Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (29 page)

He began taking the steps two at a time, fearing for a while that, in racing toward the infinite sonic beauty of Paradise, he might also be descending an infinitely long flight of stairs. But, then, the steps curved to the right and at last he could hear the opening at the bottom of the pit, not too far ahead.

“Let’s turn around!” Della pleaded, huffing. “We’ll
never
get back up all these steps!”

But he only went faster. “Don’t you hear this might be what I’ve been searching for all along? I wasn’t trying to find
Light.
I was really hunting for Paradise, but I didn’t realize that until now.”

He reached the bottom of the stairs and drew the girl to a halt beside him. They stood under a broad arch of stone that opened up on a vast enclosure, many times more expansive than even the spacious Zivver domain. Enraptured, he swayed before the rich, tremolant sound and let the mighty avalanche of ideal tones pour down upon him. It was easily the most entrancing experience of his life. He had found an auditory beauty beyond imagination. And such unbounded excellence of concord and rhythm transported him with delight, filled him with intense emotions of gratification, self-assurance.

Constraining his exuberant reaction, he listened to the world that stretched before him.

A Paradise that was practically—
all water?

Impossible! Yet, there it was—one vast, level expanse that modified the reflecting tones with nothing but liquid fluidity.

He heard now that he was standing on a ledge only slightly higher than the surface of the water. And there was no other dry ground his ears could detect. From the far end of the world came the profound roar of an immense cataract that poured out of the ceiling.

The ledge extended but a few paces to his right. On his left it followed the natural curvature of the wall and he traced its audible details around to the very origin of the perfect sounding tones.

Paradise’s echo caster was a cluster of tremendous cubic structures. Each was many times the size of even the largest shack in the Original World. And they were smothered in a complicated pattern of huge tubes that stretched up out of the water, coiling and intertwining, and disappeared into the sides of the structures.

From the tops of the super shacks reared hundreds of tubes that shot straight up and bored into the ceiling in many directions.

Confounded, he studied the
thump-throb, tut-tut-tut-tut
that was bringing all these details to his ears.

“What
is
this place?” Della whispered apprehensively. “Why is there so much heat?”

Now that she had mentioned it, he
was
aware of the clinging warmth. And it all seemed to be coming from the huge shacks that were producing the ideal sounding echoes. Somehow he had begun to doubt seriously that he was in Paradise.

“What do you ziv, Della?” But even as he asked the question, he sensed that her eyes were closed.

“I’m not zivving—not with all this heat. It’s too much.” She seemed frightened and confused.

“Try it.”

She hesitated a long while before he caught the impression of her eyes flicking open.

But she only gasped and threw her hands in front of her face. “I can’t! It’s too painful!”

Then he realized that, all the while, his
own
eyes hadn’t been open. He raised his lids and
saw
(that would be the proper word for it, he remembered) nothing.

“Didn’t you ziv anything at all?” he asked.

Stubbornly, she continued shielding her face. “Some shacks—enormous ones. And a lot of stems reaching up from the water. Everything after that was too hot. I couldn’t keep my eyes on it.”

Impulsively, he swung his head back in the direction of the shacks. There was Light over there now! Not the kind he had experienced in infinity, but the kind the monsters carried—two cones darting here and there among the noise-making structures.

Puzzled over his silence, the girl asked, “What is it?”

“Monsters!”

Then he heard one of the creatures shouting to the other above the clamor of the multiple echo caster:

“Did you dampen the fourth reactor?”

“I shut it down completely. That takes care of the last few springs in the Upper Level, according to the diagram.”

“How about those scattered springs—the ones fed by the second reactor?”

“Thorndyke says to let them go on flowing. If we miss anybody, they’ll have a place to stay until we can find them.”

Heartsick, Jared retreated toward the stairs. He had been right all along. The monsters
were
responsible for the boiling pit failures. And now he heard how precarious had been the position of the Survivors through all the generations. At any chosen moment the demons could have deprived them of their principal means of existence!

Abruptly the cone of light swung in his direction. He turned and bolted for the stairs, prodding Della ahead of him.

“They’re coming!” he warned.

At full speed they bounded upward. There was a moment, after he had climbed hundreds of steps, that he considered slowing the pace so they could catch their breath. But he realized just then that he was also receiving faint Light composites of the things around him. Which meant the monsters were already on their way up!

His lungs boiling in protest, he put on a burst of speed nevertheless and dragged the girl along. Desperately, he wondered how far they were from the top.

“I—I can’t go on!” she complained.

When she collapsed, the sudden resistance of her weight against his grip almost pulled him off balance. He helped her up and, with an arm around her waist, resumed his dash up the stairs.

Despite his help, she fell again and, when he tried to lift her, he dropped beside the girl. He would have lain there forever. But this was their last chance; if they failed now, there would never be a secure, secluded world for them.

He struggled erect, cradled the girl in his arms and forced his numb legs back into motion. Each step sent a new throb of pain through his side. Each frantically gulped lungful of air seemed as if it would be his last.

Then, finally, he heard the opening above and drew a scant measure of encouragement from the nearness of his goal. Only vaguely did he wonder, however, where he would muster the strength to find concealment after they reached the Original World.

An eternity later he hauled himself and the girl up over the last step and crawled onto the floor of the shack. He gave Della a shove forward. “Hide in one of the other units—quick!”

She dragged herself ahead, staggering on through the entrance. Outside, she pitched forward and he heard only the violent rasping of her breath as she lay there motionless.

He managed to pull himself erect. But paralyzing exhaustion sent him reeling against an inner wall. He collided with a bulky object and his auditory impressions of the shack spun dizzily about him. He crashed into something else and collapsed, retaining his consciousness not even long enough to feel the impact of all the furnishings that tumbled down on top of him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Don’t lie there, Jared! Get up and save yourself!”

Distorted with anxiety, Leah’s thoughts spanned the distance from Radiation. And Jared was vaguely disturbed by the fact that he couldn’t even recall having entered a dream.

“The demons—they’re coming up the steps!”

He stirred against the pressure of all the things which, he remembered now, had tumbled down upon him in the shack. But somehow he couldn’t quite pull himself back to consciousness.

“I can’t talk and keep track of the monsters at the same time!” Leah went on frantically. “They don’t know you’re there, but they heard all that noise. They’ll find you and bring you back to Radiation!”

He was perplexed over his passive reaction to the warning. His stupor, he reasoned, must be the result of more than mere exhaustion.

Through the medium of Leah’s conscious, he strove for a composite of the physical things around her. And he sensed, from the audible impressions stored in her mind, that she lay on a slumber surface she had learned to call a “bed.” She was in some sort of a shack that was closed off by a rigid curtain (the unfamiliar word “door” was suggested). Her arms were bound to the sides of the bed. And her eyes were stubbornly closed because she knew that if she opened them they would be assailed by the incomprehensible stuff she had been told was “light.” It was seeping in around the edges of a flexible curtain that hung in front of the—“window.”

Then he caught a surge of pure terror as he heard the door of her grotto—“room,” rather—opening. And he listened in on an auditory impression of two of the human-inhuman creatures entering.

“How’s our telepath today?” he heard one of them ask.

“We’re going to spend a little time with our eyes open, aren’t we?” the other added.

Jared sensed the awful fright lapping at Leah’s self-control as she cringed from the creatures.

As though the experience were his own, he felt her arm being seized in a firm grip. Then a sharp pain erupted in the flesh above the right elbow. At the same time, he intercepted the psychic and sonic counterparts of her scream.

“There,” said one of the monsters. “That’ll help keep you from coming down with something.”

From somewhere in Jared’s material background came a distant
zip-hiss
. But he was too absorbed in what was happening to Kind Survivoress to give it more than superficial attention.

It had been periods now since the monsters had seized Leah. And he could only wonder what inconceivable torture they had put her through.

“How’s she doing?” asked the nearer creature, taking her wrist in a gentle grip between thumb and forefinger.

“We’re having a rough time bringing her around. Seems to be immune to facts and logic.”

“We’ll just have to stick with it. Thorndyke says there was another telepath in our own complex two or three generations back. She was pretty sensitive too, but she didn’t have to put up with what this one’s going through.”

Jared felt a hand come to rest on Leah’s forehead and heard one of the creatures say, “All right, now—let’s open our eyes.”

At that instant the strand of communicative contact snapped as unrestrained fear choked the woman.

***

Jared pushed a stone bench off his chest and sat up, feeling his head. There was a clot of blood embedded in his hair and, above it, a swelling of lacerated scalp.

He cast off more of the shack’s furnishings and rose. Although he snapped his fingers intently, he received but indistinct composites of the objects that had pinned him down, of the square pit which lay between him and the entrance.

Then, recalling the
zip-hiss
he had heard while in contact with Leah, he bolted outside.

There was no audible trace of Della’s breathing or heartbeat. He banged his fist against the side of the shack and wrung impressions out of the returning echoes. The ground in front of him was utterly bare.

Eventually he caught the scent, several hundred beats old, of the monsters that had passed. He knelt and swept the ground with his hands, exploring the spot where the girl had collapsed. The soft dust clearly bore the imprint of her body. But she had lain there so long ago that the surface had already given up the warmth it had captured from her.

Stunned, he trudged toward the Original World entrance. Della was gone—recaptured by the monsters who must have assumed she was the one who had made all the noise in the shack. And they had reclaimed her so long ago that now there was no hope of overtaking them before they reached Radiation.

What a bungling fool he was! As though his fortune had been graced by some power greater than Light, he had received a second chance even after having lost Della the first time. Against inconceivable odds, he had wrested her from her captors. But, instead of fleeing to remote seclusion, he had dawdled in the meaningless depths below this world—until the demons had gotten another opportunity to carry her off.

Bitter with self-reproach and bowed by an oppressive sense of futility, he paused in the corridor outside the Original World. The silence that extended toward Radiation was as thick as any he had ever heard. He tried not to think of the torment Leah was being subjected to, of the possibility that by now Della herself might be undergoing the same brutal indignities.

He took an uncertain step in that direction, then checked himself and listened helplessly down at his empty hands. Without weapons he could do nothing against the vicious forces of infinity.

But he
could
arm himself! If the Lower Level was as desolate as he had been led to believe, then he would probably meet little opposition on returning there. Possibly no one left in that world would even remember he was supposed to be a Zivver.

He gathered up a pair of stones and rattled them vigorously as he stepped off toward the Barrier and the worlds beyond. Now that he had finally committed himself to invading Radiation, he was surprised to find that the challenge did not, at the moment, impress him as being all that horrifying.

Click-click-click-click…

The echoes rebounding from the walls and obstacles of the passageway were bare and featureless and a growing uncertainty slowed his pace. He could scarcely hear the details of the things about him!

Anxiously, he cupped a hand behind an ear. When that did no good, he extended the hand in front of him where its groping could supplement the inadequate auditory impressions.

He had practically no listening ability left at all! The memory of having received eye-stimulating composites in Radiation was so strong and vivid that he could barely hear the present sonic ones.

His next step sent his shin crashing against a minor outcropping and he went hobbling forward as he swore at his own clumsiness and deafness. He collided with a hanging stone, lost his balance and fell on the edge of a yawning pit.

Confounded, he picked himself up and went ahead even more slowly, shuffling each foot forward before putting his full weight on it.

He fought down a growing fear of the unhearable hazards, staying within arm’s reach of the right wall. And he listened suspiciously as he neared the area of the Barrier. He sensed more than heard that there was something out of place. He recognized what it was when he arrived at the spot where the obstruction of piled stones should have been. There he found nothing. The Nuclear demons had even destroyed the shield which protected the worlds from the evils of infinity. They had torn it down in order to remove the Survivors and animals. Faintly, he could smell the lingering scent of the latter in the corridor.

Tossing away his pebbles, he found two large rocks and clapped them resoundingly together again and again. But the reflections of even those vigorous
clacks
returned practically unmodified, bearing only the meagerest of impressions.

With the next frantic clap, the rocks crumbled in his fists, leaving him clutching only handfuls of dirt. Despondently, he unclenched his fingers and let the particles trickle from his grip. Light! But he couldn’t even hear the impact of the powder on the ground, much less the sound of its falling!

Frightened over his mounting incapacity, he floundered on. A few steps later he came up sharply against the right wall of the corridor and rebounded against a jagged stone formation, taking skin off his elbow.

Then he realized he was once more in the presence of Light.

The patch of silent sound clung to a rock up ahead, just as that other blotch of Light had covered the wall outside the Upper Level. Almost noiseless in volume, it filled the corridor with soft warmth.

Jared went ahead a bit more certainly, letting his eyes intercept the uncanny impressions of stone formations and hazards that were within range of the monster stuff.

The more cautious side of his judgment cried out a warning against using those unhearable composites to pick his way past the obstacles. But his hearing had already been so dulled by exposure to Radiation that, surely, this weak Light could increase the deafening effect but little.

He negotiated that stretch of passageway without faltering, even though he hadn’t used his ears at all. When he turned the next bend, however, he pulled back against a sudden apprehension.

Now there was no more Light touching him. It was as though he were smothering in the great, silent folds of that clinging curtain of Darkness. He could feel it pressing in on him with a force that was strange, ominous, heavy.

He wanted to scream and charge deafly ahead, hoping that when he reached the familiar setting of the Lower Level he would no longer be tormented by this awful fear.

Then he remembered the Forever Man and how that pathetic recluse had cringed in stark terror from something which at the time had been meaningless, as far as Jared was concerned.

But it was different now. Now he
knew
what Darkness was. And he could fully appreciate the Forever Man’s unreasoning fright. Rigid with dismay, he listened intensely all around him. With his hearing and smell practically gone, Light only knew
what
might be lurking in the flexures of that impenetrable curtain—waiting to spring upon him!

His ears finally
did
manage to intercept a distant sound and he shied away from it. But before he could turn and bolt off, the direct auditory impressions resolved themselves into words:

“Light be thanked—the Period of Reunion has arrived.”

He recognized Philar, the Guardian of the Way.

And a handful of voices answered, “Thank Light.”

Philar: “Darkness will be swept away before Survivor.”

Voices: “And Light will prevail.”

It was almost a chant. But the expressions lacked the sincerity of forceful conviction.

Jared went forward to meet the party.

Philar: “We will open our eyes and feel the Great Light Almighty.”

Voices: “And there will be no more darkness.”

“Go back!” Jared shouted. “Don’t come this way!”

The party halted as he reached them in the Darkness.

“Who’s that?” demanded the Guardian.

“Jared. You can’t—”

“Out of the way. We are told Reunion is at hand.”

“Who told you that?”

“Light’s Emissaries. They said we must all come out of hiding and go beyond the Barrier.”

“It’s a trick!” Jared warned. “I’ve
been
beyond the Barrier. You’ll find only Radiation out there!”

“When we were unwise enough to conceal ourselves from the Emissaries, that’s what we believed too.”

“But the Emissaries are deceiving you!
They’re
the ones who turned off the hot springs!”

“Only to make us use our heads and abandon the worlds. That’s why they attached patches of Light to the walls. That’s why they occasionally left behind the Almighty’s Holy Tubular Vessels—so we would be introduced gradually to Light.”

Philar pushed past him and the rest of the party followed.

“Come back!” Jared called desperately after them. “You’re walking into a trap!”

But they only continued.

He swore and resumed his trek toward the Lower Level, even more vehement in his determination to arm himself for a vengeful assault on Radiation.

***

Some time later he arrived at the Lower Level with more than a few accumulated scratches and bruises, despite his acquaintance with the passageways closer to his world.

Pausing at the entrance, he let the tension drain out of him like a waning fever. Here was a setting so familiar that he could move confidently about without even using clickstones.

But there was no valid relief, no gentle feeling of homecoming, no elation. The stifling, unnerving curtain of Darkness was pierced only by a barren silence that gave the place an air of incongruity, a tinge of almost hostile strangeness.