the direction of a voice, but whenever his mother caught him listening at the wall, she always found a cricket clinging there.”

Somehow that had a familiar ring. “Was there such a baby?”

“In the Upper Level—before I was born.”

“What happened to him?”

“They decided he was a Different One. He was let out in the passages before he was even four gestations old.”

Now he dimly remembered how his parents used to tell him the same story about the Different child of the Upper Level.

“What are you thinking about, Jared?”

He was silent a long while. Then he laughed. “About how I finally understand why I used to dream about a Little Listener. Don’t you hear? I had actually been told about such a person. But the memory stayed below the surface.”

“And your—Kind Survivoress?”

Another curtain parted on the sounds of forgotten memory. “Now I can even recall hearing the story of a Different One who had been banished from the Lower Level gestations before I was born—a girl who always seemed to know what other people were thinking!”

“There.” Della continued on around a bend. “Now you have your odd dreams all explained.”

Almost. Left now to be determined was only the psychological origin of the Forever Man in his imaginings.

He turned his attention ahead and listened to a distant, vast hollowness that enveloped the roar of a cataract. They were nearing the end of the passage and ahead, he was certain, lay a huge world—the Zivver World? He doubted it, for he had long ago lost the scent of Zivvers.

“It’s horrible,” Della said pensively, “the way people just banish Different Ones.”

“The first Zivver was a Different One.” He swung back into the lead, using his clickstones. “But when they banished him he was old enough to steal back for a Unification partner.”

They broke out of the passage and Jared listened to the river flowing on across level ground, headed for the far wall. He shouted and the trailing echoes plunged back down from tremendous heights and across forbidding distances. The words rebounded from grotesque islands of tumbled rocks, setting up a clashing dissonance.

“Jared, it’s beautiful!” the girl exclaimed, turning her head in all directions. “I’ve never zivved anything like
this
before!”

“We can’t lose any time reaching the other side,” he said calmly. “There should be another passage where the stream flows into the opposite wall.”

“That soubat?” she asked, detecting the concern in his voice.

Without answering, he led her swiftly along a level course that had been eroded to smoothness during times past when the river had been fuller than it was now. Many breaths later they plunged through the passageway entrance in the opposite wall—just as the pursuing creatures emerged from the tunnel behind them and hurtled forward, filling the world with their malevolent stridency.

“We’ve got to hide!” he shouted. “They’ll overtake us in a beat!”

They splashed through a bend in the river and echoes of the sound betrayed the presence of an opening in the left wall barely large enough to admit them. He followed Della through and found himself in a recess almost as small as a residential grotto. The girl dropped exhausted to the ground and Jared settled down beside her, listening to the enraged soubats congregating in the corridor outside.

Della rested her head on his shoulder. “Do you think we’ll
ever
find the Zivver World?”

“Why are you so anxious to get there?”

“I—well, maybe for the same reason you are.”

Of course, she
couldn’t
know his real reason—or, could she? “It’s where we belong, isn’t it?”

“More than that, Jared. You sure you’re not going there to—find some people too?”

“What people?”

She hesitated. “Your relatives.”

His brow knitted. “I have no relatives there.”

“Then I suppose you must be an
original
Zivver.”

“Isn’t that what you are?”

“Oh, no. You see, I’m a—spur.” And she quickly added, “Does that make any difference—between us, I mean?”

“Why, no.” But even that sounded too stuffy. “Radiation, no!”

“I’m glad, Jared.” She brushed her cheek against his arm. “Of course, nobody knew I was a spur except my mother.”

“She was a Zivver too?”

“No. My father was.”

He listened outside the recess. Frustrated, the shrieking soubats were beginning to withdraw to the world they had just left.

“But I don’t understand,” he told the girl.

“It’s simple.” She shrugged. “After my mother found out I was going to be born, she Unified with an Upper Level Survivor. Everybody thought I just came early.”

“You mean,” he asked delicately, “your mother and—a Zivver—”

“Oh, it wasn’t like that. They wanted to be Unified. They met accidentally in a passageway once—and many times after that. They finally decided to run off together, find a small world of their own. On the way, though, she fell part way down a pit and he got killed saving her. There was nothing else she could do except return to the Upper Level.”

Jared felt a keen compassion for the girl. And he could understand how fervently she must have longed for the Zivver World. He had placed his arm around her and drawn her comfortably close. But now he released her, acutely aware of the distinction between them. It was more than the mere physical difference between a Zivver and a non-Zivver. It was a great chasm of divergent thought and philosophy that encompassed contrary values and standards. And he could almost grasp the disdain a Zivver would feel for anyone to whom zivving was only an incomprehensible function.

There were no more soubats in the corridor, so he said, “We’d better get on our way.”

But she only sat there, rigid and not breathing. And, momentarily, he imagined he heard some faint, scurrying sounds that he hadn’t noticed before. To make certain, he rattled his pebbles. Immediately he received the impression of many small, furry forms. Now he could hear the feather-soft touch of insect feet against stone.

Della screamed and sprang up. “Jared, this is a
spider
world! I’ve just been bitten on the arm!”

Even as they ran for the exit he heard her falter in stride. As she collapsed, he caught her in his arms and shoved her into the corridor, crawling through after her. But too late. One of the tiny, hairy things had already dropped onto his shoulder. And before he could brush it off he felt the sharp, boiling sting of lethal venom.

Clinging to his lances, he slung Della over his shoulder and stumbled on down the passage. The poison was coursing through his arm now and reaching torturously across his chest, into his head.

But he pushed on for more than one impelling reason: he couldn’t lose consciousness here—the soubats would be back at any moment; nor could there be any stopping until he reached a hot spring where he might fashion steaming poultices and tend their wounds.

He struck a rock, bounced off, stood swaying for a while, then staggered on. Around the next bend he waded through an arm of the river and collapsed when he reached dry land again.

The stream flowed off through the wall and before them stretched a broad, dry passage. Pulling himself forward with the hand that still clutched the spears, he dragged Della along with him. Then he paused, listening to a
drip-drip
that came with a melodious monotony. His spear point touched rock and the
thunk
provided him with a composite of the passageway.

It was a strangely familiar corridor, with its slender hanging stone dripping cold water into the puddle below, not too far away from a single, well-defined pit. He felt sure he had been here many times before; had stood beside that moist needle of rock and run his hands over its cool, slick contours.

And, in his last impression before he lapsed into unconsciousness, he recognized all the details of the passageway outside the imaginary world of Kind Survivoress.

To be continued in Issue Three

A book on virtual reality,
before virtual reality became real