Part 9

Then he began to fall.

XIII

For a moment, after the spinning stopped, Kesley imagined he was back on the sands outside Wiener. Then, gradually, his eyes began to shift into focus. He looked around.

He was in a room. That was the first thing to grasp.

His senses told him he was in a room, high, with bare walls that glowed of their own inner luminescence.

Good. He was in a room.

He was no longer in the _same_ room that he had been in in Mutie City. He was sure of that, too. The big-skulled mutant named Edwin had lifted him--_teleport_, Spahl said?--and had sent him somewhere.

He was somewhere else than Mutie City.

Patiently, his quivering mind reassembled the world of sense-constructs and data from which he had been hurled.

He was not alone.

He made out the other figure clearly: a tall, old man, sitting upright in a webwork chair halfway across the room. The old man's eyes were closed; he grasped a small object, unfamiliar looking, in one hand. His skull was hairless.

Kesley assembled the data.

"The mutants finally found you," the other said. His voice was deep and musical, a rich basso with an underlying harmonic tremolo. "They were searching quite diligently, you know."

"Yes, they found me," Kesley said. "I'm here. Where's _here_?"

"Antarctica," the old man said.

Nodding, Kesley absorbed the fact and added it to those he had already. The jolting shock of the teleportation was beginning to wear off now; having been plucked from the spatial framework, he was returning to it, somewhere else. His mind emerged from its numbness.

"You're Daveen the Singer," he said calmly.

"I am Daveen," the other admitted.

Kesley studied the old man, realizing with a shock that he had almost forgotten the contours of Narella's face until seeing the girl's features mirrored here on Daveen's untroubled face.

A tense silence prevailed in the room.

Finally Daveen said: "Five years has changed you, young friend. You've lost your youthful face; I see beginning wrinkles where smoothness once was."

Kesley frowned. "How do you know? You're blind, aren't you?"

"The blind have ways of seeing. Besides, it's not a difficult matter to guess that after what you have been through--"

"Just what do you know about me?" Kesley interrupted. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I was," Daveen said softly, "for many years, poet and singer to the Court of Duke Winslow. Five years ago I participated in the first of your many rescues--the first time Winslow attempted to have you killed." He chuckled musically. "Poor slovenly Winslow. Every time you fall in his clutches, some blind man comes along to lead you to safety."

"You rescued me? From what?"

"That I cannot tell you yet. The Duke warns me that I must be very careful with you, that I must not swamp your mind with too much information at once."

Kesley looked around at the bare, luminescent walls, at the smiling figure of the gaunt-faced, old, blind man sitting opposite him. "Which Duke?"

"The Antarctican Duke. The man who has searched so long and patiently to bring both of us together. You see?"

"Yes," Kesley said faintly. "_He_ brought us here. But where were you?"

"I fled from Winslow, five years past, after doing what I did. I sought refuge in Scandinavia and sang for the Duke there until Winslow's men found me and forced me to fly. I returned to North America, lived for a while at the Colony--I believe _your_ odyssey brought you there as well--and when life there became unbearable, I vanished."

"Where? How?"

"There are ways," Daveen said. "When one knows the arts of the mind, one can do many things. I went into hiding. It was the only way for me to remain alive. Winslow sought me with desperate urgency, for I had betrayed him. Miguel had my daughter."

"I know."

"I continued to live in North America under Winslow's very nose. It was a good joke; now that I'm free, I must let Winslow know about it. He has a fine sense of the ironic."

"Where did you stay?" Kesley prodded.

"I lived in the ghetto."

"Among the _mutants_?"

"I _was_ a mutant. You knew me as Lomark Dawnspear."

For a moment Kesley rocked crazily in his chair; things seemed to wheel in a dizzy arc around him.

"What?" he finally asked, recovering himself.

"Mental projection, complete; constant hypnosis."

"Dawnspear was blind, too," Kesley recalled suddenly.

"Yes. It pleased me to retain the image of the blind man who saw so well. Dawnspear was blind. Otherwise, he was a complete fabrication. I invented a false background for him, persuaded people that he had always lived in that house in that part of Chicago. And they believed it. Unable to do anything else, I lived camouflaged, not knowing how urgently I was sought."

"And then I came to Chicago."

"Then you came. And stumbled into Winslow's grasp exactly as you had done before. And once again reached the dungeons. Again, it was necessary for me to rescue you."

"I did it once before, as Daveen. Five years ago. You came to Winslow's court, and he delivered you to the headsman. I intervened."

"Why? How?"

"You loved my daughter. Furthermore, I thought you should not die."

"I loved her even then?" Kesley asked, astonished.

"Yes. She does not remember, nor do you--but you loved each other. When Winslow ordered you killed, I determined to save you. I hypnotized your jailers, slipped into the dungeon, freed you, led you out. It was a gross violation of my oath to Winslow."

Daveen paused, and Kesley stared intently at him, waiting for him to go on. There was something grotesque about this calm, matter-of-fact relation of actions he had been involved in and yet remembered nothing about. Reality seemed to slide yawingly from moment to moment. He had loved Narella five years ago? He had been at Winslow's court, and been sentenced to death?

Possibly. But it was as if those things had happened to someone else.

"Go on," Kesley said hoarsely. "What was I doing at Winslow's court? For God's sake, Daveen, _who am I_?"

The singer shook his head slowly. "No. Not yet. Let me go on, and you'll learn the rest in proper time."

"Very well," Kesley said, mollified.

"I took you from the prison, as 'Dawnspear' did just recently. I attempted to contact those who would receive you safely, but could not. Failing this, I had to make provision for your safety. I therefore placed you in full hypnosis, wiped out all knowledge of your past background, and substituted a pseudo-biography in which you had been born in--Kansas Province, I believe. It was a slipshod job, but I was in a hurry. Were there inconsistencies?"

"Yes," Kesley said. "There were."

"I feared as much. But it was the best I could do, at the time. I took the precaution of webbing in a pain-threshold that would keep you from probing your own past too deeply. Then I had you transported to Iowa Province, safely out of Winslow's way, and established you as a farmer there. It was a secure, rhythmic life; tied to the soil, you would remain healthy and unmolested. Later, perhaps, I would be able to take you from the farm and restore your identity.

"I returned to Chicago. My daughter asked where you were; I found it necessary to block her memories of you to prevent unhappiness. They can be restored as well, when the time comes. Curiously, you and she came together again later, neither knowing who the other was--and the result of the meeting was the same as before." Daveen smiled. "This, I think, should amply prove the strength of your love, at any rate."

Kesley coughed. Nervously he said: "So you left me in Iowa. You never came to get me--or were you van Alen, too?"

"No. I was not van Alen. My plans were interrupted; Winslow discovered how you had been freed, and in anger ordered my execution. I fled; Narella was given to Miguel as a plaything."

"He calls her his daughter," Kesley pointed out.

"Fortunately. Miguel is going through a paternal cycle; for the moment, he no longer feels fleshly desires. Narella was sent to be his mistress--but became his adopted daughter instead. Dukes are difficult to fathom in advance."

"I know that well."

"To continue: I fled. You remained in Iowa Province. Those who loved you sought you, finally found you."

"You mean van Alen? He tried to bring me here--to Antarctica."

"Yes. He failed; you and he were separated. Once again you drifted into dealings with the Dukes--and when they realized who you were, they immediately desired your death, both Miguel and Winslow."

"_Why?_ Why'd they turn on me like that?"

"For that," Daveen said, "the simplest answer involves the lifting of the first of the psychic blocks I laid upon you. Are you ready?"

"I've been waiting for this since you started talking."

Again Daveen chuckled melodiously. "In all your wanderings you've learned but little patience. Now you will begin to understand."

He held forth the object he had been holding. Kesley now saw that it was a musical instrument of some kind, fashioned of a dark-hued, glossy plastic. It had three hair-fine strings running its length; at the top, above the bridge, were three white buttons.

"My music-maker," Daveen said. "My constant companion always. It holds the keys to your mind, my friend."

"What do you mean?"

"Listen."

Daveen touched the three buttons lightly with his long fingers, and a tone appeared, shimmering delicately, followed by a second and a third. They hung in the air, meshing their subharmonics, quivering and blending. It was, thought Kesley, like no music he had ever heard.

Daveen began to play--a slow, mournful, lingeringly lovely melody. Melodic lines intertwined in complex polyphony; Kesley found himself following the music with breathless excitement. It soothed and tensed him at the same time.

Daveen sang a deep, lulling, wordless chant. Beneath his voice the music swept to a gentle crest of subdued excitement, and Kesley felt his nerves quivering with expectation.

The music, strange, atonal now, shifting keys with impossible rapidity of modulation, held suddenly.

Daveen stopped.

There was complete silence.

In that silence, Daveen said, "_One!_"

And Kesley felt light flash numbingly through him.

He huddled in his chair while the frozen brain-cells at last discharged the information they had stored for nearly five years. The words went rumbling over his synapses, repeating themselves endlessly.

Finally it stopped. Hesitantly, he looked up at the calmly smiling Daveen.

Then he looked down at his hands--his own hands, the hands he had farmed with and killed with.

The hands of an Immortal.

"Me?"

It was almost impossible. But he knew it was true.

"You will never die," Daveen said.

"I will never die."

"_Two!_" said Daveen suddenly.

Kesley was thrown back in his seat by the unexpected, second data-release. When it was over, he looked up again, smiling.

"An Immortal and the son of an Immortal. Small wonder Miguel and Winslow wanted to kill me!"

The words of Winslow's sentence came drifting back now: "_... you represent as great a threat to the Twelve Empires as has ever been born, my young friend._"

Of course! Twelve sterile Dukes, blessed with eternal life but cursed with the inability to reproduce--what would they do, how would they react when they knew that one line of Immortals, somewhere in Earth, bred true? That they were faced with the prospect of a gathering race of Immortals threatening their powers as the years rolled on?

"You see?" Daveen asked.

"I understand now," Kesley said. "They _had_ to try to kill me. I was a menace--an Immortal who wasn't a Duke, and whose children could breed true!"

He stared at his hands as if they were covered with suddenly alien flesh. "I wasn't a Duke, was I?" He asked cautiously. Anything was possible now.

"No," Daveen told him. "You were never a Duke."

Kesley smiled, thinking now of the centuries stretching endlessly ahead. "A king without a kingdom, then. Well, there's plenty of time for me to find one. But you still haven't told me who I am, Daveen."

XIV

There was silence in the bare room for almost a minute. Idly, Daveen strummed his instrument; Kesley tensed, thinking another layer of his mind-block was to be stripped back, but Daveen was merely striking random notes.

"Well?" Kesley asked.

"The information you want is not mine to give."

"All right," Kesley said. He rose and stared down at the blind man. "I won't ask again."

He had asked too many people too many questions, without result. Now he would save his breath.

As he stood there, a door opened silently out of the wall.

"What's that for?" he demanded. Then, realizing the blind Daveen was unaware of the occurrence, he added: "A door just opened in the wall."

"Doors are for leaving rooms," Daveen observed.

"I'll take the hint." Kesley hesitantly stepped through--and saw Antarctica.

He was standing on a short, jutting balcony that hung a few feet out over the distant street below. Sudden vertigo gripped him as he looked down, down. It was five hundred--no, a thousand--feet to the ground!

Tiny dots of color moved rapidly far below on unceasing slide-ramps. Down the center of the street, graceful cars of blue and gold and red, topped with plastic bubbles, raced along. Buildings rose on each side of the street--towering edifices, mighty vaults of steel and plastic. Kesley sucked in his breath sharply.

The sky overhead was warm and bright, and just below the clouds, far in the distance, a curious, tingling, purplish light illuminated the sky. _That's the barrier_, Kesley realized. The intangible wall of force that separated Antarctica from the rest of the world.

It was a mind-numbing sight, this fantastic city. It was like no city he had ever seen in the Empires; it stretched to the horizon, tower after massive tower. A graceful network of airy flexibridges hung like gossamer in the air, linking building to building far above street level.

And the city was shining.

That was the only way to describe it. The sleek sides of the huge buildings gleamed brightly in the warm daylight.

As Kesley looked out, it seemed to him as if so many thousand-foot mirrors blinked back at him.

He stepped back inside. Daveen had not moved.

"You've never seen Antarctica, have you?" Kesley asked.

The poet smiled. "I know what it must be like. How do you feel?"

Kesley thought of the shining towers and compared them with the squat tenements of Chicago and Buenos Aires. "It's an incredible city."

"Yes," Daveen said.

With sudden bitterness Kesley said: "Why does the Antarctican Duke keep that barrier up? Why doesn't he invite the world down here to see what he has? Why must ninety percent of mankind live in squalor?"

"They want it that way," Daveen pointed out.

He fingered his instrument gently; a mocking note crept forth. Kesley remained silent in thought for a moment.

Then he nodded. "You're right. The Dukes see to it that nothing changes, that no progress is ever made. The Twelve Empires don't want any part of Antarctica, and Antarctica doesn't want any part of them."

Antarctica's Duke, for one reason or another, had raised an impregnable wall around his fantastic paradise. The Twelve Dukes of the war-blasted world had erected their own barriers. But who was to say those barriers could not be thrown down again? There was a _fourteenth_ Immortal. And he was free to act.

Ten minutes ago such thoughts would have been nothing more than bravado. Now, Kesley knew, he held power in his hands.

"Daveen?"

"Yes?"

"I'm going to leave. I'm going to go looking for the Duke. Is there anything else you want to tell me, before I go?"

A calm smile spread over the tired face. "Not now," Daveen said.

* * * * *

Another panel in the wall opened as if at Kesley's request, and without hesitating he stepped through. He found himself in a small rectangular enclosure whose luminescent walls were inlaid with tiles of a glowing green plastic.

"Down," he said, and the enclosure sank.

It glided downward with no illusion of descent, drifted through a thousand-foot shaft and came to a silent halt. A wall opened. Kesley saw that he was at ground level, in the vestibule of the great building.

He saw the people: tanned, happy-faced people who did not seem to notice him. They wore smooth, free-flowing tunics of what seemed like an uncreasable fabric; it put the finest robes of the courtiers of the Americas to shame.

As he paused in the vestibule, not quite knowing which way to turn, he heard a familiar humming sound, turned, and saw a mechanical man near him. It might have been a twin of the ones he had seen at Wiener.

"I give information," the robot said.

"How can I get to the Duke's palace?"

"Duke's residence is reached by travelling on slidewalk eleven blocks north to crosspoint, transferring to eastbound slidewalk and continuing until destination. You will be aware when reaching Duke's residence."

"Thanks," Kesley said.

"Is any other information requested?"

"Not just yet," he said. He turned away and broke the photon beam that controlled the front door. It swung open. He stepped out onto the slidewalks.

There were five of them, he saw, running in a parallel series--five bright metal strips moving at different speeds. He was on the slowest of the five; it glided forward effortlessly, seemingly without friction. Carefully, he stepped to the adjoining strip, which was a little more crowded, and picked up speed. He became intrigued by the moving roadway and rapidly passed to the fastest of the slidewalks.

By that time, though, eight blocks had slipped past, and he hastily edged back to the slow walk. At the eleventh block, he cut off deftly onto the eastbound walk that intercepted the one he had been on.

Now he could see the Duke's Palace: a square, blocky edifice of lacy foamglass that was dwarfed by the towering buildings to either side. Remembering the awesome majesty of Winslow's and Miguel's palaces in comparison to the rest of Chicago and Buenos Aires, he thought it odd--and then not so odd--that Antarctica's Duke should affect a small, relatively unimpressive home.

The slidewalk brought him rapidly to the shining door that fronted the Ducal palace. Kesley formulated his plan, set forth his demands in his mind.

It was a bold, rash idea. If it failed, he had lost nothing. And if it succeeded--

He stepped off the slidewalk. The Duke's Palace seemed to beckon.

* * * * *

Inside, a robot attendant came humming up to him. Kesley confronted the featureless face calmly.

"I'd like to see the Duke."

"Certainly. Have you an appointment?"

"No," Kesley said. "Tell him--"

"Just one moment," the robot interrupted. "I'll arrange for an appointment. Your name, please?"

"Dale Kesley."

There was the momentary clicking of data-sorters over memory banks.

Then the robot said: "Confirmation requested. Was the name Dale Kesley?"

"That's right."

"The Duke will see you at once, Dale Kesley. I will escort you to him."

A little surprised, Kesley nodded. "That'll be fine."

The robot glided away on its treads toward a lift-ramp. Kesley followed, suppressing his impatience.

He wondered if the Duke of Antarctica would be surrounded by long rows of halberdiers. Somehow he doubted it.

A pulse tickled annoyingly in the side of his throat as the elevator rose. The trip was brief; the door-panel was sliding open almost before it had closed.

The robot rolled out first and started off down a long, bright corridor. Kesley followed.

The corridor seemed to be endless. Finally, the robot paused before a richly-panelled door and touched a stud. "Yes?" a deep voice said.

Inclining its speaking-grid toward a pickup embedded in the ornament of the door, the robot said: "Dale Kesley to see you?"

"_Kesley?_"

"Dale Kesley to see you," the robot repeated impassively.

Kesley heard stirring within. He tensed; this was suspicious. Was it this easy to gain audience with a Duke?

He waited nervously for the door to open. He had been hired to kill Winslow; Miguel had begged him once to drive a knife into _his_ breast. And now he was about to see a third Duke--the first he had any real motive for killing.

The door swung back. Another robot waited within.

"Don't tell me _you're_ the Duke?" Kesley said, aghast. He had long since learned that anything was likely.

"Hardly," the new robot replied, with as much of an ironic inflection as a robot voice could muster. "The Duke waits for you within. Come."

Fingering the keen knife at his side, Kesley entered the Ducal chambers.

XV

The Antarctican Duke lived well, Kesley thought. His private apartments were sprawling, luxurious, with more than one strange echo of Miguel's room. For one, a wall of paintings looked down--but they were not oil works such as Miguel had, but paintings done in some curiously realistic technique that hardly seemed to involve brushwork at all. They were more frozen images of life than paintings, he thought.

In the distance he could see television screens, reminding him of the closed-circuit battery taking up one wall of Miguel's study. The robot led him on, gliding him from room to room.

"This is the Duke's room," the robot said finally. "You may go in."

Kesley approached the dark, paneled-wood door. It swung open without his touching it.

A man stood there, dressed in the customary Antarctican costume, smiling, his arms folded. Kesley's eyes flickered in surprise; then he crossed the threshold.

"Van Alen," he said.

The noble grinned. "Hello, Dale. I owe you an apology. I found it necessary to flee, back there in the woods. But I've been following your subsequent adventures with great interest, Dale."

"I'll bet you have," Kesley said. He studied van Alen's powerful frame, meeting eyebrows, wide-set eyes. "I never thought I'd see you again, but here I am. I suppose you're here to take me to the Duke. Well, I'm ready."

Van Alen's smile grew broader. He extracted a jewel-studded, gold case from his tunic, pressed a stud. A tiny yellow filament licked forth. He touched it casually to his wrist; a fugitive tingle of pleasure passed over his face.

"Electrostimulator," he explained. "Sensory heightening. One of my favorite vices; one that I had to leave behind when I made my abortive journey to Iowa Province."

"I'd like to see the Duke," Kesley repeated impatiently.

Van Alen chuckled. "Look at my eyes, Dale."

Kesley glanced up from the electrostimulator in van Alen's hand; his gaze traveled up over the glossy, green fabric of the noble's tunic, over his stiff reddish beard, his firm lips, the jutting nose, to the eyes.

The eyes.

The deep, tired, weary, all-seeing eyes of an Immortal.

Oddly, it came as no surprise. Double identity was almost the rule in the world, it seemed. Daveen and Dawnspear, van Alen and the Duke, Kesley and--who?

Kesley groped unsteadily toward a chair; it sprang forward and settled itself beneath him. "You, yourself--"

"Antarctica is mine, Dale. I went north to bring you here, but I failed. My life was threatened in the forest. I ran. An Immortal is jealous of his life. Remember the scream of fear when you first drew the knife on me, after I shot your wolf? That was _fright_--naked crawling fright." The Antarctican shook his head bitterly. "I should never have left here."

"I've seen Daveen," Kesley said.

"I know. The otter sent him to me."

"Spahl?"

Van Alen nodded. "That's his name. You owe your life to him many times over, Dale."

"I owe my life to everyone at least six times, it seems," Kesley said sardonically. "It seems to be a game everyone likes to play--saving me."

"Spahl found out who Lomark Dawnspear really was and sent him here. Spahl was the one who arranged to have you sent here, by the only method that can penetrate our Barrier. It was Spahl also, I believe, who discovered you in the forest when you escaped from Miguel."

Kesley frowned. "Enough of Spahl. I've seen Daveen. I know I'm Immortal, now."

"Of course."

"Why didn't you tell me?"