David Galouye - Dark Universe

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.

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.

Morever, he was sorely disappointed. He had hoped that on stepping into the Zivver domain the difference he had been hunting all his life would fairly leap out at him. Oh, it was going to be so easy! Zivvers had eyes and, in using them, they materially affected the universal Darkness, eating holes in it, so to speak — just as hearing sound ate holes in silence. And, simply by recognizing what there was less of, he was going to identify Darkness.

But he could hear nothing unusual. Many persons were down there zivving. Yet, everything was exactly the same here as in any other world, except for the absence of an echo caster and the presence of the sharp Zivver scent.

Della quickened her pace but he restrained her. “We don’t want to startle them.”

“There’s nothing to worry about. We’re both Zivvers.”

Near enough to the settled area to intercept impressions from the rebounding sounds of communal activities, he followed the girl around the orchard and past a row of animal pens. Discovery finally came as they approached a party working on the nearest geometrical dwelling place. Jared heard an apprehensive silence fall upon the group and listened to heads twisting alertly in his direction.

“We’re Zivvers,” Della called out confidently. “We came here because we belong here.”

The men advanced silently, spreading out to converge on them from several directions.

“Mogan!” one of them shouted. “Over here — quick!”

Several Zivvers lunged and caught Jared’s arms, pinning them to his sides. Della too, he heard, was receiving the same treatment.

“We’re not armed,” he protested.

Others were gathering around now and he was grateful for the background of agitated voices that, in the absence of an echo caster, sounded out the more prominent details of his surroundings.

Two faces pushed close to his and he listened to eyes that were wide open and severe in their steadiness. He made certain his own lids were fully raised and unblinking.

“The girl’s zivving,” vouched someone off to his left.

An open hand fanned the air abruptly in front of his face and he was unable to keep his eyelids from flicking.

“I suppose this one is too,” the owner of the hand attested. “At least, his eyes are open.”

Jared and Della were hustled ahead between the rows of dwelling units while scores of Zivver Survivors collected from all over the world. Concentrating on vocal sounds and their reflections, he caught the impression of an immense figure pushing through the crowd and instantly recognized the man as Mogan, the Zivver leader.

“Who let them in?” Mogan demanded.

“They didn’t get by the entrance,” someone assured.

“They say they’re Zivvers,” offered another.

“Are they?” Mogan asked.

“They’re both open-eyed.”

The leader’s voice boomed down on Jared. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

Della answered first. “This is where we belong.”

“We were attacked by soubats beyond that far wall,” Jared explained. “We jumped into the river and washed up in here.”

Mogan’s voice lost some of its severity. “You must have had a Radiation of a time. I’m the only one who’s ever gotten in that way.” Then, boastfully, “Made it through against the current a couple of times, too. What were you doing out there?”

“Looking for this world,” Della replied. “We’re both Zivvers.”