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 hemight, Kesley could not remember; his past was an utter blank. But heknew one thing—the answer to his life's riddle lay in Antarctica,the once frozen continent, now an earthly paradise surrounded by animpenetrable barrier.
But how to get there? The only means of transportation were the spindlysix-legged mutant horses. And it was suicide for Kesley to travel onthe American continents. Two immortal dictators had set king-sizerewards for his capture—dead or alive. But somewhere in the twocontinents there was someone who would help him, someone he had tofind. The future of the world depended on his success.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
DALE KESLEY - He couldn't find the answers until he knew the rightquestions.
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 theFreeze. They would mean the years between 2062 and 2527, the years whenmankind, shattered by its own hand, maintained a rigid cultural stasiswhile rebuilding.
Those were the years when what was, would be. The years when therewould be nothing new under the sun because mankind willed it so. Thecentury of war, culminating in the almost total global destruction of2062, had taught lessons that were not soon forgotten.
The old ways returned to the world—ways that had held sway forthousands of years, and which had regained ascendancy after the brief,nightmarish reign of the machine. Mankind still had machines, ofcourse; life would have been impossible without them. But the Years ofthe Freeze were years of primarily hand labor, of travel by foot or byhorse, of slow living and fear of complexity. The clock rolled back toan older, simpler land of world—and froze there.
Like all ages, this one had its symbols and, conveniently, the symbolsof the status quo were actual as well as symbolic forces in maintainingthe Freeze. There were twelve of them—the Twelve Dukes, they calledthemselves, and they ruled the world between them. They had no powerover the forgotten land of Antarctica, but otherwise they werevirtually 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 theirway to power tortuously. Most of them had lived ordinary lives, pickingtheir way through the wreckage with the others in the first threeconfused decades after the great destruction. But the others had diedand the Twelve had not.
They had endured through forty, fifty, sixty years, themselves frozenindefinitely in middle life. And as the decades passed, ea