“Sin and evil, no doubt.”
“Of course. What else?”
It was evident she knew nothing of Darkness. Or, even if she could perceive it, she still didn’t recognize it for what it was.
“Why are you so concerned over Darkness?” she asked.
“I was just thinking,” he improvised, “that zivving must be something opposite to Darkness — something good.”
“Of course it’s good,” she assured, following him around a lesser depression and along the shore of a suddenly emerged river. “How could anything so beautiful be bad?”
“It’s — beautiful?” He tried to eliminate the questioning inflection at the last beat. But, still, the words came out more interrogation than statement.
Her voice was animate with expressiveness. “That rock up ahead — ziv how it stands out against the cool earth background, how warm and soft it is. Now it’s not there, but just for a beat — until that breath of warm air goes by. Now it’s back again.”
His mouth hung open. How could the rock be there and not there in the next instant. It had continued to cast back clicks from his stones all the while, hadn’t it? Why, it hadn’t moved even a finger’s width!
The passage, he could hear, was wide and straight, with few hazards. So he put his stones away.
“You’re zivving now, aren’t you, Jared? What do you ziv?”
He hesitated. Then, impulsively, “Out there in the stream — I ziv a fish. A big one, standing out against the cool river bed.”
“How can that be?” she asked skeptically. “I can’t ziv it.”
But certainly it was there! He could hear the swishing of its fins as it stabilized itself. “It’s there, all right.”
“But a fish is no colder or warmer than the water around it. Besides, I’ve never been able to ziv rocks or anything else in water — not even when I’ve just thrown them in.”
Covering over the blunder would call for boldness. “I can ziv fish. Maybe I ziv different from you.”
She was audibly concerned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, Jared, suppose I’m not really a Zivver after all!”
“Youre a Zivver, all right.” Then he lapsed into a troubled silence. How could anyone expect to outsmart a Zivver?
The fearsome rustle of leathery wings overtook him and he marveled that anything that distinct could escape the girl’s attention. The creatures had reached an enlarged stretch of the passage and, making the most of ample flying room, were streaking forward.
Then he pulled up and trained his ears acutely on the rearward sounds. No longer were there only two soubats stalking them. It was clearly audible that their number had at least doubled.
“What is it, Jared?” Della questioned his alert silence.
One of the creatures filled the air with its strident cry.
“Soubats!” she exclaimed.
“Just one.” No point in alarming her when, with a little luck, they might lose the beasts entirely. “You take the lead. I’ll bring up the rear — in case it gets in position to attack.”
He prided himself on having worked a temporary advantage out of the situation. With her in front, he no longer had to prove occasionally that he was zivving. Now, with her hand in his, he had only to follow her lead. Still, vocal sounds were even more desirable for fetching obscure impressions, so he primed the conversation.
“Leading me by the hand like this,” he offered facetiously, “you remind me of Kind Survivoress.”
“Who’s that?”
Trailing Della along a ridge that ran beside the stream, he told her of the woman who, in his childhood dreams, used to take him to visit the child who lived with her.
“Little Listener?” she repeated the name after he mentioned it. “That’s what the boy was called?”
“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.