“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 nonZivver. 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, listenihg 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.
CHAPTER TEN
Jared flinched from the absurd impressions, from the contradictory composites of physical orientation. He was certain he still lay in the corridor near the dripping needle of rock. Yet, he was equally sure he was somewhere else.
The drip-drip of the water changed to a weary taptap-tap and back to a drip-drip again. The coarse hardness of stone under his feverish body was, alternately, the soft fibers of manna husks piled upon a sleeping ledge.
In the next phase of the here-there alternation, the distant tap-tap-tap commanded his attention. And its sharp echoes conveyed the impression of someone seated on a ledge absently drumming his finger on stone.
Light, but the man was old! Had it not been for the movement of his hand, he might easily have been mistaken for a skeleton. The head, trembling with an affliction ot senility, was like a skull. And the beard, unkempt and sparse, trailed to the ground, losing itself in the inaudibility of its thinness.
Tap-tap-tap… drip-drip…
Jared was back in the corridor. And, like commingling sounds, the straggly beard had metamorphosed into the moist hanging stone.
“Relax, Jared. Everything’s under control now.”
He almost lurched out of the dream. “Kind Survivoress!”
“It’ll be less awkward if you just call me Leah.”
He puzzled over the name, then thought flatly, “I’m dreaming again.”
“For the moment — yes.”
Another anxious, soundless voice intruded, “Leah! How’s he doing?”
“Coming around,” she said.
“So I can hear.” Then, “Jared?”
Jared, however, had returned to the corridor — but only for a moment. Soon he was back on the manna fiber mattress in a minor world where the vague outline of a woman bent over him and an inconceivably ancient man sat against the far wall tapping his finger.
“Jared,” the woman offered, “that other voice was Ethan’s.”
“Ethan?”
“You knew him as Little Listener before we changed his name. He’s been out after game, but he’s coming back now.”
Jared was even more confused.
More to soothe him than for any other reason, he felt sure, the woman said, “I can’t believe you found your way here after all these gestations.”
He started to say something, but she interrupted, “Don’t explain. I heard everything from your mind — what you were doing in the passages, how you were bitten by—”