Chapter IX: Sanctuary--for a while

"So I'm not to be allowed any rest," Kesley said bitterly. "Three days here and you're tossing me out, is that it?"

He glared sourly at the little group of mutants facing him. "Well?"

"You've been here three days," Spahl pointed out. The seal-like mutant shrugged sadly. "That's three days longer than any non-mutant's ever spent in this city, Kesley. We can't keep you here much longer."

"Why do you want to stay here?" asked Foursmith, an angular, knobby-looking mutant with a row of inch-long red nubbins protruding through the flesh of his back. "You've got to get going, you know. Daveen's not here."

"I don't know _where_ Daveen is!" Kesley said. "Can't you let me catch my breath?"

"You'll have to leave tomorrow," Spahl said. "We'll give you a horse."

"Thanks."

This was the third day since Spahl had rescued him in the forest and brought him to Mutie City; they had fed him and rested him, but now they insisted that he leave.

He couldn't blame them; the city was a refuge for harried mutants, not a harbor for escaped turncoats. They ran the risk of incurring Winslow's displeasure by giving him sanctuary. Yet, he thought, as long as they'd admitted him they might as well have let him stay long enough to get his bearings, to have some of the furor over him die down.

Well, at least they'd taken him in. A small blessing, but a real one.

"I'm sorry," he said humbly, walking to the window of the room they had given him. He looked out over the variegated city below--strange and motley compared with the neat regularity of all Empire-built cities.

"I'm imposing myself, and I'm acting like a fool." He wet his lips. "I'll go whenever you want me to."

"Don't misunderstand," Foursmith warned. The mutant with the extended vertebrae was the current head of the mutie enclave. "We're not throwing you out. We think you should leave, that's all. For your good and ours."

"Agreed," Kesley said. In the street below, a two-headed woman was making slow progress pushing a perambulator in which squirmed a many-armed monster-baby. He shuddered. He still was not used to such sights.

This was the world's genetic refuse heap, the city where the alien race in mankind's midst could live in peace and security. Gradually, Mutie City was enfolding in itself the mutants of the Ducal cities; here, the grim souvenirs of the time-shadowed great war could walk unmolested.

He could see the logic behind the agreement of the Dukes granting Mutie City total independence. The mutants came here and, gradually, the contamination of their genes would be localized, the cancer of mutation penned into one tiny area. Kesley wondered whether, on the day when the last mutant had left the Twelve Empires and entered Mutie City, the Dukes would bomb the city to shreds and thus restore mankind's genetic homogeneity. It was a terrible thought.

He turned. There they were, Spahl and Foursmith and Ricketts and Huygens and Devree, each one looking as if he had come down from a different world. They ruled the city.

"Why did you take me in?" he asked.

"There were reasons," Huygens, the double-header, said resonantly.

_Always reasons_, Kesley thought. _And everyone knows them but me._

"This Daveen--he's not a mutant, is he?" Kesley asked.

"No," Foursmith said. "I saw him once, in the court of Duke Winslow. He is very tall, without hair, and blind. He's not one of us."

"And you don't know where I could find him?"

"You might try the Colony," Foursmith suggested. "He might be in hiding there, among the other artists. At any event, the Colony is safe from Winslow, too. Perhaps you could stay there for a while."

"Good enough," Kesley said.

* * * * *

The Colony sprang from the blue-green grass of Kentucky like a sprawling, segmented worm. Its architecture bore no resemblance to that of any city Kesley had ever seen; broad, rambling, almost ramshackle, it presented an even more disorderly appearance than had Mutie City.

He wheeled the exhausted, six-legged horse the mutants had given him up the final stretches of the roadway, looking around cautiously as he rode. It had been a tense but, happily, uneventful journey down from Illinois.

The Colony, like all other cities, was walled. But it was as if a different architect had planned each segment of the wall. Here, it was high and carved from blocks of pink granite; there, it was a lazy stile of limestone. Towers of black basalt capped the wall at irregular intervals.

He rode toward the gate--an open gate. Pulling his mount to a halt as he approached, he turned toward the guard.

"Who are you?" questioned the guard, looking up from a notebook. Kesley saw a series of interlocking doodles scrawled on the man's page.

"My name is Kesley. I'm here seeking sanctuary from Duke Winslow. I'm also looking for a blind poet named Daveen. Is he here?"

"He has been," the guard answered. "You armed?"

"Pistol and truncheon," Kesley said.

"Leave 'em out here. You can pick them up when you're leaving."

Kesley didn't like the idea of parting with his weapons, but he seemed to have little choice. Reluctantly, he surrendered them and rode inside, into what seemed to be a park.

A fantastic array of houses was visible beyond the park. For a moment, Kesley thought he had wandered into a lunatic's asylum. Then he remembered it was simply an artists' refuge.

A nude girl stood unashamedly in the center of a lawn not far away, and clustered about her, sketching furiously, was a group of painters. Beneath a live-oak tree behind her, a fat, balding man squatted on the ground, playing a wooden flute. Elsewhere, other members of the colony seemed to be busying themselves at their various interests.

Kesley tethered his horse at a hitching-post just inside the main wall, and looked around for someone who might be in authority.

After a moment, a girl in a brief halter and shorts approached him. "Hello, friend. My name is Lisa. Where from?"

Her voice was clear and firm. Somewhat hesitantly, Kesley said, "Chicago, mostly."

"Oh? What do you do?"

"I don't understand," Kesley said.

"Paint, sing, write? Light-sculpture? Architecture? Come on," she said impatiently.

"I see. No, I'm not an artist. I'm ... just here visiting. Looking for someone."

"That's nice. Who?"

"A poet. Daveen the Singer, they call him. Is he here?"

The girl frowned. "Daveen? I recall the name--but I don't think he's living here now. You'll have to ask Colin about that. He remembers everything."

"Where can I find this Colin," Kesley asked.

"Over there." She pointed to the group surrounding the nude girl. "The old lecher's busy sketching Marla. He doesn't know any more about sketching than I do, but he loves to look at a pretty body. He's the bald one, right down in front. You'd better not bother him now."

"I'll wait," Kesley said. He could hold his own among assassins, but he could see that he was going to be sadly out of his depth here in the Colony.

* * * * *

The Colony was even more grotesque and wonderful a place than Kesley had imagined, in that first dazzling introduction in the park. After the darkness of the world of the Twelve Dukes, and the different darkness of Mutie City, the Colony stood forth as a land of beacon.

Total anarchy prevailed, for one thing. People lived where they liked, ate as they pleased, worked or did not work. There was always enough food. The Colony was self-sufficient, insular, smug in its seclusion. And inscribed in deep-cut letters over the inside of the main gate were four words:

_DO WHAT THOU WILT_

"The guiding motto of the Abbey of Theleme," Lisa explained, when Kesley commented.

"Theleme?"

"A reference to Rabelais," she said. "Oh, I see you don't know that either. It's a book--I mean, he was a writer. You don't read much, do you?"

"No," Kesley said distantly, staring at the huge letters in the stone. _Do What Thou Wilt._ They were shattering words; he wondered what Duke Winslow's reaction would be if he ever had an opportunity to see them.

But there wasn't much chance of that. The Colony was even older than the Twelve Empires, having been established back in the days of the chaos by a group of artists and poets determined to preserve their way of life while the rest of the world crumbled about them. They had succeeded; and now, the outside world did without them. They had no part in Empire doings, and the Empire kept its distance from them. It was, Kesley was told, all part of the uneasy balance in which the world was held. No one dared tip the scales.

He was welcomed to the Colony warmly, even though he was quick to make clear that he himself was no artist and that he was here solely in quest of Daveen. The night of his arrival they held an immense party, supposedly in his honor.

He recognized a few faces. The girl named Lisa had appointed herself his guardian; she stayed close by his side. Somewhere else in the huge roomful of milling people, he spotted the man named Colin, looking like an aging Silenus with his baggy eyes and fuzzy crown of graying hair. He was engaged in animated conversation with the girl Marla, who had modeled nude that afternoon. Now, she wore a transparent plastic blouse and tights; it was an even more startling costume.

Finally, Kesley got to speak to Colin.

The balding man was very fat and very drunk, he noticed. He stared curiously at Kesley for a few minutes, then said, "You're the newcomer, aren't you? The one we're all here to honor?"

"I'm looking for a man named Daveen. You know him?"

"No," Colin said loudly. "Never heard of him. Want a drink?"

Kesley shook his head. He flicked a glance warily at Lisa, who was smiling enigmatically. "He's a poet," Kesley said. "A blind man. Lisa thinks she remembers him."

"Lisa will say anything. I don't remember any Daveen."

"Daveen? Who's talking about Daveen?" a deep voice asked. Kesley glanced to his left and saw a tall, burly, blond man with long curling hair. The big youth was smiling sweetly.

"I am," Kesley said. "I'm looking for him."

From somewhere in the background came the discordant shrill of a strange musical instrument. Kesley winced.

"What do you want Daveen for?" the blond boy asked. "You from the court?"

"I'm _running_ from the court. Winslow wants to kill me. I have to find Daveen."

The tall youngster chuckled raucously. "Daveen hasn't been here in years. You'll _never_ find him!"

An atonal blast of the weird music blended oddly with the harsh laughter that suddenly surrounded him. Defeated, confused, Kesley looked at the alien faces of the men and women in the room. It was as if they wore masks of desperate gaiety, hiding a deep inward brooding.

He realized it had been a mistake to come here. In the middle of the room, a lithe girl of about nineteen was taking off her clothes to the accompaniment of an ecstatic chant from a ring of onlookers; a spindly man of about forty was intoning what was probably poetry, and the blond boy had gone into a frenzied solo dance.

Distortion upon distortion, darkness within darkness. Kesley felt cold and alone. At his side, Lisa clung tightly to him, sliding her hands playfully over the flat, hard muscles of his chest, giggling and whispering. The party was reaching a peak of wild license now.

This was what happened when walls closed around people, he thought. The mutants in their city; the poets in theirs. The Dukes in their Empires. And somewhere, far to the frozen south, the Antarcticans behind their blockade. They all interlocked, meshed in a tightly-geared procession to nowhere. Grimly, Kesley watched the blond boy dance himself into exhaustion, watched the girl in the middle of the room whip off her one remaining garment and stand totally naked.

Lisa was chanting, "_This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends._" It was probably a line from some poem. But it was more than poetry, thought Kesley. It was truth.

Truth.