The 13th Immortal

By ROBERT SILVERBERG

ACE BOOKS A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

THE 13th IMMORTAL

Copyright ©, 1957, by A. A. Wyn, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

To Barbara

Printed in U.S.A.

THE SECRET OF THE FORBIDDEN CONTINENT

"Who was your father?" the mutant asked Dale Kesley. And try as he might, Kesley could not remember; his past was an utter blank. But he knew one thing—the answer to his life's riddle lay in Antarctica, the once frozen continent, now an earthly paradise surrounded by an impenetrable barrier.

But how to get there? The only means of transportation were the spindly six-legged mutant horses. And it was suicide for Kesley to travel on the American continents. Two immortal dictators had set king-size rewards for his capture—dead or alive. But somewhere in the two continents there was someone who would help him, someone he had to find. The future of the world depended on his success.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

DALE KESLEY - He couldn't find the answers until he knew the right questions.

DRYLE VAN ALEN - The South Pole was his summer resort.

NARELLA - She loved two men with one face.

DON MIGUEL - He was a childless sire, an impotent potentate.

DUKE WINSLOW - Once he had been wise; twice he had been fooled.

LOMARK DAWNSPEAR - In his blindness, he saw all things.

Prologue

Centuries later, men would talk of those years as the Years of the Freeze. They would mean the years between 2062 and 2527, the years when mankind, shattered by its own hand, maintained a rigid cultural stasis while rebuilding.

Those were the years when what was, would be. The years when there would be nothing new under the sun because mankind willed it so. The century of war, culminating in the almost total global destruction of 2062, had taught lessons that were not soon forgotten.

The old ways returned to the world—ways that had held sway for thousands of years, and which had regained ascendancy after the brief, nightmarish reign of the machine. Mankind still had machines, of course; life would have been impossible without them. But the Years of the Freeze were years of primarily hand labor, of travel by foot or by horse, of slow living and fear of complexity. The clock rolled back to an older, simpler land of world—and froze there.

Like all ages, this one had its symbols and, conveniently, the symbols of the status quo were actual as well as symbolic forces in maintaining the Freeze. There were twelve of them—the Twelve Dukes, they called themselves, and they ruled the world between them. They had no power over the forgotten land of Antarctica, but otherwise they were virtually supreme. North America, South America, East and West Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, North Africa, Equatorial Africa, South Africa, China, India, Oceanica—each boasted its Duke.

They were products of the great blast of 2062, and they had found their way to power tortuously. Most of them had lived ordinary lives, picking their way through the wreckage with the others in the first three confused decades after the great destruction. But the others had died and the Twelve had not.

They had endured through forty, fifty, sixty years, themselves frozen indefinitely in middle life. And as the decades passed, each forced his way to control of a segment of the world. Each carved himself a Dukedom and, in 2162, the centennial of the Old World's death, they gathered together to divide the world among themselves.

There was a bitter struggle for power, but from it emerged the world of the Twelve Empires, stable, sedate, unchanging, determined never to allow the technology-born nightmare of old to return. The picture was attractive: twelve immortals, guiding the world along an even keel to the end of time.

Rumors filtered through the Twelve Empires occasionally that danger threatened from Antarctica. Man had redeemed Antarctica from the ice before the great cataclysm, and the polar land was known to be inhabited. But Antarctica remained detached from humanity, erecting an impassable barrier that cut itself off from the Twelve Empires as effectively as if it were on another planet. And so, the stasis held. The battered world rebuilt, on a more modest scale than of old, clinging to the simple ways, and froze that way. Here, there, an isolated city refused to participate in the Freeze. They, however, didn't matter. They intended to stay isolated, as did Antarctica, and the Twelve Dukes did not worry long over them.

In ninety percent of the world, time had stopped.

Half an hour before the neat fabric of his life was to be shattered forever, Dale Kesley was thinking desperately, This will be a good day for the planting.