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."